Eid Mubarak!!!
I thought this article appended below was interesting in discussing how blogging is affecting the news media. Well, I never claimed my blog was journalism but some certainly are, like Healing Iraq on my sidebar.
Today I drove up in the snow to Denver for an AP Stats training thing. Got lots of handouts. Learned a few new calculator things - particularly Catalog Help, an app that allows you to have the calculator remind you how to use a command - comes in handy. Saw TI-Presenter, which allows the calculator screen to be displayed on a TV monitor and I want one! $300, so if I decide to get it, it'll have to come from my own pocket. But in a way that is good, because then it is YOURS to take with you if you ever leave. And tax deductible, for what it is worth. I've never kept careful watch of all that tax deductible stuff. Apparently teachers' mileage to conferences and union dues is also deductible - I just learned that this year. I also just learned this year that your car registration tag thing is deductible, too. If anyone knows other things that are deductible I'm interested. I also went to the halal meat store and bought about $70 of halal meat. There is one Lebanese-Christian owned store on the north end of my city that has some halal meat, but it is usually old, very limited selection. Last time I went all they had was Crescent chicken - they had tons of it, but nothing else I trusted to be halal. But in Denver there is a store where they have fresh beef - they cut it up right in front of you if you want, like any grocery store butcher. And they also carry a better selection of the national halal meat brands. I wanted beef, so I bought Midamar beef bologna and hotdogs and then I bought about 6 packages of ground beef from the market. I didn't see any other cuts that looked particularly appealling. I think it would be cool if they had a roast sometime or something like that. Maybe they do, but I'm not there often.
The Prophet Muhammad (saw) said that the true Eid is the day in which you do not sin. Every day can be Eid. And no Eid is really Eid if you fill it with sin. We are happy to see Eid because we stop fasting, but really it is not such a happy occasion unless one has purified oneself. You see, Eid is a celebration of becoming pure through the spiritual opportunities in the month of Ramadan. If we did not take advantage, then we have no cause for celebration, but rather we have a cause for mourning, because the opportunity is lost to us and we have to wait for the next year, if by Allah's swt will, we are blessed to make it to that time.
By CHRIS T. NGUYEN
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The woman who writes Wonkette! needed no introduction and offered no apologies Saturday, telling her peers in online journalism that Web logs like hers have spurred a quicker response to breaking news by major media outlets.
Ana Marie Cox and others who maintain "blogs" were criticized after the Nov. 2 presidential election for posting exit polls throughout the day - a practice frowned upon in the mainstream media because the data could sway the outcome.
"To the extent to which they affect voter turnout is to the extent people believe them," Cox told the Online News Association conference in Hollywood. She added that blogs have made it more difficult for mainstream news organizations "to sit on a story."
Cox, whose gossip-packed and sometimes bawdy postings make her political blog among the most-viewed on the Web, said she did nothing wrong and had the right to give people information they wanted.
Blogs have drawn attention to political stories that more established media outlets then report on, and exposed flawed journalism by those same newspapers and television news programs. But some at the gathering said they face a near-constant struggle to establish the credibility enjoyed by professionals.
"Things get picked up by bloggers that take awhile to get picked up by the mainstream media," said Mark Glaser, a columnist for the Online Journalism Review who writes about Web logs. "Bloggers have to start from scratch in building trust."
Glaser noted the importance of bloggers in tearing down CBS News' election season story about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The constant barrage of questions and charges from the Web kept heat on the network until it admitted a mistake in relying on what turned out to be fake documents.
Mindy McAdams, a University of Florida journalism professor, applauded bloggers' efforts but urged them to adhere to ethical standards held by mainstream journalists.
"Our credibility is suffering with so many people rushing to publish things without checking them out," McAdams said after Cox's speech. "Blogging is really great. I like that more and more people have a voice. That's good ... But it doesn't give people who call themselves journalists an excuse to not check out the information."
---
On the Net:
Online News Association: http://www.journalists.org/
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
No comments:
Post a Comment