UWire 100

Recently, I was chosen to be a part of the UWire 100, a project by the online news service recognizing the top 100 collegiate journalists in the field today. The award was quite an honor, and here are just a few places you can go to find out what others are saying:

UWire 100 Profile Page

Simpson College

CBS News

Editor and Publisher

Romanesko

Chronicle of Higher Education

Ready, set....now what?

As seniors near graduation, the statistics are looming, as various articles on Poynter explain. One article clarifies the dismal employment outlook...by clarifying it is even worse than it appears.

Rick Edmonds explains that "full-time professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year, a drop of 4.4% to a total of 52,600." Edmonds also continues by explaining that the discrepancy cannot simply be explained by a movement to Web, saying "overall it does not appear, as I had speculated earlier, that newspaper organizations are making up for print side losses with growth in online-only jobs."

Colleen Eddy takes on the dismal employment outlook in her blog, but sheds new light on its depth.

"Grads and grads-to-be, your situation is not without precedent. When I graduated from college the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today it is 5.1 percent. We heard the same discouraging words and somehow found work. Your future is more promising than it looks."

More promising that it looks, but it still could be better. For so many of us, finding a job after graduation meets walking a tightrope wavering between staying in the profession or falling out, finding work in another similar yet non-journalistic path or in something completely devoid of the need for a college degree, say food service.

Ethically, those both in the field and hoping to enter it are going to need to position themselves carefully. If employers continue to allow jobs to fall off and discourage those with promise from entering the workforce, there won't be much of a chance for a bright future for the business or its reputation. Conversely, if young professionals aren't willing to stick to their ideals, make wise choices or wait out the employment crunch with the right mindset, there won't be much of a chance for them to come in and positively impact the profession they were once so committed to entering.

Gone but not forgotten

This isn't my normal blog post. It doesn't involve The Post, Times or Des Moines Register. What it does involve is the mass media's ability to impact a large number of people separated by distance.

You see, this past week, a young, talented individual with a great deal of potential was taken from us. Mason Dible, a senior in high school, suffered a brain injury after an accident on his longboard and passed away.

I learned of the news from my mother, got the details from friends back home. Mason was not a close friend of mine, but I do consider his brother and cousin among my closest friends. I have known them since high school and have had a great relationship with these great young men as coworkers and friends at my summer job back home.

After calling coworkers, I found that Mason's injury, and sudden, unfortunate death were all documented on a hospital Web site. I quickly visited this site. I was struck by the turn of both the journal entries and the messages on the site. The journal entries went from meekly optimistic, charting his progress, to sullen yet concise, telling of his passing on Thursday.

Still, the most impacting part of the site may fully be the messages by the people left behind. From classmates to family friends, individuals have left words for the family delivering messages of caring.

At first, I was emotionally aware of the timeline. So quickly, so sadly, in a matter of a day, the messages went from hope, from prayers, to consolation. This, I know, is a showing of the way the mass media is conveying the human processing of what happened quickly. Far too quickly.

Hours from home, I couldn't be with my friends, couldn't give them the hugs I wanted to, look in their eyes and try to convey how much I hoped my respect for our friendship would let them know I wanted so much to help them through. Mass media or not, I don't think this is possible in a time of such great loss.

Still, through this site, what I did see was a community of people, coming together, showing their support and their love during a time when words, eye contact, flowers...anything, just could not be enough.

Do I think that the mass media is all it could be? Of course not. I think, especially in our generation, we have let outlets such as messaging, Facebook, and other quick, to-the-point yet without-a-point means of communication suffice for what should me mature and life-defining moments. Yet, I think in a time of such utter confusion for a life taken so young, being able to see that so many others felt the same as me was comforting, even from hours away.

Mass communication will never take on the full responsiblity of truly being there for someone in a time of loss. Yet, at this time, I do know that it was an outlet for me. I looked at the site, saw the situation in the family's words, saw the application of the loss in the words of friends and knew I wasn't alone.

Mason would have lived a great life and I know he would have done great things. He had an amazing family that loved him and will miss him for the rest of their lives. I know it and now, even from so far away, I know I'm not alone.

Rest in peace, Mason. You are gone (far too soon) and far, far from forgotten.

At the 40th Anniversary of a racial injustice, how far have we really come?

In the wake of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a cover has appeared on the latest issue of Vogue that is stirring some controversy. The cover, which features a demure-looking, dainty Gisele Bundchen alongside a savage looking Lebron James. The cover, while more than likely meant as an artistic display of the differences of what makes the “ideal” female and male body type ended up being taken as a comment on race by more than a few people.

Poynter Online’s Keith Woods comments on the cover, noting it as part of a long string of recent events involving race, King and the upcoming election:

And here, 40 years later, columnists are duking it out over whether Vogue magazine meant anything racist by putting a snarling black basketball star, LeBron James, and smiling white supermodel Gisele Bündchen on its cover. Cable television is still showing incendiary snippets from the dated rant of a politically connected preacher. And in the wake of Sen. Barack Obama's King-esque speech on the topic, journalists around the country are asking if we're ready to talk -- really talk -- about race.

Well, one columnist was not afraid to talk, Jemele Hill from ESPN’s Page 2 says,

Vogue's quest to highlight the differences between superstar athletes and supermodels only successfully reinforces the animalistic stereotypes frequently associated with black athletes.

And

Too often, black athletes are presented as angry, overly aggressive and overly sexual. Or sometimes, they're just plain emasculated.
The examples of this are endless. The 2002 Sports Illustrated cover that featured Charles Barkley chained like a slave. Ricky Williams wearing a wedding dress on an ESPN The Magazine cover in 1999. And while it didn't appear in a magazine, the Terrell Owens-Nicolette Sheridan intimate-encounter tease for "Monday Night Football" gave viewers a sexualized image of a black man.

The comments of these journalists, the Vogue cover and the Martin Luther King assassination anniversary come on the heels of a March 18 Obama speech in which he vocalized what called a “racial stalemate” he believes the country is stuck in:

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

So was the Vogue cover a distasteful display of just how far we haven’t come as a country, or was it simply an artistic showcasing by a magazine known for its avant garde artistic nature? Does Lebron James’ pose signify the fact that, as a country, the racial lines are still very much drawn? Did Vogue have an ethical responsibility to rise above the option to push past racial stereotypes and instead present images that show racial progression in our country?

L.A. Times believes the crap on death of West Coast Rap

The L.A. Times walked itself right into the infamous East/West Coast rap rivalry and got caught in the crossfire. An article on The Smoking Gun revealed that Chuck Philips, a reporter from the Times, reported on the death of (in)famous rapper Tupac Shakur using fabricated documents by a mentally unstable prisoner, thus falsely saying Sean "P. Diddy" Combs was in on the plot.

Though the Times published an article apologizing for is actions, Bob Steele of Poynter Online points out some important questions the situation raises about the Times and the newspaper industry today. Steele writes:

"...let me suggest that much of the attention in that internal review should focus on how the quality control process at the LA Times apparently fell far short."

Here is one of the more compelling questions Steele raises:

"Have recent cutbacks in staffing at the Los Angeles Times and the loss of some veteran editors affected the quality control process on stories like this one? If so, how?"

Could it be that trying to get a better bottom line by cutting the staff of papers like the Times is finally reaching the point where it may cost the newspaper more than they can afford--both in legal fees and in credibility? Could the report on rap that turned out to be crap really point to more serious implications of cutting corners?

Soft and Low: Has CNN failed its viewers?

With the five-year anniversary of the Iraq war upon us, and a death toll that has reached 4,000, media outlets across the world have been marking the event in their own ways. But has each done a good job? That depends on who you ask.

At MediaChannel.org, a post which links back to the famed Huffington Post claims that CNN has gotten it all wrong, most specifically with a report by Jeanne Moos. The article outlines the way coverage was poorly balanced towards those who participated in a recent protest for and against the war, and was short in its entire nature, to allow the network to focus back on more soft news coverage.

So are Media Channel and Huffington Post blowing a lot of hot air--can CNN's lack of coverage really be that poor? And can it really have a longterm effect on the public's knowledge of what is happening in Iraq?

Turns out, there may be a correlation. The article also references a study by the Pew Research Institute that shows the public's knowledge of what is happening in Iraq is not in that great of shape.

An excerpt from the Pew Study shows the media may be to blame:

"The drop in awareness comes as press attention to the war has waned. According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% of the newshole in July to just 3% in February."

There are some important questions to ask of the media here. Certainly, the media is turning a watchful eye and a considerable amount of the newshole to the war as the anniversary serves as a legitimate reminder of what's going on so far away.

Still, is the media covering what's soft--Britney Spears, Anna Nicole, Lilo, even alleged affairs of presidential candidates--and in turn covering up the war that America seems to have forgotten?

Are we, as media consumers, to blame as well? After all, we (maybe not you specifically, but certainly a significant number of readers) turn more and more to blogs, entertainment programming and gossip magazines, and away from legitimate news telling about legitimate events that effect people we know.

From soldiers we grew up with who are now away fighting in the war or politicians with voting records which may effect the longevity or termination of the "war on terror," its easy to point fingers at CNN or Wolf Blitzer, but it really comes down to what our own eyes and ears really want to tune into.

Static on the air as NPR chief resigns.

NPR's Ken Stern is out as The Washington Post Online states, marking yet another ill-fated transition in the struggle between large media organization's inter-company clashes. According to the Post's article, Stern's departure came after his personal views on the station's future were seen as misaligned with the organization's larger goals. As the article states:

People at NPR said, however, that Stern and the organization's 17-member board had clashed repeatedly over several of Stern's initiatives, including NPR's expansion into new media. Those initiatives often riled station managers, who saw them coming at the expense of serving the hundreds of public stations that pay dues annually to NPR.

And, depending on how you view Stern's statement from the same article, the departure was a bit bittersweet, but not all sour grapes:

Yesterday, after his contract was not renewed, Stern said in a statement: "I'm proud of having brought NPR to new heights as one of the greatest journalism organizations in the world. . . . I also take great pride in NPR's financial performance during my tenure, with our financial reserves and endowment growing by over 2,000 percent. I have enormous respect for the management team I assembled and know they will keep NPR on this successful path."

Ethically, what does this mean? Could there be some dissonance between the big dogs at the station and the voices, minds and ideals that represent much of the more personal content on and off the air within NPR? I think the question needs to be asked that, when turmoil erupts within an organization such as the public radio service, should contributors such as Stern be so easily convinced that throwing in the towel is their best bet when their voices are not heard?

While we cannot admit to fully knowing how discussions were played out within the organization, is it not a bit unsettling to know that a voice that spoke up to transition the organization to the seemingly unavoidable realm of new and converged media was all but snuffed out? I guess all we can say to Mr. Stern is farewell, good night...and good luck.