FOCUS/midwest

June 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the first edition of FOCUS/Midwest magazine.

The magazine discontinued publication in 1983 after it was folded into a sister publication, the St. Louis Journalism Review (now the Gateway Journalism Review).

Starting in 2008, an attempt was made to revive FOCUS/Midwest. Four online prototypes were produced, but the project was largely abandoned in 2011.

There are no current plans to revive it.

Remarks by Bob Zieger (University of Florida, emeritus) at the annual Labor Day Breakfast, Sept. 3, 2011, sponsored by the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, Gainesville.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has recently said that “nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future.”

As a historian, however, I do think that the past can continue to instruct us.

Let me bring you back to the year 1935 and the founding of the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CIO existed as a separate organization between that year and 1955 when it merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO. Many historians see the formation and struggles of the CIO to build industrial unions as the single most important episode in the history of American labor. Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Journalism Review, younger sibling of FOCUS/midwest, celebrated its 40th anniversary last year and a move to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The publication marks the occasion at an event on Sept. 15, from 6-9 p.m., at the Edward Jones Building in Des Peres.  Russ Mitchell of CBS is emcee; Bob Woodward of The Washington Post joins via satellite. For information http://gatewayjr.org/2011/08/26/celebration/

The first volume of Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s The Round Barn will be released this October by Beloit College Press. It’s an engaging, inspiring and amazingly detailed look at the rise and fall of a family-owned dairy farm in Wisconsin. Some of Jackson’s work has been featured by FOCUS/midwest. Look for ordering information and other details at  http://roundbarnstories.com/

For four years, beginning in 1971, Barbara Olson kept a detailed journal of her family’s time in Ethiopia, telling stories of people whose lives would soon be upended by war, revolution, drought and famine. Excerpts were published by FOCUS/midwest; the book, Gondar, Ethiopia, is now available. To order a copy, go here: http://gondarstories.com/book_236.html.

Other items:

– Will Gardner, writing for Education Week, recently looked at private management of public schools, referencing Peter Downs’ study, published by FOCUS/midwest. Find Gardner’s “Are public schools supermarkets? at blogs.edweek.org. Read the rest of this entry »

When Lawrence Criscione asked a Nuclear Regulatory Commission review board last week to reopen an investigation of an incident at AmerenUE’s Callaway nuclear power plant in Missouri, the nuclear engineer expressed no hope that the federal agency would honor his request.

“I believe the decision has already been made that this petition will be bureaucratically [limited] to the investigations already performed … in spite of the fact that significant questions concerning the honesty and integrity of the uppermost management of a commercial nuclear power plant are still unanswered.” Criscione said. Read the rest of this entry »

J.J. Maloney was facing life behind the walls of the Missouri Penitentiary, sentenced for the murder of a 74-year-old businessman during a botched robbery. Remarkably, Maloney wrote his way to freedom — some of his work found its way to the pages of this magazine — and he kept writing, becoming one of the Midwest’s most intrepid journalists.

C.D. Stelzer tells Maloney’s remarkable story in the current edition, now available for free at Scribd.com (http://scr.bi/hs7o5w) and Issuu.com (http://bit.ly/ggY9G9).

In addition to Stelzer, contributors include Franchot Ballinger, Andrew Dillon, Dave Etter, Joe Hennessy, Jacqueline Jackson, Conrad Knickerbocker, Lola Lucas, Felicia Olin, Robert Joe Stout, Alan Toltzis, Karen Walsh and Daniel Waugh.

For more information, e-mail focusmidwest@yahoo.com.

The Midwest has become a cold place for African-Americans.

A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank, St. Louis District, finds that the earnings gap between white and black men in the Midwest has been getting progressively bigger for over a generation.

And the earnings gap keeps growing despite the huge strides that black men made in closing the education and academic performance gaps with white men. Read the rest of this entry »

… Stalwart plants grasp at our shoelaces, whip at our thighs, and send forth seeds to journey to new destinations upon our clothes as our little tour group continues plodding at an undaunted pace through The Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands of north-central Illinois. Here at this nearly 3,000-acre site near Franklin Grove, Illinois, the sky meets the ground unimpeded and the forever vista suggests possibility.

Something from the human past seems to be whispering, “This is good.”

It has been suggested by Harvard biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson that humans have an innate tendency “to affiliate with life, to be attracted to it, to like its varieties, to enjoy and prefer certain qualities of it.” He calls this instinctive response “biophilia.” And surely the majority of us have felt the fascination, the sense of well-being and wonder associated with a particular landscape whether hiking through a national park or standing in the midst of a backyard garden in bloom.

Yet, Nachusa belongs as much to our present as it does to our past. Read the rest of this entry »

… Job statistics offer a measure of the recent recession’s depth, but tell only part of the story.

A recent report, by MIT economist David Autor, makes the case that the middle is dropping out of the job market; specifically, the economy is rapidly shedding certain kinds of occupations that used to be solid tickets to the middle class.

The kinds of jobs that are disappearing: “Middle-skill, white collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations and in middle-skill, blue-collar production, craft, and operative occupations.”

What’s driving the change? Primarily automation and offshoring, Autor finds.

If a routine task (one that involves repetition) can be performed successfully by a machine or by a lower-paid worker in a developing country, it will be. And as computer and communications technologies continue to improve, more machines, or non-U.S. workers, will be performing those kinds of tasks.

The thing is, though, the pace of automation is escalating – Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when hundreds and hundreds of unemployed or underemployed communications workers converge with digital media? You get a veritable revolution, staged on multiple platforms, and the flowering of hundreds and hundreds of websites devoted to criticism, analysis, innovation, self-promotion and related topics. [Here] are 100 of them of varying quality, listed alphabetically. Feel free to repurpose this info, make it viral and stick in everybody’s content bucket. You supply the emoticons. Send recommendations or corrections to focusmidwest@yahoo.com

It can be argued that Twitter has emerged as a legitimate form of communication that could influence how children will spell — and think — in the future. Both Fox News and CNN have adopted the form and syntax of Twitter for their closed captions, so that Twitter is no longer merely a computer shorthand but has become an integral facet of our mainstream media.

To illustrate: On Sept. 11, 2001, Fox News carried a story about President Bush’s immediate response to the terrorists’ attacks that adopted Twitter as the style for their closed-caption account (he “did rht thin”).

This year, a new keyboard was introduced called “Tweetboard.” The traditional keyboard has been reconfigured, so that Twitter symbols assume prominent positions on the top row: @ (reply), # (hashtags), RT (retweet), and via @. Another key is for shortening URLs. Read the rest of this entry »