Blog #3- Angelos

I am here to tell you about a girl named Jo. Jo was quirky and cute, with gangly limbs and soft brown curls that framed her face. Her smile was slightly crooked and she snorted when she laughed. She had a great life and loved everything and everyone around her, with one exception, feet. Jo hated feet. She didn’t know why, she just knew that she did.

Now Jo was in college but was undecided on her major, so she was just taking classes that interested her, like Art and Bowling. Jo was in no hurry to finish college, she was more excited about the experience than anything. She went to class every day bright eyed and bubbly, curious to find out what she would learn that day.

On day before class, she was craving a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, so she made a quick stop to the nearest Starbucks to satisfy her craving. “Thank you,” she said to the barista and laughed and snorted with glee.

When she got to class she sat in her favorite spot, the same spot she had been sitting in all semester long. The teacher began his lesson, and due to her earlier caffeine fix, Jo was wide-awake and all prepared to take notes. However, Jo would never be able to take her notes. This day would turn out much different than other days. This day would be bad.

Just as Jo was about to put her pen to the page, an incredibly powerful and foul smell overcame her. She gasped and gurgled as she tried to figure out where the smell was coming from. As she nonchalantly looked around the classroom she was thinking about what it could be. Her neighbors body odor? A dead and rotting animal hidden in the room? Something oozing from the walls that surrounded her?

No. What Jo discovered was even worse.

To her disgust, the girl sitting next to her had taken off her shoes. The putrid smell was coming from her feet. As I said before, Jo hated feet. This was probably the most horrible thing that Jo could possibly encounter while she was trying to learn. Not only was Jo distracted by the awful smell, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the hideous feet. It was like road kill, she didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t stop.

After snapping out of her stare, Jo pointed at the feet and emerged from her chair, screaming aloud. “Stop, stop, stop!” she yelled repetitively. Her long, thin legs carried her away from the classroom that she suddenly despised, and she ran and ran and ran and ran, until she couldn’t run anymore. Sadly, that was the last day anyone ever saw Jo again.

Banner- Midterm

After reading the blog, report, and watching the interviews with Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson, I feel as though I have taken in an abundant amount of information about the idea of government funded journalism. I am going to process all my thoughts about the topic as I continue to write. So here goes:

First, I would like to say that I believe that print journalism has so much value to it. I cannot deny the value of online journalism as well, and I realize that the internet is the future of journalism, but I also realize that the availability and easy accessibility of news online is making print news more and more obsolete. And this saddens me.

If simply advertising is no longer sufficient enough to support print media, well, then there must be another way to get the funding needed. The idea proposed is government funding for local public-affairs journalism. And to that I say, why not? If the government is willing to help out the media by providing the necessary funds, it would be foolish to turn them down. But before I go any further with that point, I would like to make it clear that, with the acceptance of government funds, there would need to be restrictions put into place.

For one, the government should not be able to control what the media publishes. News should not have to change if it's receiving federal money, and the news should not become politicized. If this is possible, then there should be no reason to deny government funding. Also, if the government has truly been involved in new reporting like Downie and Schudson says it historically has, there would be no significant affects to the news by accepting federal money.

As the old phrase goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. I can understand the fear that might be behind federal funding of local news, but if the money is accepted under specific terms and does not affect reporting, then maybe this is the desperate measure that print media has been looking for.

I love how optimistic Downie and Schudson are about the future of journalism. It is incredible to see how many different outlets there are for good journalism to emerge, and how many publications exist in our nation. The public will always have a desire for news, therefore the public will always have a desire for journalism. I am so looking forward to my chances to further contribute my talents to the field of journalism.

I would like to end with a quote from the President of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger, that I am particularly fond of. "As a great university committed to finding solutions to society’s great challenges, it makes perfect sense that Columbia’s Journalism School would contribute practical ideas to this vital conversation about the future of quality news reporting," said Bollinger. I think this quote just sums up the power of finding a solution to an issue and the dedication that many people have to good news reporting. It's great!