Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘addyindy’

Jan 8

2 Comments

Life Skills: Developing Your Media Mix

Read all “Life Skills” posts.

This post is by George Altshuler ’11. George, a former lead editor of MiddBlog, just finished an internship with Tikkun magazine in Berkeley, Ca. He’s now living in San Francisco and teaching English at San Quentin State Prison.

Creative Commons / B.K. Dewey

The cliché you hear the most about our demographic’s news consumption is that we get all our news from The Daily Show.  Just to clear up any potential inter-generational confusion: this cliché is most often employed as a genial criticism by people who think we should get serious every morning with our coffee and a New York Times dead-tree edition.

Contrary to the criticism in this cliché, however, most people in our demographic care about the news and do follow it.  But we also understand that we live in an era in which the Daily Show is a good source for news and the paper New York Times is increasingly obsolete (unless you can wrestle one way in Proctor).  In this era, the news doesn’t literally arrive on one’s doorstep, and it’s important to be proactive about finding ways to follow the news.

One starting point for following the news in this digital age is to understand how this era of turbulence for journalism actually makes this a great time to be a consumer of news.  The decline of traditional media (newspapers have lost half their revenue in the past five years) and the advent of new technologies have opened the door to a myriad new news sources and tools for distributing the news.  And, for now at least, traditional journalism still exists. The key to being a good news consumer is learning to take advantage of all that is being offered to us.

In this first of three posts on keeping up with the news, I’ll provide suggestions for assembling your Media Mix — the different types of sources you’l need to successfully follow the news:

  •  It’s good to have at least one source that works like the front page of a major newspaper by assigning importance to stories and exposing you to important stories you may not have otherwise found. Traditional news websites like The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post work well in this role.  Aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum that use algorithms to find and feature the internet’s most popular stories are another option. Read more

Mar 7

News highlights 2/28-3/7

The Campus 3/3

  • Where are they now? Squabbling.  A feature on two Midd alums who have started Squabbler, a site that allows people to take their disagreements online.  From US intervention in Libya to whether orange juice should have pulp, debates are posted in video form, and the hive mind gets to make comments and vote on who’s right. One of the former MiddKids is the same brilliant person who founded Awkward Family Photos.
  • WRMC. Another fantastic feature, all about the history and ambiance of Midd’s radio station. Especially interesting to me were the comments on the station’s former status as a huge news provider.
  • Mmmmmm. The Grille will now be open 7 days a week! David Cannistra, Midd’s new general manager of retail foods, discusses the strategy of keeping the Grille Grilling.

The Addison County Independent

  • The results are in.  Following up on a story we mentioned in our last post, the AddyIndy sums up all the decisions from Addison County’s recent Town Meeting Day. Hyper-local coverage at its most thorough.
  • Healthcare from the horse’s mouth. Wendell Potter, a former big-name healthcare exec, quit his job in 2008 and started working against and reporting on the industry’s biggest failures. The local paper interviewed him after a talk at Burlington’s City Hall.
  • Large farms feel left out. A group of Addison County farmers, mostly dairy farmers with relatively large operations, took their concerns about being ignored in recent ag reform efforts to Montpelier. Issues discussed include GMOs, job creation, and pollution management.

Midd Blogs

  • Om nom nom. Wow! What began as a J-term independent project has turned into an awesome resource: two students visit, photograph and review local restaurants. Fantastic work.
  • Tim Spears and Tim Parsons want to know what you think about the proposed facelifts to the space between the two sets of Atwater Suites. The “Turf Battle” proposals are all there. One is called “The Garden of Scholarly Delights.”
  • Treehugging. The Arbor Day Foundation named Midd an official “Tree Campus” for its “excellence in campus tree management.”

Sep 13

2 Comments

Yes, she cans

In her latest blog post about her pastoral handwork, Middlebury alumna Jessie Raymond ’90 declares that “canning may be [her] new thing.”  Jessie blogs about the hobbies (and sense of humor) that distract her from cleaning her house in the Middlebury area. Her distractions are pretty darn close to my pipe-dream of an ideal lifestyle for when I’m all grown up and familial (insert telecommunication to that homestead utopia, and we’re all set). In addition to canning updates, her latest post features pigs, a cabinet paint job, some knitting and chickens turkeys:

From "What Housework?"

When she’s not blogging (and actually taking care of her household), Jessie writes a humor column for the Addison Independent (full disclosure: I worked for the paper this summer). Jessie’s column has won all-New England awards and I think Bill McKibben is right to say that it should be “syndicated around the country.”

In addition to being funny, Jessie’s reality-based life also, I think, offers some good food for thought, especially for us current Midd-kids. Check out one of her older essays about adjusting to (real) Vermont life from the perspective of a Midd alum:

As I have grown closer to [her native-Vermonter husband] Mark ’s family, I’ve come to understand that they tease me not because they resent me for being a flatlander [or an out-of-stater], but because they like me in spite of it; they know I can’t help it. And I have to admit that my lack of hands-on skills does make me poorly suited to many aspects of Vermont life. I was not raised in a world where I had to fend for myself. Yes, I went to college in Vermont. But that didn’t prepare me to live here.

But I think her farm indicates that she’s doing just fine at living here now:

From "What Housework?"

Sep 26

Staples OK’d for Middlebury

From the AddyIndy:

“The Middlebury Development Review Board (DRB) on Monday gave its final, conditional approval to a proposed Staples store in The Centre/Hannaford shopping plaza off Route 7 South.

Developers, however, will have much work to do if they are to proceed with their plans for the 14,737-square-foot office supplies store.”