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Jimmy Kimmel engaged to writer on his talk show
The ABC funnyman is newly engaged to girlfriend Molly McNearney.
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NEW YORK, N.Y. — Jimmy Kimmel didn’t need to look too far for his new fiancée.
The ABC funnyman is newly engaged to girlfriend Molly McNearney. His spokesman, Lewis Kay, said Wednesday that Kimmel popped the question during a recent vacation in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
McNearney is the co-head writer for the network’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. They started dating in 2009, after Kimmel’s breakup with comic Sarah Silverman.
Kimmel is 44 — 10 years older than his fiancée. The engagement was first reported by People magazine.
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Farmers Protest: Over 200 Republic Day Artists Rescued After Being Stranded Near Red Fort
The red Fort area witnessed chaotic scenes for hours as the protesters pelted stones at police and damaged vehicles.
New Delhi: Nearly 200 artists, including children, who took part in the Republic Day parade, were rescued after they got stranded near Red Fort on Tuesday after farmer’s tractor parade turned violent and protesters broke barriers and stormed the Mughal era monument.
Delhi Police said the artistes were later safely rescued by personnel after being stuck for long hours in the afternoon, provided refreshments and subsequently escorted away.
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As per latest inputs, these artists were stranded near the Red Fort since 12 noon because of the farmers’ tractor rally. It was only around 7.30 PM that the Delhi Police rescued these artists from the Gazetted Officer’s (GO) Mess in Daryaganj and transported them to the Rashtriya Rangshala Camp in Dhaula Kuan.
“There were around 300 artists including children at the Red Fort. As the situation developed, we provided them with food and shifted them to a safe place, Daryaganj Mess,” DCP (North) Anto Alphonse said.
The farmers’ tractor parade which was meant to highlight the demands of the farmer unions dissolved into anarchy on the streets of the national capital during the day as hordes of rampaging protesters broke through barriers, fought with police, overturned vehicles and delivered a national insult — hoisting a religious flag from the rampart of the Red Fort, a privilege reserved for India’s tricolour.
The red Fort area witnessed chaotic scenes for hours as the protesters pelted stones at police and damaged vehicles. On the other hand, the police personnel tried to control the mob by baton-charging them and lobbing tear gas shells.
Because of the violent protests, several roads across Delhi were closed which led to traffic snarls on arterial routes. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) also halted operations at multiple metro stations citing security concerns.
Delhi Police has also issued a statement saying that 83 of its personnel suffered injuries in violent clashes with protesters.
For breaking news and live news updates, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Read more on Latest India News on India.com.


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CAMP LEJEUNE, NC – Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune’s Marine Corps Community Services Lejeune-New River is hosting an all-hands professional military education screening of the documentary “Major Capers: The Legend of Team Broadminded” at 9:30 am on July 31, at the base theater, followed by a question and answer session with retired Marine Maj. James “Jim” Capers, Jr., himself.
According to Stripes.com, the documentary film tells the story of Capers, who was the Marine Corps’ first black special operator, a member of the inaugural class of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Commando Hall of Honor, and a well-known ‘face of the Corps’ on recruiting posters nationwide for years.
In the film, the 22-year veteran explains how he fought to free his Marines after an assault that left him with two broken legs, multiple shrapnel wounds from a Claymore mine and massive blood loss. For his heroism, Capers became one of the first African-American Marine officer to be nominated for the Medal of Honor.
According to the Stripes.com article, Capers ordered his Marines to evacuate onto an over-loaded H-34 chopper, as he continued to fight the enemy with his M-16, but his Marines refused to leave him. After multiple attempts to take off as Capers and his Marines defended their position, the chopper eventually took flight with Capers and his Marines.
“I figured it’s better to lose one man than to lose the whole team,” Capers told Stripes.com. “Any commander worth his salt would care for his men before his self.”
According to the article, Capers would leave Vietnam having earned two Bronze star Medals with a “V” device for valor, three purple hearts – surviving more than 20 injuries.
Filmmakers Ashley Cusato and Erich Recker, with Reckognition Productions, explained to the newspaper that the film discloses once-top-secret details and never-before-seen footage of Capers and Team Broadminded in action in Vietnam.
Recker, a Marine veteran who has worked in film and TV for about two decades, told the publication that the filmmakers focused on more than Capers’ battlefield experience, attempting to highlight the man behind the commando legend.
“These are personal, very personal audio recordings from the battlefield to his wife, depicting a firsthand, humanistic account of what he’s going through,” said Recker. “It’s truly fascinating … and I’ll say it’s one of the better stories I’ve ever heard or been a part of in my career.”

domain: news


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When tragedy strikes, what happens to those left behind? This is the question authors Kekla Magoon and Lindsey Lane answer in their novels. Lane’s Evidence of Things Unseen deals with the mystery surrounding the disappearance of high schooler Tommy Smythe. Magoon’s How It Went Down is a fictional work straight from our modern headlines. She explores a community’s search for answers and closure in the aftermath of the shooting of a black teenager. Here, Lane and Magoon interview each other on their work and discuss the benefits of multiperspective narratives, their shared obsession with timelines, and why it is important to talk about the ones left behind.
Lindsey Lane: Hey, Kekla. So glad to be doing this interview with you.
Kekla Magoon: Hi, Lindsey. Me too.
LL: I was blown away by How It Went Down (HIWD). Why? Because you took me inside the headlines. You created a world of real people who were living and breathing and thinking. We don’t think about all the people around a crime/tragedy when it rips across the headlines. You did. How did Tariq’s story/world come to you?
KM: I wrote How It Went Down in response to the media coverage around the shooting deaths of young black men like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. It frustrated me that the news seemed to be ALL headlines, controversy, and sound bites from people who wanted to politicize and polarize the issues. I wanted to dive a little deeper, to know what happens at the community level in the wake of such a tragedy. How would it feel if the boy who was killed was your brother, or your best friend, or the kid who bullied you? And what if suddenly he was gone, and the whole world was talking about him? The most interesting effects of controversy occur behind the headlines, so this novel explores how young people react in this kind of crisis, and how the shock and grief of loss might be compounded by the controversy and the national media attention.
LL: Well done. I definitely felt the community.
KM: Evidence of Things Not Seen also centers around the loss of one boy’s presence from a community. As you carry us through many different voices, you draw us deeper into the mystery of Tommy’s disappearance, and you paint a compelling picture of the community he left behind. What drew you to writing in this style?
The stories are tied together by place but the stories within are fractured and separate.
LL: Three of my favorite books are Kathi Appelt‘s Kissing Tennessee, Cynthia Rylant‘s Van Gogh Cafe, and Sandra Cisneros‘ House on Mango Street. In all of these novels, the stories are tied together by place but the stories within are fractured and separate. I love that effect. The reader has a bazillion entry points into the world of the story. They interact with each piece of the story and then they dance to the next piece. I love how the fragments play in the imagination and make connections in the readers mind. The writer doesn’t have to write all the connective tissue. Also, I have to confess, I am a spare writer. I don’t like to dilly dally so these kinds of taut scenes work for me.
KM: The fragmented-but-connected effect you describe is a favorite thing of mine as a reader, too. It is really effective in Evidence. I enjoy the feeling of gathering puzzle pieces and mentally assembling them in my own way. My first-draft writing tends to be fragmented, so short bursting scenes and vignettes are a very natural form for me. If it serves the story better, I can work those fragments into longer more cohesive scenes, but in this case I felt the cacophony of voices added to the meaning of the piece.
LL: The danger, of course, with this kind of multi-perspective structure is that the reader will lose his/her emotional connection to the story, that when we shift the story to another perspective, he/she will lose interest and close the book. Did you think about the reader’s journey when you were writing?
KM: I’d say I become more aware of the reader in revision. I always feel emotionally connected to my fragmented first draft, so when it comes to shaping and polishing I want to be sure that the central question I have been writing about (“What really happened?”) remains front and center for the reader throughout the book. Writing in an alternative style does require placing a lot of trust in the reader—to stay engaged and to form his or her own opinions about the characters and the situation. For me, the use of recurring voices helped shape the emotional narrative. Each of my central characters has a story arc that unfolds over the course of the book, and I expect some readers may become attached to the emotional journey of one character or another.
LL: I loved how your central characters had an arc that unfolded over the course of the book. The characters were very three dimensional. I felt like I knew them.
I attempted something very different in Evidence. Especially in the third person sections, which each had their own arc within the larger frame of Tommy’s absence. It was a risk, having them be so separate from Tommy’s story, but what I decided to do was really sharpen the epiphanies in those sections so that they would be very vivid for the reader.
KM: Your novel is structured so differently from mine, with the only recurring voice being Tommy’s journal entries. Did you consider returning to any other character’s perspective?
LL: It was important to me that the sole recurring voice be Tommy’s because his going missing sets off the inquiry. Have you ever lost anything? Like a pet? Or a child in a store? Even keys or a book? It whacks you out. You can hardly drive down the street without looking for that missing animal or person or book. So that’s how I set the wobbly world in motion. Everyone is looking for Tommy to some degree or another. It’s almost like the reader is driving through this town looking for Tommy and while he/she is looking, he/she peers into these other lives. The through line is Tommy, but everyone is a bit off course. In a way, I had be careful of having characters recur because I didn’t want them to pull focus away from Tommy.
KM: Were there any voices that you wrote that you ended up not including?
LL: I do have one more story from the world of the book that I will put on my website soon. It’s about Sam, the guy at the Whip In. I didn’t put it in the book because it occurs a few months after the book ends. It felt separate but he did have a story I wanted to tell.
KM: I always think it’s really cool to get a glimpse behind the scenes of a book, and getting to consider what the extra material adds as well as why it didn’t fit in the final book.
LL: I count 18 points of view in HIWD. Did you throw anyone out?
KM: Eighteen voices in the final book, yeah. I started with quite a few more viewpoints, but several got cut and a few others got combined/expanded in the revision process. Originally I was envisioning perhaps 30 or so viewpoints, a few of which would recur but some of which would appear just once to offer a new perspective on the controversy. Most of those extra people did not feel as real, in the end, because they were basically vehicles for expressing the different intellectual arguments that I thought were worthy of mention, from diverse points along the political spectrum. But in the end, that sort of survey of opinions did not do what I wanted, in terms of rising above sound bites. It turned out to be better to dig deeper into fewer voices, and to let those people be the ones to hold opinions that conflicted at times.
The shooter doesn’t speak because Tariq can’t speak.
LL: Did you have a favorite?
KM: I didn’t really have a favorite, but the characters that I spent the most time with were Tyrell (Tariq’s best friend), Tina (Tariq’s sister), the two neighborhood girls (Kimberly and Jennica), and the graffiti artist, Will. I viewed the five of them as my main protagonists, the ones who would be most deeply affected by Tariq’s death, and whose changes would be most dramatic and most obvious to the reader. Even though Will is on the page less than the others, the story arc of his relationship to his stepfather is fairly concrete. I enjoyed Tina’s innocence, and I hoped Tyrell’s struggle would draw people in.
LL: Each voice is so distinct. Especially the boys. Applause. Wild and loud applause.
KM: When you mentioned writing a story that takes place long after the book ends, I got to thinking about how we both used the passage of time as a marker in our books. HIWD spans just 10 days, while Evidence unfolds over a whole year. I’m impressed that you were able to sustain significant tension and intensity while dealing with such a long period of time. How did time considerations factor into your writing process?
LL: The time thing was important. When do you give up looking? When do you put it to rest? When do people move on with their lives? It’s different for each person, right? Tommy’s parents, his mother really, is still stuck, looking. But his father needed to find closure after a year, even though his interaction with Chuy opens up the mystery again.
KM: When in the writing process did you determine how much time the book would cover? Did you have to rearrange the stories much?
LL: The year mark was pretty solid in my mind. Also I talked with cops and sheriffs about how long actual searches go on. It isn’t long because there aren’t the resources to go beyond two weeks. Really after one week, the searches thin out. Because it was a smaller town, this sheriff kept going.
I didn’t rearrange the sections much. Once I had the people and the stories, I deepened their connection to Tommy and to one another and made the timeline work. I kind of got a little obsessive about the timeline at the end, making sure the moon matched the phases as the book went along.
KM: We have the timeline obsession in common! I love that you studied moon phases. Details like that make the environment within the book feel so real, in subtle ways that add up to a fully-realized whole. I’m excited on behalf of all the readers who will discover Evidence of Things Not Seen and become immersed in this richly-drawn world. So, so awesome.
LL: There is one more thing I want to know about your process of writing HIWD: the shooter. His story pretty much stays off the page. What was your thinking in making that choice?
KM: Jack Franklin doesn’t speak because Tariq can’t speak. In a book about perception and drawing conclusions from fragments, including the shooter’s perspective would mean giving too much information, skewed in one direction. It might cause the reader to feel more confident in the decision either to hate him or to excuse him. Only the shooter knows what he saw, and what motivated him to act, in the same way that only Tariq knows what he thought and who he really wanted to be. It heightens the controversy if both of the involved parties remain silent. No one knows every aspect of what really happened, and no one ever will. All that the characters—and the reader—can do is to put the pieces together to the best of their ability.
LL: Which is exactly how it is in life… minus the media onslaught. Well done, Kekla. And thank you for doing this dialogue with me.
KM: Thanks, Lindsey, it’s been great talking with you. Congrats again on such an exquisite debut novel!
Lindsey Lane received an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2010. Literary agent Erin Murphy sold her debut YA novel Evidence of Things Not Seen to Joy Peskin of Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers. It was released in September 2014.
Kekla Magoon is the author of five young adult novels: How It Went Down, Camo Girl, 37 Things I Love, Fire in the Streets, and The Rock and the River, for which she received the ALA Coretta Scott King New Talent Award and an NAACP Image Award nomination. She also writes non-fiction on historical topics, including Today the World is Watching You: The Little Rock Nine and the Fight for School Integration 1957-58 and the forthcoming PANTHERS! The History and Legacy of the Black Panther Party in America. Raised in a biracial family in the Midwest, Kekla now teaches writing in New York City, conducts school and library visits nationwide, and serves on the Writers’ Council for the National Writing Project. Kekla holds a B.A. in History from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Visit her online at www.keklamagoon.com.

domain: library


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In a novel combination of veteran and debutante, Johnny Hallyday (left)and Ludivine Sagnier (right)will receive the Jean Gabin and Romy Schneider awards for 2003.
The prize, which has been awarded for over 20 years, often goes to a new face but with the 60 year old rocker Hallyday being singled out for his work, the tide has changed.
After a long and lucrative musical career, Hallyday - who has also been making films since appearing in Les Diaboliques in 1955 - is likely being tapped for his work in the recent Patrice Leconte film The Man On The Train.
A critics' favourite, the film showcased Hallyday's trademark ruffian rocker as a worn out gangster who befriends Jean Rochefort's retired professor and changes places with him.
A more obvious choice for the female prize, Saigner is best known for her work in Francois Ozon's 8 Femmes and will also star in the director's upcoming Swimming Pool, hotly tipped for a Cannes slot. The 23-year old Saigner is one of France's emerging stars on the international scene and will appear in PJ Hogan's Peter Pan playing Tinkerbell.

domain: entertainment


POSTED ON JUNE 29, 2011:
The Paper, The Word
A look to the past, a vision for the future. The gathering and dissemination of news is essential to a thriving metro. Who can do it best?
Andy Rieger, a 30-year veteran of the newspaper business in Oklahoma who now serves as the editor and general manager of the Norman Transcript, has a daughter, Hannah, who graduated from journalism school last year. When she approached a small Oklahoma weekly newspaper about doing an internship there, the publication's management had several questions for her.
Did she know how to build a website? Did she know how to post information on a Twitter account? Did she know how to do an email blast? Her answer to all those questions was yes.
"Good," she was told, "because we need somebody to come here and teach us."
Rieger tells that story to illustrate the challenges facing the dozens and dozens of newspapers that remain across Oklahoma in an age of rapid and constant technological change. While some have done an outstanding job of staying on top of those changes and have altered their business model to reflect them, others have struggled to keep up.
"There are pockets of technology," he said, citing the Sequoyah County Times in Sallisaw, owned by the Mayo family, as a newspaper that was way ahead of the curve in embracing those changes. "But one of the problems you find in Oklahoma is that there are a lot of areas out there that don't have broadband access. You can be doing all this whiz-bang stuff, but if the person you're trying to reach doesn't have broadband access and is still using dial-up service, it doesn't matter."
It is certainly a reflection of the times that an examination of the state of the newspaper industry in Oklahoma begins -- and probably ends -- with discussion of those new technologies and how they have impacted the business. But in between, there still lies the issue of how the newspaper is faring in its traditional print form and what the future holds for that medium.
Many observers, of course, have been eager to throw dirt on the grave of the traditional newspaper for at least the last 15 years. Those who (still) work in the business have heard of its demise so many times that many have grown numb to it.
"The obituary has been written, it just hasn't been published yet," Rieger said.
The Paper Chase
Oklahoma's newspapers -- whether the metropolitan dailies or small town clarions -- tend to be pro-establishment masters of the mundane, hardly the pugnacious, rabble-rousers of print's golden age.
That's probably not surprising, given the medium's long, oft-sordid history that dates to the pre-Civil War era when the future state's newspapers tended to be operated by a particular religious denomination -- Baptists, for example -- or a tribe.
What followed in the 20th century were, for the most part, status quo-oriented, religiously and fiscally conservative newspapers.
"The way the two territories were organized and opened, you had the business of 'instant cities' and you had all occupations represented from Day One in Oklahoma after the land openings," said Dr. William W. Savage Jr., a University of Oklahoma history professor.
"In the 19th Century when towns sprang up for whatever economic reason -- usually there was instant growth because of some sort of boom or the arrival of a new means of transportation -- the typical event was towns would begin with five or six newspapers and then over the next couple of years those are thinned out. You might wind up with two, maybe three and then, as time goes on, there was the tendency toward one newspaper communities."
There was newspaper competition for years in Oklahoma's two largest cities.
According to Carolyn Foreman's "Oklahoma Imprints," published in 1936 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Tulsa enjoyed two periods of intense newspaper creation -- the first in the mid to late 1890s and the other in the early 1900s.
Among the newspapers Foreman catalogued were the Tulsa Chief, the Tulsa Democrat weekly, the Tulsa Democrat daily, the Tulsa Guide, the Tulsa Review, the Tulsa Times, the Tulsa Tribune and the Tulsa Daily World.
In the modern era, Oklahoma City was a serious two-newspaper town in the 1960s and 1970s when the Gaylord-owned Daily Oklahoman (morning) and Oklahoma City Times (evening) competed against the upstart Oklahoma Journal (morning).
The Journal was in the tradition of the golden era of print journalism when newspapers often sprang to life as weapons in ongoing grudge matches between entrepreneurs or political foes.
The Journal was launched by developer W.P. "Bill" Atkinson, regarded as the father of Midwest City (adjacent Tinker Air Force Base), to settle a score with E.K. Gaylord and his Oklahoma Publishing Co.
The relationship between Atkinson and Gaylord soured over a business deal -- some say it was because Atkinson, acting on an inside tip regarding Tinker's future location, gobbled up all the land adjacent what would become Oklahoma's largest employer. Gaylord reportedly gambled on a possible site near Will Rogers World Airport.
When Atkinson refused to cut Gaylord and Co. in on the deal, Gaylord seethed. In 1960, when Atkinson became the Democratic nominee for governor, Gaylord refused to sell him advertising in the Oklahoman and Times. Atkinson lost the race -- to Oklahoma's first Republican governor, Henry Bellmon. Atkinson retaliated by founding the Journal, which lasted nearly two decades before he sold it to a California company that eventually closed it.
In his final years, Atkinson swore he had inside information that Early California Industries, the company that purchased the Journal, actually turned out to be a Gaylord front.
Weight of the World.
The Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune engaged in fierce editorial competition for a half-century, but the two companies were the first in 1941 to negotiate a joint operating agreement -- they combined their business, printing and circulation operations, but kept their newsrooms independent.
The Democratic-leaning World took the morning slot, the Republican Tribune the afternoon -- a decision that would prove part of its undoing. As television, particularly network newscasts, came to dominate American interest in the early 1960s, afternoon newspapers lapsed into a downward spiral from which they never recovered. The Tribune, which introduced provocative, new ideas and great writing, was a popular publication among the educated and sophisticated movers and shakers of the era, failed, possibly, because it didn't control the presses and administration.
The Tribune ceased publishing in 1992, a year after Urban Tulsa, then a monthly alternative newspaper, was founded by editor and publisher Keith Skrzypczak.
For much of the 20th century, newspapers wielded a big stick in their communities, often helping shape development and culture. Some publishers, like the Gaylords, delighted in exerting the power their printing presses afforded.
The Oklahoman was notorious for its page one editorials, often a broadside against Democrats or a glowing testimony to the wisdom of Republicans -- reflecting E.K. Gaylord's conservatism that included involvement with the virulently anti-communist John Birch Society.
"They brought the cannon out on the front porch, and fired it down the street," said Ben Blackstock, 85, the longtime head of the Oklahoma Press Association.
Famed Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Robert S. Kerr, widely revered as the uncrowned king of the Senate, predicted in the 1950s that Oklahoma -- then dominated by the Democratic Party -- eventually would become a Republican-controlled state.
Incredulous reporters asked how. Two reasons, he said: "The Daily Oklahoman and the Southern Baptist convention." Kerr was prescient: Oklahoma hasn't supported a Democratic for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama failed to carry even one of the state's 77 counties. Today, Republicans not only control both houses of the Oklahoma Legislature, but also every statewide elected office.
Even after E.K. Gaylord died in 1974 at age 101 and his son, Edward L., took the Oklahoman's helm, front-door diatribes were a staple -- one of the reasons it was named America's worst newspaper by Columbia Journalism Review in 1999.
In the early 1990s, then Democratic Gov. David Walters was one of the paper's chief targets. Walters, a well-heeled Oklahoma City entrepreneur who now builds power plants around the world, often joked about his morning routine when he went out to retrieve his copy of the Oklahoman. He'd take the stick and poke the newspaper -- just in case a snake slithered out.
Dr. W. David Baird, a noted Oklahoma historian and Pepperdine University professor, said newspapers were especially crucial to Oklahoma's development in the 20th century.
"We always used to say when I was working with (then-U.S. Rep.) John Jarman -- he always used to say -- E.K. Gaylord couldn't elect you, but he could sure defeat you," Baird said. "That was true politically but it also was true in terms of the moral issues they chose. And all of these tended to be evangelical morals."
The Oklahoman, for example, waged a page-one editorial war against liquor by the drink and pari-mutuel gambling. The newspaper also was known for refusing to accept advertisements for X-rated movies.
Baird, a former Oklahoma State University and University of Arkansas professor, said a daily newspaper wielding a big stick wasn't unique to Oklahoma.
"I was in Arkansas for 10 years," he said, "and we always said that about the Arkansas Gazette. It's influence was pervasive, but wasn't any more pervasive than the Oklahoman or the Tribune."
A former Oklahoman city editor, Randy Splaingard, who later helped launch the alt-weekly Oklahoma Gazette, helped with Walters' campaign, became a journalism professor at Oklahoma City University and later returned to daily journalism in New Jersey, was quoted as saying:
"I'm always encouraging my (OCU) students to read newspapers, but I never require that they read The Oklahoman. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment."
The state's major dailies don't wield the influence they once did, thanks to television and the Internet. Declining circulation for both the World and Oklahoman begat declines in advertising that begat declines in staffing. The two papers now share content.
There is no better example of the decline of daily print journalism than the state Capitol's fourth floor pressroom. Three decades ago, its tenants included five major dailies -- the Oklahoman, the World, the Tribune, the Oklahoma City Times and the Journal -- as well as two wire services -- the Associated Press and United Press International. Thirteen full-time, year-round reporters. Of those remaining in business, the Oklahoman, World and AP have one full-time, year-round reporter each.
"They've been trying to kill it (daily print journalism) for 200 years or more," said Blackstock.
In the past, he said, success or failure of daily newspapers depended on the publisher -- and it likely will be so in the future.
"When you get right down it, it depends on the kind of person under that hat," Blackstock said. "Does he have any spark of idealism in him? Has he been infected with any liberalism? How much is he a drop-a-wrench-in-the-machinery-type guy or how much of a kind of guy is he who's interested on making deals for himself and his friends."
And yet, as others point out, most newspapers have not gone away. Few have managed to emerge unscathed from the downturn that has struck the industry in recent years, but the same can be said of businesses in just about every other field, as well.
"I don't think I've seen the death throes of newspapers as much as we heard about several years ago," said Doug Dodd, a Tulsa lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues who once was a broadcast journalist. "I'm not as pessimistic about the future of print publications or dailies as I was a few years ago."
Still, there is little doubt that the first decade of the 21st century has been perhaps the most difficult time for American newspapers in their history, with several large metropolitan dailies -- the Cincinnati Post, the Rocky Mountain News, the Albuquerque Tribune, the Tucson Citizen and the Baltimore Examiner, among others -- having fallen by the wayside.
Oklahoma newspapers have experienced their share of problems, as well, with a number of layoffs having taken place at the state's two largest papers, The Oklahoman and the Tulsa World, over the past few years. Whether the industry has hit bottom yet remains to be seen, but Rieger sees signs that things are beginning to turn around. The steep personnel cuts and circulation losses that had become commonplace are slowing down or stopping, he said, and several smaller papers are slowly beginning to add staff members.
Skrzypczak believes the industry is definitely in a recovery period. But he said newspapers are still in the process of figuring out their new role as partners of new media.
"And they can't forget their core responsibilities," he said, noting that all that new technology often leads to the temptation to produce pulp instead of substance. "Information gathering and connecting with the community, each publication in its own way, is still what it's all about."
As the publisher of an alternative newsweekly, Skrzypczak is used to being tagged as an outsider in the newspaper field, even though he's never felt that way and believes that's not a distinction most readers make.
"I hate these genre tags, even though it's always been there," he said. "Readers can see through the fluff. That's why the intelligent, influential reader picks us up, because they can see through the clutter. Do we have our own agenda?
"Sure, we've always covered arts and entertainment well. We have given voice to the voiceless. And, in the process, we've developed a really good news function, too."
Tulsa World executive editor Joe Worley was e-mailed a list of questions regarding his thoughts on the state of the newspaper industry but had not responded by UTW's deadline. Publisher Robert E. Lorton III did not return calls seeking comment.
Joe Foote, the dean of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma, was more circumspect in his assessment.
"It's a complicated process because you're going to see both," he said, indicating there would be successes as well as failures in the years to come. Newspapers that are able to erect a quality pay wall for their website and reverse the losses they have suffered in recent years by taking advantage of new technology will fare well, he said.
"Those that can't will face a rocky road," he said.
Foote believes the state's smaller newspapers will have an easier time of it than the large metro dailies, given their relative isolation and lack of competition.
"That business model is holding up pretty well, he said.
The numbers seem to bear out Foote's claim. Mark Thomas, the executive vice president of the Oklahoma Press Association, said that while the number of Oklahoma newspapers that are OPA members has fallen over time, there hasn't been a dramatic decline. A quarter century ago, he said, OPA boasted a membership of approximately 235 papers. The current number is 201 -- the same as last year and the year before, he said.
What has changed, he said, is the frequency with which some newspapers are published. Many of them that formerly were published every weekday have eliminated their Monday edition as a cost-saving measure, although Thomas believes that has not had a negative effect on their ability to cover their communities.
"In fact, it's probably improved the quality of the paper for the remaining four days," he said.
As for the overall decline in the number of papers over the past 25 years, Thomas said much of that can be explained by consolidation. In a number of suburban markets, where each community formerly had its own paper, one company has bought those newspapers and merged them, he said.
"So instead of having two weeklies, you now have one twice-a-week newspaper covering both communities," he said.
The most striking example of that, he said, is eastern Oklahoma County, where seven separate papers formerly existed to cover various communities. Several years ago, one company bought all those papers and merged them into one.
"So we essentially lost six papers," he said.
Thomas said some of the best-known examples of papers that were lost include the combining of the Enid News and Enid Eagle into the Enid News Eagle, and the closure of the Oklahoma City Times and the Tulsa Tribune.
Thomas said the key to survival for the state's newspapers is recognizing that the economy has changed, just as it has for countless other businesses.
"People who can adapt to those different circumstances are going to be OK," he said. "If you're sitting there on your hands waiting for the economy to come back, you're not."
That means a willingness to explore new ways of doing things has become very important, according to Thomas.
"You better learn to be innovative in good times and bad times," he said. "In good times, you better be saving your pennies so you can afford to be innovative in bad times."
Few publishers would disagree with that, but, so far, no consensus seems to have emerged in regard to what form that innovation should take. Of the 201 papers that are OPA members, Thomas said only 84 have websites -- though the ones that do appear to have embraced that side of their existence, with many print weeklies providing new content daily in their online edition.
Only a handful of those papers -- approximately 25 percent -- have installed a pay wall on their site, he said.
Rieger's Norman Transcript is part of the majority that still offers free content in its online presence.
"That horse left the barn 15 years ago, and we should have done it then," he said of establishing a pay wall. "The deal is, there's so much thievery out there and people take stuff from you (without attributing it). I think that's going to be the next battleground, when newspapers start to protect the things they produce."
Dodd said the need for newspapers to reinvent themselves in their online incarnation closely resembles what the television news industry went through with the proliferation of cable TV late in the 20th century. The sudden addition of dozens of additional news outlets to the traditional four-network lineup changed the landscape dramatically, he said.
"People are able to choose a cable TV news operation that fits their needs, whether that's liberal, conservative or comedic," he said. "The same thing is happening in print journalism."
Skrzypczak looks at the changes that have taken place in his industry over the course of his career and shrugs off many of them, pointing out newspapers certainly aren't alone in having to fend off challengers.
"I'm old enough to remember when disco was going to kill live music," he said. "Now, this is the age of DJs, but live music is still around. And papers are always going to be there. It's about tangibility. Machines and devices fritz out. Papers are going to be here a long, long time. They're going to outlive me."
Even so, Skrzypczak said he wouldn't mind if newspapers moved to a completely electronic format. For him, what newspapers represent is not the paper they're printed on. That's simply the medium that has been most accessible and to them, he said, explaining that American newspapers evolved from pamphlets in the early days.
"That was the only thing they had available to them aside from yelling and screaming," he said. "Paper was the cheap vehicle."
The major issue for newspapers these days is transferring the value that long has been accepted for their print versions to their online versions. That has been an uphill battle, and it's a riddle no one has really solved yet, Foote said.
"A lot of very good news organizations are doing the right thing online, delivering information on multiple platforms," he said. "But when your online product is producing only 20 cents on the dollar compared to your print product, that's almost an insurmountable challenge. If your content is not valuable enough to put behind a pay wall and you rely almost exclusively on advertising, I just don't see how you do that."
A number of industry observers believe the days of print publications are numbered, that newspapers will survive only by adopting solely an online presence.
Tulsans got a taste of that last winter when the World was unable to deliver its print edition for the first time in its history because of record-breaking snowfall. The Oklahoman published print editions throughout the blizzard, as did Urban Tulsa Weekly.
Then, on Sunday, June 19, problems with the World's printing presses caused some sections of the paper to be combined in the same section. For younger readers who have always been accustomed to reading their newspaper online, those disruptions were likely no big deal. For older readers, it may have been an uncomfortable glimpse of things to come.
For the time being, Dodd said, it's still important for newspapers to appeal to both those markets.
"I'm one of those people who love to hold a newspaper in their hands," he said. "I do, I love that. But as other generations move in, we're going to see that change."
While they may have their adherents, Foote still foresees plenty of tough times ahead for newspapers in their traditional form.
"There is going to be a shake out," he said. "If the business models continue as they have, there is a finite time you can continue to make sufficient money publishing as a newspaper, so some of these are going to go away. That's going to be a big dislocation."
But he doesn't doubt that others will figure out a new business model that allows them to endure the current difficulties and emerge on solid ground.
"That could be a radically different landscape," he said.
The Lay of the Land
Michael Mason and Vincent LoVoi are among those exploring new and different business and media models.
Mason founded This Land in the spring of 2010. A monthly publication and digital outfit billed as "Oklahoma's First New Media Company," This Land is part literary journal and art publication that, in any given issue, devotes entire swaths of its oversized pages to essays, first-person color features or stylish photos.
This Land has an atypical, two-tiered system for selling ads. There's a standard rate-card for large companies; small businesses with fewer than 50 employees bid on ad space through an auction. The publication only sells ads to businesses "based and capitalized in Oklahoma," according to its downloadable media kit.
This Land has received critical praise, including a March write-up in Columbia Journalism Review, which wrote that the unique publication is "a bet against some of the more demoralizing trends in recent media history."
In 2011, LoVoi, a venture capitalist, invested in the publication and came aboard as publisher. Mason, This Land's editor, declined an interview with UTW.
On the publication's website, thislandpress.com, LoVoi wrote that This Land's mission is about chronicling community life, not cataloguing information.
"Information is ubiquitous. We don't need it dropped on our driveway. This Land may give you access to information, but it will not be our purpose," LoVoi wrote. "Our purpose will always be the story of Oklahoma itself, over time, as a culture and a place. That's what great journalism is all about. To enable a community to better understand itself, to see itself more clearly, to move forward with greater certainty."
LoVoi also made it clear that while 4,000 copies are published each month, This Land isn't a newspaper.
"Or a website. Or any particular form of media," he wrote. "News providers can no longer dictate to you what form the news shall take. You tell us. This Land will be ready and able to offer choices, with many stories in more than one media."
Engaged and Energized
Foote is encouraged by the fact that, even in the current environment, a handful of news operations are thriving.
"The Economist has the highest circulation in its history and its highest profits," he said. "That shows people are still willing to pay for information. The success of the Bloomberg news operation shows that information is valuable and people are willing to pay for it. Look at the success of sporting publications around the world. People interested in sports are not hesitant to pay for it."
Rather than be discouraged about what has happened to newspapers in recent years, Skrzypczak takes a different approach.
"This is really an exciting time, a demanding time, and it makes us all work harder and think harder," he said. "If we like what we do and we're committed to what we do, we have the talent to do it and the will to do it."
There's a lot of opportunity out there, Foote said. Whether general interest newspapers are able to take advantage of it depends on many factors, but most are making a serious effort, he said.
"The industry is more attuned, more engaged and more energized for change than any time I've ever seen it," Foote said. "While newspapers are in crisis, they're not burying their heads. The people leading them are thinking in a more visionary way than they have in a century. There just has not come a reward for their actions."
URL for this story: http://www.urbantulsa.comhttp://www.urbantulsa.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A40554


Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show, I'm Robyn Williams, and have you ever heard of the 'Glasgow kiss'? Ask Norman Swan. It may turn out to be a variant of the 'Copenhagen copout'. Remember how that meeting on climate in 2009 promised so much and delivered so little? Well, the Glasgow kiss is a vicious, unexpected head-butt. Is that what we're in for? We shall see at the end of this month, beginning of next. And in The Science Show we shall have a series of interviews of leading observers of what's needed.
And today it's Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University, after which we will have an Einstein musical from a primary school, pen pals on science in Ballarat, and Carl's briefing on what's new in the journals. First, Professor Bradshaw from Flinders University in Adelaide, whose letter, signed with colleagues, shook the news globally at the start of this year.
What made you and your colleagues back in January publish that amazing letter about the predicament we're in?
Corey Bradshaw: Yeah, it kind of started…not only were we not getting our message across, we certainly weren't getting the gravity of the message across, and there were quite a few even of our own colleagues who seem to be quite focused on their particular fields. And while that's good in terms of detailed knowledge gathering, it can sometimes blind you to the interconnectedness to other fields. And then proposing solutions that would work in isolation but unfortunately we do live in this complex adaptive system, we felt that we weren't seeing the bigger picture. And this is encapsulated, personified even by the sustainable development goals from the UN. Most of those were built in isolation, and in some of them in fact if you achieve the goals in the required time, you actually preclude the goals from others. We were very concerned about that.
So you add the politics into the mix and while we should be becoming far more adept at addressing these problems at different scales, we are in fact going backwards. We are getting less and less political capability and political will to do what we need to do. So, all of these things came together to say, look, it's our job as scientists, and I'm including all of academia that loosely touches on environmental sustainability, the protection of human society, and Paul Ehrlich always says this, he says the Earth is fine. Yeah, we'll go through an extinction event, and two or three million years later it will be all fine again. It's human society we've got to worry about. The Earth's fine. Until the sun blows up, the Earth is fine. And he's not wrong. So it's really about our preservation and improvement. At this stage we are probably looking like a guaranteed reduction at the very least in our standard of living, and probably quite a bit more suffering, but we can lessen that if we do some key things.
Robyn Williams: And what was the reaction when you actually published, the 17 of you who actually signed that note at the time a few months ago?
Corey Bradshaw: It was a bit of a surprise because we published it in a brand-new journal that just started up last year, but something just clicked, and we came together with something that was comprehensive yet very concise, and I think that hit a nerve, and I wouldn't say it was the disaster mob, people that look at the car accidents slowly when they go by on the highway, it wasn't really that, it was more putting it all into perspective and giving people that glimpse of this complex adaptive system. And I really to this day still don't understand why it became so popular. There was some other political events happening at the time too, so the Americans had just had their storming of their capital building, and then it was just prior to swearing-in of the new president, and I think people really latched onto that.
Robyn Williams: Yes indeed, and you got some considerable coverage in the media but it's quite interesting that recently there has been discussion about how Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, The Australian here, The Telegraph and so on, are changing their attitude, especially on climate. And there was an article a few days ago by Chris Mitchell who used to edit The Australian saying they in fact had been realistic about the problems we have, and that people like yourself and your colleagues, Corey, have been exaggerating. And the people in the media, such as the ABC and so on, are similarly exaggerating.
Now, it's my experience, having covered climate change and other problems in the first ever Science Show, what we are doing is the opposite, we understate the problem. And I can see plenty of evidence for that, and know that the scientists as well have been very reserved, which is their nature. What is your opinion? Have scientists been more or less understating the problem?
Corey Bradshaw: Yes, absolutely, and for various reasons. One is that first reason I gave early in the interview about the lack of appreciation of that interconnectivity between the different disciplines. Because of that specialisation we have in the sciences in particular, that to be good at what you do, you have to do have a very focused perspective and line of research. So that kind of isolates you from the bigger problems, that when you propose a solution it's usually not a realistic one because you're failing to account for the political components or the land use components or human behaviour or psychology.
The second is…we've actually published about this, that even the IPCC, the official formatting of their language and how they couch uncertainty actually ends up inflating the amount of uncertainty artificially. So not only is there the political impetus to keep things at the middle road, their actual language inflates the scientific uncertainty so that it appears to be a lot more uncertain that it actually is. And the latest IPCC report, the physical evidence, demonstrates that even within four or five years we vastly underestimated the pace with which things have been changing and will continue.
And some other work I'm doing right now, which is coming up very shortly, shows how on the extinction side we've almost completely ignored the idea of co-extinction or extinction cascades, which ecologists talk about a lot, but when you look at the raw data about the effects of climate change on extinction rates, by the end of this century a lot of people put it in that 10%, maybe 15%, 20% range, but that's just the primary extinctions, those that are caused by species exceeding their thermal tolerances.
But when you take the co-extinctions into account, so those are the…once something goes extinct, something that depends on it goes extinct, like a flower goes extinct and then the pollinator goes extinct because it specialises on it, or a parasite if it loses its host it will go extinct. And you are at least doubling, if not tripling the extinction rate from climate change alone, just climate change. In fact, co-extinctions probably dominate the extinction process. So these are the things that don't get discussed at all in the broader media.
Robyn Williams: One of the things I have seen hardly ever before is the front cover of the journal Nature and many other journals of last year, it says 'Time to Act: Global carbon emissions at crisis point'. And the editorial inside showed the link to I think something like 250 other science journals who are united in warning, from their expertise as assessors of science publications, the kind of shtuck we're in. In other words, what you've just said.
And what you've done in your letter and the follow-up is more or less six items to summarise the kind of interlinked predicament; biodiversity, the sixth extinction of animals and plants, as you said, population problems, goals that we need to address, climate of course, and political leadership has been lacking, those were the six headings of the paper you originally published. As we go up to the next grand meeting in Glasgow, what would you hope to get from that meeting and the leadership that might actually be forthcoming?
Corey Bradshaw: Well, I think a lot of these international accords and plans are structured around particular themes. The IPCC and various scientists have recently stated that the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis go hand-in-hand and how to address them go hand-in-hand, and that's a novel statement from the political side of things. So there isn't an entity that really delves into all of those elements.
So we are actually writing…I've recruited 62 separate authors from fields as far-flung as environmental law to psychology to feminist equity and child development, you name it, we have pretty much everything in there, we have 16 spokes on the wheel of development that needs to happen to lessen the ghastliness of the future. In fact we are calling it the interwoven pathways to a less ghastly future.
Robyn Williams: Not to avoid a ghastly future but a less ghastly future.
Corey Bradshaw: A less ghastly future because right now there isn't a single scientist that I know that would seriously consider that we can avoid real ghastliness in the future. We are trying to lessen the impact of that ghastliness. So we have human behaviour, we have educational shifts, obviously conservation and biodiversity and the various ways we can achieve some of that, international oversights and giving international accords some actual bite.
Food. Food is probably one of the number-one drivers of both climate change and species loss in the last few centuries, so we really need to get on top of how we make our food. Water consumption. Population issues, which are always a little bit controversial and testy. We have how to address democracy issues or the loss of democracy, we have human rights. Even changing green chemistry and green engineering towards more sustainable outcomes. Energy provision, and another controversial component of that is including fission in the mix and so we talk about zero carbon as opposed to 100% renewables.
We talk about the corporate restructuring because of the psychopathic nature of corporatisation, how we change economics so that we have a less biased distribution of wealth. The valuation of nature into our economic system, and finally nuclear disarmament because if we achieve everything else, if we blow each other up it's not going to work. So that's quite an array.
And talk about herding cats, 62 authors from every field that I've just listed has been a challenge but we're getting there and we are very close. I asked each of the authors, I said, okay, if you were the ruler of your world and you could pick four or five things that you could do right away in your field and you had no limitations, what would you do? So we got this list of things that people would do and we say, okay, how do they connect to all the other components? And we are trying to get people to think in this broader complex system approach that will allow us to at least conceptually model how one decision will affect decisions in all the others. No one is smart enough to do that intuitively, it's going to take a lot of work to get there, and we don't have a lot of time, but this is the change in thinking process I think we need not just in academia but then transcending that into the policy sphere, and that's the real challenge, and getting people to accept the idea that we need massive behavioural shifts and that requires a really sound understanding of human psychology that we haven't really done inside of most of these fields.
Robyn Williams: That sounds an awfully large agenda for even the most brainy and keen member of the public, let alone one of our politicians going to Glasgow. But you're saying it's a reference to use as a kind of briefing and from that you select your own priority, given your own expertise, and take it from there.
Corey Bradshaw: Yes, and we are hoping that people will sit down and start to think of this more in that collaborative sense, like they do in the IPCC or in the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC, but broaden it to take in these non-scientific components, which it is starting to do more because it's all about policy, but broadening it to these other components that don't really make it into these scientific endeavours at that international level.
Robyn Williams: And you're doing this on the basis of your friends and colleagues and your contacts rather than some overarching political label or group.
Corey Bradshaw: Yes, so we asked an initial pool of collaborators, you know, who do they know in these areas that they could tap on the shoulder? And then we also did some basic searching and then found people and then they obviously had to commit the time. We had had elements of human rights and equity in there but we hadn't had a specific spoke about that, so we recruited a whole team that are specialising in that alone. And yes, it's been an interesting process because I'm working with people I had never even heard of, let alone would know about their work.
Robyn Williams: Would you say that this is a political move or it's a science move or what does it represent?
Corey Bradshaw: You know, one of the major impediments to moving towards smart policy decisions and political decisions that will make a difference is that there is a mismatch between the spatial scale of recommendations and the scale of implementation. So most decisions are actually made at a fairly small scale. We do have national governments and what have you, but the states make the decisions about education funding and healthcare, and even normal land use. And we need to be able to take those broadscale messages and find a way to implement them within the constraints of the smaller political units, and that's the biggest challenge.
So we are starting at the biggest scale again, unfortunately, because we are talking lowest hanging fruit, you know, what can we do at a broadscale. But then we need to translate that, and so this is only the first part of the process, translate that into these jurisdictionally tractable recommendations. And that's where the policymakers have to come in at that stage because we can tell them until we are blue in the face that we need to do this, and they'll say, well, yes, but how? And I don't have the expertise to tell them how to do that, so they have to work with us and say, okay, these are the broader challenges, how do we put that into a scale that actually is meaningful and doable? And I think we've lost that perspective in the broader international accords like the IPCC because for every country it's voluntary, but also we have a target but we don't know how to implement that.
Robyn Williams: But we're going to have to. Professor Corey Bradshaw is the director of the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University in Adelaide. And next week as we approach Glasgow, I shall speak to Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford.
And so to Carl Smith, standing by with briefings. Carl, do you agree we've tended to understate some of those issues?
Carl Smith: I think you're right, Robyn, in that scientists tend not to overstate their findings because the peer review and grants processes don't reward it. So now that the modelling and consensus has firmed up around climate change, it's pretty telling that many scientists are calling it a crisis.
And in this Science Brief, let's begin with climate change and how different generations will experience its effects. Based on the latest modelling, human induced climate change will have more severe effects the further we get into this century. So it's probably no surprise to hear that younger generations will see more heatwaves, floods, fires and other extreme weather across their lifetimes.
But how much worse off will younger generations be compared to their parents or grandparents? Well, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science, based on current modelling, babies born in 2020 can expect to see between two and seven times more extreme weather events across their lifetime compared to people born in 1960.
The study tracks and models the impacts of climate change across the lives of different cohorts of people. So taking heatwaves as an example, based on the paper's modelling, people born in 1960 will see on average four extreme heatwaves during their lifetime. But for children born in 2020, that number jumps up to 30. That's under a scenario of warming based on current climate pledges. But even if we limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees, which is increasingly considered ambitious, the babies of 2020 are still predicted to see an average of 18 extreme heatwaves.
The paper says that for people over 40, the different warming scenarios won't drastically change the number of extreme weather events they will live through, but for the youngest cohorts, the modelling shows that limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees instead of 3.5 degrees will mean vastly fewer floods, storms, fires, droughts and other extreme events.
Younger people have recently been hitting the streets and courtrooms, railing against the intergenerational inequity of climate change. The authors of this paper say their analysis helps clarify just how significant that inequity could be.
And while we are sparing a thought for the future, have you noticed that you haven't been as future-focused during recent lockdowns? If so, it seems you're not alone. During the UK's first COVID-19 lockdown, a team of researchers started texting people. They'd ask 'what are you thinking about' and 'what are you doing'. But they weren't just checking in. The researchers were hoping to see how people's thought patterns were changing as our social and work lives were turned upside down.
The British and Canadian team compared this bank of text messages to a similar dataset from before the pandemic, and have published their findings this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One change they noticed was that people mentioned the future less often, unless they were busy with their work. The authors point out that future thinking is broadly associated with better mental health. So they say if people felt unable to look further ahead during stretches of isolation, then that might help explain some of those lockdown lows.
The researchers also saw changes in how and when people thought about others. Those who were alone during lockdown mentioned other people less often, but if they had a rare opportunity to interact with others, then their thoughts about people would spike. So the authors say thinking about others likely depends on how often we interact with people, or the sort of social environment we are in. This might all seem a little obvious, but the authors believe the findings could be handy. They suggest that for those caught in negative patterns of thinking, a change in environment might be all that's needed to prompt an internal shift.
It's not a perfect study, and the associations they report are just about. But it joins the fascinating new body of work that has been documenting the enormous social experiment of the last 18 months.
And finally, researchers from Flinders University have unearthed an ancient eagle in South Australia. Belinda Smith has covered this story for ABC Science online. Bel, what's so special about these old bird bones?
Belinda Smith: Well Carl, I mean, they're old and they're from a bird. So birds, they don't really fossilise very well, they've got really lightweight bones, to fly, and they're hollow, and this particular skeleton that was found in south Australia is a 25-million-year-old eagle. It's the oldest known eagle discovered in Australia and one of the oldest eagle-like raptors in the world. Normally these really ancient birds are identified by a single bone and that's all the palaeontologists have to go off. But this is 63 bones, including some talons and part of the beak.
Carl Smith: And so what did this ancient eagle look like, and what was it called?
Belinda Smith: So the bird was named by the researchers Achaehierax sylvestris, which means 'ancient hawk of the forest', but it's an eagle. And it looked a little bit like a wedge-tailed eagle but it had shorter wings and longer legs for its body. So this means that it likely lived in a forest, and this really matches with the fossil record of the spot where it was found. So, where the fossil was dug up is a place called Lake Pinpa, it's about 400 kilometres north of Adelaide as the crow flies or as the eagle flies. And today it's just a desert, but 25 million years ago it was the site of this lush forest, and it was also home to a really big shallow lake.
So when you think about a wedge-tailed eagle and the way they hunt, they kind of soar through the open sky, looking for prey, and then they chase it down. But this Achaehierax, it lived in the forest, and those shorter wings were really good not so much for speed but for manoeuvrability. Similar kinds of raptors, birds of prey today, that live in forests, they are ambush predators, so they will sit on a branch and just wait for a possum or a mammal or a bird to make one wrong move, and then they will just swoop in and grab it. So this is how the researchers think this eagle hunted.
Carl Smith: And I believe this ancient eagle was top of the roost in this environment back then.
Belinda Smith: Yes, it was an apex predator, and that's another reason why this find is so incredible. Apex predators, there's definitely fewer of them because they are the top of the food chain. But it probably didn't eat fish, despite living next to a lake, and that's because it's got slightly longer legs, which aren't really conducive to fishing. So, fish probably wasn't on the menu.
Carl Smith: I'm sure there are many more mysteries to be uncovered from this now dry Lake Pinpa. Belinda Smith, thanks so much.
Belinda Smith: No worries, Carl.
Carl Smith: And next week's Science Brief will be special for two reasons, Bel. First, I'll be away, so you'll be stepping in. And second, I believe you are covering a few special prizes.
Belinda Smith: That's right, it's Nobel season, so there will be plenty to talk about next week.
Carl Smith: That's Bel with the Nobels next week. And back to you, Robyn.
Robyn Williams: Thanks Carl.
And so to that question about Einstein. Could you possibly teach primary school kids physics, let alone Einstein's relativity ideas, without having to give up after five minutes, relatively speaking? Well, the answer is intriguing and we will have examples from both far North Queensland and schools in Ballarat, Victoria, that will astound you, I hope.
But we begin with another of our Top Five Scientists, David Gozzard at the University of Western Australia. And yes, he teaches kids.
David Gozzard: So I'm an experimental physicist in the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at UWA, and I've always been interested in science and engineering. My heroes as a kid were Les Hiddens the Bush Tucker Man, and David Attenborough, and as I got older I got more interested in engines and aeroplanes and things like that, and I wanted to do engineering and physics.
And my plan when I started university was to go off and work for something like SpaceX or something similar, I wanted to build rockets or aeroplanes. But as I went through university, I started to gravitate more towards physics, largely because as an experimental physicist I got to do more what I considered to be engineering in physics, I get to go in the lab, be hands-on, work with all sorts of cool equipment, build stuff, solve problems, and so that's why I became an experimental physicist.
And I sort of meandered accidentally towards working on the Square Kilometre Array. I was genuinely interested in experimental physics, I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do, I knew I wanted to work on something space related if I could. And so my job for the SKA for my PhD was to work out how to synchronise all of the dishes in the SKA. So the Square Kilometre Array, it was going to be made of at first hundreds and then eventually thousands of radio dishes spread over thousands of kilometres, and to work together as one radio-telescope, all of those dishes and the signals they are receiving need to be synchronised to a fraction of a billionth of a second. And over those distances, that's a very hard thing to do.
So my supervisor and I developed the technology to be able to do that, and it is currently nearing the point where it's going to be manufactured and installed on the SKA, which is soon to begin construction.
What we are doing now is we are taking that technology and other technologies from astronomy and applying them to ground-to-space laser links. So a laser can carry a lot more information than a radio wave can. And so this means you can do higher precision scientific measurements, but also you can do higher bandwidth communications.
There are two pillars of science right now: Einstein's theory of general relativity, and quantum mechanics. One explains the universe at large, one explains the universe on the scale of atoms and smaller, and they don't gel at all. Where you take something enormous like a star and crush it down to the size of an atom and you're creating a black hole, suddenly you have to merge the two together, and they don't. By testing Einstein's theories and how the universe works to ever greater precision, we might find the key that enables us to solve this problem, get the two to work together, find a deeper understanding of the universe. And one way we can do that is by positioning hyper-accurate atomic clocks on the ground and ones on satellites in space, so that one is in the Earth's gravity and one is higher up out of Earth's gravity, and looking for minuscule deviations not predicted by our current theories. So that's what we want to do with the science.
With the communications, we are throwing more and more satellites into orbit, and we've got weather satellites, crop monitoring, bushfire monitoring, communications, all sorts of things, all trying to get data down to the ground, and there's just not enough radio bandwidth to do it. And so we need to go to laser communications which have much higher bandwidth to get all this data down, as well as trying to get images of the next Moon-walk in high definition.
Robyn Williams: Yet another thing you do, David, is you actually teach young people, very young people, Einstein's ideas, relativity and so on, but that problem about physics, the big and the small not gelling, how do you explain that when they say, well, what's the ultimate answer, where does it all come from, what's it all about?
David Gozzard: It's tricky, it's a very hard thing to explain. This is at the edge of our knowledge of how the universe works, and to a certain extent when it comes to things like what was before the Big Bang and questions like that, we know so little, we don't even know how to ask the questions. 'What was before the Big Bang' isn't a question that even makes sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, how can you have a 'before'? We don't know what we're doing, that's why it's research.
But explaining why they don't gel is very, very tricky because it all comes down to the mathematics of it. So general relativity is deterministic. You have the same inputs, you always get the same output, according to mathematics, and it treats space and time as these things that warp and move around the stuff in that space-time. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, you can have the same inputs and it's probabilistic you get different outputs. We can predict that probabilistically, but you can never predict exactly what's going to happen. That doesn't gel with general relativity, just mathematically it doesn't work. And also there is currently no way to get space and time into quantum mechanics. Space and time are just the stage on which this quantum mechanical stuff is happening, and they kind of ignore it. And when you try to put the two together, the maths just doesn't work, it throws up nonsense.
Robyn Williams: Yes, but you can't tell the kids that, can you.
David Gozzard: I can, I try. It's not a very satisfying answer, is it.
Robyn Williams: Dr David Gozzard, an ABC Top Five Scientist for 2021. He works with Professor David Blair, a Prime Minister's Prize-winner who established the Einstein in schools project in WA. And it may not be a satisfying answer to tell the kids you just don't know, but it is one that leads somewhere. Remember the old joke that goes; do you know relativity by Albert Einstein? Answer; not sure, could you just hum it for me? Well, they have, an entire school in the far north of Queensland. Just listen:
[excerpt from E=mc2 The Musical]
Chris Kohn: I'm Chris Kohn and I'm the director of arts at Good to Great Schools Australia. E=mc2 The Musical is all about the famous equation, the work of Albert Einstein, and in the musical the students discover what the meaning of this equation is and they discover all of the elements that go to make the equation; energy, mass, the speed of light.
The musical is a brand-new piece of theatre that was developed by Good to Great Schools Australia working with the students and staff and the whole community of Hope Vale campus of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy, which is a primary school out in Hope Vale which is 45 minutes drive north of Cooktown, which is four hours north of Cairns by road. So it's well and truly up Cape York Peninsula towards the pointy end. And Hope Vale is a school of around about 120 students.
So the musical charts the journey of four young science students who are presenting as part of their annual science fair, and I like to think of it as Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure meets Hamilton meets a TED talk, because they get into a time machine and travel to different times and places throughout history where they meet famous scientists such as Michael Faraday, Émilie du Châtelet, Marie-Anne and Antoine Lavoisie, Lisa Meitner and Otto Hahn, and of course Albert Einstein and his wife Mileva. And through travelling to all these times and places, they not only present in the audience with the story of E=mc2, they unwittingly present Albert Einstein with the secret to the equation.
The idea of this musical is that it's part of the Aussie science curriculum that Good to Great Schools Australia is developing with the school. And it's a curriculum that includes physics and chemistry and all of the aspects of science that come under the Australian curriculum, and the musical is a family engagement and community engagement part of that. So the idea is that every year or two the school will present this musical, and in doing so the students engage with their learning with their families, with the teachers who also perform in the musical. So it's a way of embedding that learning within the community, and it's also a way of embedding that learning within I guess the voices and bodies of the students in a way that we hope means that it's a deeper way of learning that will ensure that they remember this information about physics for many years to come.
The younger students were in a scene where they played elements or atoms or protons, neutrons and electrons, and so they learnt things that were more appropriate for their age, whereas the older students were in scenes about electromagnetism and force, again more appropriate to their age. So everybody learnt their specific part, which was about an aspect of physics and an aspect of E=mc2. And that's the way that we've designed it, is that different the scenes can be tied in with different experiments you might do in a classroom or different aspects of curriculum that's appropriate to a certain age. So they all learnt more about their specific focus area, but also by being part of the whole show, they have access to all that knowledge that the other students are also learning at the same time.
This was really a whole-of-community event, given that there's only a few hundred people in Hope Vale, and 120 or so of those are students at the school, and then if you include their parents and extended families, you're pretty much straight away including the whole community.
One of the real highlights was we invited a group of elders who have a singing group, they sing in their Guugu Yimidhirr language, which is the language of Hope Vale, and they contributed to the musical by translating part of one of the songs into Guugu Yimidhirr and then singing that on the night.
It's been really extraordinary working on this project over the last year because I've seen the growth of these students and the community in terms of their understanding of the science, but also in building capabilities around performing arts and public speaking and performing in front of peers and in front of the whole community. So it's building understanding about science, but it's also tapping into the natural abilities of the students and their teachers, and it's actually great to see teachers and family members and elders on stage performing alongside these students because it's a really powerful expression of community engagement.
There is a song towards the end of the musical that's called 'Women in Science' and it's a hip-hop song where women who have contributed greatly to science but have gone relatively unacknowledged are celebrated. So there's Émilie du Châtelet, Marie-Anne Lavoisie and Lisa Meitner, and their contributions are celebrated through that song, and as a gesture towards evening-up some of that equality, because that's also an important part in inspiring young girls to go on and study science as well. We felt that that was really an important part of the show to include.
The feedback from the performance, which was just a few days ago now, has been really positive from the community. We've got a wonderful staff member, Cheryl Cannon, who is based in Hope Vale, and she's been gathering feedback from students and teachers and parents, and overwhelmingly they want to see the musical happen again as soon as possible.
Chanae Cannon: My name is Chanae Cannon.
Cheryl Cannon: Okay, what did you like about being in the show last week?
Chanae Cannon: Being Einstein's wife, to support Albert with his ideas.
Cheryl Cannon: Did you know anything about Einstein before the show?
Chanae Cannon: Not really.
Cheryl Cannon: But you learnt more during the show?
Chanae Cannon: Yep.
Cheryl Cannon: Has it made you more curious about science?
Chanae Cannon: Yes.
Cheryl Cannon: In what way?
Chanae Cannon: Learning how people came up with ideas and how they figured out E=mc2.
Darren: Hello, my name is Darren.
Cheryl Cannon: And you liked being in that show on Friday?
Darren: Yeah, it taught me a lot of stuff about science.
Cheryl Cannon: Did you know about Einstein before the show?
Darren: During the show.
Cheryl Cannon: When you were practising?
Cheryl Cannon: Okay. And do you want to know more about him, do you think?
Darren: Yes, I want to know more about Einstein.
Cheryl Cannon: So would you go in the play again?
Darren: Yeah, I would like to go in the play again, but I'm off to high school next year.
Chris Kohn: So that's really fantastic, and I think the feedback has been that it was a really powerful performance, that there were obvious gains in terms of student confidence, but also there was an expression that came from many parents that they understood the science from having their children rehearse it over many weeks.
We intend to do this musical every couple of years as part of the Aussie science curriculum that we have developed, but it's also something that we can imagine could happen in other schools as part of their family engagement approach. In fact there is a school in Sydney that will be performing it next year, but we also imagine that it's something that other schools may want to include as part of their science curriculum because of the great benefits it brings to the learning.
Carl Smith: Chris Kohn, thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Chris Kohn: Great, thanks Carl.
Robyn Williams: Chris Kohn of Good to Great Schools Australia, and we were at Hope Vale, way north of Cooktown, northern Queensland. Yes, primary schools. We were in one a few weeks ago with kids at Whitehorse Primary in Victoria.
Now another brilliant experiment, this time in Ballarat. 90 pupils were paired with 90 scientists as pen pals. Here's ABC Ballarat's Gav McGrath with Dr Jennifer Payne of Monash.
Jennifer Payne: So the pen pal program started this year during Covid, which made it a bit interesting, and we as scientists are matched up with primary school students, grade 6s to be exact, to share letters, bringing back that old-school letter writing. So the science behind that as to why we are getting into primary school students is if we give positive science experiences to children at a young age, we find that they are actually more interested in science later on. So we are hoping to increase the science literacy. Even if they don't go on to become scientists, that's fine, but at least we are helping improve, showing that science is all around us.
Gavin McGrath: What was the genesis of this program?
Jennifer Payne: Writing to my boss's kids actually in Covid. The joys of needing to send a laptop to my boss and it's going in a huge box, let's turn this box into something fun. And then I realised these kids elsewhere are stuck in lockdown, and letter writing is really one of the aspects that everyone has access to, it's cheap, all you need is a pen and paper. And then from there maybe we can extend this.
We need to be able to connect scientists with kids to help improve science education because we are dropping off the number of students enrolling in science. And I run into a few teacher friends and I've got this idea, can we match some of your students with scientists to write letters across the year? And in a matter of four weeks I had 140 scientists signed up and really enthusiastic about potentially being involved, and there's more scientists than I knew what to do with.
Gavin McGrath: It's Asolina Braun, is that right?
Asolina Braun: Yes, Asolina Braun. I very much like the idea of having a pen pal. I am a skin immunologist, interested in how our immune cells in the skin keep us healthy and save us from trouble with pathogens, and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Monash University. When I was the same age group as the kids that are taking part in this program, I also had a pen pal back in the day, so I was very interested in having that experience again.
Gavin McGrath: Okay, so thinking back, Asolina, to when you were 12, how much would something like this have helped you on your way to your career?
Asolina Braun: When I was a bit older, I had a teacher who was very good in teaching us science and that was something that sparked my interest, and so I think by taking part in this program I was hoping that I can do something similar as my teacher did to me.
Gavin McGrath: How much would having a female role model have helped?
Asolina Braun: Oh, that definitely is something that I think is only becoming more and more of an awareness now because when I was a kid I used to think of scientists as those male blokes. And I think one of the main points of this program and that was all sorts of shapes, sizes, genders of scientists that I hope the kids when they were talking to each other about which scientist did you get, who are you corresponding with, that they got to see the whole diversity of scientists that are out there.
Gavin McGrath: Tell me a little bit about your pen pal?
Jennifer Payne: My pen pal is awesome. I've never actually heard her voice but her letters are amazing, so I'm always looking forward to opening them. They are filled with amazing questions about science but also about daily life. I get to find out about what she is doing. She is really curious and seems really interested in bacteria and superbugs and what I'm doing, and also about the scientific enquiry as well. She really has a fantastic enquiring mind and is really curious. We'll start off as scientists really, it's then just a matter of where we go with that.
Gavin McGrath: If you had a scientist as a pen pal when you were in primary school, what difference would that have made to you?
Jennifer Payne: I think it would have helped because I would have actually seen what a scientist is. I didn't know what it was, and therefore I couldn't be it because I didn't know it.
Gavin McGrath: You've been paired with Khadija who is a 12-year-old schoolgirl. Having a role model who is a woman, what advantage might that give for a girl in school, potentially looking at a career in science?
Jennifer Payne: When I was in primary school, scientists were men in white lab coats, and that's all we really got to see. And not knowing that that was even a professional career that you could take, having a mentor that is kind of like you, you can therefore see what this is and what it could be, and it would have made a remarkable difference to me if I had that.
Gavin McGrath: You've exchanged half a dozen letters now with Khadja. What is something in one of those letters, something of a highlight, something that has stood out to you that you read and really impacted you?
Jennifer Payne: Her interest and curiosity into what I do was really inspiring.
Khadija Asad: Hi, I'm Khadija, I study at Jells Park Primary School in year six.
Gavin McGrath: Who is your scientist pen pal?
Khadija Asad: My scientist pen pal is Jen Payne and she studies three different fields of science at Monash. The first one is microbiology, the second one is immunology, and the third one is biochemistry. Out of the three that she has told me about, the one that intrigued me most is probably microbiology. It's really cool to study about superbugs, the bacteria resistant to our drugs and antibiotics. She's told me how they operate and why they are resistant to our immune cells and everything, and she is currently…in biochemistry she is designing a new antibiotic that is supposed to kill the superbugs and bacteria so that you don't get sick.
Gavin McGrath: I have seen some of these letters. Describe what is in the letters that Dr Jen has sent you.
Khadija Asad: Something really cool that she does in the start of every letter, she writes my name in this really cool calligraphy, and then she hand-writes most of her letters and she adds these little drawings next to each of her paragraphs. And in her very first letter she gave me pictures of herself and some of the things that she is doing, like her experiments in the lab, and then she has given me a description of what she is doing in that picture.
Gavin McGrath: Based on some of these letters, how would you feel about eventually having a career in science?
Khadija Asad: I think it would be really cool and I think I would really enjoy it myself because now that she has told me what she does, it has given me a new perspective of science. I always thought scientists were playing with beakers, but now it's way different, they do experiments and they are just like us but they study about stuff and they tell everyone about that.
Gavin McGrath: What has that done for you in terms of how you actually see your future, career-wise?
Khadija Asad: Before we started this pen pal program I thought of what I wanted to be when I grow up. Science is very interesting to me now and I feel like I would definitely consider being a scientist, it sounds like a really exciting job, and you get to learn about lots of different fields and different types of sciences. It's really cool to talk to different scientists and see what they do because it has given lots of people in my class different perspectives, and everyone thinks it's really cool, what they do at Monash, so I think we should do it for the rest of the year.
Gavin McGrath: Do you have certainly some hopes of what science might look like in 10, 20 years time?
Jennifer Payne: It's going to be so different, it's going to be so amazing. Going back 10 years in time from now and just seeing the change from here to then has been so interesting, let alone predicting 10 years into the future. I look forward to it, it's going to be awesome.
Gavin McGrath: You've got plenty of scientists, are you still looking for some more kids to be pen pals?
Jennifer Payne: That would be lovely. We actually have more scientists than we know what to do with for next year's program, so we are actually looking for some schools, particularly primary schools, that would be interested in joining the program.
Gavin McGrath: How should they get in touch with you?
Jennifer Payne: If they can reach out through our website, penpalprogram.wordpress.com.
Robyn Williams: That's penpalprogram.wordpress.com. Chris Kaliviotis of Jells Park Primary, and Dr Jennifer Payne from Monash, with Gav McGrath and the great team at ABC Ballarat.
Well, so far in this Science Show we've leapt from Adelaide to Brisbane with Carl, to Perth, northern Queensland and then Ballarat. Check this on a map. You will immediately perhaps think of a good old school map or a mud map, but as Bill Bunbury finds in his new book, that's only one way of doing it.
Bill Bunbury: When my wife Jenny and I started to write a book tackling understanding and misunderstanding between European arrivals and the original Australians, it took me a while to find a title. I toyed with something like the English novelist Ian Forster's 'Only Connect' but it seemed too abstract. But when I revisited a conversation I had held with anthropologist Peter Bindon, I found one.
In 1980 the Kimberley Noonkanbah Station's traditional sacred places were threatened. The state government was looking for oil and gas on Noonkanbah land, and the WA Museum had asked Peter to assess any endangered sites. The Noonkanbah elders took him to one, Pea Hill, a conical mountain and a dominant feature in the landscape, with long-cherished stories and legends. Pea Hill was also a marker for travellers across the Noonkanbah plain. For them, as Peter said, it was part of a significant map for country.
I suggested that perhaps there were many ways to read a map, and, as Peter added, and there are many maps. Useful insight? What is a map, and how do people read it? Well before our 2005 conversation and a long way south of the Kimberley, an interesting exchange took place in 1831 in Albany, Western Australia, between a British military officer, Collet Barker, and a local Minang man, Mokare. Barker was there to prevent any French usage of Albany's superb natural harbour, and he needed a friendly relationship with the locals.
Mokare and Barker shared conversations about their different cultures. Mokare was especially curious about the large sailing ships the British had brought to their shores, and Barker's diary records that interest. Mokare enquired the age of ships, how long they would last before they broke up, or died, as he called it. Barker's response suggests that he saw this as a technical enquiry. After all, ships rot, sink or wear out and get broken up. But if Mokare remained puzzled, it might suggest that he held a very different notion of creation and life, an animate way of interpreting existence. For him, a ship is evidently a living creation, it walks on water. And while it may die, it becomes something else. In his world, all things have life; trees, rocks, and strange new vessels.
Wadandi cultural custodian Iszaac Webb from south-west WA describes this understanding:
Iszaac Webb: So for us as First Nations people and Wadandi people, we always look out to the ocean as saltwater people, and we see the ocean and the sky meet together and that is like a resting place or a stopover where your spirit will go and you are reborn or rebirthed back into the country, so you will become a tree or an animal, an object, whether it's animate or inanimate, so whether it's a dolphin swimming in the water or just the rock that sits beside the river or in the ocean, they cannot be disconnected, either one.
Robyn Williams: Iszaac Webb in south-west Western Australia, and that was a taste of Bill Bunbury's talk on next week in The Science Show. The book, written with Jenny Bunbury, is called Many Maps and is published by University of Western Australia Publishing. The full story next week in The Science Show when we shall also hear about the Nobel prizes, about to be announced, the Eureka prizes, to be revealed on Thursday next, and Prince William's prizes, including an Australian finalist.
The Science Show is produced by David Fisher, with lots of help from the two Carls, Carl Smith and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. I'm Robyn Williams.
Avoiding a ghastly future
The science brief
New communications technology for astronomy and space missions
Einstein musical introduces students to physics through performance
Pen pal scientists inspire young students
Different cultures, different maps
New ways to inspire young students about the world of science
In this episode


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H E L L O !
Welcome to the inside of my brain...
...my little gallery by the sea is also my own creative outlet!...S H O P N O W !
I am lucky enough to have lived the vast majority of my life by the beach and I have always been one of those people who can't leave it without a pocket full of 'finds' !
I love to paint, make crafts & artwork from reclaimed materials and like to dabble in ceramics and jewellery making too.....
Original paintings on canvas...
I always have a selection of original paintings available, sizes and prices vary but are generally between £180-£300 depending on size.
All the featured paintings on the left are currently available.
Please contact me for details of any particular painting or if you have a view that you love we can talk about commissioning a painting in a size to suit you!
I like to try my hand at many crafts as well as my lifelong love for painting.
Everything I make or paint goes straight onto my instagram page so please head over there to stay updated!
Currently I am making cushions with fabric printed with my own artwork, making lino prints highlighting plastics in our oceans for a travel mug design and as always, painting views of my little corner of the coastline here in Devon.

domain: artistic


International heavyweights: 40 machines in four months
Old treasures and very modern types of machines– after the closure of a German factory for the production of gears for wind energy facilities and ship-building, a real mammoth task awaited our specialists.
After it was auctioned off on-site, the production equipment installed there had to be properly dismantled and loaded.
As the general contractor, we were given the privilege of having to deliver 25 principals and their 40 machines to a wide array of destinations in only four months. 12 of our best employees already worked in advance to optimally prepare the various types of machines for the grinding, polishing and milling required for the looming trip.
Some types of equipment were truly heavyweight and oftentimes weighed up to 21 tons which had to be transported via international routes to Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Turkey. Even if the communication with our international partners can be described as being particularly challenging, everything functioned very smoothly and the deadlines that had been set could be successfully met.
25 international principals