Muslims hope for no backlash after Fort Hood shooting

Fort Hood experienced violent attacks on November 5 by one of its own military personnel. Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly killed 13 people and wounded over 20 during the shooting. Hasan’s Muslim and Palestinian background has been highlighted, though nothing he allegedly did during the shooting suggests religious extremism. Muslims all across America have condemned the attacks and have told the press that he does not represent Islam. Imams, Muslim clerics, across the country have spoken to their congregations condemning the attacks, calling Hasan’s alleged actions “criminal.” Many Muslims fear that Hasan’s alleged actions will cause a backlash against Muslims.

Imam Mohammad Fuad, the Imam of the Islamic Society of Denton, Denton’s mosque, said a special prayer for the victims of the shooting and their families. Monday night after night prayers, he spoke to members of the mosque about the importance of not taking verses of the Qur’an out of context.

Zeeshan Syed, a Muslim student at the University of North Texas, said some personal prayers after the congregation left.

“It is really sad what happened,” said Syed. “I really hope this doesn’t cause a backlash against Muslims.”

He prayed for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting and their families. He also prayed for the safety and security of Muslims during these difficult times.

 

http://orion.cascss.unt.edu/~amt0046/Soundslide_1/

Today’s Map(s)

Tarrant County fast food holdups may be linked

Police in three cities are investigating a series of robberies at fast food restaurants early Thursday morning that may be connected.

Jack in the Box restaurants were targeted in two of the holdups — in Fort Worth at 8156 Anderson Boulevard shortly after 2 a.m. and in Euless at 3001 West Euless Boulevard about an hour earlier.

A Wendy’s location at 1311 North Collins in Arlington was also hit.

In at least one case, the man walked up at the drive-thru window and demanded money. The man was wearing a mask and had a gun.

OKC Picture Slideshow is OK

I chose to analyze the slide shows of Oklahoma City’s local newspaper The Oklahoman. The address is www.newsok.com and that’s what you see when go to the site right on the top of the page. (The website is powered by The Oklahoman, and it’s the self-proclaimed “the state’s most trusted news.”)

The photos are split up into categories: All, News, Sports, Business, Life, A&E, and Weather. The number of photos in each gallery range from as little as 5 and as much as 63 and more pictures.

The pictures are decent enough. The default setting of viewing the slide show is clicking your way to the next picture, which I think is the best way. It doesn’t automatically start going to the next picture unless you click the play button, giving the viewer full control of interactivity. The slide show shows each picture for five seconds. There’s also a button to click that will enlarge photos.

The types of pictures range from party pictures of locals watching the TX-OU game to a search of a missing family from Red Oak. I think the pictures can be compelling to locals. After all, proximity plays a key factor in local newspapers.

Final Project Ideas

Team Members:
Ayman Taleb
Stephen Masker
Anastasia Jakse

Blog Outline

Potential Sources:
1) Graduating Seniors
2) UNT Graduates
3) Advisors
4) Employers
5) Texas Workforce Commission
6) Grads who found jobs
7) Freshman, Sophomores, Juniors
8) Students returning to college for a 2nd degree

Anticipated Interactive Elements:
1) Polls
a. College Grad – Do you have a job?
2) Graphs and Statistics
3) Slideshows
a. Application process, students, advisor coaching, people in their careers, paying back loans
4) Videos/ Stills of the above
5) Interactive Quizzes
a. Is this job right for you?
6) Interactive games

Brief Story Description:

A story that follows the lives of students post-college and enter the real world of paying back students loans, finding employment that pertains to their degree, students working in fields that do not pertain to their major and those that return to college to pursue additional degrees. Additional concerns: Graduates who aren’t covered on health care, graduates with families.

Chicago Beating

The graphic video of 16-year-old Derrion Albert being beaten to death in an after-school melee has raised alarm across the country.

“What happened to Derrion is barbaric, it was barbaric,” anti-violence advocate Diane Latiker said.

Each of the last three years has witnessed a classroom of children getting killed. 500 children were injured by gunshots in 2008 alone.

“There’s a lot of frustration and there’s a lot of pain right now – there should be,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in Chicago after meeting with students and parents from a neighborhood where Albert was beaten to death last month.

The value of life has gone down, and many of our young people have lost faith in the future. Many youth grow up believing that their life is not worth anything – and neither is anyone else’s life. It’s very difficult to work for a positive future when you don’t think you will live past the age of 18.

The quality of our future is at serious risk because children are fearful they can’t learn, and when children don’t get a quality education, we won’t have a bright future.

This is about our values as a country and as a society.

What is Your Philosophy? Poll

Crowdsourcing = Rip-off

Jeff Howe defines the word “crowdsourcing” as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Howe also defines it as “The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.” Personally, I define crowdsourcing as an amateur attempt or a professional without creditentials. I may be so bold and say that the products of crowdsourcing are rip-offs. At the very least, crowdsourcing is a serious threat to professionals, not only in their work, but also in the value of time professionals have spent studying in their respective fields. I could have used this method to get my career in journalism by writing editorials, sending them out to newspapers, and become a published writer. Instead I am taking the time to learn the skills and methods of a true journalist to become a professional.

Take the recent failed-terror plot that occurred in Dallas last week. Anyone could have used crowdsourcing to write about that story, put their name on it, and sell it for a much lower price than that of a journalist. And why should the buyer pay more for the professional’s work when the crowdsourcer’s work rivals the professional’s? Personally, if I were to do that with this story, I would 1) search every major news network and newspaper, 2) use the quotes from the people interviewed (Smadi’s friends and ex-roommate), 3) call up the FBI office that has information on the case, 4) call Smadi’s lawyer to get a statement from him, and voila! I can write a full article telling the story of Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian homesick teenager who was, according to his ex-roommate, lonely and suicidal in the last few months.

I could stoop even lower than that and just use the information written in the articles and re-write it to sell it. For example, if I wanted to sell the article to Seventeen magazine (bad magazine example, but I think you’ll get my point), I just have to write the article so that it’s using my words in telling the story and put my name on it. Maybe I could even include a picture of Smadi from the trusty search-engine Google, point some arrows at various points on his face, and comment on how he could’ve avoided taking such a bad mug shot.

I reiterate, crowdsourcing is a bad idea and it takes work away from professionals who actually know what they’re doing. In this economically hard time, I can understand why companies would find crowdsourcing appealing, but bottom line, it’s unfair.

Not Flashy Enough

With the news reaching out to the youth, many studies have been conducted to find out what is it that the youth want to know. With a few minor details, it turns out teens are very much alike to adults when it comes to news and what grabs their attention. World news, national, local, business, financial, and entertainment are all sections of the news that youth look at. But if you want to gear something to particular viewership, it’s all about one thing: presentation, and that’s what ourworldtv.tv seems to lacking in some areas.

It all comes back to the old saying, “Know your audience.” With the studies that have been made, there’s no doubt that the media industry is trying to know its youth audience. Studies have shown that youth like their news to be bold, short, and direct to the point. This can often mean, as seen on many major news websites such as cnn.com or nytimes.com, as having the headline in bold lettering, a two or three sentence summary of the story, and a decent-sized picture to give the reader a visual. A video or photo gallery of a story would be really good also. But on ourworldtv.tv there are a number of things missing there to promote the shows and music artists on the site.

The site’s initial page is good with the video presentation. It’s innovative, bold, and direct. But once you go inside the site, there’s no way back to it. Having a picture of the host in different poses is a good idea for the website I think, and one page even takes you to her own site featuring a video of her, but a few of the pages have low-resolution pictures of her. At the very least the pictures should be medium-resolution. On the page promoting the show “Our World,” the text invites the viewer to watch the pilot episode. Where is that pilot episode? How come there isn’t a link to it? I couldn’t find it. On the music page there are links to a few artists’ Myspace page, which is cool, but personally I think a sample of their music, such as the chorus or the hook of the songs playing in the background on the site would have enhanced the experience.  The rest of the pages’ content are decent enough.

All in all, this site could use some excitement, something to give it some life and make it bounce off the screen. What’s already online is a good starting point. Enhancing it shouldn’t be that big of a sweat.

In Class 9-17

Restitution Payment Cut in Half

Former Mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick owes the city of Detroit $1 million from his criminal conviction. Kilpatrick has now reduced his restitution payments by 50%. A court order from Wayne Country Circuit Judge David Groner has Kilpatrick pay 30% of his gross monthly salary as restitution. Kilpatrick told a judge he can legally drop his payments by half because his monthly income has dropped from $20,000 to $10,000. Wayne Country Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement, “It is our position that he has violated his probation. We have seen no proof that his salary has diminished.” Kilpatrick’s former aide Christine Beatty owes $100,000 and has yet to make any restitution payment since her release in March. Her lawyer Mayer Morganroth said she has not found a job yet and “certainly she wants to make her restitution.”

Sugar Taxes

Taxes are one of the weapons governments should use in the fight against obesity, researchers say in an online New England Journal of Medicine commentary. The Journal authors say that taxes can significantly reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, following the model of programs to reduce cigarette intake by smokers. Commentators write that a national tax of 1 cent per ounce of sugar-sweetened beverage would yield $14.9 billion in the first year alone. In the analysis, that could mean $320 million for the state of Massachusetts. Sweetened beverages have doubled in the United States between 1977 and 2002, and the authors of the commentary say taxing sweetened beverages is one way to cut consumption.

Journalism & Blogs

With immediacy and interactivity exponentially increasing in the last few years in our ever-changing world of technology, more and more people look to the internet either through their computers, laptops, and/or cell phones for up-to-the-second news coverage. And it’s not just the news that people want immediate service on. It’s everything. How many products do we use that have “instant” in the product name? For example, 10 or 15 years ago, most people would make long-distance phone calls to friends and loved ones whereas now, most would rather use the convenient instant messenger, and for free. If the public had an opinion on an article or news story, they would write the paper that printed it. Now, media websites have made it incredibly easy for readers to leave their comments and opinions about the stories they read, and from this many people began blogging about all kinds of topics, and lately sometimes bloggers have been the first to write about the latest breaking news before mainstream media.

So are bloggers a threat to journalists? Personally I don’t think so. Most if not all bloggers lack one thing that journalists must have: credibility. A journalist only write stories that they did the fact-gathering on themselves. That means that journalist went out to the field, found a story, interviewed people, and told the story. This is a heavy task that requires the utmost care, and it simply cannot be done by bloggers.

Also to this day, people write the editors of newspapers expressing their thoughts on an article or a story. I think blogging makes writing the editor a lot easier and much more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise do so. So instead of 20 or 30 or even 100 letters sent in regarding a story, a journalist may literally get hundreds of blogs written regarding the story. Writing the editor was never seen as a threat to journalism, and I believe that dealing with bloggers now was like dealing with people who wrote complaining/commenting about a journalist’s writing or story.

I don’t think blogging will be the death of journalism. Not at all. Instead it makes journalists and aspiring journalists step up higher to the plate to meet the challenge of writing ethically and with all the principles a journalist writes with. Bloggers have their place and journalists have their place.