Assignment: Hard News Leads

1. A survey was released yesterday by the Child Abuse Prevention Center in Baltimore shows that three to four children die every day in the United States from child abuse or neglect.

2. MILWAUKEE – Nearly 150 anti-abortion protesters were arrested yesterday on disorderly conduct charges after blocking the entrances to an abortion clinic, according to police.

3. A delivery driver from The Great Wall of China Restaurant was robbed at gunpoint yesterday at 718 S.W. Western Ave.

4. A manageable late night fire was extinguished by firefighters last night but not before doing $45,000 in damages to a two-bedroom home in the 2300 block of Main Street.

5. Murders in Maryland increased 53 percent in the first quarter of 2010 according to a crime report released yesterday by the Maryland State Bureau of Investigation.

6. Damages to the Earth’s ozone layer, which absorbs the Sun’s harmful cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, are increasing, according to a report released yesterday from the United Nations Environment Program.

7. SANTA ANA, Calif. - A local woman was charged with attempted murder yesterday after dousing her disabled husband with rubbing alcohol and attempting to set him on fire, according to police.

8. The dropping prices of broadband Internet has led the number of users to surpass that of dial-up users.

9. PRINCETON, N.J. - Princeton University has limited the number of high grades that can be given per class in order to crackdown on grade inflation.

10. As many as 47 million adults may be putting themselves at risk for injury, health and behavior problems because they aren’t meeting their minimum sleep requirements, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

Assignment: Quick Editing

PANORA, Iowa – A small town welcomed home one of its soldiers Friday. Instead of jubilant well-wishers, there were 525 mourners who packed United Methodist Church.

To the rest of the country, Army Spec. Michael Mills was one of 191 Americans killed in the war. Though to Panora residents he was one of 28 people killed Feb. 25 when an Iraqi suicide bomb exploded.

To the 1,100 people here, Mike Mills was the 23-year-old hometown boy who carried on a family tradition by joining the Army.

His funeral Friday provided a somber contrast to the joyous reunions held for returning troops throughout the country.

After the ceremony, not a parade, but a stream of cars that stretched down Main Street from the church to the West Cemetery.

There were flags at half-staff and red, white and blue ribbons tied to flower sprays that surrounded the altar. And there were tears – of grief, not joy.

Dean/Rove debate budget ideas

  1. A preview on students going to the debate, will they approach it with an open mind or a pre-formed political bias
  2. Origins of the program - who brought Howard Dean and Karl Rove to CU? Why?
  3. Reactions to the event from student-run political groups
  4. Did the event sell out? Is there a market at CU for more political lectures/debates?
  5. Did they comment on Obama and his policies? What did they have to say about the way Obama is running the country? Student reactions?

News - Study: Righties Live Longer Than Lefties

Right-handed people live an average of nine years longer than left-handed people according to a recent study comparing death and accident rates conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, which was concluded last year, examined the death certificates of 987 people in two Southern California counties. Diane Halpern, a psychology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, and Stanley Coren, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, wanted to know why there are fewer left-handed people among the elderly population.

“The results are striking in their magnitude,” Halpern said. Halpern is right-handed.

According to the data, left-handed people were four times more likely to die from injuries sustained while driving and six times more likely to die from accounts of all kinds.

In addition, the study found that right-handed females tended to outlive their left-handed counterparts by six years. Right-handed males tended to outlive their left-handed counterparts by 11 years.

Why are left-handed people more susceptible to death? Halpern believes engineering is the culprit.

“Almost all engineering is gear to the right hand and right foot,” Halpern said.

“There are many more car and other accidents among let-handers because of their environment.”

The study, however, should be interpreted cautiously. Halpern noted that it is not a predictor of the lifespan of any individual. Females studied lived to around the age of 78 and 72 and males lived to ages 73 and 62.

Researchers initially believed that the difference in numbers could be attributed to the early 20th century in which most left-handed individuals were forced to switch in order to accommodate themselves to a right-handed world. Disproving their original hypothesis, Halpern and Coren found that the number of left-handed people alive paled in comparison to the number of living right-handed people.

“It’s important that mothers of left-handed children not be alarmed and not try to change which hand a child uses,” Halpern said.

“There are many, many old left-handed people.”

Hurricanes, Earthquakes and Plane Crashes - Oh My!

Did you know:

Hurricanes - The costliest hurricane to occur in the United States since the year 1900 was undoubtedly Hurricane Katrina. The main areas of damage occurred during Hurricane Katrina were southeastern Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In total, the total cost of damages were around $81 billion.

Source: The National Hurricane Center

Earthquakes - Staying safe during an earthquake is all about preparation. It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint when and where an earthquake will strike. If you live in an earthquake-prone region, the following links could prove invaluable to you and your family’s survival

Plane Crashes - Last year in Baltimore, Maryland, there was one plane crash. A non-fatal plane crash occurred on May 6, 2009, involving a Boeing DC-10 aircraft.

Source: NTSB.gov

In 2000, an Alaskan Airlines Douglas MD-83 airliner went down, killing 88 people. In August 2006, a Bombardier CRJ-100 went down in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.

Source: NTSB.gov

Stay safe out there.

Blogging, Twitter, and the mainstream media

It seems as though the shift in the mainstream media to an entertainment model rather than a news model was complemented perfectly by the emergence of blogging. In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, where what organizations heard almost became more important that what they could prove, the rise and popularity of 24-hour news networks opened an avenue for blogs and self-proclaimed experts.

In the first few years of blogging (2003-2005), the mainstream media seemed to reject blogs more than they embraced them. Now, realizing that some very good journalism can come out of blogging, we seem to fit right in with the 24-hour news model.

Unfortunately however, in the communications sphere, blogging presents pressure to news organizations. Gone is their luxury of preparing a factual story over a period of hours. We can report on stories and accumulate comments while they write and fact check and then re-write and re-check. Journalistic standards be damned. The bloggers can publish and amend stories as complaints or corrections roll in (see also: Fox News).

The biggest breakthrough of blogging into our mainstream media was undoubtedly seen during the Iranian election and citizen journalism through Twitter. The mainstream media, mainly CNN, had no choice but to embrace the technology as a simple journalistic tool to the point where live tweets were read on air in place of content created for broadcast. In the absence of information coming out of Iran by traditional sources, the micro-bloggers became king.

Now Twitter has turned into more of a distraction than it has a tool. Social media tools serve as perfect time-wasters to help fill in those 24 hours. Joe19 in Michigan apparently has some brilliant insights. How the hell else did he get on TV?

It doesn’t seem as if blogging is going away, either. Arianna Huffington’s regular appearances on cable news networks, experts and bloggers yelling at one another, and the inclusion of bloggers as a part of news organizations show that embracing blogging will prove much more fruitful than rejecting it.

Assignment: An introspective look at icanhascheezburger.com

Blogging has taken many forms in the years since its inception. One of the most interesting takes on blogging is an extremely popular photoblog entitled, oddly, “icanhascheezburger.”

Icanhascheezburger.com is a website consisting of a collection of images of animals, though mostly cats, with funny captions included. These images have become known as LOLcats (pronounced lawl-cats) and are circulated regularly throughout certain channels of the Internet. This type of captioned image is known throughout Internet culture as a meme (pronounced both meem or in the traditional French, même).

The audience of icanhascheezburger is not a very specific one. Animal lovers, witty individuals, comedians, or anyone looking for a chuckle could be fair game to enjoy the content of this blog. In addition, the aforementioned members of an entrenched Internet culture, the ones who initially started this phenomenon, are part of the audience as well.

Icanhascheezburger is a collective effort by fans and readers of the site who can make and submit content to be displayed among the ever-growing ranks of humorous pictures of cats. The site is intended to make its readers laugh and it does a good job, as the 817th most visited site in the United States (source: Alexa page rankings).

Finally, the presentation and layout of icanhascheezburger.com is fairly simple and effective in the sense that it doesn’t get in the way of the site’s main objective which is to display funny pictures of captioned cats. While I could contribute to a site like icanhascheezburger with a funny entry or two, I could never run such a site because I would get bored of its repetitive nature. That being said, icanhascheezburger does provide a cheap laugh every now and then when I need a break from the daily grind.

"The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy."
–

Walter Lippmann - Liberty and the News (1920)

90 years later, in a world on 24-hour news networks, do Lippmann’s words still hold true? Are journalists still sacred gatekeepers to the world of facts?

No they aren’t.

The problem in our society is a rather laughable paradox: we are both starved for news and inundated with it at the very same time. There are local nightly newscasts on TV, newspapers, and blogs; there 24-hour news channels, tweets to follow, celebrities to check up on, and magazines to read. We can’t get enough news yet we have too much to choose from. News has given way to entertainment. Where we begin and how we evaluate what’s credible and vital to our task of making informed decisions is fundamentally different from what it was in 1920.

In Lippmann’s era, 90 percent of the news that is reported today would be left on the editing room floor or laughed out the door. As reporting strictly on the facts has given way to reporting for ratings and views on Google Analytics, the truth isn’t as important anymore. What’s more important now is the latest rumor or half-truth. What will drive viewers to a particular news website, TV channel, or blog today?

An ideal example of how modern journalists have lost their “priestly offices,” as Lippmann said, can be found by looking at the Lie of the Year for 2009: Sarah Palin and the alleged death panels found in Congress’s Health Care Reform Act bill.

A 1920‘s journalist would sift through the information available and ultimately report on Sarah Palin’s scare tactics for what they were. They would point out her ignorance and her misunderstanding of the bill’s goals while reporting on what the bill actually contained. While news organizations on the political left did in fact do just that, their reporting of the facts became fodder for the right-wing news organizations who continued to spin the story and promote Palin’s agenda.

In Lippmann’s era news organizations didn’t exist at polar ends of the political spectrum. It wasn’t the journalist’s job to spin a story or report it in a skewed fashion. Reporters were to inform the public, wading through the “medley of facts, propaganda and rumors” to determine the truths of the story and nothing more. Somewhere in the past 90 years (most likely in the past 30 years) the propaganda and rumors began to make their way into the news. As Thomas Wolfe said in the title of his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.

What was once the journalist’s job, determining the truth, is now the viewer’s job, the reader’s job, the listener’s job. Our one lane highway of news consumption has grown exponentially and now it’s on us to separate reality from entertainment, shock for the sure thing.

Walter Lippmann would be disappointed in our world today. He would be disappointed in our laziness and our greed. He would argue against news-around-the-clock and for the luxury of time to prepare factual stories that journalists used to hold dear. More news isn’t such a great thing after all. With so many outlets mis-reporting information for ratings and advertising capital, we may be less informed than we were 90 years ago.