How to make $30,000 a year

By: Sara Crouse

Catching up on the latest blogs isn’t hard to do. Simply go to www.google.com and look under more, and there will be a blog hyperlink listed for you. Click.

Blogs are becoming a main source of information and news for many tech-savvy web browsers. Blogs seem to provide a different look at the daily news, and a look that many appreciate. Bloggers takes sides and gives us the news from their angle. A blogger’s voice is very distinct compared to the usual mono-tone or slightly yelling voice of a news anchor.

In a world where one if pressed for time, why not read a blog that curtails news to an opinion we identify with? One can filter news to their tastes and not have to take the time to sort out the stories. Seems like a pretty good deal.

However, what if we start to rely heavily on blogs for our main source of news? Bloggers aren’t required to publish honest or accurate information. Blogs are online journals, not an online newspaper with credible stories. Blogs could potentially be providing us with misleading information.

There are people in our world though who are actually making a living off the explosion of blogs. It takes a little more time these days to write a sophisticated blog, unlike the early days of the Drudge Report. Full time bloggers generally make around $30,000 a year, while those bloggers who specialize in a topic can make up to $75,000 a year.

Should bloggers be held to the same criteria as journalists? Are their roles primarily the same? It’s a tough question to answer, and one that will have to be answered in the upcoming years.

For now though, enjoy the emergence of so many unique ideas and opinions expressed through blogs. Just be sure to read the paper too.

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It's a bigger world out there

By: Taylor Browning

With the economic crisis taking up the headlines, it is easy to understand where our nation's focus is at. I feel however, that the media needs to start emphasizing how all this downfall will affect everyone in the long run, across the world.

Other countries obvious have their hands and fair share of stocks in our economy, but they need to start worrying about their own. While we watch the Dow drop by the hundreds, other countries are struggling with their own economy.

The United States has started a whirlwind in the global economy, and Europe and Iceland are starting to feel the effects.

I feel to inform our people, we need to be hearing about how not only our economy is affected by our government's spending in our downfalling economy, but how our economy is affecting everyone else globally.

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Reporters doing a great job

By: Shauna Agan

Last Tuesday I attended the play “Frost Nixon” at the Civic Center of Greater Des Moines.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history behind this play, “Frost Nixon” is about David Frost and the interviews he conducted with Richard Nixon after the Watergate Scandal and after Nixon resigned from presidency.

Many reporters during this time period were racking their brains trying to find a way to get Nixon to sit down and do even one interview with them. Much to the American people’s surprise, Frost was the one Nixon finally agreed to sit down with.

Frost was a British reporter with a playboy reputation. Nixon believed that if Frost was the interviewer, he would not be faced with difficult questions and the American people would love him again.

The play “Frost Nixon” showed the interviews between these two gentlemen and the media process that was put into preparing for these interviews. It allowed the audience to see the staff on both sides of the interview preparing for the questions and determining strategies for the interviews.

Rather than asking the easy questions Nixon had hoped for, Frost’s staff decided that Frost would jump right into the interview with challenging questions about the Watergate Scandal.

The strategy used goes against everything we have learned in class about interviewing, and at first, the strategy backfired against Frost and his co-workers.

There were a series of four interviews conducted, and during the last interview, Frost finally got Nixon to answer to the American people. Nixon was forced to answer questions about Watergate. He was forced to admit that he was wrong during the cover-up.

This play was a great production about the media coverage during this important historical event. It did an excellent job of showing the audience, especially those individuals like myself who were not alive during the events of Watergate, what really happened.

Before going to “Frost Nixon”, I had knowledge about the scandal behind Watergate, but little knowledge about the media coverage of Watergate. I knew that two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate Scandal, but the aftermath is often times not told.

The whole scandal goes to show how important media coverage is. Reporters are the ones who found out about Watergate, and an interviewer was the one who forced Nixon to apologize.

Regardless of what anyone says, media is significantly important, especially in politics. Media forces individuals to be honest with the public.

Although media cannot discover every detail behind every scandal, the media is doing a great job of making people tell the truth to the public.

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Search still going strong

By: Kayla Miller

A week ago today, a 19-year-old lady was involved in a hit-and-run accident leaving her in a coma.

Again, this hits home. The young woman, Allison Manning, is from Indianola, IA and the accident had occured on Highway 65/69. Very close to home, just like the Indianola man, Jim Brown, that I had blogged about previously. Once the reader catches an article that may deal with people you know, you can't stop reading. Though the first article about made me cry tears of joy, this one had me about cry tears of sorrow.

Even though this accident may be old news, it is important to the community to find the person that had fled the scene. Journalists know what's important to us, and writes about it. Until the person that has caused Manning's coma is caught, this article will probably still be floating around in the local newspapers.

Journalists provide the correct information in case anyone has information about the accident, too. They list phone numbers of the police and Polk County Crimestoppers, making the article become helpful to the readers.

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The world of comedy

by; Sarah Keller

As an art major I am always looking for more creative ways of getting news, or to view others opinions on subject matters. That is why I like to go on to slate.com and look at the cartoons that are on the web site. They show a large variety of cartoons daily.

As I mentioned in my blog last week, comic strips are a good way to quickly tell a reader things that are happening in the world, while giving the news a funnier, more bias spin. They can cover things from the election and the Wall Street issues to same sex marriage, or full on comic stories in any one day.

I could see myself doing a job like this for a living because it would allow me to draw, and use humor, all while telling the news, which are my favorite things to do.

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The importance of reporting basics

By, Sarah keller

I decided to look at videos on youtube to see if I could find anything news worthy, when I came across “Anchor vs Reporter”, after watching this video I laughed a lot, when I was finally done laughing I decided that maybe it could be something that I could blog about.

This video was about a news anchor, who was interviewing a man and woman at an apartment. The anchor cut the questioning off too soon, the camera then shot back to an anchor on the set of the news station, and that anchor told the other one that he should have continued to interview the people at the apartment. The two anchors started arguing on air about how to do each others jobs, the on set anchor told the other one that he did not want to teach him how do his job, while the on the scene anchor told the other one that he used to be his boss.

After listening to the two argue it made me think about the chapter of “reporting basics” from the Harrower text, and if the on the scene anchor would have followed some simple reporting rules, he could have avoided the confrontation all together.

First off he should have remembered to not interrupt; he interrupted the person being interviewed by saying that they were out of time, which leads me to my next tip to “budget your time” (page 77 of Harrower), if he would have budgeted his time he could have avoided the argument altogether. The anchor should have stayed flexible, asked follow- up questions, and should have not forgotten that he was in charge (when the other anchor started scolding him).

If only the anchor had remembered the basic tips that every good reporter should know maybe he would have had a much better and smoother interview, no wonder he is no longer the other reporters boss.

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It's finally happening!

By: Katie Anthony

It's been seemingly obvious that since 9/11 news has become increasingly negative. Ever since my previous blog posting over this same topic, it seems that one would have to search for hours to find anything positive about what has recently been going on in the world today.

I, for one, have had more than my fair share of negative news. Thankfully again, I'm not the only one.

Yair Lapid, (noted as the Israeli man-of-all-media by Poynter's Online Alan Abbey) has taken it upon himself to start a column entitled "The News You Want."

Lapid wrote an article called "One Good Person." The article consisted of asking random people what something was that he or she did that was good for his or her community. The story ran, and regretfully, Lapid's community did not have positive feedback.

His community argued that this story was not relevant to his specific area of expertise purely because the article he wrote threw a positive spin on things versus a negative. The Israeli feeling about news according to Lapid is "was is more interesting than peace."

Considering the amount of conflict across the world today, I think it's past time to hear about peace.

I'd just like to take a minute to thank Mr. Lapid because reading his article gave me hope that, while there are negative attributes in society today that may seem to overpower the positive, they don't ALWAYS have to overpower the positive.

So, I'll hold on to my hope that, little by little, the media will start having some positive reports to match their negative ones.

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