Media Articles

I'm already breaking my promise to be outward-focused in this space, but before I get to commentary and whatnot I want to link to a few media-related articles I've done recently.

One of my favorites is about how the news media cover campus violence. Less than a year after the Virginia Tech shootings, reporters planted themselves on Northern Illinois University's campus in suburban Chicago. While coverage of this shooting rampage wasn't as all-encompassing as the reportage from Blacksburg, Va., (morning show anchors didn't show up in DeKalb, for one), the NIU shootings did receive quite a bit more coverage nationally than did a campus attack earlier in the week at Louisiana Technical College’s Baton Rouge campus. Journalism professors, media commentators and others sounded off on why certain violent outbursts tend to receive the lion's share of attention.

On a completely different subject, here's a piece I did about a new product that offers athletics departments help tracking what their players are writing on the two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. This gets at the issue of whether athletes should be held to a different standard than students when it comes to projecting a positive image of a university. And, perhaps more to the point of this blog, it's an example of software that users say is invaluable but some argue is too invasive.

On yet another note, this is a feature story on a Pitzer College course called "Learning From YouTube." The interesting hook here is that the class not only focused on the Google-owned site, but the professor asked students to post all of their assignments on YouTube, and she taped the entire course and posted the videos for all to see.

Finally, here's a short story I did about a viral video that explains -- and demonstrates --Web 2.0.