Posts Tagged ‘msnbc-com’
Mobile journalism in the real world, or: How I work
My Livescribe notes from a recent (non-msnbc) food writing outing. If I tap anywhere in the notes, the pen begins playing the audio from that point.
Originally posted April 15, 2011, and revised Aug. 19, 2011, to reflect upgrades.
When I joined msnbc.com nearly 12 years ago, I made an abrupt transition at age 38 from a very traditional newspaper orientation.
When I worked at The Charlotte Observer, Congressional Quarterly, Knight-Ridder Washington and The Washington Post, I had been using the same tools for almost 20 years:
• The standard reporter’s notebook and pen.
• A landline telephone with an audio pickup to record interviews.
• A handheld audio recorder for field interviews.
• A “portable” (but actually fairly bulky) point-and-shoot camera. Later, that got traded in for an equally bulky portable camera that could shoot as much as 90 seconds of grainy video.
With standard variations for specific assignments (if you were ever a cops reporter, you’ll remember clipping a brick-size beeper to your belt), those were the tools print reporters used for decades.
I recently returned to work after having taken a couple of weeks off, during which I did nothing remotely job-related, and the tools I use now were scattered on my desk where I’d left them. I was struck by how remarkably different they are.
Obama: Military action has stopped Gadhafi
President Barack Obama declared Monday night that the U.S. military action in Libya had “stopped (Moammar) Gadhafi’s deadly advance,” fulfilling what he said was a U.S. responsibility not to “turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries.” …
In a nationally televised address from the National Defense University in Washington, Obama sought to convince a skeptical Congress and a doubting nation that he was doing the right thing by intervening militarily in a third Muslim nation. He did that by casting the conflict as a moral response to oppression by Libya’s leader, whom he called “a tyrant.” …
The administration has struggled to make clear what it hopes to achieve in Libya, where U.S. forces were sent March 19 while Obama was out of the country on a South American tour. …
Obama acknowledged that “Americans continue to have questions about our efforts in Libya.” To allay those concerns, he stressed that enforcing reform in Libya “will be a task for the international community and, more importantly, a task for the Libyan people themselves.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Triple whammy slows Japan relief effort
A gas station worker tells drivers who camped out overnight Wednesday that no fuel is available in Ichinoseki in northern Japan. Physical destruction and harsh, snowy conditions have created a severe fuel shortage in the country. (Hiroaki Ono/AP)
Rescue and recovery efforts after the nuclear disaster in Japan are being stymied by a nearly overwhelming array of obstacles, as government and aid groups struggle with the physical devastation of last week’s earthquake and tsunami, the specter of radiation dangers and harsh weather conditions.
“The huge challenge for the aid workers on the ground is just the operating conditions they are dealing with,” said Kirsten Mildren, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Search and rescue workers are saying they’ve never seen anything like this.”
Mildren said the tsunami that followed last week’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake “took everything in its path. … The level of destruction is just monumental and you’ve still got flooded areas, and now on top of that you’ve got this rain and this snow.”
The need in Japan is extreme, the United Nations reported. The 450,000 refugees crowded into 2,444 shelters don’t begin to tell the story: About 1.6 million households are without water in 12 prefectures. Temperatures are below freezing in much of the area. Anxiety is rising over radiation leaks from the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors.
Full story (Miranda Leitsinger and Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Reporting: Safety debate delays new license for Japan-type reactor
A new license for one of the U.S. nuclear plants most similar to Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi facility has been on hold for more than five years, offering a uniquely extensive record of safety and security concerns with its reactor and others like it.
Of the 104 active nuclear reactors in the United States, 23 use GE or GE Hitachi boiling water systems featuring the same Mark I containment system as the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station.
Only six of those, however, are Mark I systems paired with General Electric Model 3 reactors, closely resembling the configuration of the first reactor to fail at the Fukushima plant, according to records of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
And just one of those six — the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., about 40 miles south of Boston — has a new license application currently before the NRC.
As it happens, Pilgrim and its parent company, Entergy Corp. of New Orleans, have been tied up in court and legislative hearings on the license since January 2006 — the longest such delay on record. That has generated a years-long docket of regulatory filings, responses, claims and counterclaims.
The records show that Pilgrim is still vexed by leaks of radioactive tritium into the groundwater and unexplained cracking in control rod blades that help regulate its nuclear reactions, as well as unspecified security violations.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Teacher layoffs raise class-size tensions
Video: Higher projected classroom sizes have sparked a debate on whether student performance will suffer. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.
As governments struggle to reduce education deficits, they are considering closing thousands of schools and laying off huge numbers of teachers. What will that do to class sizes, and what will it mean for pupils?
In fact, research into whether smaller classes actually improve academic performance is extensive but contradictory.
“Probably few issues in education have been studied as often as class size, yet few studies have produced satisfactory or consistent results,” said researchers at Health and Education Research Operative Services, a nonprofit foundation that studies education programs nationwide.
Full story (Rehema Ellis, Victor Limjoco and Alex Johnson/NBC News)
Agencies consider new kidney transplant rules
The rules that determine who goes to the top of the list for a kidney transplant could change dramatically under an idea working its way through federal health agencies.
Some transplant specialists and medical ethicists say the idea — which is under discussion and hasn’t been formally proposed to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network — is likely to be controversial if it is eventually adopted.
The complicated formula would give higher priority for access to the “best” kidneys to younger and healthier patients with a greater chance for long-term survival. That would be a significant shift from current first-come, first-served rules that, broadly speaking, favor patients who have been on the waiting list the longest, with less regard to age.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Schools cut lunch options for kids who struggle to pay
New federal nutrition regulations are in the works that could put an even bigger strain on the finances of already-struggling school meal programs. To encourage eligible children to sign up for federally subsidized free or reduced-price meals, some meal programs are serving them shrunken “alternate” lunches, often just two slices of bread, a slice of cheese and a 4-ounce juice cup.
If a school can get more eligible children enrolled, its direct costs go down because the federal government picks up more of the bill. Slenderized lunches, administrators say, are simply part of an aggressive campaign to make families aware of the benefit and get them signed up.
“If they need assistance, we give them assistance,” said Wayne Nagy, the Lee County district’s food and nutrition services director. But “if they don’t need assistance, we expect them to pay.”
Is that a creative way to address a shortage of school funding, or is it just punishing lower-income children? Hit the comments and let me know.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
States seek to copy Arizona immigration law
This co-production was reported with Vanessa Hauc of Telemundo and cross-posted from msnbc.com. Read the original in context, with a state-by-state box.
Arizona’s hot-button immigration law is on hold, pending court appeals, but its effects are rippling across the country as state legislatures reconfigured by the November elections begin their new sessions.
The disputed Arizona law would allow law enforcement officers to demand proof of legal immigration status from anyone they stop.
In July, a U.S. district judge granted the Obama administration’s request for an injunction blocking parts of the trailblazing law, which raised many legal questions, including whether local officials can legally enforce federal immigration law and whether such local enforcement could lead to unconstitutional racial profiling.
Why you should ignore crowd estimates
(Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images)
Cross-posted from World Blog. Read this post in context.
Update 1:10 p.m. ET: Al-Jazeera has now cut its estimate in half. Earlier: “up to two million.” Now: “more than a million.”
Wired, meanwhile, offers a way to guesstimate a big crowd.
_____
Estimating crowds is a notoriously inexact science, so much so that the National Park Service stopped doing it for protests in Washington many years ago. That leaves it up to news organizations to make their best guesses.
So it’s no surprise that estimates of the crowd that gathered today in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are very imprecise and wide-ranging:
• Washington Post: “Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”
Live-blogging Egypt
I’m live-blogging the protests in Egypt today for msnbc.com’s World Blog. Here’s a roundup to get you started.
Right: Egyptian soldiers and civilians gather Monday in Al Tahrir Square in central Cairo. (Felipe Trueba /EPA) Full slideshow.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 