research method

Question 1: Weather Story #1

Website: www.nhc.noaa.gov

Question: Name the costliest hurricane in the United States since 1900.
Answer: Hurricane Katrina was the costliest hurricane that took place in the U.S. since 1900.
Question: When and where did it occur?
Answer: Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in August of 2005.
Question: How much were the damages?
Answer: Hurricane Katrina cost $81 million in damages.

Question 2: Weather Story #2

Website: earthquake.usgs.gov
Question: Find a site that offers good tips on earthquake preparedness.
Answer: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?categoryID=14 has the tips for earthquake preparedness including the supplies needed for earthquakes, what to do during an earthquake and what to do after an earthquake.

Question 3: Plane Crashes

Website: www.ntsb.gov/AVIATION/Aviation.htm
Question: How many fatal crashes occurred in the last year?
Answer: Last year there was two fatal plane crashes, but between the span of 1/1/2009 and 1/27/2010 there were 4 crashes
Question: How many nonfatal crashes occurred in the last year?
Answer: There were 10 nonfatal crashes last year
Question: If the type of plane or company involved has had more than one fatal crash in the last year or two, check the record of that company using the same query site.
Answer: No company had one or more fatal plane crashes last year.
Question: In 2000 the NTSB conducted a major investigation of an airplane crash in which 88 people died. What was the airline?
Answer: Alaska Airlines.
Question: In 2006 how many people died in the crash in Lexington, KY?
Answer: 49 people died.

Rather Blog

Me?

Personally, I am like a ninety-year old Farve wheeling into the first game of the season. I’m like the polygamist salivating outside the hair salon. I’m John Madden at a Nacho Bar for crying out loud—I can’t get enough!

But for me it’s the Bloggers I crave—not their content, but their presence.

In 2004, during an air-tight Presidential Race, Dan Rather of the CBS Evening News reported a story that avowed that President Bush’s National Guard service during Vietnam led to his quick departure.

The content was muddled. The sources were obscure. The Bloggers were on the attack. And that was only after Rather’s opening line.

The Bloggers would attack Rather and CBS for nearly 14 days before the 73 year-old anchor apologized to the public and eventually “resigned.”

A “resigning” that would leave Rather suing CBS for 70 million—he lost that to.

The winners? Every lump and scrap in the Blogging world talking about this—crying about that. But in the end, that’s when they won me over too.

Does this mean this is the new form for all my news needs? No. I know most of these Bloggers wouldn’t even be credible even by their mothers’ standards. I know that, and I am at peace with it. That’s not their job.

Instead they are the new watchdogs of Online Media. Sure, they won’t always catch scandals like “Rather-Gate,” but the fear alone they sent to all other journalists that day could only make the media more inclined to only report the truth.

If Rather can’t get away with questionable content, that doesn’t leave too many journalist breathing easily.

And because of that, the Bloggers’ presence alone should serve as a component to the incline in American Journalism.

… you’re welcome.

jour 3001 blogging about blogs

Interruptions can be so frustrat—terrible!

Especially on the Internet, when all you really want to do is read the printed word. I mean I have blinking ads telling me to improve this, enlarge that—and I don’t know if this site is going to inform me about electoral polls or strippers’ poles.

Now I know how Clinton’s advisors felt…

But if you are like me and sometimes you need your Web sites as plain as the Amish, you’ll love http://ateanytasteofthesublime.blogspot.com/. It’s a graceful blog about various types of food and drink, but has just enough humor to keep your attention.

The mission of this blog is to first and foremost entertain. The author Michael Trimboli writes in his most recent blog about Gold Peak tea. He starts the blog off with a humorous encounter and tension between the personified drink.

“I went back to my old friend Gold Peak and begged forgiveness,” he says at one point.

Then, the secondary mission of this blog is to inform the reader about his opinions of a food or drink. Trimboli says the Gold Peak tea he sampled was unsweetened, but he says the taste was “very smooth and crisp and leaves your tongue with a pleasant, cooling honey aftertaste.”

I skimmed through a couple of his older blogs and they pretty much take the shape of the Gold Peak tea blog. There are no podcasts, no polls—a few pictures here and there… altogether a pretty simple Blogger site.

And sometimes it’s the simple things that you value the mos—Greatest!

Point taken.

first jour 3001 assignment

George Bush could have been a ray of sunshine, and for eight years we all could have basked in the light and warmth he brought into our lives…

But alas, pigs still do not fly.

Instead, he had the grace of a wheat combine and a lying nature you could set your watch to. He was arrogant, insular and incompetent. And that’s when he was trying to be nice.

He was the man I saw for eight years dripping from every newspaper and television set I could get my hands on. Yet in the end, I never knew the man. I only knew what I was told about the man.

What I was told by the media.

Journalist Walter Lippmann once wrote: "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."

What Lippmann attests to here, is the media controls what the culture deems as important and worthwhile. They are the lens in which we see the world.

The lens I saw President Bush in, the lens I see the stories of violence and the lens I see the stories of love through.

With this kind of “sacred” and “priestly” duty, Lippmann is signifying the importance of responsibility in media. No other profession in the world instills what is important, what is true and what is rumor in a culture like the media does. Which means, with that type of power, it is a necessity that journalists have the type of good character and willpower, to be left with such a duty.

Because without responsibility, the news that journalists preach are merely bought propaganda and lies.

In 1930’s Germany the newspapers preached Jewish slander. The news they brought to the country was mere dribble, not worth a second of time or thought. And yet, people bought into it—a war and a genocide later, people are still buying into these contrive and idiotic ideas, notions and stories of irresponsible low-class journalism.

In close, perfection in journalism, like most things in life can never be attained, and in the end we can only strive to get close. However, what Lippmann stresses in his quote is the importance of responsibility cannot be a thing journalists strive for, but a thing they always attain.