Bob Ross, the movie boss

The progression of our class guests have led us down quite a winding road. We've had our hard-core reporters turned editors. Visitors abounding with story telling talents, with flecks of poetry disseminated into their prose. Writers writing for a demographic and writers writing for an audience of one. Realists, comedians, awareness of confidence and admission of insecurities.

Then Mr. Thelen throws a monkey wrench into the equation. I wondered, how does a movie critic even begin to fit into the bunch?

Well even though I never got the chance to meet him up close and personal, I didn't have to google his name all that long to realize that Bob Ross is a tenacious, hardworking man in media who is making a way for himself.
Like most of our guests, he was a reporter. But he didn't transition into the more predictable news occupations such as an editorial writer or a columnist.

He pursued his passion of pop culture and became a movie critic. After an expansive 22-year career at the Tampa Tribune, he got the ax in April 2007.
What I am most impressed about with Ross, is his life, post Tampa Tribune.
He didn't take the news lying down.

Candid and vulnerable, he shared the blow of his job loss.
"Sure I'm hurt," he wrote in the Sticks of Fire Blog, but in he went on to say that life goes on and he announced that he would be posting his movie reviews on that blog. Although he was new to the blogging world, as he mentions, that didn't stop him from putting his craft to use. Many of his reviews got quite a few dozen comments and eventually he created his own self titled website.
Chocked full of multimedia applications and interactive features, Ross is ready to fight for his crown as the Movie Boss.
He has written reviews as well as created videos of himself discussing films with clips of pertinent movie scenes edited in between his comments. With a Google Ad on running on his website, it appears that he is getting his piece off the on-line revenue pie. He also has the freedom to do exciting and fulfilling free lance work. Not even a month ago, he joined the local Tampa Fox affiliate in making his predictions for the 2009 Oscar winners.

Alas, we have evidence to confirm was the others have been telling us all along: Us writers can land on our feet if we take advantage of the changing media around us.

Ross, older in age, and vibrant in spirit, is a great inspiration in the dismal humdrum of gloom and doom. If he can do it, so can we.

Mears' musings on the AP

Walter Mears comes from an indispensable yet under appreciated staple in the news industry: The Associated Press, simply referred to as the AP. My understanding of the AP was limited; I thought of it as the all knowing,trusted and independent entity that provided of the basis of many stories. Although I had been exposed to it for the greater part of my academic career as a journalism student, I never had an understanding of its origins, and its position in the world of news.

Mears, the most seasoned guest speaker my critical writing class has had thus far, has covered 11 presidential candidates, and been doing political reporting for more than half a century, to put things in perspective. According to Mears, the Associate Press dates back much further. Created around 1848, the AP was established by a few newspapers in the civil war era. He is a strong proponent from the old school paradigm of journalism.

" What is news? The closest I could come up with is a disciplined explanation, boiled down to fact, stripped from clutter," he said.

When Mears became a reporter for them in 1955, he along with his reporting peers created the news. They provided a uniform voice as well as a high standard in journalism. Only ten years later, the news fragmented somewhat when broadcast news presented itself into the picture.

"We had to change the way we looked at reporting...we no longer were always the first to give people the news," Mears said.

Decades later, media continues to divide and multiply like splitting amoebas. With the internet, multiple cable networks, blogs and other diverse news sources competing to tell the same stories, this forced the AP to challenge themselves and find an appealing and different way of reporting. At the same time, shifts in the digital information age and shrinking budgets of news organizations made it hard for them to support the AP, despite the fact that they created it.

But the fact that most papers cut down lots of international coverage means that they need the AP to do what they can't afford to do.
"The AP’s presence in bureaus overseas have become the real time eyes and ears of the news media." Mears said.
Evolving alongside the digital revolution, the AP found different ways to charge companies on the internet and otherwise as a news cooperative for their services.

When Mears was once told that he could be replaced by four reporters, he retorted, "but can those reporters make up more than half of the news paper content? "
And the answer is, of course not.
However, the AP did cut back it rates by 10 percent, in response to the dwindling finances of many news organizations.

Its likely that the balancing act on this teetering scale will continue to be a little shaky until the older forms of media figure out how to be relevant in the digital age.

However the cards may fall, Mears is confident that there will always be a need for the AP to fill in the blanks.
He believes that if a society loses true reporting, "it loses its democracy."

blogging on blogging: Round 1

The contestants for tonight's round up are:
1.http://www.dailykos.com/
2. Reuters' Front Row Washington
3. Donklephant!

I'm sure many people saved their favorite blogs for last but I will start of with the best blog in my opinion, Daily Kos. Of course, there is a lot of Obama blogging, but they're a lot of other topics to choose from, like climate change, global warming and other topics that can tend to get burried. But what I loved about this blog is that it cut straight to the point. Instead of writing mile long opinion that's part info, part, "let me show you how witty I am" the blogger's style tends to briefly state his problem, show an exert of what he's referring to and then he wraps it up in a paragraph or two. Visually, dailykos.com is clean and attractive. The blog is highly organized and user friendly, all while managing not to come off as an overly polished and pristine. There is a great simple graph at the top keeping visitor's up to date of the nation's approval of Obama's performance so far and imbedded videos to supplement the blog conversation. As far as I can tell, there are an unusual amount of poster's commenting on the topics, well into hundreds of comments are being made.
Reuters is more of a more newsy structured blog. Though some of these professional news blogs tend to miss the point of the more relaxed stylistic freedom that the genre offers, I can also appreciate that blogs are more in depth and well reported. The posts have lots of personality, humor and sarcasm at times that keeps them exciting to read.
I must admit, donklephant caught my attention because of the cute attempt to meld the Democrat and Republican "mascots" for lack of a better word. This blogger tries to keep objectivity no matter which topic or what side is being blogged about. The style is very matter of fact and seems rather careful not to demonize or praise, omitting any type of language that would imply a position.
All three are interesting in their own right and will give deeper perspective into the news and policies of the moment.

Martin Fennelly

Anyone who knows Kristal Roberts knows that sports is not my thing. I'm the punchline in all of those movies with the inept little kid that could(n't) pitch, punch, punt, kick,throw or catch. I'd sooner see two roaches reproduce than sit through a stinking game. So you could just imagine how I felt when sports columnist, Martin Fennelly walked into my Critical Writing class.

However, I knew that I had been pleasantly surprised before, so I decided to give this guy a chance.
Dressed down in a cozy green sweater, khaki shorts and weathered nikes, one thing that I could admire right off bat is that the man was comfortable in his own skin.

"I would never look back on these 24 years and wish I would have listened to mom and gone to law school” Fennelly said.

Through out his career, he has reported on six people dying. The first story was a death defying boating stunt turned tragic boating accident. The most recent story he's covered involved the young football players who disappeared at sea and for all intensive purposes can be presumed dead. In both instances, he had the painfully uncomfortable task of speaking to parents and loved ones to create coverage out of travesty. As he talked about those athletes, I could hear the care in his voice and I could feel the duty weight that each story left on his heart.
This guy couldn't help but where his emotions on his sleeve, and I loved him for it.
But in the midst of acknowledging the gut punching blow of unexpected, often presumed too early death, Fennelly honored the athletes by celebrating who they were. The hobbies that occupied their time. The friends that new the person behind the number and uniform.
To some, I'm sure that could come of as corny. But the last thing that Fennelly, as well as my self, would ever want is to be that monotone 6-inch blimp in the paper briefly describing bland, lifeless accolades dotting our lives; zip,that's all she wrote. After mentioning that most people only made it in the paper when they're born, married and dead, he feels obligated to make the last one, the best one.

Fennelly isn't a great sports writer because he can recall every play that had been made. He is a great writer, because he finds humanity in your garden variety sports story.
He looks at journalism as a snap shot. “This is what I learned, this is what I know, this is what I can tell you in this amount of time," Fennelly said.