Those Fuzzy Numbers...

CNN came up with an interesting way to track how stimulus money was spent. It looks like a clean, simple and interactive approach. Guess the auto industry bailout was smaller than I realized...

Stories that Count

This Washington Post article put a smile on my face--you only vaguely hear speechwriters mentioned. This story gives some great insight on the people behind Barack Obama's speeches.

Journalist Throws Shoes at President

I would never deny that I get angry. I do. As a journalist, it's part of the job. I just wish some of my fellow colleagues would find better, less embarrassing ways to deal with it. This guy decided to chuck his shoes at President Bush.

The Sixth Sense

Over Thanksgiving break, I really didn't do much. I ate. I slept. I read non-class related material.

I read mostly popular fiction, mass-marketed paperbacks and other fun, brainless stuff. And I found lots of mistakes. While I read, my brain went on autopilot and started honing in on things like subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, case and misused words. Surprisingly, there were a lot of those mistakes. When I read a sentence, I felt like my brain was picking it apart simultaneously, looking for the noun and verb.

But the effects of this class really didn't sink in until last night, when I decided to read for my history and Asian American studies class. I went a little crazy when I saw the word "however" used four times in a page from my journalism history text. And to further feed the flames of my ire, "however" appeared in two sentences in a row. I drowned in readings saturated with sentences in passive voice that could have easily been rewritten. My only relief was an essay written by Helen Zia, a journalist. Surprise, surprise!

Am I crazy? Was the lack of heat in my apartment addling my brain? I hope not. I kind of liked having this hypersensitivity and hope to put it to good use in the future.

More Paperless Joy... Not Really

The managing editor of the news publication I'm interning for sent out an e-mail with a link to a site for a company that converts magazines into an electronic form. The resulting product allows people to "flip" pages by clicking on the corner of a page.

I'm not too fond of it. I think it's awkward. It works great for page designs that focus on graphics-heavy layouts but in order to read text, you have to zoom in and out. Not good at all for newspapers or text-heavy magazines. It just feels like a lot of eye and hand work. But the concept is pretty cool to play with.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Going Paperless and Making Money

I could never really figure out how online newspapers earn revenue from advertising. But an article from the New York Times put out an article last week with what seems like happy news: E.W. Scripps Company, which owns various newspapers, claims it is adopting an online advertising strategy that may bring in enough revenue by 2012 without making job cuts.

I'm still fuzzy on how this new strategy works or if I've even summarized it correctly, but at least it's some kind of positive news.

Sense and Sensitivity

A story caught my eye this morning. It was about a baby born to an Indian surrogate mother that, by Indian law, could not have left India for Japan with her biological father because neither of her mothers (biological or surrogate) was present. It was the first time in 28 years that the Indian government issued travel documents despite that law. The baby's biological parents are from Japan.

The story had three headlines. The one on CNN's 'Most Popular' side bar read "Japanese girl leaves India" while the headline on the 'Latest News' list on the CNN home page had "Baby born to Indian surrogate out of legal limbo" and the headline on the page with the article read "Japanese girl born to Indian surrogate arrives home."

"Japanese girl leaves India" and "Japanese girl born to Indian surrogate arrives home" really bugged me. I found myself asking, 'Does it really matter that the baby is Japanese? What does that even mean?' I got the impression that these headlines were insinuating that only Japanese people live in Japan and only Indian people live in India. And well, things are more complicated than that.

I would re-write them as "Baby girl leaves India for Japan" and "Baby girl born to Indian surrogate arrives home despite legalities." They're not the best headlines because I don't think they encompass the heart of the story, but they make the baby's race less of a focal point and summarize the main action in the story.

I liked the third headline better but it had some issues: "Baby born to Indian surrogate out of legal limbo." So... who was out out of limbo? The surrogate or the baby? It also sounds like the baby was born out of legal limbo (whatever that means), which is clearly not the case. The omitted "is" makes it seems like "born" is the verb and creates a whole mess of misunderstandings. I'd change it to "Baby born to Indian surrogate escapes legal limbo."

I would change the headline on the article to: "Baby leaves India for Japan despite law requiring mother's presence." The headline on that page can easily be expanded to a three-line headline of more than 30 units per line. This may not be the best headline since "surrogate" is not mentioned and that is probably an important key word. So I guess it will have to be something like: "Baby girl born to Indian surrogate arrives home in Japan despite law requiring mother's presence."