Keynote speaker Rich Beckman addresses the Kansas City National College Media Convention on October 31.

This past weekend, nine members of the Reporter staff attended the National College Media Convention in Kansas City, a gathering of collegiate journalists from across the country. The major theme of the convention: technology is changing journalism.

Though the quality of the discourse throughout the convention varied widely, Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication and the keynote speaker at the convention, did a pretty good job of outlining the major points (taken directly from his opening speech):

1. The audience knows more than the journalist. News is a conversation and not a lecture.

2. People are in control of their media experience.

3. Anyone can be a media creator or remixer.

4. Traditional media must evolve or die.

5. Despite censorship, the story will get out.

6. Amateur and professional journalists need to work together.

7. Journalists need to be multi-platform (and entrepreneurial).

As RIT students, I’m sure this news comes as no surprise to you. We generally take it for granted that we will be able to personalize our media experiences.

For example, if we happen to be busy on any given Saturday night, we’re certainly not going to wait around for a rerun before we see Tina Fey’s latest performance — whether we’re interested in watching it or not, we’ve come to expect availability in other locations. If we want to see that episode, we’ll TiVo it, or torrent it, or find a streaming video online.

For us, this is second nature; we do it almost without thinking. For traditional media outlets, however, it’s not quite as easy as that. It’s mind-blowing, game-changing stuff. It’s exciting, sure, but it has also made them quite anxious.

In the sessions that followed the keynote speaker, there were a lot of good tips given on how to take advantage of the changes that are going on, but as the weekend wore on, one thing became very clear: nobody has really got it figured out yet.

This new media landscape is uncharted territory, and there is no definitive set of directions to get us to where we want to go. Stumbling around in the dark is pretty much the only option at this point. For the most part, professional media organizations are just as lost as student media organizations.

According to Beckman, it is our generation that needs to lead the way. Our understandings of social media are on totally different levels, and there is a lot that our generation can teach the older generations about it. This, supposedly, is going to be the key to figuring this all out. I don’t know about all that, but you’ve got to figure it’s worth a shot.

Thoughts?

Laura Mandanas
Editor in Chief

Voting for change? Or are you putting country first? Either way, here are three RIT events that you can partake of.

Vote Shuttle

RIT is sponsoring a special shuttle to the polls. This shuttle will make a continuous loop from the SAU, Gracies, and Crossroads to the polling location for campus. It’s supposed to run until polls close at 8 p.m.

Free Ice Cream

To reward voting Ben & Jerry’s is giving away free ice cream. You don’t actually have to vote to get some, but wouldn’t you feel dirty if you didn’t?

Results Watch

Both the RITz and the RIT Library’s Idea Factory have multiple screens set up to watch the election results come in. The Library’s event starts at 6 p.m. and will include free pizza.

The brainstorming process for Reporter articles is all over the map. Much of the work, in terms of defining content for each issue, is done by the individual section editors (News, Features, Leisure, and Sports/Views) prior to our weekly editorial board meetings. I’d say about 80% of the magazine originates in their brains. The other 20% is pitched by other editors or by writers.

I’m never quite sure where my own article ideas come from. A professor could say something engaging in class or I could read something in the New York Times and then days or weeks later, I’m sure it will have turned over enough times in my head to produce some original strain of thought that somehow morphs into an article. It’s an ill-defined process. Most of the time, it feels like magic.

Except for the article I wrote this week. I know exactly where the androgyny article came from. The moment that Laura announced that we’d be doing a Gender Issue, my skin started crawling. The article ideas that people had made me more uncomfortable than I have ever felt while sitting in the newsroom, which by now has become my second home. Their ideas were solid, though, and initially I had trouble identifying the source of my discontent. And then it hit me: The magazine pitted men against women, strict masculinity against strict femininity. And I didn’t fit into this issue. I’d been with the magazine for over three years and yet I was about to be written out of it.

I was stressed. My heart pounded louder and louder in my chest as the brainstorming went on. Then I realized that most of the editorial board hasn’t had my life experience, and they probably never think about gender norms. My life, by contrast, is engulfed in them. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge of gender and I was the one to fill it.

So, I told them what I thought the magazine was missing: What we needed was an article about the gray area between genders. The board seemed to like the idea; it was approved with little to no discussion.

Alright, I’ll admit it. I lied to the board when I made my article pitch. I said we needed the androgyny article to bridge the magazine’s two parts, and to make sure we weren’t alienating readers who held alternative gender identities. I didn’t care about tying the issue together, and I didn’t give a damn about alienating readers. I cared about Reporter alienating me.

The point I’m trying to underscore here is that Reporter isn’t created by some vast pool of informants or by some weird telepathic network that blankets this campus. 100% of this magazine is defined by a small number of overworked and underpaid students who each bring their unique perspectives and motives to the table. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s media bias within stories, but it certainly does mean that the magazine has a focus that may not reflect the campus at large. If you think that’s the case, great! Drop a line to one of those four section editors with a story idea you’d rather see. 80% of the magazine comes from their brains, after all. Someone should be keeping them from writing you out of your own college magazine.

I’m in the home stretch. With 24 days left until I graduate from this Institute of Technology, I find myself suddenly afflicted with the dreaded Senioritis. (A note to my professors, parents, and future employers: I am still getting my work done, just… more slowly than usual.) I blame a variety of sources for my inability to focus on my studies. Today, more than ever, the culprit is Snooker videos on YouTube.

Snooker is a game that looks a lot like pool, and plays sort of like pool with some key differences. There are ten red balls on the table, and then a variety of colored balls. You must sink a red ball before you sink a colored ball. The black one is worth the most (seven points). Whenever you pocket a colored ball, it is placed back on the table. Like in pool, if you miss a shot, your opponent gets a crack at the table. When all the red balls are sunk, the colored ones may be pocketed for good and the game ends.

To score 147 points, you have to sink a red, then the black, then a red, then the black again until all reds are off the table. Then, you gotta sink all the rest of the colored balls. This is called a maximum break, and it looks like this:

(Look especially to the shot at 2:26)

The guy in that video, Ronnie O’Sullivan, is the world record holder for maximum breaks. He’s done that nine times in professional play, including in this tournament earlier this year:

This last one is a compilation of Snooker Flukes — shots that the players messed up but somehow managed to sink anyway. These are all good, but 1:55 is pure gold.

Expect my posts in the upcoming days and weeks to be in a similar vein, less thoughtful and more distracting.

The New York Times has a piece on RTS’ recent fare decrease. It’s an interesting read in its own right, but it also contains this nugget:

“In Rochester, the transit system has also formed agreements with private businesses and colleges. It runs shuttle buses on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology and provides special weekend service to the campus, for which it receives about $1 million a year.”

I was always curious about the RIT-RTS shuttle arrangement. I still can’t help wondering if a more comprehensive shuttle service couldn’t be provided for less, or not much more.

This morning, as I was washing my hair with cheap bar soap and using what is now a 6-month-old disposable razor, it occurred to me: I am poor. Between rent payments, electric bills, and other (usually unforeseen) expenses, I barely have enough left over to buy proper shampoo; I’m left dousing myself in household cleaning products and constantly scavenging the campus for free food.

When Bill Nye the Science Guy visited the RIT campus yesterday, this is precisely why his arguments made much more sense to my soap-smothered head; they really struck a nerve. He showed pictures of his house, the roof of which is lined with solar panels, and discussed various ways that he is actively conserving both energy and money. At the end of the day, his gas and electric bill is $7.00, while mine is a whopping $70.00 (as I’m embarrassed to admit). This “do it your own damn self” attitude which I so admire is seemingly cost-effective.

Nye posited that climate change and global warming have become a battle between theory and myth, left and right, in this country. Quite sadly, this is all too true. As the first American born into my family, I hear constant complaints from British, German, and Irish relatives who poke fun at the fact that “Most Americans don’t even know what a fortnight is,” and, more seriously, “They seem to take offense at climate change research.” All it takes is a television documentary with a point shimmying the blame off of humans for someone to be convinced.

Nye extended his point to include a place where we are all a bit wounded: our wallets. He stressed the fact that, through developing alternative energy sources, we could all “get rich.” It’s a little-known fact that massive tax incentives — as well as lower energy bills — are provided to those who have solar panels installed on their homes.

According to my father, who is currently installing solar panels on his 1000 square foot business warehouse, the initial cost is around $25,000. As we’ve seen throughout the past decade — with USB flash drives, MP3 players, and even the iPhone — that price is likely to drop over 50% as more research and improvements are made to the products themselves. This is the part where richness steps in; someone is capable of increasing the panels’ efficiency, after all.

In light of Nye’s visit yesterday, I have decided to conduct a small experiment of my own kind. $25,000 is a bit too much for my budget, so I am instead going to craft my way through a modified solar-powered electronics charger (found here) for under $160. I’ve come a long way since the days of guinea pig wheel-powered generators, and so will we, one day.

This is RIT, so I have to assume that I’m the last person on campus to have caught this clip of the Colbert Report. His number one ThreatDown last night was Zombies v. Humans. Considering it’s all the rage on this campus, I figure this could be a quasi-shoutout for our lovely Brick City. Queue it up to 3:16 to get to the good stuff.

Alright, Ilsa, you make a good point. However, I think that if you’re hankering for a good read, the New York Times Bestseller list is a fine place to start the search. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones was a top-selling novel, after all, and damn can that woman write. Then again, Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye make frequent appearances as well.

So, where’s a voracious reader to turn? My bookshelf. Here’s three of my all-time faves. They may not be the newest books to hit shelves, but they’re certainly not ancient, either. All of them are available for purchase at the Park Point bookstore as well. Bonus!

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathon Safran Foer) - I’m always hesitant to tell people what this book is about, because the one sentence-description is a real turn-off. Experimental at points, it tells the story of Oskar Schell, an eccentric 9 year-old who roams New York City on a super secret mission to find the lock that fits a strange key left to him by his father, who died in the attack on the Twin Towers. Yes, this is a piece of post-9/11 literature, but it’s not depressing; Foer has an exceptional ability to weave humor into drama, making this book, at times, into a side-splitter.

2. Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) - In this collection of short stories, Lahiri tells a series of tales of Indians and Indian Americans as they struggle to make their lives in America. The stories can carry themselves, no doubt; each one is laden with its own emotional voyage and well-constructed characters. What sets this collection apart, however, is Lahiri’s writing style. Her prose glides gently across the page in ways I find difficult to describe. Reading one of her novels is like drinking a cold glass on water on a hot summer day.

3. Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) - Rounding out my trio is a non-fiction work by Malcolm Gladwell, a famous writer for The New Yorker. Blink is about the “power of thinking without thinking,” about a force that Gladwell labels as “rapid cognition.” Using examples ranging from racism in police shootings to the unbelievable unpopularity of Kenna, this book dissects the power and the danger of our snap judgments.

Anyone else have any good reads?

Image provided by an Amazon Customer for Obama Nation.

As I stared across the aisle of $313.87 worth of books, I picked up two that caught my attention. I made my way back to the seat and absorbed as much as I could about the reproductive cycle of remoras. After one chapter, I glanced at my partner’s book and nearly scoffed out a laugh: It was The Book of General Ignorance, with a #1 New York Times Bestseller sticker on the front.

The fact of the matter is that books do not need to be good in order to make it to the List; they need only be backed by money, and lots of it. Yet as soon as some of us see a cheap, red sticker with prestigious-looking text slapped on a book, we go gaga over believing that this book must — it simply must — be golden.

Case in point: Several months ago, a book seemed to shoot up to the top of the Bestseller List from the middle of nowhere. That book was Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, by Jerome Corsi. It stayed at number one for a long six weeks and then, as quickly as it had spawned, it disappeared. Whether buying or bribing, someone ran out of money.

Ever nosy, I read it in one sitting so I wouldn’t have to contribute my $18.48 to the List’s figures. The book was absurdly biased, laughably so. They could have even made a case for Senator Barack Obama’s rape of kangaroos, given “strong evidence from a childhood friend”. The author plowed through the book as if it were a small child’s book report. Still, you’re bound to find a chuckle or two in a sentence like, “Now I am going to write. It will be about ‘Barack Sr. — Lying Deadbeat Bigamist.’”

If anything, this book was used as a political tool to draw attention to Obama’s race. The author makes repeated subtle attacks, “facts” backed by “researchers,” and even goes so far as to devote a massive pompous chapter to “Black Liberation Theology.” Of Michelle Obama’s thesis, he says: “While being educated at an Ivy League school she indulged in the luxury of experiencing alienation, instead of being grateful for the opportunity,” as if she were sipping laudanum and haphazardly sans brain.

With a title of Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community, the underlying point of Michelle Obama’s thesis is alienation. And why shouldn’t she write about it? It’s certainly better than passing off a book report as a political tool and throwing gobs of money at it for attention. Sometimes, it seems, we just can’t help but miss the point.

For the sake of individual opinion, I therefore ask that you consider where and why a book — or anything, for that matter — is a ‘bestseller.’ Often, general consumers are the true cause (after all, there really was a time when Furbies were just the best), yet, more often than not, judgment must be left up to us, $18.48 at a time.

First year Computer Science student Pravesh Kothari takes a pamphlet from student protesters before entering the Career Fair.

Eric Drummond

One of the common themes that we find on campus is apathy. Just read some of the posts below, we all see it. But I’m not just talking about school spirit or how many orange shirts show up at a game. The apathy I refer to goes deeper.

A real eye opener came while I was covering a ‘protest’ at the career fair this past Wednesday. Six students stood near the main entrance to the Gordon Field House, bearing signs with messages I don’t remember. They didn’t hold the signs. The signs leaned up against the legs of the protestors. The six stood and watched their suit-clad classmates walk into the fair. They grabbed the attention of a few, but most paid them no attention.

This was a pitiful sight, 6 protestors, 2 photographers and 1 reporter, all standing around hoping something would happen. It reminded me of my freshman year and of the RIT Socialists standing near the exit of Gracie’s, holding clipboards and ideologically dated newspapers.

We have reached a new level of apathy when the protestors and the public wear the same uncaring expressions on their faces. A few weeks ago, Laura talked about being uninformed and misinformed, as well as apathetic. I don’t think this is a new problem. Uninformed and apathetic voters have probably made up a majority of the electorate since the franchise has been around. The problem is, if someone is informed and not apathetic, then what do they do?

Individually a person may hold strong opinions on subjects and perhaps their friends agree. However, it seems there are too many outlets for those opinions. Everyone and their grandmother has a blog, a cell phone, or a website. While everyone has a voice, they merely add to the din of the crowd. Having opinions and sharing those opinions with others has become a cheap process.

The students who walked by the protestors may have shared their opinions, but why should they stop and pick up a flier? Those opinions have just as much merit as the opinions in their friend’s blog or from the facebook group they just joined.

With the economy of ideas flooded by the masses discovering individuality, it’s no wonder the public wears the same expression as the protestors. We have all become pocket revolutionaries, standing around with signs at our feet, watching our compatriots pass us by.