Recent college graduate hits the streets for job search - Roanoke.com:
".... a July graduate from Radford University, has advertised his search using a sign board in downtown Roanoke...
"His degree in social science allows him to do 'pretty much anything'..."

"Allows"? Maybe I'll ask my writing students to come up with a better verb for that sentence, and a list of additional questions and people to interview for the story.

Annals of Alternative J-School Careers...

"Born in Denmark and trained as journalist, Ms. Spiers-Lopez quickly discovered that it would take much longer than she anticipated to obtain a coveted feature writer position. During her years as a reporter, she learned how to think on her feet and get along well with people -- two skills that have served her well in retail."

Rupert Murdoch: Big Man On Campus - Forbes.com:

"Heading back to college this fall? Rupert Murdoch will be waiting. In May, his Fox News subsidiary bought a minority stake in a Web video-based college news network featuring student reporters called Palestra.net. This fall, he'll be ramping up the partnership..."

For more, see "JOE WEASEL Palestra Trusts Young Journalists" from Broadcasting & Cable earlier this summer.

Nope, that's not the cartoon character who used to sell cigarettes. Joe Weasel founded Palestra after working as a on-air journalist for NBC affiliate WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio. He told Forbes he began talking with Fox's local affiliates last week about placing Palestra content on their Web sites around the country.

Hmm. I wonder how Palestra.net and Current.tv will compare... as well as the other student-oriented video sites mentioned in the story...

Police looking for vehicle Obama?

The http://topix.net "local" page for Radford, Va., has a startling lead on a story carrying this headline:

Pedestrian killed, police looking for vehicle - Topix:

The lead:
"Radford, VA August 19, 2008 Pedestrian killed, police looking for vehicle Obama due for campaign double-dip in Virginia Energy a hot topic in local congressional race Jury selection begins tomorrow for Radford capital ..."

It's all the result of some software glitch -- under insufficient adult (human) supervision -- pointing to the actual "Pedestrian..." story at WDJB Channel 7, and apparently picking up other headlines into one garbled "sentence." http://www.wdbj7.com/global/story.asp?s=8864397

But even the pedestrian fatality story alone is wrong. It's from Henry County, which isn't Radford, either.

Who's in charge? Topix news page says the item was "posted by roboblogger."

Time to go back to news written and edited by humans!

College presidents seek debate on lower drinking age;
critics say highway deaths would rise
(AP) via Newsday.com

"College presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus. The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age."

This AP story is something my reporting students should be able to follow up for a local angle next month.

If the Newsday version of the story has "expired" from the archives by then, they should be able to find another copy elsewhere. I hope the Newsday version is still around, though, because it already had 84 comments the day it ran. The readers' comments are or were here. Thanks to the Web, the comments are (or purport to be) from well beyond Newsday's New York circulation area.

The Washington Post version of the story had half that many comments,but since it's an original (not AP), maybe it and its comments will be around longer.

ugig

GlobeSpotting with Steve Hamm OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy - BusinessWeek:
"There's no question that some large governments, including China and India, have felt threatened by the Constructionist philosophy, and they rejected the laptops partly because of it. But I think it would be a major mistake to strip Constructionism from the OLPC package just to make the XO laptop more palatable to some unenlightened governments, which are stuck in the stone ages with the command-and-control educational philosophy."

One Laptop Meets Big Business:
"The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head."
Click headline for full article in Business Week.