Full disclosure: I have no inside knowledge about what happened in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse during the month of September, or the inner workings of how the Boston Globe’s Bob Hohler compiled his front-page post-mortem last week. I write this speculation simply as someone who was a sports reporter a lifetime ago and later a city desk reporter who got to do the hatchet jobs on Pittsburgh pro sports teams that the sports desk wouldn’t touch.

Here’s a broad generalization about the sports journalists I have known in my career: they are, by and large, super fans, suffering from a Stockholm syndrome of sorts, held hostage by the teams and athletes they cover. Their freedom is an off-the-record or not-for-attribution comment that gives them a minor scoop in the competitive, horse-race nature of covering major league teams.

They will be the first to call a guy out when he’s not playing up to his multi-million dollar contract or question a coach’s late-game strategy decision that led to a loss. But when it comes to reporting the really compelling stuff — stuff like star players drinking beer, eating fried chicken, playing video games and shrugging off instructions from a strength coach — they’re not going to cover it. I have former students who have interned for the Red Sox and NESN, and if they can figure out who is sleeping with whom and who is not doing what they’re supposed to, you’re going to have a tough time convincing me that beat reporters who spend almost every working moment following the team didn’t know at least some of the behind-the-scenes reasons of why the Sox collapsed so spectacularly.

So I wasn’t really surprised that Hohler’s article A) ran after the season ended and B) was written by someone who doesn’t cover baseball — or sports, for that matter — on a regular basis. The Atlantic has a pretty good post-mortem of Hohler’s post mortem, ultimately concluding “Boston’s media outlets, including the Globe itself, [need to] take a hard look at their own rules about covering the beloved team.”

City desk hatchet men

I started my career as a sports journalist before realizing I didn’t like watching sports enough to make a career of it. When I moved to news that brief stint covering high school basketball, college hockey and Legion baseball somehow qualified me to cover the construction of two professional sports stadiums in Pittsburghs. Our task, as city desk reporters, was to look for “the gold plated toilets” worked into the publicly-funded stadium deals the teams got.

As a result, the owners of two professional sports teams have started interviews with me using almost the same exact quote. It’s been awhile but I still remember being asked as we sat down “So…how are you going to fuck me today?”

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Storify, a site that lets you build stories using a variety of social media posts and updates, is featuring one I put together on its homepage:

The Storify I did, which you can view here, chronicles the ups and downs of my semester-long experiment of using Twitter as a teaching tool in my Intro to Journalism classes at Bridgewater State University.

This was the first building I taught in at Bridgewater State College (now University) in the fall of 2007.

If my guess is right, our classroom was right behind where the bucket of the backhoe is (and, by this writing, probably a pile of rubble by now).

I’m almost certain all of the students — some of whom later told me they were worried about how nervous I was on that first day — have moved on. Even the freshmen I had that year (none were in that class) should have graduated by now if they stayed on track.

Question is, when do I move on?

I won’t be long, as there’s already a lot of noise out there on this:

1. More than anything, I was stunned by how many people wrote about personal interactions with him last night. A lot of them seemed to be of the “he walked into the store where I was selling computers” variety, and a lot of them seemed to have happened in the 1980′s. It’s pretty clear there’s a direct connection between Apple’s success and the willingness of Jobs to spend so much time seeing how regular people used his products.
2. From a media standpoint, this was the first news event I can remember where almost all of the information I got came from non-traditional news sources. I haven’t read the New York Times obituary yet, and I’ve been a bit unimpressed with coverage on mainstream newspaper tech blogs, which are primarily linking back to the tech blogs and news sites.
3. I was most saddened when one of my students asked “Why is everyone making such a big deal about Steve Jobs dying?” after reading the news on an iPhone.
4. The answer, beyond the simple ways he changed everyday life, is that few people get to live in a time when you have business leaders that are going to be immortalized and have their names fall into the canon of people like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie. We get at least two (Jobs and Gates), and if you look at Google and Facebook, we may have three more. What may be most stunning about jobs is, unlike most of the others in that club, he didn’t truly “invent” any product; he just took existing products and assembled the right team of people to make them so exponentially better than what was already out there.
5. Words by Steve Jobs worth remembering, particularly now: “Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

All of the writing I’ve been doing about Mexican drug cartels for Daily Dot — and, specifically, how the cartels are now targeting social media users in the same way that they once targeted cops and journalists — ended up becoming the basis for a lecture I gave this morning on social media as a replacement for traditional journalism, with an examination on all the pros and cons:

People who post information on social media about Mexican drug cartels are essentially facing a two-sided attack. One one side, you have the cartels themselves, which killed three people last month for purportedly posting information on Mexican crime blogs. The cartels themselves are online, posting propaganda about themselves, false information to distract or disparage rivals and law enforcement, and to root out enemies to target for execution.

On the other side is the government, which is looking to avoid a repeat of an August incident in Veracruz, in which tweets about armed gunmen taking hostages at a school spread rapidly. The false reports set off chaos as parents raced across the city to retrieve their children, and now at least two Mexican states are considering laws that would punish people who “disrupt public order” with information they post online.

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This is a quick update on what I’ve been reading in 2011 as I play along in a Massachusetts library’s challenge to read 50 books this year.

These are books I have read I am reading or that plan to read. I’ll update this list from time-to-time and cross out the books as I finish them. Bold titles are books I finished since the last update.

1. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
3. Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
4. Room by Emma Donoghue
5. The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins
6. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
7. Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
8. An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan
9. Father of the Rain by Lily King
10. At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
11. Townie by Andre Dubus III
12. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
13. Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadio
14. The Social Animal by David Brooks
15. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
16. Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic by Sarah Allen Benton
17. Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff by James B. Stewart
18. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
19. In Basement of the Ivory Tower by Professor X
19. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
20. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
21. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 Edited by Dave Eggers
22. The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
23. The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For by Naomi Schaefer
24. Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn
25. Paying For It by Chester Brown
26. The Compass of Pleasure by David J. Linden
27. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
28. Reading In The Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene
29. The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides
30. The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
31. The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean
32. Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
33. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
33. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
33. Election, by Tom Perrotta
33. House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III

Like it or not, Facebook changes forever on Friday. Here’s a round up of ways to make the most of new timeline features…

Can’t wait until Friday to have your own Facebook timeline?

Activate it now.

Give your profile a cover photo:

A cover photo is not the same thing as a profile photo. And it’s also one of the cooler features of the new timeline. Mashable has the how-to on adding your cover photo.

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