The great leveler

I think it was in 11th grade that the final inevitability of life actually dawned on me in biology class. I was reading out loud the textbook that stated that all living things on earth had a birth, a period of growth and then death. The text stated the only difference between man and the creatures that crawl upon, swim in or soar above its surface is that we know we will die. It's not a question of if, but when, the text reiterated. Up to that point I had only experienced death or thought about it as something that happened to someone else. Now the message was being made abundantly clear: I was going to die too. Through the intervening years I have lost many relatives and close friends. I was only five when my great-grandfather died, but I remember seeing him for the last time in the hospital room and then he was gone. Several great aunts and great uncles went to their graves and I was sad, but failed to connect the thought that their demise was indeed a fate in store for me. The summer between my sixth and seventh grades I became best friends at summer camp with another kid also from New Orleans. While we were not close at first, we gravitated towards each other and did everything together toward the end of the summer. We pledged to get together during the coming school year. Within just a few weeks we were both back home and in school. One morning I received a phone call from a friend that informed me my buddy had been killed in a tragic car crash with his mother and brother. They had been driving and struck an abutment. The car had caught fire while my friend was still buckled in the back seat. Quick action allowed his brother and mother the chance to get out of the vehicle. They survived, but my friend didn't. I didn't attend the funeral, but I did visit his grave a year or so later and to this day I still miss him. Yet, I don't think the gravitas of his death made quite the impression that the deaths of my grandparents and even more great aunts and great uncles did later. But in retrospect, it should have. He was just a kid, after all. They had lived many more decades, had had an opportunity to have families and to enjoy what others referred to as their golden years. They were able to travel, while he had rarely sojourned from the city of his birth. There have been several friends and close family members I have lost through the years, not the least of whom were my father and wife within just a three-week period. Now, though, I am beginning to realize that the unanticipated mourning for but a few of my contemporaries is about to make the turn towards the expected and commonplace. Yesterday I attended a funeral for an 82-year-old man who was deeply religious and kind beyond description. His memory was still fresh in my mind when I received the startling news that one of my contemporaries, a woman only a few years older than I, has succumbed to an aneurysm. While we were not close, I did feel a loss for her husband and the two grown children she left behind. A religious man might state that G-d really needed her in a hurry, while a secular man might suggest it was just her time. But knowing she was nearly 60, I began to consider actuarial tables. I remember thinking to myself that she will be the first of a new decade of departures. The odds are that some of us will die due to accident, disease or foul play. Many of my contemporaries will die in this coming decade and whether I will be on that list, no one can say. I want to live my life as best I can with the knowledge that what I do is important and enriching to others and myself. I consider my days on earth as precious gifts and I want to treasure those that are left and the possibilities they signify. But in the end, imposed with a sentence of life, I will continue to carry on as any man could or should: with faith, hope and charity deep in my heart.

The truth comes out about Dell

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when news was leaked on the New York Times and Gizmodo sites yesterday that Dell Computers has finally admitted what industry insiders had long suspected. According to recently unsealed court documents, Dell executives revealed that the company knowingly sold thousands of faulty motherboards with defective capacitors in their OptiPlex desktops that they knew would eventually explode, leaking their contents onto the boards and requiring immediate repair or replacement. According to the testimony, Dell estimated the failure rate at a whopping 97.7%. To those of us in the field, that number seems about right. I know of several businesses that went through their OptiPlex computers like the stuff that goes through a goose. No sooner would a replacement motherboard come in, then another workstation would fail. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibilities that a board would fail, be replaced and then fail again. By the time it failed a second or even a third time, the original warranty by Dell would expire, leaving the owner of the business with the no-brainer of ditching the OptiPlex and getting another workstation in its place. Sometimes, they would figure they had just had bad luck; they had been stuck with a lemon. Others who were a bit more knowledgeable knew that something else was afoot there. In only a few cases did the owners of affected OptiPlex workstations ever decide to abandon the brand. Dell was great at marketing the fact they had very affordable machines and could get shipments out very quickly. For most businesses, cheap and fast was what they were looking for and if they were smart and paid for the three-year gold service contracts, the failures were easier to swallow. During complaint calls it was disclosed that Dell would replace the entire computer if two motherboards failed within a 30-day period. It struck me as odd at the time that a company like Dell would put that policy into place. Now, with 20-20 hindsight, it makes sense. They fully expected the great majority of motherboards to fail and so they needed something to assuage singed customer relations between their company and the employees who suffered the most in the shortest time. I would assume that Dell reasoned if they could keep ahead of the failure curve in terms of the one year warranty period most people opted for, they would come out ahead. Most disgusted buyers purchased another computer rather than repair the problematic one. I admit to having purchased Dell computers for clients still, but the failure rate on motherboards today is much, much lower than it was five years ago. Of course, for those of you who are familiar with the latest Dell promotion for their cute and colorful line of laptops, the quartet of Dell assembly line workers singing "Lollipop" may spring to mind. But beware. In case you forgot the other common name for a lollipop...it's a sucker!

Jonathan Metz

Many of you have heard about the ordeal of Jonathan Metz, 31, the West Hartford, Connecticut man whose arm became wedged inside a basement boiler earlier in the month. Faced with the unbelievable decision of having to sever his own arm or to slowly slip into consciousness and die from a combination of infection and exsanguination, Metz was placed in a position few can truly fathom. He could smell his flesh beginning to rot and he knew that gangrene would soon spread from his decaying arm throughout his body, releasing toxins that would eventually shut down his organs. Because of the position Metz was in while cleaning the boiler, he was neither in a full sitting or standing position. He screamed to no avail for hours on end and had left his cell phone upstairs. He would not be able to sleep, but he did drift in and out of consciousness for the two days of his crisis. The thought of being found by his parents or others days later gave him the courage to consider the options he had. He famously pondered, "What would MacGyver do?" Like a wolf whose paw has been caught in a trap, Metz made the choice for life. Over a two-day period in terrible pain, bleeding and without food and only limited water from the boiler, he took the brave, painful route of tying off his arm with a tourniquet and almost completely hacking off his own rotting limb with several saw blades that were in reach of his one free hand. The pain was so severe that he could not complete the operation entirely. A small set of nerves underneath the arm sent such unbearable paroxysms of pain that he left a small section of his arm still attached to his body. When Luca DiGregorio, a co-worker, came by to check on him and discovered the door locked and Metz's dog Porsche yelping at the door, he called the local emergency services. First responders from West Hartford ripped down the door, only to discover the weak and frail man in his basement still wedged in the boiler at the verge of death, the floor covered in a mix of blood and waste from the boiler. It is a life choice that was similarly faced by mountain climber Aron Ralston seven years ago. Ralston's arm became pinned by a boulder while single canyoneering in Utah. For five days he, too, had to consider what other course to take before he used a pocketknife to amputate his arm just below the elbow. Metz's arm was cut just past his shoulder, but doctors say his actions probably saved his life. Released from St. Francis Hospital in Hartford after a week, he will require a new prosthetic arm and donations to recover the cost of the surgeries and that device are being sought on a website here. This story has captured much of the nation's attention over the course of the last several weeks and Metz took the Today Show's Matt Lauer on a tour of his basement and described for him in gory detail what was going through his mind during his crisis. It made for very gripping and compelling television watching and his positive outlook and total lack of self-pity were especially moving. However, what many of you don't know what is Metz's New Orleans connection. Metz was an undergraduate student at Tulane University from 1997 until his graduation in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in psychology. While here he met and fell in love with his fiancée, Melissa Mowder of Kinston, North Carolina. Metz later completed his Master of Business Administration graduate degree at the University of Connecticut and has been working as an insurance industry financial planner. Prior to the accident both Metz and Mowder had been planning a fall wedding in New Orleans, a city that has meant much to them through the years, especially after its recovery from the catastrophic flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina. Both of them indicate the wedding will take place as originally planned. It is safe to say they are both grateful to have that choice and Metz's ordeal and his positive attitude towards living life will serve as an inspiration to others in Connecticut, Louisiana and throughout the world.

The future of journalism, part 2

Yesterday I pontificated on the changes in newspaper newsrooms from the hectic days depicted in Hollywood movies like "The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday." The loss of a number of high profile jobs and the transformation of newspaper rooms from busy hubs of activity into much more quiet and empty halls of inactivity has been startling to me. When I first started to witness newsrooms, even the teletype machines from powerful news gathering services like the Associated Press and United Press International were ever clattering with bulletins and alerts signaled by a series of bells. A five-bell alert was an extremely grave or serious bulletin such as the death of a president or the crash of an airliner and to hear these machines start to peal meant heightened blood pressure and a racing heart. Today's news to a wired nation and pushed out to wireless handheld devices such as PDAs and cellphones has created a very different delivery of news to end users. Newspapers and wire services no longer serve as the primary purveyors of breaking news. For example, last year's back-to-back deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and the "Miracle on the Hudson" were announced largely over Twitter and Facebook. With thousands of journalists graduating from traditional journalism schools each year, faculties and advisors have been busy keeping up with the technological advances and the ramifications for the Internet and mass communication in the coming years. Although the lead is much slimmer than it ever has been before, newspapers still own the largest percentage of annual advertising. That means that radio, television and the Internet all have varying degrees of success behind the powerful news organizations that own many of the nation's newspapers such as Gannett, Hearst, Newhouse and Fox. It also means that newspapers have the most to lose. As to TV and radio news gathering organizations, much of what has shaped them has been a change from traditional methods of news delivery such as daily newscasts to more breaking news reports with continuous coverage as well as more entertainment-oriented stories that in previous eras would be seen as gossip mongering or salacious. So what does the future of journalism portend for daily subscribers and journalists? Well, in case you didn't hear the pronouncement from none other than Microsoft's Bill Gates, the future of newspapers - indeed for all media - is to go to a paperless, online delivery system. According to Gates, all reading will be online in the future. Maybe that's a bit optimistic on his part, but you can read the story here. Frankly, I agree that newspapers and television will be profoundly impacted by coming changes, but despite the love affair technical gurus have with the Kindle and the i-Pad, I don't see libraries emptying their racks of books in favor of a method of digital delivery. What will prevent this from occurring, in my humble opinion, will be the authors and publishers who control copyrights. Scholarly researchers, for example, will probably resist posting to a digital nexus until it can be determined that this method is one that will be consistently available to all other researchers and at all levels of interest. Also, finding a fair way of payment to the holders of the intellectual properties will be of prime concern. Consider last year's battle with John Grisham versus Amazon and Walmart, which were selling his $25 books for less than $10 each! I look to the way record companies have suffered at the hands of Internet downloads. No longer are music lovers interested in purchasing entire albums by an artist. They merely download the songs they want. This means a considerable revenue loss to composers and the producers and recording companies who provide the backing for the sessions and pay for other administrative costs. Imagine how a concept album like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or "Tommy" would be presented in today's digital delivery world. Journalists have much to fear as news reports get watered down into easily digested packets of a few well-chosen words. In-depth or investigative reports will undoubtedly suffer as news organizations are no longer able to afford to provide the backing to reporters or correspondents to generate reports over a long period. Will we become a nation of bloggers, using Twitter to alert our followers about breaking news or poking each other on Facebook? I'm not sure, but it certainly would appear that way. Since I consider myself both a journalist and a computer expert, I have my moments of indecision and feel the pull inherent in such a dichotomy. With all of the emphasis placed on ethical choices, to be made in the field, journalists are probably on a much better moral placement than ever before. The problem is that as the delivery method becomes more digital, there is a greater likelihood that hard-working journalists will become the morally-chaste victims of unemployment and corporate downsizing. Say it isn't so, but the vast majority of journalists coming out of schools could one day be singing the song "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?"

The future of journalism, part 1

There was a time when the time-honored badge of journalist meant someone would be clanking out letters on a noisy Remington in a newsroom filled with ringing phones and busy, scurrying folks. Then, one by one, the manual typewriters were replaced by more efficient electric ones like the IBM Selectric that allowed writers to change fonts as easily as replacing a small aluminum ball. The quieter sounds of electric efficiency and the gentler ringing tones on the telephones made the newsroom a place where writers could think about their stories, while still being in a busy hive of activity. Eventually, the IBM Selectric II with correcting tape and early word processors became the most desirable tools of the newsroom-bound journalist as reams of paper continued to circulate around the busy room. Then, bulky keyboards would input stories which would appear on monochrome cathode ray tubes (CRTs). The clicking sounds of computer keys made the newsroom even quieter than they were beforehand and the numbers of employees took a bit of a dip. The cacaphony of keys clicking sounded like crickets chirping in midday. It wasn't all that long before the personal computer invaded the space of the newsroom and the quietness of the keypads coupled with the loss of personnel due to industry-wide downsizing made the solitude and cavernous nature of most newsrooms seem palpable. Paper copies are today non-existent, as editing is done on computer screens. In more recent years some newsrooms simply stopped running. The downturned economy shrank local advertising while the Internet and its free classified ads like on Craig's List and through Google, Yahoo and other search engine sites aggregated viewers elsewhere. The staffs of top publications have been decimated as publishers have decided to offer early retirement to top writers rather than continue to pay them salaries far above what they would be required to pay for less seasoned new recruits. So, progress has been made, for good or bad. Hard-nosed, cigar chomping and heavy drinking editors and reporters have given way to determined, no-nonsense women journalists and well-mannered men, who have transformed newsrooms into quiet dens of respectability and civility. There's still a lot of cussing going on, but it's usually directed at management these days. Some have taken to referring to newspaper offices as snake pits. Forty years ago newspapermen were on the short side of the ethical equation. Many would eagerly take gifts and accept free tickets to any and all events. Slowly, though, the concept of being more professional and ethical in the way journalistic business was conducted was considered. New rules were put in place. Gifts being lavished on reporters are simply not tolerated today and even critics and reviewers are expected to pay their own way to events, oftentimes reimbursements not being provided readily by management. So, a young budding writer can look forward to low pay, long hours and virtually no perks in a business model that is collapsing upon itself. What does the future hold for professional journalists? More on this tomorrow.

American Jewish Press Association

Once a year the American Jewish Press Association meets to conduct business and assess where the industry is and where it is likely to be going. Previous year's meetings have been held in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Evanston, Illinois. This year the site of what is the largest gathering of Jewish press and public relations firms that cater to the Jewish community is Scottsdale, Arizona, a sleepy desert suburban locale not far from busy Phoenix. A partner in this year's event is Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Media. Numerous faculty members from the school have taken part in panel discussions or have headed up interesting topics such as Digital Entrepreneurship. Much of the topics have dealt with the concept of social networking and how newspapers can take an active role in integrating social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter into their digital presence on the Internet. For some it is a logical next step; for others it is a frightening reality that looms large. Many have already placed some social networking into their scheme of things, but others have yet to figure out how to harness all of the possibilities and pitfalls these sites and applications portend. There is also the concept of raising ad revenue through this kind of integration as web traffic is increased and, by extension, more eyeballs should translate into more page views and unique visitors to newspaper websites. While not everyone has been ecstatic about all of the sessions, most have been satisfied that much of what has been discussed is pertinent to the future of newspapers and journalism. There's more to consider for the final day tomorrow, but first the Rockower Awards, the equivalent of the "Pulitzer Prize" for Jewish journalism, will be announced. It is all part of a very well-orchestrated conference and organizers are to be congratulated for a job well done.

Frankly, BP, I don't give a damn!

Thanks to the efforts of those in the media, there is a sense of urgency that the languid, viscous pools of oil and tarballs washing on Alabama and Florida beaches have made even more clear to our nation's leaders, particularly President Obama. When the oil first reached Louisiana shores and permeated the fragile marshes and estuaries known as the Louisiana wetlands, critics and commentators were appalled. With the loss of thousands of jobs and businesses closing down that had been healthy a little over two months ago -some that had existed for a hundred and more years - the pressure has been ramped up for a more rapid response. Do something. And for those on the sidelines, far north, east or west away from the crisis, there is one burning question: what can we do? As British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward attempts to get his life back, hundreds of thousands of honest, hard-working Americans who have had little to do with the petroleum industry are at risk. They want their lives back too. They also want their fragile ecosystem and ways of life back. The thousands of dead birds, turtles and other sea creatures have weighed heavily on the minds of the young and old. Vox populi - the voice of the people - has been issued from the collective mouths of the innocent and those responsible leaders we look to for action. The question we should all be asking is: are you listening, B. P.?