Mirroring California’s problems, other cash-strapped states await health reform relief
Graphic created via Creative Commons images
Just a reminder: The 2009 New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit is Monday. Wish I could go — required school trip to Gettysburg instead, woot! – but perhaps a talented media maven or two will see this post and decide to sign up. One of the keynotes is from Lisa Williams, the brains behind Placeblogger, who is always pushing for more women to get involved with new media startups.
So, yeah, if you’re savvy, do it:
Sign up here.
Finally, success! Since those first invites were dispersed Sept. 30, I’ve been waiting with bated breath to be asked into the secret Internet funhouse that is Google Wave. This afternoon, it happened, and I surfed on over.
First reaction? Crickets chirping. Not many of us have the device yet, so it might be a bit of a waiting game until friends and work collaborators get asked to log on. Luckily, there were a couple tech-savvy people floating around out there on my contacts list.
The awesome part about Google Wave? It’s like having a business meeting without having to track a string of emails. In my first attempt/tutorial, I used Wave to plan a friend’s trip from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Here’s what the Wave, named “Ian’s Visit to D.C.,” looked like:
A few important points:
- Notice the highlighted text at the top? Wave allows for real time edits. It’s just like a wiki or a shared document in that way.
- We created a map (not pictured) of important locations relevant to Ian’s visit: My house, Dulles airport, the Spy Museum, etc. Of course, both of us were able to add and edit each pinpointed location as needed.
- Those little illustrated avatars next to us are bots: One told us what the weather is like in Washington, and the other allowed for text to be converted into emoticons (smiley faces … yeah, not sure how useful this one is, but fun to tinker with just the same).
- At the bottom, you’re able to tag your Wave. Since our Wave is public, other users can search “tourism” and our little project can pop up.
Are you starting to see how collaboration works? Wave users, what are you loving/hating? I’ve heard that the Wave is still quite buggy — Ian said it crashed his browser earlier in the planning session — but I haven’t seen any problems quite yet. Comments appreciated! (Special thanks to Ian Monroe for the invite — as he would say, so meta!)
OK, Justin Vernon. Like every other 20-something woman who gets her music from friends a year too late, I might be a little obsessed with you.
So. In honor of National Blog Posting Month (brought to my attention by my buddy, Diane), I’m trying to add something to this site every day. This means some of my posts are going to be totally uninteresting to you, but are going to be enjoyed by me at a much later date, probably when I am old and boring. Anyway, I could listen to my Top 25 iTunes picks every single day. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I do. So, without further ado:
- “Skinny Love” Bon Iver
- “Use Somebody” Kings of Leon
- “Flume” Bon Iver
- “For Emma” Bon Iver
- “Re: Stacks” Bon Iver
… sense a trend …?
- “Wisconsin” Bon Iver
- “Crimewave” Crystal Castles
- “The ‘59 Sound” Gaslight Anthem
- “Electric Feel” MGMT
- “Lump Sum” Bon Iver
- “The Wolves (Act 1 & 2)” Bon Iver
- “Blindsided” Bon Iver
- “For Our Elegant Castle” Of Montreal
- “Creature Fear” Bon Iver
- “Team” Bon Iver
- “Can You Tell” Ra Ra Riot
- “Rebellion (Lies)” Arcade Fire
- “When the Night Comes” Dan Auerbach
- “Sex on Fire” Kings of Leon
- “It’ll Be a Breeze” Long Winters
- “Smile Like You Mean It” The Killers
-”Manhattan” Kings of Leon
- “Stupid” Long Winters
- “Charlie Darwin” The Low Anthem
Kings of Leon: At the point in their career where it's embarassing for me to enjoy them as much as I do.
[You probably didn't] notice that there are only 24 songs listed — that’s because “Sex on Fire” comes up twice. Yes, I am a 24-year-old teenybopper, and I needed a quick and easy way to add to NBPM while in the midst of working, studying and looking for jobs.
It really is as terrifying as they say.
(Written by me for Medill News Service on 10/29/09)
With Halloween coming up, here’s a horror story to start you off with: A recruiter at one of the most prominent newspapers in the country compared the current state of journalism to “making sausage” this week.
Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for personnel at The Washington Post, visited our newsroom and didn’t exactly sugarcoat the current state of the news business. (Just suffice it to say we didn’t file out of the conference room with a corner office on 15th.) It’s called content now, not stories, Perl said. Processing content rather than newsgathering and writing. It’s a new language he admits has taken some getting used to.
“It’s like the stages of grief,” Perl told us. “You have to make peace with that.”
Spooky, huh?
Into the void: A sampling of Medill student Web sites
This year, journalism schools across the country will be churning out tech-savvy reporters by the thousands as the media industry decides what to do with itself. Most of us have Web sites, and nearly all of us have Twitter. The question, then, is this: Will any of this stuff help us do a better job as journalists? Beyond that — can it help us get a job?
So, using non-traditional methods like Twitter and Gchat, we contacted people in journalism — starting with the guy who reads your resumes — to ask what works and what doesn’t when it comes to journalists engaging the web.
Will multimedia know-how make me an attractive candidate?
“The same things that would distinguish you in print are the same things that distinguish you on the Web,” Perl said.
* Perl said Post recruiters critique blog entries in the same way they would print clips. Bloggers: Is there an element of enterprise to your posts? How about basic background reporting? (No surprise here, but Perl pointed to Ezra Klein as a sterling example of someone who blogs with authority.)
* Be aware that what you’re going to tweet will get back to you, Perl warned. In other words, yes, you will be Googled.
* Clips, Perl said, are “where it’s at.” When asked if he’d take a journalist with a slew of multimedia skills or a highly-skilled reporter and writer, the latter will win out every time.
* Even if it is just “processing content,” Perl said, the best journalists still report and deliver facts. They just consider the web as another tool to get out their reporting.
Should all journalists use Twitter?
Nope, said Jay Rosen, a New York University faculty member, author and blogger with more than 27,000 followers on Twitter, many of them eager to see what he’ll say next about the state of the industry. Here’s what he wrote to us via Gchat:
” … I would definitely say not every journalist needs to be on Twitter …
I would say it stronger … don’t go on unless you know why you are on …
… rules like “you have to have a blog,” or you “have to be on social media” are promulgated by people who have not studied it well; they are a substitute for knowledge and learning …
and that is on the record …”
New media guru Jay Rosen gives his tips. Graphic via Creative Commons images
Beyond that, here’s a quick primer Rosen recommended journalists start with to get themselves up to speed with blogging and Twittering:
* Put a bio up that reflects your interests on your Twitter profile.
* Use the single URL they allow you to link to your blog or to a home page of yours with more information about you.
* If you don’t have one already, make a blog or homepage for yourself at a hosting site like True Slant.
* Then, depending on your area of interest, start following people who Tweet links and ideas about that interest so that you have what Rosen called a useful inflow.
* “It’s initially about what you are bringing in, not putting out.”
How do working journalists feel about engaging an audience through social media?
Hoping to engage the community, I also asked journalists who follow me on Twitter to let me know how they felt about using social media tactics on the job. Every response I got was positive. Here’s a sampling:
So there, from the mouths of experts, you have it.
As for me, I could just say that everything I need to know about branding myself as a journalist I learned in kindergarten: Be nice, share and learn from your peers. Then you just hope common sense kicks in naturally.
Katie Rogers, who is set to graduate from Medill in December, is from Elkhart, Ind., and holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Loyola University Chicago. Before coming to Medill, she was a staff reporter for The Elkhart Truth, her hometown paper. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Journal and McClatchy Newspapers. She wrote this opinion piece for Washington Reporting 2.0., an occasional column about the experience of reporting.
Matias Ramos, 23, blogs to help rally support for the newest incarnation of the DREAM Act (Photo: Katie Rogers/MNS)
WASHINGTON — As her fellow college graduates busy themselves with spamming every available inbox with resumes, 25-year-old Lizbeth Mateo keeps to the same Los Angeles coffee shop she’s worked in for the past five years.
A native of Mexico and an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Mateo earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Northridge last year. Though she said she’d like to find a job that would allow her to give back in some way to the low-income community she grew up in, Mateo’s immigration status has placed a cap on what she is able to achieve.
You could say she’s still waiting on a dream. “You’re not allowed to work where you grow up or have a job that’s related to your field,” Mateo said.
It’s been just over two years since the last version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act failed in the Senate. Re-introduced in both chambers of Congress in March, the most recent incarnation of the DREAM Act would provide for students like Mateo, people who want to earn a path toward legal U.S. residency over time.
To mobilize supporters, Mateo and others in her situation have taken to social media to spread their message. Using the Web to invite other savvy supporters into the fray, undocumented bloggers and tweeters across the country have formed a coalition called United We Dream. The group rolled out the countrywide “Back to School DREAM Act Day of Action” demonstration in September. Floridians alone hosted 13 demonstrations across the state last month, half of them in Miami.
Recent UCLA graduate and Washington resident Matias Ramos, 23, said undocumented people of his generation are becoming less afraid to speak out against what they see as injustices. On the web, as he is in person, Ramos is an unafraid activist, maintaining a blog on the topic and reaching out to his Twitter following to spread news.
Ramos and others hold hope that policy work on the DREAM Act will begin in earnest next year, either as part of more comprehensive immigration reform or as a standalone bill.
“I think a lot of us are coming together and say enough is enough,” said Ramos, a native of Argentina. “We’re ready to lead this debate and say ‘this is what the undocumented population is about and what it’s not.’”
Undocumented and born abroad, Mateo and Ramos both defeated steep odds for their degrees. As a group, Latinos historically trail their classmates of other races, according to Pew Hispanic Center data.
Being foreign-born just widens the gap.
Though not necessarily undocumented, only 29 percent of young, foreign-born Latinos interviewed in Pew’s 2009 National Survey of Latinos plan to pursue a bachelor’s degree. That’s compared with 60 percent of those who are native-born. After age 18, though, only one-fifth of foreign-born young adults surveyed remained enrolled in school, representing a presence half that of native-born enrollees.
Cinthya, an undocumented 22-year-old, hasn’t been able to find time to get her GED after nearly a decade in the U.S. Smuggled with her parents by coyotes, or human traffickers, from Honduras when she was a teen, Cinthya is in her third attempt at earning a GED since dropping out of high school at 17. Cinthya said she sees no way out of her two jobs, one at a cleaning service and the other at a restaurant.
Unlike Ramos or Mateo, Cinthya he sees no path to college.
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, updates a “Corruption Chronicles” blog that tracks the progress of undocumented immigrants through higher education. He said that the DREAM Act threatens to draw in even more immigrants illegally than other reform bills offering amnesty.
“There are people who are waiting to get into this country because they’ve patiently abided the law,” Fitton said, “and those who cheat get these proposed benefits. Why would someone who is not a citizen be able to get resources that might otherwise be devoted to helping citizens?”
Qalim Cromer thinks there should be a better path. Cromer teaches a GED class at the Latin American Youth Center in Washington and works with first-generation and undocumented students.
He calls his work “plugging the dam,” not fixing the problem of helping the undocumented access higher education, but biding time until immigration reform moves forward.
If she thinks too long about her limitations, Cinthya panics. She doesn’t dream; instead, she tells of the deportation nightmares that plague her.
“What if this is all I can do?” she asks Cromer in perfect English. “This is the max I can move on without papers.”
By Katie Rogers, Medill News Service for Imperial Valley Press on 11/02/09
Real quick, just wanted to say I was blown away by a CollegeJourn chat I peeked in on tonight. It hasn’t been that long since I got my undergrad degree, but the entire nature of the conversation is different. In fact, I’d venture to say that just two years ago, there was no conversation about where journalism was going — I think many of us, including our instructors, were still very much rooted in traditional practices. I hate to say that grad school hasn’t been all too different.
Some questions posed by the discussion, which Greg Linch of Publish2 told me usually consists of mostly undergrads:
- How should editors best pay attention to search results, specifically using SEO terms?
- Are site homepages still relevant, or do most readers access content story-by-story?
- What are the best editors out there doing right now to harness the capabilities that come with the web?
I mean, wow. Quite intimidating. It made me think the future of journalism will consists of people who can not only write, but possess technical knowledge to build a site from the ground up if they had to. But now I have a couple questions I wish I would’ve asked:
- Where do mid-to-late career journalists, many of them now editors strapped for time and resources, fit into these theories? I had a great experience with an editor named Marshall King. He let us roam free as far as using web techniques to gather stories were concerned, but he’s a busy guy. It seems like a tall order for us to expect every traditionally-trained journalist to go out there and learn to code and use SEO. The people out there hiring us are still trying to save the print dinosaur, bless them.
- Where does the print model fit? No one talked tonight talked about newspapers.
Maybe I’m a little late to this discussion. Has the past year of my life been spent learning stuff that won’t be applicable in five years? Whatever happened to writing? I feel like I’m right on the cusp, somewhere between new and old.
When Washington Post recruiter Peter Perl spoke to us at Medill today, he jokingly compared journalism today to sausage processing.
So telling, and so scary, and so true.
If you need me, I’ll be outside with the chirping crickets. Night.
