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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Crime time

By: Katie Schaefer

Police have discovered that in the school years of 2005-06, there were over 400 fights in the Des Moines school districts. When I read about this I was shocked.

School districts need to get grant money so they can have better security matters and try to cut down on the incidents. To be able to get the grants it has to look like there are a lot of fights going on. Cops right down everything they can about incidents so they can get a lot of grant money.

The Des Moines police department reported 415 fights and assaults and got a grant for $250,000. The more that you report the more money you are going to get. But it's not all about the money. Kids need to be able to go to school and feel safe.

Still, even if 200 of the 400 are actual fist fights that's still a lot of crime going on. We need to come up with a way for kids to go to school and not get in fights. Schools are made for learning, not for fighting.

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News- As valid as High School Gossip

By: Christina Woldt

Most people have the radar for what is valid news and what is not, but what about others who cannot make this distinction? Celebrity news is all over and insights much gossip that many times proves to be false. When this gossip travels from celebrity to politician, is when the media needs to do a little bit of homework. 

We are at a time where we need our voters to be informed about each political candidate, the problem arises when that information gets overloaded with gossip and here say. I wouldn't consider Barack Obama and Sarah Palin to be celebrities but many think I am wrong. Palin and Obama are seen on the cover of  People Magazine as much as famous actor and actress "celebrities" are. 

 

These political candidates are important but it concerns me that their lives are getting plastered over gossip magazines. Websites like Wikipedia, TMZ, and various news blogs that roam our web aren't an innocent party either. This is where the news vs. false news battle really ensues. When doing a google search for Sarah Palin, the search results are flooded with blogs and opinion editorials about her. There are informational and valid sources along with the gossip but in a time like this, shouldn't we have filters? 

 

When searching the web I came upon a story from  The Los Angeles Times about a blog called, "Blue Tidal Wave", a liberal blog. The blog reported that the CBS News was not releasing information about an embarrassing Palin videotape in order to secure the McCain/Palin Campaign. The article hit the "Top Topics" over all topics on the blog site. Many of this blogs readers know that this blog has a political agenda and bias, but, what about those who don't? 

The LA Times had to prove the blog article to be untrue and clean up the mess that this blog could have or did leave. It shouldn't take a valid news source, like the LA Times to reflect on a meaningless blog. 

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Take a deep breath Bill

by Pat Tierney

In these last couple weeks of class, we have spent a considerable amount of time on how to interview and get information from sources. I couldn't help but smile then, when I ran across and interview that I just didn't think was "by the books".

Bill O'Reilly, host of "The O'Reilly Factor", had what is being described as an "on air meltdown" while interviewing Barney Frank, a congressman, on Thursday.

O'Reilly was interviewing Frank about the proposed bailout bill that was sent through Washington this week when he literally began yelling at his interviewee. This led to an all out shouting match on the air.

In an interview with a newspaper after the incident, O'Reilly said that he did not regret the on-air heated exchange, and that it is his job to hold these people responsible for their actions.

This made me think about what we have been learning in class. O'Reilly is viewed as a journalist, but when asked he said that it was his job to hold people responsible.

We have also discussed the importance of not being overly aggressive with interviewees, and I have to say that being aggressive may be an understatement in this case.

The job of journalists is to report the facts straight. Personally, as nice as it was to see a big time Washington insider be held accountable, it didn't fall under the category of responsible reporting.

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Biased views when reporting sports

By: Hannah Pickett

In class discussion earlier this week, we discussed the importance of being completely objective, impartial, and unbiased when reporting a story. If a writer writes with an opinion, he/she is no longer reporting the facts of the story.

So, I got thinking about this when I was writing my articles for the Winterset Madisonian, and realized that when writing sports stories, we are not objective about the situation at all. Winterset's football team is struggling to say the least, yet every week I manage to put some sort of positive spin on things.

In fact, I actually tell our writers to make sure the team we cover (Winterset, Earlham, and I-35) sound somewhat decent. According to our text and class discussion, what we do in the sports department of the Winterset Madisonian is far from journalistic.

When does it become alright to go beyond reporting just the facts, especially in sports, and put a positive spin on the situation to suit the demographic?

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Change may be in the hands of journalists

By: Kathryn Lisk

The number one rule in journalism is getting the facts straight. Never should a journalist publish anything before being certain that the information they are about to publish is accurate.

However, in the present society where the media is impossible to avoid and the public is obsessed with being informed, I would argue that the media affects its public as much as it informs.

For example, the U.S. is currently attempting to sort through a financial crisis. Obviously the media is providing its audience, whether that be readers of newspapers, listeners of radio stations, or viewers of news networks with information and answers on the Wall Street crisis and the proposed $700 billion bailout plan. In providing this information, journalists surely shift the views of their audience no matter how unbiased they attempt to be.

When it comes to economic problems, the more people doubt the economy, the less they spend and the worse it becomes. Therefore, journalists publishing or reporting about our country's financial struggle could cause Americans to keep their money in their pockets and away from an improved economy.

I am not saying journalists should keep the truth away from the public. Nor do I believe that Americans should be less informed. In fact, I feel the opposite.

Instead, I am simply stating what an important role journalists play in society. The views journalists publish can become the views of the public.

So in a time like this, the pressure is on.

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One Shot Wonder

by Peter Merchlewitz



One of the best skills you can have in the business world is to have a special, attention-getting company logo that will help consumers remember your product.

So why is it that many logos are starting to look the same?

The Creative Review blog delved into this superficial conundrum, wondering why many companies are deciding to slim, cut, and smooth their old logos. Barclaycard just recently received its new face-lift, courtesy from global brand agency, Brand Union.

Apparently, all the cool kids believe that sanded edges, and rounder surfaces give off a more "Look how round and soft and approachable we are."

However, that warm, fuzzy feeling you might get could come at the cost of individuality. In such a competitive market, how can a company get any recognition if consumers can't tell the difference in your company if they all look the same?

In trying to say they’re about the new, the modern, the global, they’re in fact revealing a willingness to simply blend in with everyone else.

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Nielsen online publication suggests editorial restructuring

By: Allison McNeal

Print publications are moving towards consolidating their major companies to impliment a new content strategy.

Nielsen Business Media recently stated that they are starting a company restructuring, which would consolidate editorial staffs.

One proposal for the company restructuring is to merge Nielsen's Adweek, Mediaweek, and Brandweek magazines to increase sales and boost revenue.

According to Foliomag.com, this company restructuring could mean that layoffs are going to be imposed for a second time this year.

Nielsen layoffs have been ongoing since April because of the enormous amount of debt the company has consumed in 2007 and 2008. The company reportedly had "revenues of $4.7 billion in 2007, an increase of about seven percent over the previous year," said Foliomag.com. "The company’s total debt, however, was $8.25 billion on Dec. 31, with cash balances of $399 million."

The organization also had to scale back its print from 47 issues to 36 because of the restructuring.

Nielsen's Web site, Adweek.com, also has been redesigned to appeal to consumers. The Web site now has longer features and more marketing ideas embedded in the site.

Sabrina Crow, Nielsen's Business Media Group senior vice president of marketing and media, states how they are trying to appeal to more consumers.

"This is a rapidly changing industry, and we are staying ahead of the marketplace by delivering the two things our audiences want and need: instant news and thoughtful opinion," Crow said.

She also stated that “we are moving with our audience as they evolve and are maximizing the value we provide our community by delivering [online] content [every day]."

As Nielsen and other companies are revamping their organizations, a primary factor is the audience and what they should get out of the publications.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of NYU's graduate interactive telecommunications program, expanded on how media organizations try to appeal to the average users as a whole, instead of focusing on people as individuals. He also goes on to explain how companies are underestimating the power of their audience and their creavity.

The decision of companies embracing their audience was one topic that we discussed in class and raises the question of what would online newspaper and magazine companies do without input and creativity from individuals? These organizations rely on individual opinion and would want to restructure their company to please their viewers.

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Bailout plan for newspaper industry

By: Callie McBroom

Many journalists are now expressing concern about how the banking crisis will affect the already-struggling newspaper industry.

As Inksniffer puts it, this is a time when "a highly leveraged company with high debts secured against an asset that is small and/or diminishing in value and which is paying steep interest rates on loans, has no prospect of getting out of them because they can't refinance." This situation describes the state of many newspapers in the country even before the crisis hit.
Which, then, brings up an interesting point. If the government has an interest in saving banks for the greater good of its citizens, shouldn't it also be interested in saving the newspapers in the country? Should there be a plan to bailout the newspaper industry?

Newspapers could soon be going out of business at a much higher rate than banks have been recently. Not to mention that a very small number of newspaper companies have and continue to buy out numerous smaller operations.

Just like banks recently, healthy companies have been able to buy newspapers at an increasing rate because it's easy to buy a company that has financial problems. Consolidation over the last 25 years or so has led to falling numbers of independent dailies. Slate says these numbers fell from 1,300 to 700. This is alarming to many people for many different reasons.

I realize that many people would prefer to not have the government involved in the process of newsgathering. However, that may be the lesser of two evils if it means keeping newspapers around to gather news in the first place. Just something to think about.

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Writers will be editors of their own material

By Austin Bates

Recently, Express Newspapers has let writers of the Daily Express and Sunday Express know that they may soon have to edit their own stories before finally submitting them. Express Newspapers has let it be known that they intend to eliminate around 80 editor and support staff positions between the two papers in order to cut costs and make themselves more efficient.

The new plan now is to have writers edit their own material with the help of a pre-made template that will be distributed by the newspaper layout designers, along with lawyers who will do a final check. The newspaper hopes this will keep them alive and running. Others are not so optimistic or happy with the decision, even expressing "anger".

If I was a writer, I'd have to say I would be a little angry as well. I also feel this could be risky, and overstress the capabilities of many of the writers. And editing will not be anywhere as good as it would be with a dedicated person.

Personally, I feel that first of all, having a writer also do his own editing is detrimental to the quality of that writer's work. He'll now not only have twice as much to do, but this means he also has much less time to work on his story, and has to allocate more time just to edit it. Further, the writer will be under a tighter deadline with more to do.

Second, an editor is dedicated to looking over a story and only looking for errors of all kinds, typographical, grammatical, and structural. Everybody knows that after writing something, you can't effectively edit it if it's your own work because not only will you be more concerned with little minute conceptual details, like whether you said want you wanted to say, and whether you sound good, but you won't catch your own mistakes even if you go over it several times, because many times your brain automatically corrects a sentence based upon your memory of what it should say. An editor has no preconceived notions of what a story should say, and will see the sentences that make little sense, or the out-of-context material much better than the writer could.

Overall, I think this sounds like a bad idea for everyone involved. Editors not only see things a writer couldn't have thought of or seen, but they find larger mistakes, like a lack of connection between ideas, or subtly incorrectly organized sentences. Dropping editors will only lead to more mistakes, more carelessness, and less time to perfect stories.

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The debates of the future

By Liz Tjaden

Last week, just in time for the Presidential debates, MSNBC.com revealed a new way to view video online. The new Debate Video Player is now up and running and will give viewers the opportunity to watch past and future debates.

The new program allows viewers to watch the entire debate from beginning to end, search the debate according to key words or topics and skip ahead to those certain points. (While also being able to skip the boring parts in the middle!) The dialogue is also color coated. If a viewer would like to hear what McCain had to say about health care, it is now easy to find. Everything he said in the debate held on Sept. 25 is in red, while Obama’s segments are in blue.

This is just another example of how online news is becoming bigger than other media sources. This new way to consume footage will allow viewers to watch, analyze and discuss instead of trying to tape the debate or remember all the details. By searching for a particular topic makes it easier for people to find what they want.

The rest of the page has neat features too. An interactive map that shows which candidate is predicted to win each state, another interactive map that lists where each candidate will be on a specific date and also a few polls where viewers can express their feelings on different topics.

The Web site is really easy to use and I encourage anyone who is even semi-interested in politics to check it out.

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A hope to reduce medical errors

By: Erin Floro

Medicare will stop paying for medical errors this Wednesday. Even if it is the doctors fault, you will be billed. Medicare is the largest insurer in the country and their decision has made other insurers follow the same guideline.

These insurers will not pay for as many as 28 "never events." They are called that because they are never supposed to happen. If a patient gets an infection after surgery, or gets bed sores, or needs a second operation because the first one wasn't done properly, Medicare will not pay for the treatment.

This affects alot of people, there are over 12.5 million people annually that are covered by Medicare.

Medicare is reducing payments to hospitals with high readmission rates and they grant bonuses to doctors that report quality measures. Nurses have been trained and are more careful with medications and to prevent falls from happening.

Hospitals strongly enforced washing hands, that even cut as many people from getting sick again. Some changes have been technological, like an electric prescribing machine which reduced medication mistakes.Hospitals are complying with the rule to report medical errors. Doctors and nurses are focusing on avoiding accidents. By Medicare doing this, they want to encourage hospitals to eventually have zero medical errors.

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A hope to reduce medical errors

By: Erin Floro

Medicare will stop paying for medical errors this Wednesday. Even if it is the doctors fault, you will be billed. Medicare is the largest insurer in the country and their decision has made other insurers follow the same guideline.

These insurers will not pay for as many as 28 "never events." They are called that because they are never supposed to happen. If a patient gets an infection after surgery, or gets bed sores, or needs a second operation because the first one wasn't done properly, Medicare will not pay for the treatment.

This affects alot of people, there are over 12.5 million people annually that are covered by Medicare.

Medicare is reducing payments to hospitals with high readmission rates and they grant bonuses to doctors that report quality measures. Nurses have been trained and are more careful with medications and to prevent falls from happening. Hospitals strongly enforced washing hands, that even cut as many people from getting sick again. Some changes have been technological, like an electric prescribing machine which reduced medication mistakes.

Hospitals are complying with the rule to report medical errors. Doctors and nurses are focusing on avoiding accidents. By Medicare doing this, they want to encourage hospitals to eventually have zero medical errors.

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Credibility of journalists

By: Jessica Hamell

I couldn’t find something that interested me more then what I wrote on in my last blog. Journalists and reporters are already criticized for not being reliable. It doesn’t help that there are countless web sites that run fake news stories that are just to catch people attentions, but so many people can let them go as just rumors or fiction.

I found a poll at GeoCities.com which was talking about reporters that stated "44% said they are 'often inaccurate.' "

People often believe what they read or see until someone proves to them that it is wrong.

I found an article telling about how television news station had been fooled by a video they found on YouTube. They aired it on an expose talking about tendencies at a local high school.

The video even looked fake enough that there were comments posted on it saying it was fake but the television station disregarded those comments and still aired it.


Reporters as well as readers should do a little more investigating if they don’t think the news is credible. If people would just put a little more time into getting the news maybe the credibility of journalists would go up.

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