Monday January 3, 2011-photos and new project

Assignment: due Thursday 6 January at the close of class. Please send them, so I can collect them in the drop box. Any not received by that time will be considered late at the going rate of 10 points off per day. Your own obituary. Minimum 500 words.

ALSO: at the end of this blog is a copy of the crime terms handout. You will have a quiz on these words this Friday 7 January.
The end of the year brings the usual round-ups of summaries: films, music, exhibits, photos, and passings. Start out by taking a look at some of the significant public people who have died this year: http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/gallery?section=news/entertainment&id=7202445&photo=11
Use about 20 minutes of class time- ON THIS! These are people whose lives have made an impact in the fields of music, film, politics, journalism and literature. Their work will continue to resonate. How many of these folks are familiar to you?
Moving on… Those starting out as reporters often view obituary writing with disdain. After all, they say, an obit is by its very nature old news, the story of a life already lived.
But experienced journalists know that obits are some of the most self-fulfilling articles to write, for they allow the writer an opportunity to chronicle a human life from beginning to closure, and in doing so to find themes and deeper meaning beyond the simple retelling of events. As well, remember that obituaries are about people, and isn't writing about people what makes journalism so interesting in the first place? Writing your own obituary could grow out of – or in to – a personal memoir.
Now before you begin to write your own, read through the following two examples. Note the word choice, any euphemisms, imagery, how facts are presented, reflective observations and quotes. Heads up: on your mid-term you will need to answer a couple of questions about each of these.

Richard Holbrooke was a patriot who was prepared to be ruthless in what he saw as his nation's interest. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP
Richard Holbrooke, who has died aged 69 after suffering a ruptured aorta, was not the most universally beloved, but was certainly one of the ablest, the most admired and the most effective of American diplomats. He is one of the few of that profession in the past 40 years who can be compared with the giants of the "founding generation" of American hegemony, such as Dean Acheson and George Kennan.
Holbrooke was tough as well as exceptionally bright. He was a loyal, liberal Democrat, but also a patriot who was prepared to be ruthless in what he saw as his nation's interest. To his friends, he was kind and charming, but he could be abrasive: no doubt that characteristic helped prevent him becoming secretary of state on two occasions, under Bill Clinton and again when Barack Obama became president.
He held almost every other important job in the international service of the US. He was ambassador to the United Nations, where he dealt with the vexed problem of America's debts to the organisation, and to Germany. He was the only person in history to be assistant secretary of state – the key level in routine diplomacy – in two regions of the world, Europe and Asia. He distinguished himself as an investment banker, a magazine editor, a charity executive and an author, but he will be remembered most of all for his success in negotiating an end to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina at an Ohio airbase, and for his part in the American intervention in Kosovo. At the time of his death, he was Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke, generally known as Dick, was born in Manhattan. Though his parents were ethnic Jews, they had little sense of Jewish identity, and were atheists. His father, Dan, had been born in Warsaw of Russian-Jewish parents and in the 1930s came to the US, where he was a successful medical doctor. Dick's mother was the former Trudi Moos, a potter. She had first gone to Argentina as a refugee from Germany before moving to the US.
Dick was educated at Scarsdale high school, in New York's affluent Westchester county suburb, one of the most academically successful secondary schools in the US. His best friend there was David Rusk, son of Dean Rusk, later secretary of state to Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Dick's own father died when he was 15, and he went on to Brown University, the Ivy League college in Rhode Island. Graduating in 1962, he was influenced by Kennedy's call to young Americans to serve the nation.
Holbrooke joined the foreign service, and in 1963 was sent as a civilian official to Vietnam, where he was one of a talented cohort of young men who were to become leaders in American diplomacy, including John Negroponte, George W Bush's ambassador to Iraq and deputy secretary of state; Les Aspin, a future congressman and secretary of defence; and Anthony Lake, who became Clinton's national security adviser. Holbrooke worked for the infamous Robert Komer, who earned the sobriquet "Blowtorch Bob" for his work in the Phoenix "strategic hamlets" programme of forced resettlement.
Once back in Washington in 1966, Holbrooke worked for two years in the White House under Johnson, and then at the state department, where he was a junior member of the delegation to the fruitless initial peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris. He also wrote one volume of the famous Pentagon Papers, the government's secret history of its involvement in Vietnam, subsequently leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post by Daniel Ellsberg. In 1970, probably aware that his Vietnam service might not be universally admired, Holbrooke asked to be sent to Morocco as director of the Peace Corps there.
By 1972, Holbrooke was ready for a change. He became the first editor of the magazine Foreign Policy, created as a less stuffy competitor to the august Foreign Affairs. He also worked for Newsweek magazine. In 1976, he went to work for Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, who was beginning his campaign for president and badly needed some foreign policy expertise.
When Carter became president, in 1977, Holbrooke became his assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs. He was charged by critics with protecting the Indonesian president, Suharto, from criticism by American human rights advocates over East Timor, but his most important work lay in completing the shift in American diplomatic relations from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, formally recognised by the US from the start of 1979.
After the Republican Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, Holbrooke went to Wall Street. He became a consultant to, and later managing director of, the investment banker Lehman Brothers. At the same time he took on a good deal of pro bono work for the Carnegie Commission and other foundations interested in foreign policy. When Clinton became president in 1993, he appointed Holbrooke as his ambassador to Germany, where he initiated the important German-American institution, the American Academy in Berlin.
After a year in Berlin, he was brought back to Washington as assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and became passionately committed to the search for peace in the former Yugoslavia. He achieved a close relationship with the Serbian president, Slobodan Miloševic as well as with the equally intransigent Croatian leader, Franjo Tudman. He invited them and the Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to an isolated airbase near Dayton, Ohio, where in a brilliant display of "parallel diplomacy", negotiating separately with all parties, he achieved the accords that ended the fighting in Bosnia by devising a federal structure to accommodate Bosnian Serbs on the one hand, and Croatians and Muslims on the other. In order to do so he was willing to threaten Miloševic that the US would bomb his headquarters. He maintained that the Serbs had experienced nothing but military success, and would not come to the table unless they feared American military power.
With the concluding of the Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia-Herzegovina in November 1995, Holbrooke then announced that he had to go and get married. This was the third such occasion, his marriages to Larrine Sullivan, a lawyer, and Blythe Babyak, a television producer, having ended in divorce. His new bride was the television journalist Kati Marton, daughter of the Associated Press's White House correspondent, Endre Marton, and previously the wife of the television anchor Peter Jennings. Marton had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but discovered that her grandparents were Jews and had died in Auschwitz.
Holbrooke resigned from government because he wanted to move back to New York with Kati, and went to work for Credit Suisse First Boston. The bank allowed him to act as President Clinton's representative, first to Cyprus in 1997, and later to Kosovo, where atrocities had been committed by Serbs on the Albanian majority. Extremely tough discussions followed, and when it proved impossible to reach agreement he lobbied within government for air strikes on Serbia. To give Miloševic a last chance of a negotiated settlement, he went to Belgrade for talks in the presidential palace. But no breakthrough was forthcoming, and so shortly afterwards Nato began the bombing campaign of March-June 1999 that resulted in Serbia's capitulation.
The following August, Holbrooke returned to public service as US ambassador to the UN. It had taken more than a year for his appointment to be confirmed, in part because he was accused of lobbying for Credit Suisse First Boston when engaged on government business. However, once he had been sworn in, he negotiated a crucial deal with the 188 other member nations. The US would pay its $900m debt, accumulated since President Reagan's attack on the UN, and in return dues were redistributed so that the US share was reduced.
After the Republicans won the 2000 presidential election and George W Bush became president, Holbrooke went back once again to the private sector, becoming a director of Human Genome Sciences, Inc. He also founded and remained president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, whose activity was subsequently extended to deal with tuberculosis and malaria: it was an extremely effective NGO linking such powerful corporations as Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, Chevron and many more.
In 2009, President Obama made Hillary Clinton, whom Holbrooke had supported in her presidential campaign, secretary of state, while Holbrooke became his envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan; she acknowledged her friend's "ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges".
Holbrooke's incandescent confrontations with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, became legendary. On 21 August 2009, Holbrooke accused Karzai to his face of having rigged the Afghan elections. Though officials denied details of the showdown, it is clear that Holbrooke's relation with Karzai broke down totally in a shouting match.
Subsequently his influence waned. He was deeply committed to improving relations with Pakistan, which he saw as the key to the Afghan situation. But when floods devastated Pakistan last July, he insisted that relief must come as the first priority, ahead of putting pressure on the Pakistan government to do more to root out jihadis from its tribal area, the policy issue on which he had put maximum pressure before the humanitarian issue arose.
Last Friday, at a meeting with secretary of state Clinton, he fell ill. After he arrived at George Washington University hospital, Washington, he underwent prolonged surgery, and remained in a critical condition till his death.
He is survived by Kati, his two sons, David and Anthony, from his first marriage, and his brother, Andrew.
SECOND OBITUARY TO READ




Billy Taylor, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 89 from The New York Times by Sara Krulwich
Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.
Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as much as any other musician to erase.
Dr. Taylor probably had a higher profile on television than any other jazz musician of his generation. He had a long run as a cultural correspondent on the CBS News program “Sunday Morning” and was the musical director of David Frost’s syndicated nighttime talk show from 1969 to 1972.
Well educated and well spoken, he came across, Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in a review of a 1996 nightclub performance, as “a genial professor,” which he was: he taught jazz courses at Long Island University, the Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. But he was also a compelling performer and a master of the difficult art of making jazz accessible without watering it down.
His “greatest asset,” Mr. Ratliff wrote, “is a sense of jazz as entertainment, and he’s not going to be obscure about it.”
A pianist with impeccable technique and an elegant, almost self-effacing style, Dr. Taylor worked with some of the biggest names in jazz early in his career and later led a trio that worked regularly in New York nightclubs and recorded many albums. But he left his mark on jazz less as a musician than as a proselytizer, spreading the gospel of jazz as a serious art form in high school and college lectures, on radio and television, on government panels and foundation boards.
He also helped bring jazz to predominantly black neighborhoods with Jazzmobile, an organization he founded in 1965 to present free outdoor concerts by nationally known musicians at street corners and housing projects throughout New York City.
“I knew that jazz was not as familiar to young blacks as James Brown and the soul thing,” he told Barbara Campbell of The Times in 1971. “If you say to a young guy in Harlem, Duke Ellington is great, he’s going to be skeptical until he has seen him on 127th Street.”
William Edward Taylor Jr. was born in Greenville, N.C., on July 24, 1921, and grew up in Washington. His father, William, was a dentist; his mother, Antoinette, was a schoolteacher. He had his first piano lesson at 7 and later studied music at what is now Virginia State University. Shortly after moving to New York in 1943 — within two days of his arrival, he later recalled — he began working with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and he remained a fixture on that celebrated nightclub row for many years.
Dr. Taylor had the technique, the knowledge and the temperament to straddle the old and the new; his adaptability made him a popular sideman with both swing and bebop musicians and led to his being hired in 1949 as the house pianist at Birdland.
In 1951 he formed his own trio, which was soon working at clubs like the Copacabana in New York and the London House in Chicago. Within a few years he was lecturing about jazz at music schools and writing articles about it for DownBeat, Saturday Review and other publications. He later had a long-running concert-lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He also became one of the few jazz musicians to establish a successful separate career in radio and television. In 1958 he was the musical director of an NBC television show, “The Subject Is Jazz.” A year later the Harlem radio station WLIB hired him as a disc jockey; in 1962 he moved to WNEW, but he returned to WLIB in 1964 as both disc jockey and program director, and remained in those positions until 1969. He was later a founding partner of Inner City Broadcasting, which bought WLIB in 1971.
Commercial radio became increasingly inhospitable to jazz in the 1960s, but Dr. Taylor found a home at National Public Radio, where he was a familiar voice for more than two decades, first as host of “Jazz Alive” in the late ’70s and most recently on “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center.” That series, on which he introduced live performances and interviewed the performers, made its debut in the fall of 1994 and remained in production until the fall of 2002.
In 1968 Dr. Taylor was appointed to New York City’s new Cultural Council, along with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and other prominent figures in the arts. He later held similar positions on both the state and federal level and until recently was an adviser to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
In 1980 he was a member of an advisory panel that called for greater support for jazz from the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the panel’s proposals were eventually enacted, and Dr. Taylor became a beneficiary of the endowment in 1988, when he received a $20,000 Jazz Masters award. He was also given a National Medal of Arts in 1992.
Dr. Taylor wrote more than 300 compositions. They ranged in scope and style from “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” a simple 16-bar gospel tune written with Dick Dallas that became one of the unofficial anthems of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to the ambitious “Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra” (1973).
In addition to his daughter, Dr. Taylor is survived by his wife, Theodora. A son, Duane, died in 1988.
As much energy as his other activities required, Dr. Taylor never lost his enthusiasm for performing — or his frustration with audiences that, as he saw it, missed the point. “Most people say, ‘Hey, let’s go to the nightclub and have a few drinks, and maybe we’ll even listen to the music,’ ” he once said. “It’s a lack of understanding of the musicians and of the discipline involved.
“This is not to say that playing jazz is all frowning and no fun at all. But because you make it look easy doesn’t mean you didn’t spend eight hours a day practicing the piano.”

Below is a copy of the crime terms handout from class. Your quiz is this Friday 7 January. simple matching.

A guide to crime in the AP Stylebook
People are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime. In some states, the district attorney decides whether enough evidence exists to charge a suspect with a crime. If someone is arrested on a charge of murder, be sure the district attorney has charged the suspect. Otherwise, you'll be talking about libel to the suspect’s lawyer. This is a distinction from the AP Stylebook, which suggests the wording “arrested on a charge of.” This may be legal in some states, but not all. “Arrested on suspicion of” avoids the issue of whether someone has been charged with a crime.
Assault: Technically, an assault is the threat of violence, such as pointing a gun at someone or yelling “I’m gonna kill you!”
Assault and battery: When someone is actually touched by the assaulter or his agent (stick,knife, gun, etc.), battery has occurred.
Burglary: Entering a building (but not necessarily breaking in) with the intent to commit a crime is burglary. Even if the criminal is scared out of the house before swiping the jewels, the crook has committed burglary. However, if you mistake someone else’s house for your own – perhaps you are too drunk or tired to tell the difference – you have not committed burglary.
Larceny (legal term for stealing and theft): This is the wrongful taking of property.
Robbery: Used in a legal sense, it is the use of violence or threat in committing larceny. “Giveme your money or I'll shoot” is a threat to a bank teller. If I brandish a gun when I take your wallet, I am using the threat of violence. If I throw you against a wall when I take your wallet, I am using violence. Used in commonly accepted broader sense, it means to plunder, which means a house can be robbed when a person is not present. You rob a person or house, but you steal the jewels or money.
Theft: Larceny without threat or violence is theft.
Homicide: This is the legal term for slaying or killing.
Murder: Malicious, premeditated homicide is murder. Unless police say premeditation was involved, don’t say a victim was murdered until someone is convicted in court. Instead, say the victim was killed or slain.
Manslaughter: This is homicide without malice or premeditation.
Assassin: A politically motivated killer is an assassin.
Killer: This is a generic term for anyone who kills with a motive of any kind.
Murderer: Someone who is convicted of murder in a court of law.
– Compiled by Dr. Deborah Gump, Ohio University (gump@ohio.edu)