Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

The Children’s Defense Fund’s New York chapter is holding a one-day summit in Central Brooklyn called “Connecting the Neighborhood Dots: Promoting Solutions to Dismantle the Pipeline to Prison.” Hosted by CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in partnership with the Casey Family Programs, the day has been scheduled full of panel discussions and presentations by leaders in the children’s advocacy and juvenile justice organizations.

I will be chronicling the start of the conference and the back-to-back morning sessions that focus on the disproportionate impact of prison and the criminal justice system on specific communities in New York City, mainly in the Bronx and Central Brooklyn, and how community-based strategies can promote healthy children, families and neighborhoods.

Read and watch the full coverage here.

Tonight I’m going to be live blogging a panel held at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism that features several reporters from various outlets around the city who cover the in’s and out’s of City Hall. The panelists for the evening are:

Azi Paybarah from the NY Observer’s PolitickerNY.com blog
Grace Rauh from NY1
Fernanda Santos from the NY Times
Liz Benjamin from the NY Daily News

And here we go…

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On December 10th, Sean Hetherington and Aaron Hartzler organized Day Without A Gay. They asked people to “call in gay” to work and spend the day volunteering for GLBT and/or human rights organizations. The idea was intended to demonstrate the contributions of the GLBT community to the nation’s economy.

The event coincided with the International Human Rights Day and was conceived in response to California’s Proposition 8 initiative which banned gay marriage. According to press reports, the turnout was low.

No word yet on whether or not there will be a repeat next year.

Arts and Letters Daily had teaser for a New Yorker article that got my attention today: “Academic performance of kids in U.S. schools would be enhanced by getting rid of the worst 10% of teachers. How do you know who they are?” My response: academic performance of kids in U.S. schools would be enhanced by getting rid of the worst 10% of students. (more…)

As the debate whether Gov. David Paterson should appoint Caroline Kennedy as the next U.S. Senator heats up, many questions arise about her qualifications.

But to bluntly oversimplify her qualifications of philanthropy and law into one word, it would be her name.

As a Kennedy she would have the ability to raise money and awareness for the issues of New York State.

The fact that Kennedy has not had to pay her “political dues” does not really concern me.

The real questions I would like to know are not about her qualifications, but rather her intentions.

I want to know, why she has decided at this moment to enter politics, what her agenda would focus on as Senator, and how she plans on helping the economically depressed and bleak, upstate New York.
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By Sergey Kadinsky & Joel Schectman

The public has now come out against the American car manufacters saying they have been sluggish in innovating their classic American guzzlers.

But a survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation showed more than a third of the nation’s companies have laid off workers or taken other steps to reduce labor costs in the past three months to cope with the global economic crisis. Nearly 40 percent of manufacturers are expected to lay off more temporary workers.

At the same time, much like their American counterparts, Japanese unions continue to defend wage increases, the Japanese Automobile Workers’ Union is demanding at least ¥1,000-a-month as a salary adjustment, while other unions are demanding even more.

Since 1986, Japanese law has made it easier for companies to hire temporary workers, who are largely non-union. Both Japanese trade union confederations, Rengo and UI Zensen, are working to enlist these workers, making substantial gains last year in recruiting part-time and non-regular workers into the union ranks, judging by a 12% increase in 2007.

Among Japanese Auto Workers, membership declined from a peak of 830,000 in 1994; to the 2004 membership of 699,000. Today, JAW is looking for further growth through part-time and temporary autoworkers. Their strategy is clearly forward-looking as major automakers recently announced that they would slash the number of contingent employees due to slow sales.

Toyota reports that its number of full-time workers will fall from 9,200 early this year to 3,000 by the end of next March. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. says it will not renew 1,100 contract staff from now until next March. Mazda Motor Corp. is eliminating 1,300 temporary jobs.

People often cite the $70+ per hour cost of American labor as the reason behind the Big Three’s financial losses, but it should be noted that in Japan, the pensions are paid by the state. As a result, labor costs are much lower  for Japanese companies

Even Chris Sands of the conservative Hudson Institute says that a lot of the auto industry’s problems come from having to vest pensions, which often forces them to shift money from working capital. This is a problem not shared by the Japanese auto industry, that has state pension. In the past, American companies  would borrow money to pay for this gap, and they’ve always been able to pay it back. But with the markets frozen this year, they didn’t have this option. That’s why they’ve come begging to Congress.

Did any one catch the absolutely hilarious (so wrong, but absolutely hilarious!) skit on Saturday Night Live with Fred Armisen portraying New York State Governor David Paterson? Apparently, the faux governor doesn’t New Jersey.

But the real Gov. Paterson’s apparently not into this skit either. He believes his portrayal in last Saturday’s Weekend Update actually did harm to the cause of disabled people. Says the gov, “I can take a joke. But only 37% of disabled people are working and I’m afraid that that kind of third-grade humor certainly adds to this atmosphere.” (Personally, when I saw the broadcast news piece on this issue, I wondered aloud if maybe Paterson could dish it out, but not take it.)

The skit is below.

So President Bush was the target of two shoes thrown at him – quite haphazardly – by an Iraqi television journalist whose employer, Al Baghdadia, is based in Cairo, Egypt. In the video clip viewed ’round the world, Mr. Bush tells a security agent that he is fine after the incident, later joking about the incident and telling the assembled press that he didn’t feel the least bit threatened by the attack. The journalist, however, may not be so fortunate.

While an attack on any world leader, however innocuous the weapon and bland response from the attacked, is cause for alarm and legal consequence, I have serious doubts about the existence and stability of any current Iraqi justice system. They didn’t have a fair one before the U.S.’ 2003 invasion and they haven’t had a chance to build one now, and with a history of lack of due process in the region, regardless of professional standing and international attention, it seems a very real possibility that Muntadar al-Zaidi, the journalist apprehended, faces either a violent fate or an untimely demise.

The words that al-Zaidi shouted in Arabic while throwing his shoes have been widely translated to have been: “This is the farewell kiss, you dog!” However, an unaccredited blogger at The False Oswalds expands the translated quote to “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog. … This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
Whether this is accurate or not, I don’t know, but CNN expands the translation to: “You killed the Iraqis!” These add another layer of context to al-Zaidi’s motivation for the assault.

In that CNN article, it is also noted that al-Zaidi is the same journalist who was kidnapped in November 2007 on his way to work and then released three days later. I do not know if there are reports of what happened to him during his captivity, whether he was tortured or not. But I imagine that after the initial impulse to throw his shoes at President Bush wore off and he was surrounded and restrained by security agents, his mind flashed to those three days from one year ago and he came into a panic about his current situation. That is the only thing I can think to explain the blood trail on the carpet and the cries from an adjacent room while other Iraqi journalists apologized to the President and Mr. Bush made light of the situation.

I would love for someone to brief the U.S. president on the final translation so that after the jokes have subsided, he will no longer lack understanding of al-Zaidi’s cause. And hopefully, he will actually reinforce his claim that this show of protest – which is more than just an empty ploy for attention – is proof of democracy in Iraq by ensuring that Mr. al-Zaidi is not executed or tortured for his form of expression.

The pharmaceutical industry is coming under fire for allegedly hiring ghostwriters (writers who work for pay, but not a byline) to write positive reports/analysis of clinical tests on drugs with possible efficacy issues – and then recruiting notable doctors to stick their names on it. This issue has been bandied about for months and suspected for longer, but now U.S. Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa is renewing the fight.

Is the fact that this possibility has surfaced doesn’t surprise me troubling? Even before I declared my concentration in health/medicine reporting, I was aware of the corruption and rampant abuse of power by what is referred to as Big Pharma. Government deregulation and regulation on a slew of business and healthcare policy issues end up benefiting these corporate entites, whether allowing unapproved drugs and drugs with possible side effects to go on the market before they are fully vetted by the FDA or removing/weakening price caps on prescription drugs so that Pharma can charge more for less and profit from donations of life-saving drugs to Third World countries. And of course there are the deceptive drug ads that have had varying levels of regulation over the last two decades.

Journal articles are an important “first draft” introducing new developments in medicine to the public and are among the sources used by health professionals and medical reporters in their story research. Doctors and reporters already look at journal articles with a wary eye, and the likely possibility of journal articles being fabricated can be even more detrimental to the trust people place in such written work.

And that doctors would sign on to put their names on these works they haven’t written – even if they agree with what is being written – is egregious and says they condone this deceptive practice. Like the regulations placed on drug advertisements, all that would be needed is for the doctors to acknowledge that this IS NOT their work. It would be better if it were, but if this is the way they want to roll, then disclose your affiliations.

It is tantamount to plagiarism.

In both of those cities there are many many more women – and therefore more single women – than men. The supply and demand of this means that men are able to be either more selective or much more poorly groomed and do quite well for themselves. It means that we can be slack and indulgent in a land of plenty while the other team gets vicious on a barren gaming field.

In both cities the reason might have to do with migration patterns. American women who are better educated these day then their male counterparts, flock to cities for jobs and husbands. They want guys of comparable education and earning potential, say Richard Florida, author of the Creative Class. According to Florida’s singles map there are 210,000 thousand more single girls than guys in the New York-Northern Jersey area.

When their are fewer options those options start looking a lot better. Some people will even eat at Mcdonald’s when that’s the only thing open.

In Bangkok this situation is even more wonderful (from a guy’s perspective). There are 547,000 more women than men in the marriage year between 20 and 44 – that’s a huge number when the group we are talking about has less than 3 million.

This enormous gap (500,000!) is due to a massive in-migration of women into the city and a flight out of BKK by the men according to a report from the Economic Institute at Kobe University. Bangkok is a service economy of finance, hotels, and restaurants – all areas where women are thought to better employees in Thai eyes.

Bangkok’s men (who like American men are less educated than their female peers) often leave the city to work in heavy industry and manufacturing.

This leaves the city incredibly gender lopsided – walking around Bangkok ourists often wonder – where did all the men go? The images of the protests were so female dominated that it felt like you were looking at a women’s liberation movement instead of an anti-goverment rally.

But that’s just Bangkok.

Did I come to the wrong rally?

And its for that reason that you hear the same complaint from women there that you do here in big NYC – all the good ones are taken and the rest aren’t too good.