The quest for better, more ethical journalism at WMUA continues, but that’s a post for another time.
This is a “thing n°11 I learned about journalism” that I can’t really justify putting on the midterm: it’s damn hard work. Continue reading
This is just a quick aside (I have all these blog posts planned, but I need to get this off my chest).
Most of you probably don’t know this, but I’m half-Greek. Greek enough that my grandmother lives in Athens, even though my mother was born in this country. I speak Greek and have visited my grandmother, in Greece, every summer since I was born.
What most of you are probably at least peripherally aware of is that Greece is currently facing some serious difficulties because of their economic woes. Continue reading
I’m in line at the elementary school. I am, whenever its snaking brings me to the door, going to perform my citizen’s right; I pay taxes and in return, I vote to decide where and how that money is spent. This is the most basic definition of citizenship, as I understand it, the people sustain the government with taxes and in return the government provides them with services; education, roads, security (laws, judges, police officers, armies), to name a few. The republic allows us to then contribute by voting, we are allowed to decide how the government will be run, by electing those who are running it. In theory. Today, before going to vote, I read a piece in Harper’s Magazine about fraud in the voting system. (It made waiting for the election results very stressful.) Continue reading
I’m still feeling proud of myself. Wednesday, at 5:30pm on WMUA, I read two stories that I had done some more significant research for. They weren’t proper reporting: I didn’t get any interviews, I didn’t find the lead and hunt it down. But I drew from multiple sources, and came to some good conclusions. I did some things that the places I first encountered the ideas didn’t do (not particularly complex additions, but that’s alright).
The first story was one about what the possible effects of climate change may have been on the creation of Hurricane Sandy. [Pro tip: don’t try and understand all of meteorology in an afternoon. It will not go well.] Continue reading
It turns out that I joined the WMUA news team just as big changes were beginning to get put in place. It just so happens that up until this year, the news you may have heard on WMUA was the journalistic equivalent of a chop shop. The stories were put together from bits and pieces of the New York Times, the Gazette, al-Jazeera… The attributions were fishy, and the licensing non-existent. It was, in short, Very Bad Journalistic Practice. Continue reading
desert/oasis 