Media

There are 262 posts filed in Media (this is page 22 of 27).

Fungal infections follow tornado

Wow. I never would’ve guessed this. Here’s a fascinating tidbit from WRAL meteorologist Kim Deaner on the WRAL WeatherCenter blog.

Tornadoes can be deadly and destroy lives and homes with their violent winds, but did you know that they also have the potential to kill you in a way you would least expect?

Victims of the massive Joplin, Missouri, tornado are finding this out now along with the rest of the world. Days after the EF5 tornado devastated the town, people started getting sick and dying from a rare fungus. The CDC is now investigating how this fungus appeared and why it is killing already wounded victims of the tornado. To date, at least twelve people have been sickened with the fungus, and three people have died due to their injuries from the tornado and the fungus.

via Fungal infections follow tornado as threat :: WRAL.com.

Crispy lawns

The Triangle is in another drought, with little substantial rain falling in the last few weeks (ever since I planted the garden, it seems. Hmm). The lawns around the neighborhood are all crispy brown. While I wish we had some rain to refresh those lawns, I’m very happy to see that everyone is resisting the urge to water their wilting grass because it means folks are conserving water.

Because of everyone’s efforts, Raleigh’s main fresh water reservoir, Falls Lake, is at 251.2 feet, just four inches below full. This is in contrast to December 2007, when Falls Lake dropped to a record low of 242.62 feet, or almost nine feet below full.

I know the city’s public utilities department has conflicting goals of conserving water and selling it (as the Raleigh Public Record so eloquently pointed out), but it’s hard to sell something you don’t have. Although the area lawns might taking a beating, at least the city is in good shape to weather this drought.

Update 2:30 PM: Rain! Glorious rain! Bucketsfull! Half an inch so far in the past half-hour! It’s wonderful!

Google hunts government business


There was a full-page ad in today’s newspaper from Google, trumpeting how “the State of Wyoming has gone Google.” Apparently, the state government there has transitioned from hosting their own mail servers and commercial office applications in favor of Google Apps.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. UNC Chapel-Hill’s Ibiblio transitioned its email accounts from in-house servers to Google’s GMail and has been happy with the results. So has UNC Asheville. I know some local governments in North Carolina which are considering the move, too. But I’m still smarting from Google’s no-show during this year’s losing municipal broadband legislative battle. Google could have become a high-profile proponent of open networks in this state but instead its efforts were limited to lending its name to a form letter. Google’s lobbyists (Capstrat, apparently) have been all but invisible.

I wonder how Google hopes to persuade governments to turn over a major portion of their IT work based on a newspaper ad (and a spectacularly uncreative one at that). We’ll see how effective this approach turns out to be.

Discovering a thriving newspaper

In my handful of trips made to St. Charles, Illinois, I had never come across a local paper until this most recent visit. My hotel had a stack of Daily Herald papers in its lobby so I took a look. I have to say I’m impressed. I would’ve never thought that a paper could thrive in the shadow of giants like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times but this one apparently does.

The Herald serves the suburbs of Chicago. It keeps a decidedly-local focus but still carries occasional AP wire stories. It appeared to have a robust advertising business (including, regretfully, some of the same shyster “gold exhibit” type of advertising that I’ve taken the N&O to task for). Aside from the somewhat wingnut-flavored stories (OMG gummint employees are being compensated for their unused sick time!!!) it seems like a decent newspaper.

I think the Daily Herald may be validating my view that the way for media to succeed is to focus on the local. That, and don’t take on a mountain of debt!

CACs and the Open Meetings Law

A question came up during last month’s RCAC meeting, regarding the legal standing of CACs with regard to the city. RCAC Chair Will Allen got an opinion from Raleigh City Attorney Tom McCormick. Will says:

Tom advises that the CAC is an organization created by the Raleigh City Council and is therefore a public body and subject to the Open Meetings law. Email is a type of communication that is covered by that law, and so any of the types of email communication involving CAC and/or city matters would be public record.

But the CACs aren’t advisory boards in the spirit of North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law. From the City’s own page on CACs (emphasis mine):

CACs are nonpartisan. They also are independent of the City Council. In fact, CACs are the only advisory boards to the City Council that are not appointed by the Council. Instead, residents of each CAC region elect the chairperson and other officers of their CAC.

Membership in a CAC isn’t by appointment like other city boards: one becomes a member of a CAC based on where one lives. That means every city resident is now subject to the Open Meetings Law. And since there are over 10,000 residents in the East CAC (for instance) and therefore 10,000 members in the East CAC, does that mean a quorum of this “advisory board” is 5,001 citizens?
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Media-police dichotomy

There was one more thing I wanted to say about yesterday’s Amber Alert. The police were looking for a missing girl. The media responded in force with photographs and news trucks, keeping the story front-and-center all day long. The media’s wide exposure was needed for the girl to be found, yet police blocked the media from the street in front of her home. The road was open to through traffic but not to reporters. Any reporter who dared venture closer was gruffly told to stay in the “staging area.”

Why? Why treat the media so poorly when went above and beyond to help locate the girl? It was the top story all day yesterday, for goodness sake. I don’t know whether the coverage made the difference (and I’m inclined in this case to say no as I had a strong hunch she was with her boyfriend the whole time), but is this the proper way to treat your partners in a missing-child search?

I’m a staunch supporter of Raleigh Police but at best this looks ungrateful and at worst a breach of First Amendment law. Time for the officers to get some PR training.

On the air with Rivendell

By LeRe Pics

My use of online music services like Pandora, Mondomix, TaintRadio.Org, and my recent voiceover dabbling has gotten me itching to start my own online radio station. Or reignite my itch, I should say: back in 1997 I became one of the first to apply to the Library of Congress for a compulsory license for Internet radio (back when the list of online radio stations would fit on just few pages). I never followed through with it because it was a leap of faith: the song royalty rates were not fixed and could have been enormous once they were.
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Amber Alert

It’s not every day that I awake to find police cars and news media in the neighborhood, fortunately. It was because there was an amber alert in our neighborhood, with a 15-year-old girl reported missing early this morning. While the news was at first certainly distressing (especially since I’m acquainted with the family), when I realized who was missing I was almost certain there was no abduction.

It started just after midnight this morning. According to the 911 tape which was released later today, the girl’s mother got texts that indicated her daughter was in mortal danger. The search by police began soon after (followed by the media stake-out). Police put up crime-scene tape around the home and blocked off the road in front of the house, steering the media away from the home.
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Skating on Thin Ice

Seems I’m not the only one who has grown tired of John Edwards’s publicity-hound ways. Carter Wrenn of Talking About Politics quotes Will Patton, who nails it.

… but then old Will Patton raised an even tougher question, saying, If I was prosecuting this case I’d only ask John Edwards one question: If you wanted was to keep your affair a secret from your wife why on earth did you run for President?

Richard thought that over and said: He might not testify.

Mr. Patton snorted, You couldn’t keep that fellow off the witness stand with a shotgun.

Sad but true.

via Skating on Thin Ice > Talking About Politics.

John Edwards

John Edwards in 2004

The federal prosecutors who are pursuing campaign finance charges against John Edwards better do whatever they can to make sure I’m not selected as a juror. I would tear them apart. It’s not that I’m a fan of Edwards: far from it, actually. I would be hopping mad at being forced to defend him.

Look, Edwards is a phony. He’s always been a phony. Though it’s true he could work a crowd like a rock star, I wasn’t impressed with him when I met him in 2004 (I misjudged his being “tired” for being bored). He became a “champion of the poor” while chilling in his posh mansion in Chapel Hill. He cheated on his dying wife and lied about it. Did the money he got from a donor friend and used to cover up his cheating rise to the level of cheating campaign finance laws? Hardly. Edwards may be a self-centered scumbag but I can easily see him doing the very same thing, finding a rich friend like Bunny Melon to paper over his infidelity, whether or not he was campaigning. It’s not like he was buying votes with the money.
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