Dr. Rau (4:37)

“It’s just a very negative environment here for residential real estate, which obviously feeds back into consumer attitudes and consumer spending,” said Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist for MFR, a New York research firm.

Lennar reported a 44 percent drop in revenue last quarter and has reduced its work force by 35 percent, another victim of the high inventory levels and credit market turmoil that have buffeted home builders this year. The company’s chief executive, Stuart A. Miller, said in a statement today that Lennar had seen “continued deterioration of our net margin and accordingly, higher impairments to our inventory.” Mr. Miller said further staff reductions were in store for the fourth quarter.

http://www.vitabase.com/supplements/beauty-skin-care/default.aspx

There’s only so much news one can read in a day. Like Rosen admitted himself, there’s a saturation point. People are going to like this project. I can see them champing at the bit to get behind the scenes in their child’s school, for example. And that’s great. But there’s a point where there’s just too much news about really refined entities — stuff that, quite honestly, you really don’t need to know. There IS such a thing, even in the news, as too much information. There also are way too many stalkers out there.

Wikipedia’s one thing. I use it, but just to get summaries, really. I can’t fathom that these news sources will be truly trustworthy, because in journalism, there’s always a pressure to publish, and some people (aka some people who have been poorly trained or haven’t been trained at all) just aren’t cut for the chase. Fabrication? Oh, you bet it’ll happen. No one’s really going to check up on these people on a regular basis to make sure they’re reporting truthfully. We’re under enough pressure in J-school to get articles done under deadline pressure of a few hours. Cut that significantly, which is what PressThink aims to do on late nights, and you’ll have a lot of leaks to the press that are unfounded.

I’ve used a LiveJournal, but stopped posting to it long ago. My life wasn’t that interesting to read about; my thoughts weren’t fleshed out much.

Times haven’t changed.

I do appreciate that Prof. Jarvis has helped me get over my fear of blogging. I told Michele Rabin back in April that I was scared to blog (as in, chicken, paranoid, etc.). Blogging is growing on me, but slowly. Really, really slowly.

As such, if I were told that I must keep two blogs, when I have enough difficulty keeping tabs on one and reminding myself to read my fellow classmates’ posts BEFORE class, then I honestly think I’d be swimming out too far and probably would get caught in the undertow.

I can definitely see that others have their reasons for wanting to keep two blogs. I really, really respect that — they’re better blogs than I am. I’m pretty sure that at this point in the semester, in my schooling, the two-blogs approach is not for me. I’ve really enjoyed learning the tools, I’ve enjoyed reading and posting (but not on a daily basis), and still need someone to hold my hand.

I like the idea about sharing a blog for the interrelated communities, with each of us having a different login for that one blog so we’d know who’s writing what. Unfortunately, I think it would work really well for some communities (south Brooklyn and Harlem, for example), but not so well for others (the various communities we’re covering in Queens are pretty spread out, both topographically and with their own separate issues). But maybe that’s the beauty of it: to go the extra mile to get the topics to weave.

As a copy editor, what I like most about the blogs is that I suppose they afford another opportunity for me to write headlines and check for spelling, grammar and style. I’m just still not so much into the writing, and constantly writing, part.  I admit blogs are addicting, but I just simply lack the time to throw all my efforts into that addiction. Sometimes, I wish I did. But most of the time, I’m content just writing for myself and editing for others.

This photo prompted my friend to ask me, “Amy, how DO you get so close to all the fish?”

But I wasn’t in the tank.

Sure, I, like the rest of us, would love to know who leaked the secret grand jury testimony in the steroids case (Who wouldn’t?). But if the source(s) hadn’t been anonymous and hadn’t trusted these reporters, there would’ve been no leak (and there would’ve been many fewer pieces of steroid-related news to debate).

They can’t put Mark Fainaru-Wada in jail over this. He’s a journalistic staple, especially to the San Francisco Chronicle. Lance Williams, too.
Issuing reporters subpoenas probably won’t make fewer journalists pursue the investigative reporting track, but even with the Judith Millers out there, it hurts to see such a thing happen to such quality reporters who have received awards for their groundbreaking work. And at this time, the work really does matter when the discussion centers on current home run records. Sure, Ryan Howard could erase Barry Bonds’ single-season, asterisk-laden, home run record soon enough, but it’s not happening just yet. There’s also Hank Aaron’s home run record that could be broken within the next 365 days by Barry Bonds. Without Fainaru-Wada and Williams, many would be thinking today that Barry Bonds is clean.

So, how would one make this story an interesting read? Here’s what I’d do if I were putting it as a lead story on my Web site, like ESPN.com did, barring money and resource limitations:

-Obviously, I’d update the story as updates came in. In this case, the story was updated several times between when it broke Friday and Sunday morning. With that, I’d add an RSS feed so people could receive updates on the story.

-If it were available, I’d get a soundbyte of what Conte said and put it on the Web site as a podcast.

-I’d include a tabbed chart of the total home runs in a season by Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth.

-I’d try to get a quote from the Phillies’ Ryan Howard, who is on pace to hit 63 home runs at the end of the season. It’s not Bonds’ total of 73, but Howard’s only in his second year playing major league baseball and is presumed never to have taken steroids.

-A tabbed photo gallery of Howard, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Maris and Ruth in their home-run swings so people could analyze differences in their swings.

-File video of the steroid hearings in Congress in March 2005, when sluggers such as Sosa and the Baltimore Orioles’ Rafael Palmeiro denied taking steroids and ballplayers such as the Boston Red Sox’ Curt Schilling spoke out against steroid use

-Polls such as whether folks have had enough of the story; whether they think Bonds and the others have taken steroids; what they think MLB should do next. Also, perhaps a video survey (similar to Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking”) on what people think about Barry Bonds
-Links to other wire reports on the story, if there are any

-A timeline on the evolution of steroids in baseball and other sports

-A graphic comparing baseball to other sports regarding how pervasive steroid use is in baseball compared to, say, track and field events

But if Howard were to raise his batting average by about 30 percentage points and win the triple crown, you know Major League Baseball will sample his urine in a heartbeat.

Fast forward eight years. Reaching the ESPN rounds just isn’t cool enough for many of these kids. At least 20 spellers have their sights set straight on the trophy and nothing less in a competition dominated by luck. Five said they read the dictionary cover to cover. I’m pretty sure all five made it to ABC’s televised rounds in prime time.

Some say the documentary “Spellbound” contributed to these kids studying day in, day out with their sights set on winning, but the kids in “Spellbound” didn’t study from the dictionary. How do I know? Because I was (and still am) good friends with six of the eight students featured in the documentary, and not one read the dictionary cover to cover (and not one claimed to do so, either).

So what’s going on now? Well, the Internet has become a study tool. Back when I was in the competition, Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary (the official source for bee words) wasn’t available on CD like it is now. Having the dictionary on CD is a powerful etymological tool. I do wish I had it then, but at the same time, I’m glad I went into my final spelling bee with humble hopes, because I still relish the experience today.

But the media have grabbed onto — almost leeched onto — the spelling bee when Bee Week rolls around each year. Granted, a bevy of reporters come to support the kids from their respective newspapers, but one set of reporters that certainly didn’t interview me back in 1998 was bloggers.

So you can imagine my shock when I learned that according to Technorati and quoted in David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere for August 2006, the National Spelling Bee could have been considered a big event in the blogosphere. There’s this strange cult phenomenon that exists around the bee; a bunch of spellers (including myself) are “Facebooked” all the time by complete strangers, who say they watched us spell with poise on ESPN several years back. So I do understand that a lot of people watch the bee, consider it a sport, consider it not a sport, etc. But until recently, the bee was really shared among family and friends. Now, in part due to the higher difficulty of words and more of an international presence (spellers from New Zealand and Canada competed last year for the first time, and Finola Hackett of Alberta placed second this year), the bee is an event that requires breaking news coverage in addition to the feature stories about the number of homeschooled students participating each year — and that’s where bloggers from all over the world fill in the blanks during Bee Week.