Friday Tidbits
June 20th, 2008 by KimYou can probably tell from the lack of blog posts yesterday and the day before that I've come down with a case of uninspired-itis again. Here are some things that interested me today:
Preggers.
Disturbing: A pact between teenage girls at Gloucester High School to get pregnant was at least partly behind a rise in the number of pregnancies there, according to the AP.
The school's principal told Time magazine that several girls confessed to making the pact. The school started to worry when 17 girls, none over 16, became pregnant. The school average is four pregnancies per year.
The principal told Time, according to the AP, that "[s]ome of the girls reacted to the news they were pregnant with high fives and plans for baby showers."
I wish teenagers would stick to trends like black nail polish or Hello Kitty pencil cases -- things that can be rubbed off or thrown away or outgrown ... not like a baby.
In other news...
Seventeen year-old Jamie Lynn Spears gave birth to a baby girl on Thursday. Hm.
Attack of the Clones (in a good way).
The Guardian reports that a man whose skin cancer had spread to his lung and groin was cleared of all traces of the disease after doctors injected him with five billion of his own immune cells.
Cloning was used to create billions of the man's own cells, which, when they were put back into his body, starting attacking the cancer. Tests showed that tumors in the patient's body disappeared within two months of the treatment and had not reappeared two years later.
Doctors believe that the treatment could work in about a quarter of people with skin cancer whose immune systems are already primed to attack the cancer, the article said.
Hat tip to juh for the link.
Aloha, Azerbaijan!
Hawaii state House Rep. Gene Ward's Thursday op-ed in the Advertiser about a recent women's rights conference in Azerbaijan got a mention in APA, which covers news in that Eurasian country. Amusingly, the news service labeled Ward a "Congressman," and included beside the article what I think is a photo of the U.S. House? Senate?
Congress, legislature, it's all the same. Oh well.
Props to Ward for looking beyond Hawaii and offering his perspective on an important international issue.
What's a Blog For?
There's a 6-comment discussion going on over at Poinography regarding the Advertiser blogs, in response to Doug White's recent post about Editor Mark Platte's June 15 column about blogging. For the most part, the comments (all besides mine) are pretty critical of the approach to blogging the Advertiser has taken.
This underscores an interesting and current debate about the purpose of a blog. When I first got to blogging back in high school, blogs were online diaries where you'd post your thoughts, feelings, angry poetry, song lyrics and other gibberish. Flash forward 10 years later and blogs are transforming the media landscape with insider analysis or information posted minutes or seconds after news breaks.
A lot of the Advertiser blogs more closely resemble the online diary model than the Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), Instapundit, Boing Boing or Talking Points Memo models. Which is great, if you're just looking to offer your two cents about cell phones, but annoying if you're looking for something with more, well, substance, or insider info that all of us reporters are supposedly toting around in our pockets. Believe me, if it were THAT interesting, we'd have written about it by now.
Some of the government/politics and business-oriented blogs don't so much follow the diary model as they're written by reporters who know their blog subject intimately. That goes for the sports bloggers, as well. Of course the Advertiser would like to supply readers with more blogs about things they're interested in. But it seems just from the numbers that what readers want isn't always what's most pressing or significant in the grand scheme of things. I'll admit it -- it's puzzling to me when a post I write about slippers gets 10 times as many comments as one Jerry Burris writes about important rumblings in state government.
Let me follow that by saying that I do not begrudge anyone their blog posts about slippers, as reading about Hawaii politics can get depressing.
I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of "meaningless fluff" designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I'll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.
Happy Aloha Friday!
Tags: blogs and new media, health, high school, random
June 20th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Actually, I think "fluff" is what blogs should be for, anyway. The rise in "blogging as reporting news" is disturbing, becase as you very well know 99% of bloggers are not always apt to check the veracity of the news they are repeating. It's like someone emailing their address book about something they heard from someone who was listening to someone gossiping at L&L Drive Inn. In addition--newspaper blogs aside, which I think are regulated--no 3rd party is editing them for content. We have seen reputations (as well as election campaigns) go down the youtubes because of online smearing and false reporting.
If I was a writer by trade I would want more of my stuff in print rather than solely in a blog, because you can't really give someone a URL as your resume. =D
That being said, the blogosphere (I dislike that word) is consistent in its inconsistency, so you never know how things will grow and perhaps one day there will be a generation of kids who will not understand the joke about newspapers 3 colors... white, black and *read* all over.
June 20th, 2008 at 5:40 am
And that preggers thing is disturbing...when I have children I'm going to make my teenage daughters eat kim chi 3 meals a day to ward off the potential suitors!
June 20th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Then the Korean teens will be her best friends.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:02 am
the pregnancy thing is very disturbing. I saw one quote where one of the pregnant girls said their reason (for the pact to get pregnant) was so they could have (and receive?) unconditional love. But one of the new mothers in her class said it is very hard to feel love for a baby screaming at 3:00 in the morning.
At a recent high school state tournament several of the high school girls had dolls that they were "caring for" as part of a school assignment. It makes me wonder if that encourages or discourages them to want to reproduce at a young age. I also wondered if any boys had to take that class.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:03 am
I also read something similar--but both boys and girls carried a 10 bag of flour all around--they certainly learned about parenting! I think the pact came about partly because of how the media glamorizes celebrities such as Jamie Lynn Spears - way too young and pregnant.Teens forget that she has millions of dollars and a supportive family to help her bring that child into the world. Not the reality for most teenage females.
Surprising observation: a small percentage of shoppers at Macy's Children's are under 18 y.o.s buying stuff for (1) their children or (2) a friend's child. And I see a bunch of teenagers with baby strollers in the Mall--kid mom's comparing recent buys,etc.
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:15 am
What I find interesting about blogs that reporters write is what they reveal about the reporter. Or to put it another way, a reporter's blog can reveal the inner workings of a reporter's mind or reveal more of the point-of-view the reporter is coming from.
For example, Miss Fassler, in her list of some of the blogs that are dissimilair to the Advertiser blogs ("What's a blog for?"), has revealed something of herself.
The blogs she listed -- Talking Points Memo, Daily Dish, etc. -- are written by bloggers to the left of the political center (Instapundit is in the center). It's interesting that she didn't mention Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin or Powerline. Those are all conservative blogs.
Just by the simple act of listing blogs with which she is familiar, Miss Fassler has revealed something about herself, mainly the point-of-view she is coming from when she writes (and reports?).
Blogs perform an important (new) function in the world of journalism, and whether the blogs are composed of mainly fluff or juicy tidbits, they are here to stay.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
Timothy,
Yes, but is that a good thing?
-Kim
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
Yes, I think it's a good thing.
If it's not an interesting blog, people will see that quickly and choose to stop reading it (obviously, the same is true for any blog out there).
If it's interesting, insightful, humorous, people will continue to read.
I like that I, a reader, can get to know a reporter/columnist better through what he or she writes about in a blog. I want to know where the reporter is coming from.
I think the days of reporters being these mysterious "neutral" entities who reported the news right down the middle are long gone (if they ever existed to begin with).
In my opinion, anything that lets me get a better glimpse into the mind of the person who is giving me the news, is a good thing.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Timothy,
I beg to differ. In the case of Ms. Fassler's blog I will continute to read it even if it becomes uninteresting, not insightful and dishumurous simple because of the fact that Kim is a BABE!!!