Professor Selvin is an awesome professor of journalism who loves her students and doesn’t want to fail them (especially me) =)

In case you don’t have the distinguished honor of knowing her, here is some basic information:

• She LOVES grammer (almost as much as she loves her MWF 301 class)
• She used to work at Newsday
• She was the first full time professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism
• She teaches many JRN 110, 111, 210 and 211.
• She loves the show Lost

Professor Selvin rocks.

Here is the blurb written about her on the School of Journalsim website:

Barbara Selvin became the first full-time professor in the School of Journalism in January 2007, following seven years as an adjunct in the university’s journalism minor program. She has also taught journalism at Queens College and Hofstra University.At Stony Brook, Selvin teaches beat reporting and news writing. She created a grammar lab for the school’s introductory reporting class and is developing a quantitative literacy lab that will train journalism students to use numbers authoritatively. She inaugurated the school’s Journalism 24/7 course, which examines the impact of the digital revolution on journalism and journalists.

In 2005, Selvin was recognized as one of the university’s top teachers when she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching as Part-Time Faculty.

For seven years, Selvin directed a high school summer journalism workshop in the City University of New York system that inspired dozens of students to pursue journalism in college and beyond.

Before she became a journalism educator, Selvin was a reporter for Newsday and New York Newsday. At the New York paper, she covered economic development, commercial real estate and housing and wrote a biweekly real estate column. She spent a year writing about health-care reform, medical research and sexuality for the paper’s health and science desk on Long Island.

After graduating from SUNY-Binghamton with a bachelor’s degree in English, Selvin began her reporting career at weekly newspapers on Long Island. She earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983, where she received the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and worked for a year at The Advocate in Stamford, Conn., before joining New York Newsday.

Her freelance work has been published in Newsday, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and business and health-care magazines.

In case you guys haven’t figured it out yet… go to Stony Brook!

I don’t like this. Even with music iTunes has its flaws. People have been going around iTunes and illegally downloading music for their iPods since they have been around, the news would be no different. People are already rebelling against paying for online news, this will just intensify it. People will continue to find loopholes on the internet to get the news they are looking for. If that becomes too difficult, it won’t be long before pirating sites are created to get the news stories desired.

I think it is going to take more to save the industry then iTunes.

Recently a famous composer, Maurice Jarre passed away. In a tribute to his legacy many people began looking at his wikipedia entry to learn more about him. What they didn’t know was that an Irish student had made up a quote that Jarre had never said and posted it to the page. Many newspapers around the world then proceeded to print the quote in their obituaries.

This just goes to show you, don’t always trust wikipedia! If you don’t see what you read on that site anywhere else, be wary of using it as a fact. As for the journalists who re-printed the quote from wikipedia, shame.

The Wave is a good example of a local paper that is surviving in the temporary failing phase of journalism. It does what it can to keep its readers interested by maintaining the old time feel of  a classic newspaper and yet still keeping up enough with the modern journalism practices through their website.

1) You aren’t necessarily getting news, I know you think you are, but you aren’t. To the common eye these sites are giving you information that is being presented as fact. The problem is that many of the things they are telling you may not be true. To the trained eye, like a journalist, or someone who has taken News Literacy at Stony Brook University, (yes Dean Schneider, we were listening) it is easy to spot the actual news from the fabricated or misreported news. More often then not blogs are confused for news. If blogs were easily separated from news it wouldn’t be a big deal, but many times the blogs come up higher on the list from aggregated sites then the actual stories. If you go to Google News and type in a topic, chances are that you will get a page full of blogs before you get the single story that these blogs are linking off from, which is absurd. The bloggers don’t have the reporting skills or information to accurately report the stories that they are reporting as facts on a day to day basis, and yet, they are getting higher hits because readers are getting them from aggregates and confusing them for true.

2) Someone needs to pay journalists! Okay so I’m a little bit biased here because I’m a journalism major, but come on people help us out! All of the stories that you are reading from your RSS feeds and aggregates are not being paid for! They are being taken from other places on the web and presented to you without the authors permission. Often times, they don’t even know their pieces are being spread. If you are a surgeon, you probably want to be paid for performing a surgeon. Journalists want to be paid and recognized for their work too, they don’t necessarily want untrained bloggers tearing up their every story and massacring it. It isn’t logical nor does it make sense. A new system needs to be developed here.

TIME for KIDS focuses on kids. It is a pull out of the standard TIME magazine and gives elementary school children age appropriate articles from around the world. Many students who read TIME for KIDS as kids grow up to read TIME. Their website has worksheets and teachers aids to improve the understanding of the news these kids are reading.

Channelone News is aimed more at high school students and is more broadcast news. Televisions are placed in the schools and every morning the broadcasts are sent to the school. They show important stories from around the world but do a good job in localizing the news so that students feel like they are a part of it and not just watching it, like doing video highlights of the top highschool sports clips from around the country for the week.

Children who understand the news are more likely to continue reading it.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health website, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat. This disease effects journalists every day and many of them don’t even realize it.

Imagine standing outside of a different fire once a week for a year. You watch countless people die. Scores of people get hurt. Grieving families losing everything they own. It is bound to have an effect on everyone around, journalists included.

Mike Walter, a 25-year veteran Washington broadcast reporter and anchor is attempting to show the connection between Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and journalists in a new 36-minute documentary titled “Breaking News, Breaking Down.”

It is important for people to understand the horrors journalists can see every day.