The Ads are scary

A belated April Fools Day posting

Many Tentacled Media: We have our hands in everything flashy

Three journalistic sites that tell stories in multimedia are 360degrees.com. It is an unbiased look at the stories of those working, serving, and imprisioned by the criminal justice system. This is told using recorded audio, videoblogged interviews, even 360 degree image views inside jailbird's cells, (on of which reminded me of arjona in a scary way). It has links and a glossary for anyone that does not imidately understand the work being presented to them, all housed within the one stop shop place of the site.

There is a well researched timeline of the punishment and crime history. Each stylishly playing off one another. In the best and most online journalistic feature we can join in the dilogue on the forums and an E-debate platform. It's the best non-major news site I've seen.

It even provides a reading list, and contact information for organizations taking action against crime in the community.

Where and how did multimedia add value to these stories? (2) Where and how did multimedia not work right? (Use McAdams' rationale)

The Author of A Revolution: Medialens.org, Jazzy Bessie and Heston

Medialens.org is a sporadically, if weekly updated blog aimed at correction...as in "We hope to raise public awareness of the underlying systemic failings of the corporate media to report the world around us honestly, fairly and accurately. Fundamentally, we wish to reduce suffering wherever it occurs.." They correct our mistakes or try to. It's very British. As any good journalist knows, it should be made note of. If that note is a post-it or setting the site as a homepage is relative to the journalist.

A summation of their most recent article would be, Tibet + 20Th Century Invasion + China = Illegitimate Occupation. Iraq + Afghanistan + US Armed Forces + Torture of Small Peoples = X
In traditional media substitute X for the phase Insurgency Seen Too Optimistic. In medialens.org substitute X for phrase Illegitimate Occupation. Evil Media is sugarcoating total tragedies and failures in Iraq. USA out of Iraq.

That's about what you missed.

In other news, some important people died, as they are prone to do from time to time.

What we do not know is that we have lost a great man. What we do know is that we have lost Charlton Heston. Whom we knew from Planet of The Apes, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and the comically tragic figure with cold dead hands on a gun, the same one that walked in the Civil Rights era marches in the spirit of the thinking man's macho man, Mr. Heston. I remember a not so Mexican detective from a touch of evil. Mr. Confidence all 6 foot, 3 inches of him is gone. We aren't any wiser for it.

But I put to you that someone more important than that has fled our conscious. If he was ever there at all. His name was Simon Bessie. You've never heard of him. Far away from prying eyes and rugged good looks, he died in Lyme. He was not 93. He was 20 years forgotten.

Simon Michael Bessie is the reason that you enjoy such great literary pop cultural references. He wrote Jazz Journalism. He tried to get great injustices told. Like the freeing of Vladimir Bukovsky, another man you haven't heard about.

In 1971, in The New York Review of Books, He cosigned and petitioned this letter to the editors.
"We are writers and publishers who are deeply concerned that the Moscow poet and human rights advocate Vladimir Bukovsky is being confined under prison camp conditions which, in view of his state of health, gravely endanger his life."

Bukovsky risked his life in 1971 to get several hundred pages documents to the United States to show the horrors political prisioners were experiencing as they were forced into concentration camps and mental institutions. For this, Bukovsky was subjected to the same horrors and treatment he described in the leaked reports because he "refused to recant his views."

His life for about twelve years was as follows. "He is confined in a punishment barracks, on greatly reduced rations, deprived of the right to have visits, mail, legal counsel, and medical treatment essential to his survival."

Bessie helped him emigrate gaining him the freedom, releasing one of the greatest voices for soviet human rights in his day and galvanizing forces dissent within Russia. He has become an influential figure helping to aid the rebuilding of the Post-Communist world, advocating for artistic freedom. Bessie helped him get there.

He called the Godfather garbage after publishing the authors first work. Mario Puzo is a great (LOVE HIM SO MUCH) writer. But one must wonder what might have been had gangsters not achieved a renewed status of 70s exploitation glory which eventually translated into 1990s-millennial retro cool. For one thing, Bulgaria's Murder Mystery writer, Georgi Stoev, an author patterning himself on Puzo's work, would still be alive. He died yesterday FYI.

The best thing he did was for journalist though was Jazz Journalism. He is the author of Jazz Journalism. The end all compendium of the daily news and tabloids. He saved and bound pages that might have been destroyed or lost on microfiche in obscure city libraries and other literary enclaves. He gave us a look at the flashy layouts and picture saturated headlines. The sensation and sultry. The new standard of news speak set by the lightly yellowed, roaring twenties epistles whose work has now been translated to sepia toned masterpieces of pre-war Hollywood sex, sin and death that try for Oscar season each year.

He printed the first version of online journalism. The Reporters and Stringers that gave in and formed public demand for interconnectedness and entertainment. And For this achievement, this culmination and keeping of the memory of Journalism's modern roots. I salute him.

The Lattice Work of Cconscious

Yesterday M. Shannahan came for a talk. Yesterday I was awake until 3 am, studying for a test and scrambling to find lost documents I ultimately hadn't lost at all. That same day the Daily Campus staff, slogged out of the Dog Lane offices at 4 am. Mrs. Shannahan however did that long before any of us had to get up at ungodly hours.

I come in late from studying and my roommate whispers how lazy I am that I am still sleeping in, when she's slept a fullnight.

I must confess it was nice to hear the voice of a fellow journalist. One of the biggest problems of the internet is where to go and what to see. It's much like life infact, we can't see it all. But we can and we have to see most of it, because we are peoples eyes and ears.

As journalist in the internet age you don't often get to hear your own voice. If you choose to be a journalist. If you are a paid blogger for a newsmedia outlet of of the era of the independent, you face and name is plastered everywhere. Somewhere now someone is writing the news, and somewhere someone isn't.

I admired her bravery for taking a new path in her career. Something I would do with heady enthusiasm. I also like that she was honest that intially it was lonely. What struck me most, besides her offer for an internship, to which I can't afford the gas.

What she said next stuck to me like glue, when I wanted to be teflon. The missing journalists. What I went through in my first professional journalism experince only echoes that. The newspaper the Chicago Tribune owned us, then they foreclosed upon us and sold the interest of our company to another. My summer was one spent surrounded by fear. Three early retirment and switching career send off parties were given. I wondered if this meant I could be easily hired. I felt bad for them, and for the termination of my pay. Eventually Gannett Company Inc, that media or media titans acquired us. Or would have

But Gannett didnt get us. That summer the people of the newsroom formed a union to fight back. They put it this way, "The agreement was terminated following an arbitrator’s ruling last month that Tribune could not sell the company unless the buyer assumed the existing UAW contract as a condition of the sale, which Gannett declined to do. The contract covered certain editorial employees at The Advocate."

Everyone thought they were safe. Now they are a Hearst Publication, with half the staff of the news and entertainment department. More people doing less things, when there is more than ever news to uncover. But this isnt a lament about less journalists in the workforce, with no one competient replacing them. This is about the news that doesn't get covered, all those stories that never get looked into, until finally it's months or years later, a some woman at a local newsdesk opens with we bring this tragic and breaking news to you tonight. Then we blame whoever could have prevented it.

Journalists names are not to be included in this. No one blames people that they don't think would have been there. Dont tell me it had to be this way....she didn't. I did. It has to be this way...for now.

Really Simple Syndication

An RSS feeds is new type of communication, as the world

I am reminded of what Kokogiak, an old bookmark of mine said, I originally booked marked him because I loved his humorous following of the 2005 king kong marketing craze.

"There are so, so many ways to get quality media these days (I hate the term "media" in this case, but what better all-encompassing term is there for books, stories, music, news, movies, podcasts, TV shows, blogs, art, audiobooks, and more). Using an RSS reader, TiVo, iTunes, iPod, Netflix and more, I've achieved a constant stream of high-quality information and entertainment - way more than I actually have time to process, let alone enjoy or savor. And, my daily media consumption has grown way out of proportion with my level of output. "