Interesting Blog

http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/01/do-mean-girls-make-mean-women/?hpt=Sbin

"Mean Girls, Meaner Women"

This is a video showing the two women who wrote the book Mean Girls, Meaner Women, Erika Holiday and Joan Rosenberg. They explain why girls are becoming more 'mean' in today's society. Videos like this are posted often for CNN's American Morning.

Blogs, blogs, blogs.

I've been reading up on some blogs of the New York Times and some other news organizations, and I've found some pretty interesting stuff.

One blog I particularly liked is called Media Decoder and is from the New York Times. This blog focuses on tracking the media industry, from the movie business to print journalism. One of the things that I like about this blog is that every day it posts a "Speed Read," which gives a list of highlights of the media covered that day in the Times. This would be helpful to find out the important things quickly.

Another blog I like is Bitten, which talks about food. I really like reading new recipes and articles related to food so I found this interesting. The blogger gives recipes each day and then posts short articles about food-related topics.

Garrett Smith:Progress Report

The News Peg article that I chose to write about deals with the large local, and national, media attention towards UNI's progress in the NCAA March Madness Tournament. I have questioned how all these players are able to manage their workload with school while dealing with the stress of the game. The news peg will be focused around the way that other students, at Coe and UNI, are able to manage this amount of work and pressure. I plan to interview some student athletes at Coe as well as Jared Kuehner, a former UNI student athlete who transferred to Coe in 2009. I will also focus not only the stress behind this workload but also on the expectations of the workload given in big games like these. Overall, the progress on my news peg article is going great.

Garrett Smith: Blogs of other news organizations

I have found several blogs located on the New York Times website that caught my interest. The blogs are very easy to navigate and access through several categories and links. I explored the blog "At War" to see what it consisted of and was very pleased with the information provided. The blog offered very interesting stories about the current war in Afghanistan as well as other stories related to this area. The blog has a professional appeal and provides the reader with visuals such as videos and photos. After each blog there is a place for readers to share their comments on the topic. The URL for these blogs under the New York Times is http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html .

Sally: News Peg Ideas

Tiffanie Lloyd, a mother of four in the Coe College neighborhood (www.haveninthehood.blogspot.com) is pregnant with her fifth child and has decided not to visit her doctor until much later in the pregnancy. With the health care fiasco as it is, I would like to interview her about her motivations behind this choice. Could it be that she is just comfortable with her body's pregnancy process? It's true that women at one point were fully capable of bearing children without doctors. I think it would be interesting to see what she thinks about the health care issues and if this affects her decision to put off the doctor's visits, especially since she is rearing a family of five children.

I would also like to interview Andy Thayer, who works for the Gazette in Cedar Rapids. It started out as a normal conversation and quickly moved into something I've been thinking about a lot for this class. Earlier in the semester we did a survey about how groups of people get their news, and I want to ask Andy if his job has been affected by print news going 'out of style.' I want to ask him about what he takes in from the news environment on the 'non-writing' side, and what he feels he has received by working there. He has already explained to me that the Gazette is keeping ahead by buying out smaller news sources, and I would like to be able to get specifics.

Sally Stark: Introduction

Hi! I'm Sally Stark, a sophomore English major at Coe. I am taking Journalism (thus, I appear on this blog) as the class requirement for the rhetoric portion of my English major. Hopefully you will find this collaborative blog as exciting as we do. Check back with us through April (the end of this class) for our updates!

Beth Wallace: News Peg Feature Idea

Our upcoming journalism assignment is to write a news peg feature. This is a feature story that is somehow connected, or pegged, to the news.

The latest technology is always a trending topic in the news; currently, the buzz is about smartphones and how they are going to continue to become more advanced and improved upon in the near future. I thought it would be interesting to create a poll using Survey Monkey (as we did in the beginning of the class) to collect responses from my peers as to what they think about smartphones/new technology. I would ask if they have a smartphone, how often they use it, what they use it for, etc. I could also interview a technology expert, such as Lisa, from Coe College, about how she thinks technology will impact education, and whether it will be a hindrance or an aid to education.

News Peg Ideas

Northern Iowa’s Win in the First Round of March Madness
Northern Iowa capture their first round win over UNLV on March 18, 2010 in the March Madness Tournament. I would write a news peg story about this since it is local news that has captured a great deal of attention in Iowa. The news peg story would include an article about college, their success in sports, their journey through the season, and interviews of people who go to college there as well as some of the faculty. Writing about the school and students reaction about their team doing well in such a large tournament would be a great news peg article to write about.

SAPADAPASO
This year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa was a huge hit do the festivities and the beautiful weather. Coe College was involved in this year’s parade which is why I believe it would be nice to have a news peg article that interviews and talks about Coe involvement in the parade. I think it would be nice to interview the students involved in the parade, Coe’s ideas about being involved, as well as the President of the college ideas about being involved. The article could talk about Coe College in general as well as its float in the parade.

Garrett Smith: Introduction

Hello, my name is Garrett Smith and I am a junior at Coe College. I created this blog as part of a journalism class that is part of my Business Administration and Public Relations major. I took this class hoping to improve my writing and journalism skills. The class has so far been a success event though we are learning material that I never expected to learn about. We learn mostly about the news media such as newspapers, magazine, television, and radio. We learn how to write articles in each one of these categories. It is a very enjoyable class even though there is a good amount of work and I believe taking this class will improve my skills for the future in my career.

Beth Wallace: Introductions

Welcome to Coe Journalism 101! My name, if you haven't already guessed, is Beth Wallace. I am a first-year student at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I intend to double major in English and Public Relations with a minor in Spanish. I chose to take Journalism Workshop (the class for which I'm writing these blogs) because it is a course requirement for the Public Relations major. Enjoy!