5 thoughts this week….Sept 7th- Sept 13th

What a great week! Football is now in full force and Fall is just around the corner.

1) Going Loko!!!!!

It is a relatively new drink that combines an energy drink with a 12%  malt beverage. I did a story on it for KOMU this week and had a really good time learning more about the drink. Health experts said besides the fact the can is packed with alcohol, almost an entire six pack of beer, there were other issues I didn’t even think about.

MU Wellness Resource Center Official Kim Dude was disappointed for who she thought the target audience was for the drink: women

“Clearly it is targeted for women. What men is going to want a fruity drink. It is upsetting because it has so much alcohol. And with caffeine, they may be wide awake and not realize how much they have drank, but in reality they have drank too much. Then they are left vulnerable.”

If you like to see the angle approach I took, check out my story here.

MID-MISSOURI GOES FOUR LOKO

Also check another stations Four Loko story and see if you think they went a little over the top.

2) Dwight Howard pays a special visit.

I am a sucker for feel good make-a-wish stories. When you mix sports with them, it makes me respect certain athletes for what they do off court even more. Dwight Howard has always had a very likable personality and this story definitely shows his caring side.

Definitely give this a look because it is a tear jerker…but in a happy way .

3)  9/11

I remember going in late to school that day. I saw the second plane fly into the Tower #2 and I froze. I honestly thought I was watching replay footage of the first plane, and it took me a few minutes to realize what was going on. I went to school for an hour but then was checked out by mom because everyone was in panic. I was in Arkansas, hundreds of miles away, but chaos was happening around me.

9 years later, there are still a lot of issues involving Americans over Sept. 11th.  The mosque at Ground Zero has been in discussion over the past couple of weeks and protests have sparked a nation built in majority by Christian beliefs. Regardless on what you stand on, this day should be a day we come together as a nation and be remorseful by the thousands of people who lost their lives on this tragic day.

I wrote a reader’s theater in high school about 9/11 that won 1st place at a speech tournament. It recaps the day from a personal standpoint and I really put a lot of effort into it in high school…

Take a look!

4) Mizzou Tailgating has become irrelevant…again.

This is a picture of the new tailgating spot that is designated for students before the game. However, not a lot of people showed up and instead took their tailgating elsewhere because of strict police enforcement. (This has been a common theme over the years).

But even when I drove from my house toward the stadium an hour before the game, I was shocked.  I saw no traffic and parking lots near the stadium were relatively empty.  It was a very unintimidating game day atmosphere.

The MSA president Tim Noce says they are trying to model tailgating after Ole Miss, which is consistently considered one of the best pregame experiences in the world.  But I just don’t see that happening.

What do you think?

5) No more New York Times????

Well atleast no more printed paper.

We have been discussing the future of print paper in my Creativity and Journalism class. Some students were very advent on the extinction of printed papers in the future. Well on Thurs. Sept. 9th, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times said “we will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future.”  I think it is a very relevant article because it shows how companies are on a quest to find a business model that will work with high quality journalism. I also liked how Sulzberger mentioned with the digital age the cost of changing is low. When the Kansas City Star paid 200 million for a huge state of the art printing press, who know how much less they could’ve spent for a facility with state of the art digital equipment.

Source: http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2010/09/arthur_sulzberger_on_charging_online_to.php

5 thoughts this week….Aug 30th-Sept 6th

I have been thinking of how I can expand my blog that will be more entertaining to readers, but at the same time keep a journalistic approach to it. I came up with this idea that each week I will try and come up with my five thoughts of the week. So for the first time ever….here we go..

1) COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS BACK! It is easily the top choice for this past week, as it is without a doubt my favorite time of year. The first week did not disappoint whatsoever. Mizzou nabbed a victory in St. Louis…Two D-1 AA teams shocked Ole Miss and Kansas (my two least favorite teams), and last night’s Boise State and Va Tech game was an epic battle through and through. One could argue which team had the better jerseys….

I liked Boise St’s bold blue. However, what was Brent Musburger calling Boise the “cinderella” over and over again all about. (Thought: How many years does it take for a team to go undefeated before they lose the cinderella label.)

All in all it was a great first week to college football and it looks like next week will jnust get better!

2) The biggest loser of the week was cancer.

Sticking with the college football theme, my favorite story of the week was Boston College’s Mark Herzlich. The linebacker spent all of last season battling cancer and returned to the gridiron on Saturday. Although Boston College will not win a national championship this year…Herzlich has got to be one of the feel good stories of the year. When I Youtubed his name, I came across a really good story about the continuing fight back to football that everyone should check out…

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3) Twitter is addictive.

I know I am a little late to the Twitter World, but it is fun and very useful.  A week ago I was asking Chris Spurlock, a friend of mine and twitter fanatic, how to use the application. Now I am getting family members joining in on the fun. I think it is really cool because I get information from all of the things I find useful to me right away. I get local news, college sports, information about my favorite teams, huge world news, as well as getting updates from friends and celebrities. This week, when Columbia Police booked and released Derrick Washington, I tweeted his mugshot out and gained several followers just because of it.  I definitely will  continue to look for more ways to use it at a social tool but as well as a journalistic tool.

Oh and follow me: thlindsey

4) Next on my mind and the talk of the town in Columbia is the girl Kelshi Poe who fell down at Quinton’s Bar and Deli.

Here is the story.

It is an incident that will definitely spark issues among a lot of people in town. An underage 19 year old whose BAC level was .32 and fell down 15ft and landed on her head is going to create debate. Should the bar be responsible? Is it her fault? Her friends? Whose to blame?

Besides the issue at hand, I truly hope the girl will make it through this terrible accident. The last update I got from a friend, who was at the hospital with her, is that she’s had multiple surgeries on her head, skull and brain and at the time she’s in serious critical condition.

5) Houston, we almost had a problem.

Another oil vessel owned by Mariner Energy from Houston caught fire in the gulf but luckily there was no sheen.

The reason there was no sheen is because this wasn’t a drilling platform, it was a production platform.  I think a lot of people overreacted after the incident based upon what happened back in April with the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the oil spill in the gulf that ensued.

People have every right to think the worse of a situation (and when I looked at Twitter, a lot of people assumed the worse as I saw “Here we go again” all over the place).  But I was very uncomfortable with the way some media outlets handled it.  If you google Mariner Energy and look up the results in the news, several journalists link the company to Enron and BP presenting them in a negative light. Yes, this is a big issue  in the gulf, but this doesn’t make Mariner Energy and the people that work for them, bad people.

I know the media isn’t labeling anyone from Mariner as a “bad person” or making them an “enemy.” But at the same time,  linking them to companies with scandals on top of an oil platform fire doesn’t seem very fair to me.

Well this is the end… I hope everyone enjoyed and will come back next week for more.