Instead of blogging on Sunday as I have been, I am once again getting it done early. Next week, I will be on vacation and Sunday we will be driving there so I am taking care of all my assignments early.
This week, I’ll be honest, the news of Trump’s acquittal and all the snow and delayed vaccine clinics, has got me really turned off news right now. I have been kind of avoiding it for my own mental health.
I did some reading still though and here are those thoughts.
First, I saw this obituary from New York Times about Rush Limbaugh.
Now, I’m not a Rush Limbaugh fan or anything, but this obituary still gave me pause. It seemed excessively negative and opinionated, to the point where my boyfriend and I both had to check to see if it was listed under opinion or not. While complaining to my boyfriend about how negative it seemed, he brought up the points of there not really being anything great to say about Limbaugh and not sugarcoating reality. Katherine even said in class today, that journalists write the first draft of history. However, my argument is less about what was said and more about the place it was said. I brought up the points that death should be handled respectfully and that I thought obituaries should be more factual. I guess something along the lines of if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.
This reminded me of a discussion we had in the newsroom about the obituary for Kobe Bryant as well. When he died, I remember there being a conversation about his obit and whether it should include only the good stuff, or also include information about his past sexual assault charge. It seemed like most the world opted to not include that little side note, to not have a full biography of him in the obit, but to rather focus on his accomplishments.
So, I know these are very very different cases, but it just got me thinking about how obits should be handled especially in sticky situations.
Next, I want to bring attention to a graphics page I saw in today’s print edition.
I found this story to be way more readable and interesting since it is told through these graphs. Reading a block of text with these numbers, or really even a lengthy story on this with just a few graphs, wouldn’t have gotten my attention. I think this is also an important story that we maybe don’t talk about enough so I liked seeing us return to this. I thought it was well done and informative.
Next, I want to put this story in here. This story is about inmates who broke out of their cells, but not the jail, in St. Louis. I thought they did a nice job providing the background context. I liked that they took this breaking news story and were able to report a little more in-depth on it. I thought it was an interesting story and some excellent reporting. It must have been difficult talking with officials and prisoners about such a touchy topic.
It also made me wonder if this is a story we can pursue closer to home as well. How are our jails doing? What about the Jeff City ones? Is there COVID there?
Lastly, I will be in Florida next week. I would like to take that time to practice doing journalism on the road and networking/marketing myself. So I started brainstorming some story ideas for a Florida based story.
I found these aerial photos of Cape San Blas. There didn’t seem to be much info or story to go along with it. They all have this same caption, “Aerial photograph of Cape San Blas peninsula including the beach, the rock re-inforced area of Cape San Blas Road, the Troy Deal Tract-St. Joseph Bay State Buffer Preserve and Lighthouse Bayou, also known locally as the stumphole area.” So I am wondering if there’s a story about the re-inforced rock? Or maybe how a sea-side road is handling this current weather?
I’m not really sure. This is my first time attempting something like this and I am not sure the right way to go about it. Maybe I need to call Jackie again….