Jason Castro on Neighborsgo.com
The idea? Great! What better way to build readership in a dying industry than to devote content to the events of one’s backyard. It’s like blogging only in print form. That, and it’s more factual. There’s a team of editors that edit the content that those “neighbors” submit to Neighbors Go. The problem starts when those neighbors are doing most of the writing and not the journalists themselves. Sure, newspapers as we know them are an archaic and dying form, but that doesn’t mean that journalism is. After all, a journalist’s job is to “seek the truth and report it.” Yes, there is a thing called “citizen journalism,” but they in no way compensate for the job trained journalists can do. Neighbors Go needs more STAFF writers reporting on stories in the communities. While the idea that ordinary citizens can submit their stories to the newspaper is a new and fresh approach, those stories should be then covered by an experienced professional who will act as the neutral man. When people are submitting only their stories, it defeats many of the standards set in journalism. Conflict of interest and maintaining a neutral stance are a few of the journalism standards that come to mind. After all, they’re submitting stories that THEY want to be covered, which can be a good and bad thing. On one hand, it’s a good way of knowing what interests readers. On the other hand, why does this person want this story covered? So they can scrapbook the article about their little boy losing his first tooth? Save it for the blogs.
Pink. That’s her favorite color. Pink stilettos. Pink taffeta gowns. Pink handbags. Pink convertibles. Pink everything.
Pretty in Pink. 2009 Holiday Barbie
She’s the envy of women alike with her perfect waist, long legs, shapely torso, flowing hair and perfectly sized tattas. For little girls, the Barbie aisle was princess land. All the dolls, with their perfectly painted faces and dainty outfits peering out from behind plastic cartons. “Pick me! Pick me little one,” they’d whisper. “I’ll teach you to imagine. I’ll teach you to pretend.”
They taught girls to act out the life they dreamed, the life they imagined for themselves outside of being the odd one out on the playground at lunchtime. As a grown up, somehow the doll aisle doesn’t quite evoke the same feelings. Maybe it’s because as a grown up, we’re acting out real life, as ugly as it may be, we’re living it. As a grown up we realize that the life we imagined for ourselves isn’t always the life we end up with. Bills, full-time career and college loans to pay back aren’t exactly something a 10-year-old imagines as she prepares Barbie for her wedding extravaganza. Those things don’t exist in Barbie land. Happily every after is the only vocabulary Barbie knows. Barbie only knows perfect in her perfect pink ball gown, perfect pink slippers and perfect golden hair.
But if hope is what keeps Barbie as the reigning queen of doll sales, then she must be doing something right. Mattel had the right idea when they invented her in the 1950s.
The Presidential elections of 2008 sparked “unprecedented interest within the electorate” according to findings in the Pew Internet & American Life Project. According to the same article, 46 percent of Americans used the Internet to get their political news and to share their viewpoints with others. The Pew Internet study compared the 2008 election to the election of 2004, marking key differences between how users got their content and how they shared that content with others. One noteable change was in the growth of social networking. Many interested viewers used Facebook and MySpace for political activity. Blogging was another area to grow.
In light of the 2009 elections, I reviewed the USA TODAY, one of the top 25 newspapers in the United States and analyzed their political news sections.
The article entitled, “Off-year elections will test Democrats’ Influence,” caught my attention for the mere reason that in the 2008 election, younger voters gravitated more towards the Democratic party, according to the Pew Internet study. The article was informative and they had links to social networking sites both along the right hand side of the column and at the bottow of the page. These included links to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Reddit, and many others. At the very top of the page, there were a number of videos relating to the political elections that interested readers could watch. There was also a link to sign up for E-mail newsletters from the USA TODAY which would allow new content to be delivered straight to an interest viewers E-mail inbox.
For the most part, the political news content followed Pew’s recommendations minus the use of charts and graphics. Aside from the links to social networking sites, there weren’t many other interactive tools that were used.
