Can't trust police with drones

(NOTE: This is an example of how to structure an editorial blog for use in my Online Journalism course)

 

LEAD: The Wyoming Legislature is considering a bill to prohibit the use of drones by law enforcement.

CONCESSION: Opponents of the bill say that drones would be a valuable tool for law enforcement to use to solve crimes, monitor dangerous situations and save lives in emergencies.

TRANSITION AND BODY: However, there is nothing to stop police from abusing the use of drones to invade people’s personal lives. Police could spy on innocent citizens going about their business on the streets, or even spy through the windows of citizens’ homes.

Many Americans don’t trust police following highly publicized incidents of alleged police abuse ranging from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City.

House Bill 18 is “AN ACT relating to drones; specifying requirements for use of drones by law enforcement agencies; limiting use of information obtained with a drone by governmental entities; requiring reports; and providing for an effective date.”

Specifically, the bill would require law enforcement to get a search warrant from a judge before using drones in criminal cases.

CONCLUSION: While drones could aid sheriffs and police in their work, the threats to individual privacy are too great to allow law enforcement to use drones with no judicial oversight. HB 18 should be passed.

 

Losing newspaper is like losing friend

The Denver Post notified me last week that it will no longer deliver newspapers to Laramie as part of a cost-cutting effort. Sunday papers will still be delivered for $1.50 a week, but I wonder how long that will last. For an extra 10 cents a week, The Post will give me full access to their online version.

I've subscribed to The Post for 21 years and really like getting a large, metro newspaper with a great sports section, occasional investigative reporting and lively editorial section. I enjoy the leisurely pleasure of flipping through its pages while savoring my morning coffee or evening beer. Reading it on my laptop will take away that pleasure of physically turning pages, wondering whether the next page will contain a story or photo that catches my attention.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big advocate of online news. I read numerous online stories every day and regularly follow two or three online newspapers. I teach an online journalism class and began the first online news site in Wyoming in 1995.

I still subscribe to our local newspaper, the Laramie Boomerang, which is fine for providing superficial coverage of local events, overkill coverage of high school and UW sports, and the daily police log where I sometimes find the names of people I know. It's not a very good newspaper.

That's why I appreciate getting The Post so much. It provides most of what I expect from a newspaper - good writing and photography, indepth reporting, solid coverage of breaking news, entertaining columns, wide-ranging sports coverage, and thoughtful analysis.

I understand the need for The Post to cut costs. The newspaper industry is in big trouble with declining readership and advertising. The Post also announced this week that it is offering early retirement buyouts to its news staff and may have to lay off employees if the buyout doesn't work.

But cutting delivery does a disservice to loyal readers who count on The Post for indepth information on local, regional, national and world affairs.

I will be getting the Sunday edition while delivery lasts, but I'm passing on the daily online version. My morning coffee and evening beer just don't taste as good with digital news.

Taos: Visual communication in New Mexico

The Visual Communication Association's 25th conference is over, after four days of presentations, scenery and great weather at Taos Ski Village, N.M.
My presentation was Symbols of England: The Archetypal Images of British Football Club Crests, if anybody is interested.
For me, conferences are all about the local cuisine and sightseeing. We had Friday afternoon off, so Debby and I toured the area and had a fantastic dinner of southwestern-style Mexican with friends Rob and Toni Dean from Santa Fe.
Next year, Viscom will be in Utah. I'll see you there.

Wiltse and His Bowling Trophy

Academics isn't all about teaching, research, committees, advising, vacations.

Sometimes it's about bowling.

Let me preface this blog post by stating that bowling is not really my game. In junior high and high school, I played football and baseball, skied, fished and hunted. These days, I mostly do the latter three.

But bowling has been on the periphery of my life. My junior high school was next to a bowling alley. When I worked at a newspaper, a bowling alley was across the street. So I've spent some time on and near the lanes.

Not much time recently, though. The COJO Department used to have a bowling team when there were lanes in the student union. But I haven't bowled much since then, except occasionally at kids' birthday parties.

Earlier this semester, however, COJO students organized a bowling night to raise money for Professor Frank Millar's cancer battle. Even though bowling is not my game, I somehow managed to get high score for faculty and saw my name placed on the faculty bowling trophy. I am the third winner, along with Cindy Price and Ken Smith (pictured).

This is only my second athletic trophy and the first since my baseball team won the local Little League championship in 1966.

The trophy is on display in the COJO office until I can raise funds for a pedestal display case with ceiling and floor spotlights.

Academic professionals bring teaching skills to UW

Serving on the college's tenure and promotion (T&P) committee this year is an opportunity to see how well other faculty are doing their jobs. As a journalist, I like to stick my nose into other people's business. T&P committee service gives me access to vitae, comments by faculty members, their department chairs and the dean.
Of course, all this information must remain confidential, but the committee spends plenty of time discussing faculty behind closed doors during our meetings.
I only sat through the decisions to rehire or promote academic professionals. Most people aren't aware that there are two strata of faculty at UW. Professors can attain tenure and must conduct research. Academic professionals, who mostly are lecturers (APLs), don't get the job protection of tenure. Their job duties usually emphasize teaching, not research. Professors in most departments must have a doctorate, while lecturers usually only need a master's degree.
UW gets a good deal with lecturers. Their salaries are lower than professors, and they teach more classes than professors. In exchange, academic professionals get to work in higher education with just a master's degree, and, if they do a good job, generally are rehired every year.
On T&P committee, we reviewed 29 packets from APLs going up for promotion or trying to be reappointed for another year. While there was some debate on a few candidates, all 29 passed the committee vote.
After reading their packets, including their self-assessments of their job performance, I was impressed with the quality of teaching done by APLs at UW. Many of them have won major teaching awards. Student evaluations of their teaching were downright glowing in many cases. Their self-assessments demonstrated a keen insight into the classroom environment, the effectiveness of their teaching, and their concern for student learning.
Overall, I came away very proud of the work done by APLs and am proud to be among them at UW.

Technology makes breaking news easy to report

In my Online Journalism course, I emphasize that one of the advantages of online media over print media is the ability to post news quickly and to update previous stories as new events unfold.
The advent of social media such as Twitter and Facebook has broadened the news-reporting process so that stories and photos are quickly available to various audiences.
Cell-phone cameras have made photojournalism more convenient, since journalists always have a camera with them now.
I used my mobile device last week while on a trip to Montana to take several photos that could be used as news or feature shots. I then uploaded them to my e-mail and also sent them to friends and family.
A fire broke out the morning after I arrived. (I am not a suspect). I walked downtown and shot several photos of the firefighting effort.
A few days later, I spotted a bassett hound with his head stuck in a catfood bag. The poor guy was running into fences and cars. I took a quick photo and then caught him and freed him from the bag. I hope he got a catfood snack for all his troubles.
Then we saw a Hutterite girl riding a horse across the prairie. She was dressed in a bonnet and a long dress with pants underneath. The scene was straight out of Little House on the Prairie, and I couldn't resist getting a photo of her.
The photos aren't as high resolution or in-focus as I would get with my old 35mm Nikon, but they work fine for publishing on the Web. And my mobile device is a lot easier to lug around.

Oregon is overcast, damp and beautiful

I just got back from Viscomm24 in Portland, Ore., where I presented a research paper: "Archetypes, Mandalas, Collective Unconscious: Jungian Analysis of Newspaper Flags." Yeah, it probably was as boring as it sounds.
However, I reunited with an old college friend who lives there, Michael Fellows, who drove me around after the conference ended.
We visited the Columbia Gorge and the Oregon Coast. We hit a lot of Oregon's wonderful breweries. In fact, I tried 27 different beers on the trip.
Even though it was cloudy, drizzly, cool and gloomy every single day, the lush beauty of the state still shined through.
I love the hypnotic quality of waterfalls, and we saw plenty along the Gorge. At the coast, I spotted a seal swimming in a bay. The trip to the coast actually saw some sunshine, too, although it was overcast and drizzly at times.
If you haven't been to Oregon, go. Allegedly, there are some spectacular mountains there, too, including views of volcanic peaks Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens. That is, if you can see them through the drizzle.

The Ayers Affair: Embarrassment for UW

After all the controversy over former radical turned professor William Ayers' talk at the University of Wyoming, I have to wonder what was the big deal?

Ayers spoke last night at UW following Tuesday's federal court ruling that UW officials were wrong to cancel his speech. His speech did not try to indocrinate impressionable college students into a life of firebombing or anarchy. Rather, he rightly criticized the U.S. educational system and urged major reforms.

That's hardly radical thought for those of us in education who every day witness the weaknesses of a public education system that has failed to produce young people prepared for the rigors of college.

Some reflections on the whole messy affair:

I am proud of UW student Meg Lanker for pressing a freedom of speech civil case against the university. Lanker came to my office the day after UW canceled Ayers' speech soliciting donations to bring him to Laramie. I doubted she would succeed, but was impressed that she would take the initiative to raise funds in the name of protecting the First Amendment. Lanker also started a new campus organization, Students for Free Speech, and organized a rally last week. Few students have that kind of gumption any more. I hope her professors give her extra credit in some classes.

I am ashamed of UW officials for allowing their attorney, Tom Rice, to bring up Lanker's past during the trial. Her actions in the past were not on trial. UW's actions were. Rice's tactic is often used by sleazy defense lawyers in rape cases who attempt to put the victim on trial. UW should have more respect for its students than to subject them to unethical harassment.

I also am embarrassed by the president of UW's Conservatives, Brian Profaizer, who exercised his freedom of speech by making personal and insulting attacks against Lanker on Facebook, rather than sticking to the issue of UW canceling Ayers' speech. Profaizer has a future running attack campaigns for conservatives, but he has a lot to learn about becoming a citizen in a democracy.

UW also blew it by bending to the threats of donors. The court case revealed that one big donor, John Martin of Casper, threatened to stop giving money because he didn't want Ayers on campus. When I worked for newspapers, we received similar threats. For example, an advertiser threatened to pull his ads unless we would agree to not run the name of his son, who was arrested for drunken driving. Our response was that advertisers don't control our news coverage. Sometimes, businesses would cancel their advertising, but usually they didn't.

UW needs to use the same response with disgruntled donors. Their money cannot dictate the educational process at the state's only four-year university.

Finally, if UW hadn't cancelled the original appearance by Ayers, maybe 50 people would have shown up. Because of the national controversy that erupted over the cancellation, more than 1,100 people showed up last night. Ayers couldn't have bought that kind of publicity.

William Ayers cancellation tarnishes us all

The University of Wyoming should not have backed down after it invited controversial William Ayers to speak on campus about education reform. The Center for Social Justice should have known that Ayers, because of his radical Weatherman past and his flimsy connection with President Obama, would get conservatives and Tea Party types worked up.
Knowing this, UW administrators and Center officials needed to take steps to ensure everyone's safety after threats of violence surfaced last week, leading to the cancellation.
Initially, I didn't plan to attend Ayers' speech, particularly if there was something I liked on TV that night. But after his speech blew up into a front-page story, I would have gone out of curiosity and to support his and everyone at UW's right to free speech.
Here are some of the comments I got from friends that I e-mailed about the issue.
"Even in saner times his visit would have caused a lot of protest. If they didn't have the cojones to weather it, they shouldn't have invited him in the first place. ThugNation is starting to scare me," said a fellow telemark skier.
A Montana University System employee commented, "So much for university campuses being laboratories to test and question the merits of ideas."
A former UW employee, who added he didn't like Ayers because of his radical past, said, "If the University had to bring the National Guard down here to maintain order, that is exactly what they should have done. If every state patrol in Wyoming had to be on hand to provide security, then that is what should have been happened. Because THAT is what academic freedom is all about."
I agree. Unfortunately, when confronted with threats of violence, the best solution may be to respond with a show of brute force. To quote country songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, "Up against the wall, redneck mothers."

Denver Press Club: A trip to the past and present

Press clubs always appealed to me with the image of hard-boiled reporters sitting in overstuffed chairs, drinking, smoking, telling tall tales and stealing story ideas from each other.

But I never had the chance to go to a real press club until this week when I was invited to the Denver Press Club, one of the oldest press clubs remaining in the U.S.

The event was a presentation of Pronghorn Passage, a multimedia show produced by two UW students about the annual migration of antelope from Grand Teton National Park to winter range in the Red Desert. One of the students, Joe Riis, was funded by the Larsh Bristol Photojournalism Fellowship. I am on the committee that selects the annual award winner.

The press club had loads of atmosphere and history. A bookcase held Damon Runyon books. Plaques announced Pulitzer Prizes for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. On one wall were caricatures of Hall of Fame winners. There was a beautiful hardwood bar. A pool table was in the basement.

The Press Club was formed in 1877 and has been housed in the current building since 1925. The club has hosted numerous presidents, including the current one. Now, the club regularly schedules such events as book readings, music and other presentations.

I would join if I lived near Denver. I ran into one of our alums, Dan Haley, who is a member. I also met a Metro State photojournalism student whose father bought her a membership. Funding was raised to renovate the two stories of the club, but the club retains its 1920s charm.

If I ever go again, I hope to wear a smoking jacket and a green eye visor.

Welcome to Laramie, Kristen

Those of you who read my posting of Nov. 13, 2009, may be wondering what happened to the COJO job search for a new faculty member.

It is my pleasure to announce that the search was successful, and we hired Kristen Landreville as a new assistant professor in new media starting fall semester.

Kristen is finishing her dissertation from the Ohio State University and is living in Columbus, Ohio. Her undergraduate degrees are from the University of Florida.

According to her Web site, Kristen's research involves "the intersection of mass and interpersonal communication on political and social outcomes, especially how uncertainty, emotion, and engagement in political entertainment (e.g., documentaries, satire) influence political discussion."

She has published research articles in such journals as Mass Communication and Society and Communication Quarterly.

Next fall, she is scheduled to teach Online Journalism and Politics and the Media.

To find out more about Kristen, check her Web site.

Welcome back, sucker

In the immortal words of the great American actor Adam Sandler, in the film Billy Madison, "back to school."
I'm off to a tough start this semester. I started teaching a class named Online Journalism back in 2000 using a Microsoft program, FrontPage, to teach students how to create and manage web sites. I began building web pages by hand coding HTML back in the early '90s, but I have relied upon the simplicity of FrontPage for a long time.
So I was very surprised to find that FrontPage was no longer on the student computer lab machines this semester. In fact, the program was removed last fall when I wasn't using the computer labs.
Information Technology informed me, after I complained, that they had notified me via email in February 2009 that FrontPage would no longer be available in the labs starting fall semester. That gave me 11 months to forget about it - easy for me to do.
So I am scrambling to do a quick learn of the replacement program - another Microsoft product named Expression Web 2. Not surprisingly, it's a typical MS program with the same menus and look as most of their software. And it seems to be the same as FrontPage, but with a few new bells and whistles to justify a new program.
It seems like another example of "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
Meanwhile, I am rewriting all of the lab assignments for Online Journalism from FrontPage instructions to Expression instructions. I will probably miss a few things as I learn how to use Expression, so I hope students will show some patience with me this semester.
In the long run, though, it's probably good for this old dog to learn a new trick.

New media job search

If you're wondering who the new faces are circulating around the COJO Department office for the next week or so, they are candidates for a new journalism faculty position. The department brought in the first candidate for interviews this week and will bring in the other two finalists next week.
The department is looking for a new faculty member with a specialty in new media to teach courses in online, digital media and video streaming. Whoever is hired would begin work at UW in fall semester 2010.
During their visits to campus, each candidate will meet with COJO faculty and students. They also will present their research to a graduate student class.
We're excited about the hiring process and believe that a new media specialist would fill a gap in our curriculum.
If you get a chance to meet one of the candidates or attend a research presentation, let us know what you think. We welcome the input.

Welcome back: COJO grad speaks at convocation

Every department has its "stars" - students who excel in the classroom while at UW and former students who rise to the upper echelons of their career paths. Many are successful while attending UW. But that's no guarantee they will excel in the workplace, especially in the current economy.
One COJO alum who stood out both as a student and as a graduate is Dan Haley, a 1992 journalism graduate. Dan will be the keynote speaker for this year’s Keith and Thyra Thomson Honors Convocation on Oct. 9 at 2:30 p.m. in the College of Arts & Sciences Auditorium.
Dan is the editorial page editor for the Denver Post, the biggest newspaper in the Rocky Mountain region. Before that, he worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in Colorado and Wyoming, including for the Gillette News Record.
I remember Dan from when I first came to work at UW in 1990. At that time, he was the sports editor for the Branding Iron student newspaper. He was a student in one of my classes before he graduated. I recall that his writing stood out from his peers, and that he wanted to work for newspapers. Both of those attributes seemed to guarantee that he would have a respectable journalism career, I thought at the time.
But I never expected he would become editorial page editor of a metro newspaper.
I've seen Dan a few times since he left UW. He taught a summer class for the department a few years back. More recently, he was president of the UW Alumni Association, which required frequent visits to campus.
Welcome back again, Dan. Enjoy the spotlight at the honors convocation. You've earned it.

Teaching online: Cyberlearning has pluses/minuses

Somebody once told me that the best thing about teaching online classes is that you can work in your pajamas.
I won't admit to ever wearing PJs while teaching, but I will admit that I will never wear a necktie while teaching online.
I've been teaching two online classes - Public Affairs Reporting and Investigative Reporting - since 2006 during fall semesters. This is the third time I've done Public Affairs, and there has been a steady increase in enrollment. The first year, 16 students signed up. The next class there were 19 and this year there were 26 students enrolled at the start of the semester.
In informal surveys that I send to students at the start of the semester, they are asked what they like and dislike about online learning. Their responses are enlightening.
"I enjoyed the freedom of being able to access ‘class’ from various locales. I did not, however, enjoy the detachment I felt from both my classmates and my prof in lieu of a real classroom," said a woman in this semester's class.
"I liked online because I can do things in my own time. I like that I can set aside my own time to do things and having online lets me manage some more credit hours," said another woman.
However, she added, "I disliked online, because sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly what the teacher wants. I like having face to face interaction, because I think I understand things more clearly."
A male student echoed that dichotomy: "I liked how you could set your own schedule, the class fit to you instead of you always having to fit to it; I found it hard when I needed to contact instructor because in a face-to-face if you are still confused you can ask them right there where in an e-mail you have to send another and another until you have the answer."
Surprisingly to me, their likes and dislikes are similar to my own as the instructor. The convenience of teaching whenever and wherever I please are two of the main draws for online instruction for me.
However, I am convinced that many students will not learn as much in an online class because they need the face time and hands-on instruction that can only come from a classroom environment. However, research has shown there is no difference in performance for students in online vs. traditional classes. Essentially, students learn as well online as they do in live classrooms, according to studies.
I try to include as much interaction as possible in online classes. We hold weekly live chats in real time. There is a threaded discussion each week in which students post comments to a question and interact with each other by posting responses. And students can and do e-mail me all the time.
One reason that I developed the two journalism classes offered online is so students at the UW-Casper College campus can take required courses without having to come to Laramie, or without me having to drive to Casper.
Besides Casper, students in my online classes have been based in Colorado, Jackson Hole, Gillette and even Hawaii.
Online classes will probably continue to expand in the COJO Department because there is demand for them from students and UW administration.

COJO changes: Faculty take new posts

There will be some changes in the COJO Department when fall semester begins later this month. Two faculty members are moving to new jobs that will affect the department.
Tracey Patton, associate professor, took over as director of the African-American Studies Program on Aug. 1. She will continue to teach three classes a year, including her popular Cross Cultural Communication course that has raised money for an orphanage in Africa.
Tracey also was director of graduate studies in the department. Dr. Michael Brown will resume that role.
At African-American Studies, Tracey replaces Gracie Lawson-Borders, who also is an associate professor in the COJO Department. Gracie moved from AAST director to associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences on Aug. 1. As associate dean, she no longer will be teaching COJO classes. Those include Media Convergence and Minority Media Ownership, which I consider crucial classes for our journalism majors.
We wish them both the best of luck in their new endeavors.
However, their departures coupled with the hiring freeze at UW will impact students. After a couple years of requests, the department finally obtained permission to hire a new journalism professor. We had to shut down our job search after budget woes forced the university to make budget cuts.
As a result, we won't be able to offer as many courses, particularly in journalism, as in recent years.

Conferencing: A trip to Grand Targhee

Two weekends ago, I was in Grand Targhee, Wyo., to present a paper at the 23rd Visual Communication Conference.
While conducting research is not part of my job description, I occasionally write a scholarly article for publication in journals or to present at an academic conference. Tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW are required to publish, but I do it just as a mental hobby to keep my brain functioning at an acceptable level.
What I've discovered about academic writing is that it's a lot harder to get published in a journal than it is in a newspaper or magazine. Before coming to UW, I did a fair amount of freelance writing and had stories published in such places as the Boston Globe newspaper and Fly Fisherman magazine.
Those stories were probably read by thousands, possibly tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (in the case of the Globe). In contrast, an article in a scholarly journal may attract an audience measured in single or double digits.
So figure out why there is so much prestige in being published in academic journals. Never have so many worked so hard and stressed so much for so little audience.
In any case, my paper was entitled "Tapping the Collective Unconscious on Page One: Two Case Studies of Traditional Community-newspaper Flags." The study looked at the flags of the Glenrock Independent and Guernsey Gazette, both weekly newspapers in Wyoming. The research applied Jungian analysis to try to explain how the artwork in the two flags taps into the collective subconscious of readers in both towns. If interested in the details, here is a link to the article.
I kind of felt like a dinosaur at the conference, where many participants were exploring some cutting-edge, 21st-century topics such as visual memes, technology dissection, veromones, Second Life, etc. The Viscomm conference attracts a wide range of experts, including journalism faculty and grad students, artist types, and other educators and researchers.
The COJO Department hosted the conference this year, and three of our graduate students and four of our faculty presented research at the conference. Although it rained three of the four days, Grand Targhee was a beautiful, visually stimulating locale for the event. The highlight for participants was a cookout at a local dude ranch that included wagon rides through herds of elk and bison.
For people who came from as far as California and Rhode Island, Viscomm 23 was about as Western as it gets.

Summertime: When the learning is easy

Summer classes are under way at UW, and I'm teaching two classes during a three-week session. Online Journalism is in the morning, and Graphics of Communication is in the afternoon.

The three-week classes are kind of an endurance race - can students and faculty last three hours, 10 minutes per class Monday through Friday for three weeks? Can you cram in everything you'd cover during a normal 15-week semester into 14 days (no classes on Memorial Day)?

My observations after years of teaching in summer is that students actually learn better in three weeks than in 15. I base that on anecdotal evidence as well as on their actual performances.

For instance, last summer in Online Journalism, the average final grade was 85.3 percent. This spring, the average in the same class was 82.5. I didn't run a statistical analysis on the grades to see if they were significantly different, but judging by the gap, I'm willing to bet they were.

What accounts for the difference, I think, is that students are only taking one class during summer and are able to focus all of their attention on that single subject. During a regular academic semester, full-time students are taking 4-6 classes and their energies have to b e divided among all of those courses.

While summer classes can be intense, they also seem to be better learning experiences. Higher education should consider revamping the old semester system into three-week sections, during which students would take just one class in each section.

Graduation into the real world

Graduation is a time for celebration, and there were lots of events at the University of Wyoming at the end of the semester to put people in the mood.

First, I attended a luncheon to honor the finalists for the Spitaleri Award given to the top female student at the university. Hanna Bush, a senior in journalism from Gillette, was a finalist, and I attended the lunch with her and her parents. Hanna didn't win the award, but the recognition of being one of the top seven women out of the entire senior class is truly an outstanding achievement. And the lunch was pretty good.

The next week, I went to breakfast with Hanna and her parents (they put in a lot of driving!) to honor the College of Arts and Sciences top 10 graduating seniors. Dean Oliver Walters and his staff put on a nice spread, and I ate way more than usual for breakfast that day. By the way, Hanna also was editor for the Branding Iron this past year.

Last weekend, the winner of the first Larsh Bristol award for photojournalism was honored at the UW Alumni House. UW student Joe Riis had a public show of his photography funded by the Bristol award. Larsh Bristol was an alumni of our journalism program, and his friends set up this award after his death. Riis has done some incredible work documenting the migration of the Jackson Hole antelope herd. His work is also being funded by National Geographic, which gives you some idea of the quality of his photography project.

Hanna and Joe are just two of the remarkable students you will find at UW. I think you'll be hearing more about them in the future.

Roller derby mania hits Laramie

Last weekend there were two sporting events in Laramie - the University of Wyoming spring football game and the first-ever bout for the Naughty Pines roller derby team.

Guess which event attracted the most fans?

The roller derby sold 730 tickets at $10-$15 apiece. It was a sellout. Meanwhile, only about 400 fans turned out for the Cowboys game, which was free. As many as 1,000 fans may have attended the derby because a lot of comp tickets were given away.

I'm not going to predict that roller derby will always outdraw UW football, but I was amazed at the crowd for the debut event. People had to park as far away as the Rec Center and walk through drizzle and rain to the ice arena where the derby was held.

Many people probably didn't know the rules, but that didn't stop the crowd from getting loud and crazy, ringing cow bells and stomping feet on the steel bleachers. Even though the Pines got creamed by the more experienced Denver squad, they never lost the support of their fans. It should also be noted that Denver had a ringer - their best jammer previously was a competitive speed skater.

Beer sales helped fuel the crowd, no doubt. The Altitude had a table with kegs of wheat beer and IPA for the older crowd and the ever-popular Pabst's Blue Ribbon for the college set. In future bouts, the beer situation needs improvement. There were only two servers and people spent more than 20 minutes in line. Altitude needs at least twice as many servers next time.

The Naughty Pines originated in the COJO Department with some graduate students and administrative assistant Sue Benson. Judging by their initial outing, the Pines were a rousing success.