It's Bobby Denton Time!
at the 2000 Front Page Follies

WIVK Vice President and General Manager Bobby Denton, whose leadership has helped make his station a perennial award winner for outstanding news coverage, will be the honoree at the 22nd annual edition of the Front Page Follies on May 20.

The Follies, a spirited roast of newsmakers, is sponsored by the East Tennessee Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The event raises funds for scholarships at the University of Tennessee College of Communications and Pellissippi State Technical Community College.

Veteran broadcaster
Denton is a Knoxville native and a 40-year veteran broadcaster, 39 of those years with Dick Broadcasting Co. Bobby started at WIVK-AM in 1961 playing rock and roll. He was part of the WIVK team that broadcast the news of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In 1964, Denton moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was midday announcer on WMBR. He returned to WIVK in 1966. At WIVK-AM-FM, Denton has served as announcer, music director, program director, operations manager, and sales manager. He became general manager in 1982.

Outstanding news operation
”Bobby Denton is a giant in the broadcasting industry and a very deserving Follies honoree,” said ET SPJ Board member Jean Ash, a former award-winning WIVK reporter/anchor herself. “WIVK and WNOX are consistent award winners for news coverage. The Associated Press has voted the station the state’s outstanding news operation for six years in a row, and these awards are a credit to Bobby Denton’s management support of the operation.”

When Knoxville experienced a severe snowfall in 1993 and power was out in many locations, WIVK was the only station that stayed on the air. Denton had gone on the air himself to broadcast updates on power emergencies to WIVK listeners.

NASCAR announcer
He was NASCAR’s public address announcer at Talledega International Motor Speedway for 16 years and has been the public address announcer for University of Tennessee football for the past 31 years. He became famous for, “It’s football time in Tennessee!” and referring to stadium concession prices, “Please pay these prices and pay no more!”

Denton is active in Knoxville, East Tennessee and state activities. He was the 1996-97 president of the Dogwood Arts Festival and 1995-96 co-chairman of the event. In 1995, he was appointed by Gov. Don Sundquist to serve on the Tennessee Film, Entertainment and Music Commission and has served for eight years on the Country Music Association Board. Denton has been president of the Knoxville Arts Council and the Knoxville Advertising Federation. He was a member of the first Leadership Knoxville class.

Besides honoring Denton, the 22nd Front Page Follies will include a reception, dinner, show and auction to raise funds for the scholarships. The event, which will be at the Knoxville Radisson May 20, promises to be a lively one with 2000 a presidential election year.

For more information, contact Alan Carmichael at 544-0088 or Karen Bridgeman at 483-3295.

Meeting to spotlight ‘Unseen Minorities’

Dozens of ethnic and religious minorities in the Knoxville area are virtually, if not literally, “unseen” by the white majority, and ETSPJ’s annual diversity meeting will bring some of them into the spotlight.

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1, in Room 223 of the University Center at the University of Tennessee.

Panelists representing the Hispanic, Persian, Chinese, and Indian communities in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge area will speak. 

Jeannine De La Torre Ugarte is the assistant director for Hispanic ministries with the Catholic Diocese in Knoxville and is a native of Peru; Babak Abdolrasulnia is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee pursuing a Ph.D. in public health and a master’s in political science and is a native of Iran; Po-Yung Lu, originally from Taiwan, is the section head of Toxicology and Risk Analysis, Life Sciences Division at ORNL and has been named president of the Organization of Chinese Americans, East Tennessee Chapter; and Harbans Singla, president of MS Technology, is a native of India. 

They will each speak briefly on their backgrounds and how they perceive the dominant majority sees — or doesn’t see — their group. They will discuss what they think about area news coverage as it pertains to their group. A question-and-answer session will follow.

Pulitzer winner to speak

John Noble Wilford, Pulitzer Prize-winning science correspondent and senior writer for the New York Times, will speak on “Science Journalism Across Two Centuries” on Feb. 28 at 8 p.m. in the Shiloh Room of the University Center at the University of Tennessee.

The occasion is the School of Journalism’s annual ALfred and Julia Hill Lecture on Science, Society and the Mass Media.

Wilford, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes and many other awards for his science reporting, earned a B.S. degree in journalism from U.T. in 1955.

Have you ever dreamed of being your own boss? A panel of freelancers discussed the pros and cons of self-employment at a joint meeting of the East Tennessee Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Knoxville Writer’s Guild held in January at the University Center.

It’s just a fabulous life,” said Dorothy Foltz-Gray. “I feel like I own my life.” Patrick Murphy-Racey agreed. “I receive the full benefit of my labor. When the check comes, it’s all my money.”

Foltz-Gray has written for a variety of magazines, including Bon Appetit, National Geographic Traveler and Ladies Home Journal. She is a contributing editor for Health Magazine and a health columnist for American Way, the in-flight magazine for American Airlines. She is also revising a book on fibromyalgia for the Arthritis Foundation and is writing a memoir, “With and Without Her,” about being and losing a twin.

Murphy-Racey is a graduate of the journalism school at Marquette University. He worked as a newspaper staff photographer in several different cities until 1992 when he resigned from his position at The Knoxville News-Sentinel. He works regularly with ESPN Magazine, Sports Illustrated, the NFL and the NBA. He also has corporate clients for whom he does photography for annual reports and advertising.

Wynne Brown was the moderator for the evening and is the newest of the panelists to move to full-time freelance work. She recently left The Knoxville News-Sentinel where she worked for five years. She has written for national horse magazines, is editor and designer of the magazine for the Sequoyah Museum and is a graphic designer and editorial consultant.

As she introduced herself to the audience, Brown half-jokingly held up a T-shirt that said, “Will Write for Food.”

“I was really ready for the flexibility that freelancing offers,” she said.
Each of the speakers had practical advice for the audience. “If you think you are interested in writing, go to the book store and figure out which magazines you like best. Then write a story geared to that magazine,” Brown said. “Get a good story out there, get yourself published and build relationships with editors,” she continued.

Foltz-Gray added, “You have to write a lot of different stuff at first. Then you’ll find your niche.”

All of the panelists agreed that making connections is of primary importance if you want to get your work in front of the right people. “It’s who you know. Work on personal relationships,” said Murphy-Racey.

The panelists answered questions from local journalists and students in the audience about time management, how to handle rejection and the effect of online journalism.

“What’s hacking? Phreaking? Smurphing?” you ask.

Recent news of attacks on the Web sites of Yahoo!, CNN, ZDNet and others have caused many in the business of computer security to complain that the media do not understand computer security jargon.

Here’s a primer from Alex Sigal, software QA and testing lead engineer for Lucent Technologies in Cupertino, Calif. (and a former student of your editor’s University of Phoenix online business communications class).

Hacking — Generally describes a computer enthusiast. Among the programmers (Unix / Linux historically), the term hacker implies an amateur, who is talented but lacks formal training. Mass media use the term to describe individuals who gain unauthorized access to computer systems for the purpose of stealing and corrupting data.

Cracking — Breaking into systems. This can mean breaking through the security of a system and copying the commercial software illegally by overriding various copy protection and registration techniques. The term “cracking” was coined in the mid-80s by hackers, who wanted to differentiate themselves from individuals whose sole purpose is to sneak through security systems.

While a cracker’s sole aim is to break into secure systems, hackers are more interested in gaining knowledge about computer systems and possibly using this knowledge. Although there is a big difference between what hackers and crackers  do, the mass media have failed to understand the distinction, so the two terms are often used interchangeably.

Phreaking — Using computers to break into telephony systems. Typically, phreaking is used to make free calls or to have calls charged to a different account.

DoS — Denial of Service is a type of attack on networks that is designed to bring the network to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic. Many well-known DoS attacks, such as the Ping of Death, exploit limitations in standard Internet (TCP / IP) protocols. Generally, Internet software manufacturers issue fixes to overcome known DoS attacks. But, like viruses, new DoS attacks continue to pop up.

Smurph — One of the advanced variations of DoS. This attack includes sending requests (pings) to special broadcast addresses that retranslate the messages to all the hosts on the subnet. Every broadcast address can support 255 hosts; therefore, every ping is multiplied by 255. The ping originator’s Internet address is changed (spoofed) to be the victim’s address so when all hosts respond, it floods the net with pings going in circles. This type of attack may cause serious performance hits (the meltdown) to networks.

There is NO bulletproof protection or tracking tool to be used against skillful malicious operators. The most common and fairly easy method  to get away is to spoof the Internet (IP) address of the computer used for break-in. Generally, the intention would be to change the IP address to one located outside the United States