Spearfish High School will have a new English teacher this fall. Eric Lappe is leaving the prairie comforts of teaching social studies in Wilmot to come teach Spearfish youth the joys of literature, research, and composition. This work is important: every student has to take English, a core subject area that is key to all the standardized tests that will be used to rate our school and our teachers. Lappe will have the opportunity to work with almost every student who goes through Spearfish High School, to directly contribute to the skills they will need to learn, to communicate, to persuade, and to appreciate and enhance the vast wealth of Western culture.

But what’s the front-page story in last night’s local paper?

Black Hills Pioneer screen cap, 2012.05.10

The Black Hills Pioneer staff devote four words to Lappe’s new full-time assignment as an English teacher. They pour out ink discussing his additional part-time assignment as the new girls basketball coach. Interested parents learn nothing about the skills he will bring to the classroom, his particular interests in certain literary genres or periods or the application of social media to research and collaborative writing—you know, the kinds of things that will benefit a hundred-plus of our kids every day. But the press highlights the full coaching resume, right down to the fact that Lappe played for the 1992 Class B state champion Harold Cardinals and won a Mr. Basketball award for his high school hoop-shooting.

If we take the Black Hills Pioneer‘s ink spilled at face value, the efforts Lappe will exert for a couple hours a day during a few months of practice and games with a couple dozen physically elite girls will add far more value to the community than the far larger efforts he will make all day, every day throughout the school year for a much larger and more diverse crowd of our girls and boys.

Teaching English is a vital function of our public schools. Coaching basketball is fun but peripheral to our mission. In headlining Spearfish’s latest hire’s coaching duties and ignoring his teaching portfolio, the Black Hills Pioneer sends exactly the opposite message. BHP is boosting the jockocracy and marginalizing what matters to many more students and taxpayers. If reporters can take the time to research a coach’s list of basketball awards, it can take the time to compile a list of a teacher’s much more important list of classroom achievements.

Welcome to the show, Mr. Lappe. I look forward to hearing your kids gripe about all the heavy reading you assign and helping your kids proofread their really big research papers.

Some people drink. Some people cut. I read Gordon Howie’s fake blogroll.

Howie has a new spokesmodel for Freedom and Guns and Kicking the Crap out of Commies. Lynne Hix-Disanto appears on Howie’s latest re-enactment of Wayne’s World to recite the Sixth Amendment. Here’s a screen cap:

That’s darn near cleavage on Gordon’s little TV program. Gord must be wising up and trolling for Google Juice from Babe-raham Lincoln.

I can’t speak to Hix-Disanto’s constitutional expertise; everything she says on camera about the Sixth Amendment appears to come from the cue cards Gordon cribbed from  the 700 Club. Hix-Disanto does know a thing or two about babe-a-liciousness: she runs the Fierce Modeling Agency in Rapid City, which, among other services, provides “promotional models” for the Sturgis rally:

Sturgis Models, Fierce Modeling Agency, Rapid City

Every year hundreds of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts come to the Hills seeking adventure and their own “wild west” experience. Rapid City based talent agency FM Models has formed partnerships since its inception to provide promotional models for company’s looking to tap into this South Dakota market. If you are looking to hire beautiful ladies that enjoy the rally environment and know how to promote your product, we can assist you in making that connection. Each girl has been interviewed, and is trained on representing your company in a way that is both fun and professional [marketing copy, "Fierce Modeling & the Sturgis Rally, South Dakota," Fierce Modeling, Rapid City, SD, downloaded 2012.04.29].

Beautiful ladies that enjoy the rally environment and know how to promote your product… and we all know that promoting your product in the rally environment is not about Faith & Family; it’s about T & A (and equally obscene attempts to trademark public domain geographical names).

Hix-Disanto’s business got some national attention (well, to the extent anyone can get attention from an appearance on the CW network) on a January episode of Remodeled, in which host Paul Fisher declared Fierce Modeling a scam:

What pisses me off most? Modeling schools. Giving kids false hopes. You want to piss me off? Have a modeling school.

Let me explain to you, you’ve been ripped off. Just so you’re clear, you’ve been ripped off. You can’t train to become five-foot-ten.

They’re paying these schools and they can never become models. That’s a scam to pay the rent [Paul Fisher, "Modeling Agency or Modeling School?" Remodeled, 2012.01.24].

Fisher notes that, despite Hix-Disanto’s four years in the business, “She’s never found one star, ever.” The episode proceeds to show Fisher and company gleefully sledgehammering Fierce Modeling’s runway to bits as a symbol of the triumph of honesty and hope that Fierce can find its footing and rise to Fisher’s standards as a modeling agency, not a modeling school. Alas, a recent Rapid City Journal article on painful fashion trends shows the FM runway rebuilt as of February 27, 2012.

It appalls me to cite “reality” television as a source, but modeling is all fakery, so I’m in the right ballpark. And so is Lynne Hix-Disanto, joining forces with Gordon Howie to peddle his fake outrage for profit in his fake media empire.

If any of you see reason why these two should not be wed, speak now…

The South Dakota Newspaper Association is inducting longtime newspaperman Noel Hamiel into its Hall of Fame this month. I herewith tender my official protest, or at least least my official asterisk, to Hamiel’s exaltation.

SDNA President Lucy Halverson says her organization is bestowing this honor on Hamiel because he “has had a positive, powerful impact not only on the newspaper industry in South Dakota, but throughout our state as well.” However, during his two-year tenure as a Representative from District 20 in the South Dakota Legislature, Hamiel sought to have a negative impact on that online citizen journalism that complements and competes with his industry.

Hamiel was the prime House sponsor of the 2010 Blog Control Acts. This vague, sloppy legislation would have imposed onerous legal burdens on bloggers and other citizens using the Internet to share news and commentary. Hamiel’s two bills would have required bloggers and others to keep detailed records of every person who visited their websites and created new legal liabilities for folks who maintain websites that allow comments. These record-keeping requirements and legal risks would likely have shut down blogs and chilled online speech across South Dakota.

Hamiel disingenuously claimed he was simply trying to put online media and traditional press on a level playing field, while he blocked efforts to allow online media to compete with the traditional press as outlets for public notices. His confused and inconsistent rationalizations for his Blog Control Acts were as shakily revealing of ignorance of and spite toward online citizen journalism as the defenses this year of HB 1234 were of K-12 education.

Hamiel’s legislation failed in committee. The South Dakota Legislature has since followed the advice and counterproposals of various bloggers and stayed out of trying to fix an unquantified problem that must not have been as pressing as Hamiel pretended.

In advocating the Blog Control Acts, Hamiel came across as an advocate for one special interest, the newspaper industry, seeking to impose chilling burdens on the free speech of others to preserve his industry’s competitive advantage. I suppose if you are the newspaper industry, that’s plenty of reason to honor one of your fellows.

I know my protest is thin. I’d try to phrase it in terms of the newspaper association’s bylaws and specific Newspaper Hall of Fame qualifications… but, predictably, one can’t find that information on the SDNA’s website or on the website of the SDSU Journalism Department, which keeps the Hall of Fame plaques and records. And even if I could, Hamiel’s résumé contains all sorts of other evidence that he’s a generally nice guy who has served his industry and his community well.

But it bears remembering that Noel Hamiel supported significant First Amendment restrictions on the online speech of all South Dakotans. Such advocacy against the First Amendment warrants at least an asterisk on Hamiel’s nice new plaque in the Newspaper Hall of Fame.

Easter Sunday can’t go by without Dakota War College burping up some peeps-induced indigestion. The fake-named SDGOP mouthpiece blog flogs its favorite son, Senator John Thune, as a rising star in the Romney veepstakes. In a bizarre twist, DWC ignores Thune’s own statements and my agreement therewith that Thune doesn’t want to be vice-president. Of course, it’s not so bizarre if you assume that DWC’s “Bill Clay” is really working for Thune and trying to stoke the speculation his boss quietly craves but must for appearance’s sake plausibly deny.

But let’s not go Sibster on the conspiracy theories. Let’s focus on refuting the horsehockey that DWC actually puts on the record.

DWC claims, “Thune’s name is being discussed more and more as a possible vice presidential candidate.”

English students, pay attention: we have here a stellar example of the deliberately vague passive voice. Discussed by whom? DWC points to one article that mentions his name, then fails to offer any evidence of other sources who weren’t discussing Thune’s name last month but now are burning up with John-fever.

Beyond grammatical evasion of actors, DWC commits another fluffy sin: the Thune-booster avoids any quantification of its claim. As Romney puts Santorum away, one would expect VP talk in general to increase. Maybe the chattering classes are discussing Thune more and more, but maybe they are discussing Marco Rubio or Rob Portman more and more and more.

So, in the great South Dakota blogospheric tradition of DWC just saying stuff and the Madville Times having to clear things up with facts, let’s study some numbers. First, what are the players on Intrade saying about the GOP veepstakes… with their money?

South Dakota’s junior Senator is in eighth place on this scorecard. And if you look at the potential picks’ historical share-price charts (i.e., the amount of money folks are willing to lay on the chances of each person getting Romney’s nod), you see Rubio, McDonnell, Martinez, and Daniels showing increases over the last few months while Thune’s price has eroded. If more and more people are discussing Thune for Vice-President, they must be saying, “Don’t think so.”

But good or bad, let’s look at the volume of chatter about the above ten candidates. Let’s Google each potential VP’s name in quotes followed by “vice president” and see how many results pop up for each month this year and for April so far:

Those data are messy, since we’re dealing with differently sized time periods. One interesting artifact of this data: all of the potential nominees other than Rand Paul got produce more Google VP results in this first week of April than they do for all of January. That surge in chatter supports the rather obvious conclusion that as the primary battle winds down and blessed summer draws near, we will naturally hear more VP speculation.

But focus, people! Let’s look at the daily average Google mentions for each candidate within each time period:

You’ll notice that in each month this year and even last week, John Thune’s VP attention has been below both the median and the mean for Intrade’s current top ten possible nominees. Even the two guys below him, Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul, have gotten more daily Google VP mentions than Thune in every time period these charts consider. And last week, Thune has gotten the least VP attention of the ten folks above. If more and more people are discussing John Thune, they aren’t doing so on Google-searchable pages.

(My Sibby-conspiracy urge strikes again: maybe that’s exactly what Thune’s Web advisors noticed. “John! We’ve gotta boost our buzz! Call Pat— er, Tony— er, Bill Clay and tell him to make up some fluff mentioning you and the vice-presidency. You know Heidelberger will tear him apart, and Heidelberger will have to say ‘John Thune’ and ‘vice president’ a half dozen times. That’ll really juice our Google juice!” Clever devils.)

Now let’s compare how these average daily results have changed over the last few months. From January to February, Web VP chatter increased for all ten possible nominees. From February to March, daily chatter dropped for all ten (everyone was watching basketball, right?). In the last eight days, daily chatter has leaped for all ten. So indeed, by itself, DWC’s claim that “Thune’s name is being discussed more and more” is technically correct.

But does that matter if everyone else is being discussed more and more, too? Let’s see how each candidate’s Google VP numbers have changed:

The past week brought the man from Murdo a 361% jump in daily Google VP attention. 361% sounds spectacular… until you notice that’s still below the 423% average early-April spike for Thune’s top competitors for VP attention. Even on the most generous metric I can cook up for John, he’s still in the bottom half of the top ten.

Therefore, by these numbers (actual numbers, to which Dakota War College and the South Dakota Republican Party appear terminally allergic), John Thune does indeed continue to warrant VP consideration… about as much as Jon Huntsman warranted Presidential consideration on January 1.

Forbes and Bitly get together to create an interactive map showing the most influential media outlets in each state. No, the Madville Times does not make the list yet. But here’s a nationwide snapshot of who’s clicking on what big news:

Popular Media by State Forbes-Bitly January 2012 (click to enlarge)

Of the 15 major media outlets sampled in January, CNN was the most popular in South Dakota… and South Dakota is the only state in which CNN came out on top. South Dakota also shows some of the lowest interest in Al Jazeera. Fox News was the top read in three states: Montana, Texas, and Mississippi.

Now these ratings are just one snapshot of media influence based on frequency of clicks through Bitly links. That’s not measuring all eyeballs on the TV or news page or ears on the radio. That’s measuring the number of times a link was shortened, shared, and then clicked by another interested reader. So these numbers could be measuring the influence of the given media outlet, but they could also be measuring the influence of the most active sharers of content within each state.

Forbes and Bitly plan to update this cool media influence month each month. Yum!

Bonus Tech Note: You can check the popularity of any Bitly link simply by adding a plus sign at the end of the shortened URL. For instance, click on http://bitly.com/GQ0U6G+, and you can see how often my story on the Charlie Johnson–Russell Olson Senate race has been shared via Bitly. Cool!

Speaking of sports, the Sioux Falls School District wants to make more money on its games. The Sioux Falls school board will give second reading April 12 to a new activities broadcast access fee policy. Media outlets would pay the following amounts for play-by-play broadcast rights:

• Volleyball, Football, Wrestling, Girls Basketball, Boys Basketball, Track, Cheer & Dance Competitions — $125 per event
• Double-Headers (boys & girls on same night, or football), Dakota Relays, President’s Bowl, Festival of Bands, and all tournaments (day long or multi-day) — $250 per event
• Entire Sports Season for all schools (includes all home games, double-headers, and tournaments for one sport {e.g. boys basketball is one sport}), excluding Dakota Relays, President’s Bowl, Festival of Bands, and postseason tournaments which are contracted by the South Dakota High School Activities Association — $1,000 per season

The new policy would impose no fees on highlights or live updates… which makes me wonder: suppose I suffer a traumatic brain injury and decide to spend my evenings going to high school sporting events and live-blogging and Tweeting. I would assume that activity would fall under “live updates” and thus not incur a fee. But suppose I’m really fast at the keyboard and my Tweeting becomes a play-by-play. Does SF Lincoln’s Jim Dorman come over to the bleachers and ask me to fork over $125?

Now part of me thinks charging the media to cover high school activities is counter-productive. Schools can use good publicity; a radio or television broadcast puts the school’s name and mascot out in front of the parents and voters in a relatively positive, feel-good event. And aren’t the things our kids do in our public schools matters of public record that everyone should be able to see and enjoy?

I guess we do charge folks for tickets to games and plays and concerts, so it’s not beyond logic for schools to assert that their extracurricular contests are an entertainment service for which they can charge users a fee. And sports draw a big enough audience that the Sioux Falls School District can likely find some media takers who know they can recoup that fee with just one 30-second ad.  But don’t expect towns any smaller to make much headway with similar policies.

Blog neighbor Tim Gebhart is right, and that Sioux Falls paper is wrong: censoring this Doonesbury cartoon on abortion laws passed by various states is as hypocritical as the Republicans who want to keep government out of everyone’s health care except when they want to punish women for having sex.

To make up for that Sioux Falls paper’s reticence, I reprint the censored cartoon, as Mr. Gebhart has. I would say enjoy… but that is not the appropriate response to this skewering of Republican priorities.

Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, 2012.03.15

Skewering. Oops.

The Watertown Public Opinion‘s latest editorial hardly warrants comment. Discussing the sales-tax initiative and the proposed referendum on Governor Daugaard’s education reforms, the editors vaguely assert that the Governor and Legislature are smarter than us common citizens. They reduce HB 1234 to “the Governor’s bonus program” and wishy-wash it away:

…if the teachers aren’t sold on the bonus program, and if the voters agree with them, then maybe it’s time to pull it back and take another look at it ["Education Referendums Raise Questions," Watertown Public Opinion, 2012.03.12].

Two ifs, one maybe, and take another look… how’s that for a recipe for punchless prose?

But then I get to the bottom paragraph and find the WPO editors can’t even commit to facts about the November ballot:

Neither of the two petition drives has enough signatures at this point to get on the ballot. But if one or both succeed, voters will need to pay close attention because their decisions in November will affect South Dakota for a long time to come [WPO, 2012.03.12].

Say what? Sure, petitions to refer HB 1234 haven’t hit the streets yet (you’ll hear from the Madville Times the moment they do!). But the proposed extra-penny sales tax for education and health care is most certainly on the ballot. Supporters submitted their petitions with 34,000 signatures last fall. Gant certified the petitions, and the sales tax is most definitely on the ballot as Initiated Measure 15.