Jacob Riis

 Jacob Riis was born on May 3, 1849 in Ribe, Denmark before immigrating to New York in 1870. Riis struggled to find work in New York as he soon found himself begging for food and living in police lodging houses. 

After three years of odd jobs, Riis got a job as a police reporter for the New York Evening Sun working in the most dangerous and impoverished areas of the city. He began to photograph his work in 1888 using the magnesium flash powder which allowed photographs to be captured in little light. Riis is considered to be one of the fathers of modern photojournalism as well as muckraking journalism because of his documentation of the neighborhoods he patrolled. 

Two years later, Riis published a work of photojournalism titled, "How the Other Half Lives" which had been a compilation of his past work over the years. The book opened with his observations of the social and economic situations of different racial and ethnic groups. In addition, his book received attention from then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt who closed the police lodging houses and deemed Riis, "New York's most useful citizen."

Riis also released a follow-up volume to "How the Other Half Lives," titled "Children of the Poor" in 1892 along with his best-selling autobiography, "The Making of an American" among other books. 

Riis's work inspired many including Lincoln Steffens, the man considered to be the godfather of investigative journalism. Steffens argued in his Autobiography published in 1931: "He not only got the news; he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them. He was a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the desperate condition of the tenements where the poor lived. He had exposed them in articles, books, and public speeches, and with results." 

Jacob Riis died in Barrie, Massachusetts on May 26, 1914 at the age of sixty-five. 

The significance of Riis's work exposed the putrid living conditions of the poor to the middle and upper classes using the early adaptions of the flash in photography.     

Outside Sources: 

http://www.nps.gov/gate/historyculture/jacob-riis-biography.htm

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/jacob_riis/index.html

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAriis.htm

Media Participation Project: The Diamondback

Ever since I enrolled in the University of Maryland, I knew that I wanted to write articles for The Diamondback. Not only is The Diamondback an award-winning college newspaper, it is an independent student run newspaper; therefore, the daily news is coming from the perspective of college students.

Therefore, when assigned the Media Participation Project it became my goal to receive an article from The Diamondback. I went to the initial Sunday night meeting located in the South Campus Dining Hall to see the process in acquiring a story as well as the type of news stories that The Diamondback covers. At the meetings, students pitch ideas and then the General Assignment editor Quinn Kelley gives out additional stories as well.

The following Sunday night, I received a story for The Diamondback for their annual Fall Career Guide tab. The story that I wrote was about students who have on-campus jobs. For the story assignment, I interviewed three Maryland students, including Journalism 200's own Caroline Cummings. In addition to interviewing students, I also interviewed Ms. Becky Weir, an assistant director at the University Career Center about the impact and importance of having an on-campus job.

Writing this article gave me a first hand look of the process that journalists go through when reporting. I had a strict deadline and I was responsible for finding all my sources and interviewees.

I truly enjoyed my experience writing a story for The Diamondback and I look forward to writing more stories throughout my years here at the University of Maryland.

Finley Peter Dunne

Finley Peter Dunne was born in 1867 in the west side of Chicago to Irish immigrants. He began his career as a newspaperman in Chicago in 1884, working for six different daily papers including The Chicago Times and The Chicago Tribune, before he settled in as the editor of the Chicago Evening Post in 1892.
It was here where he became famous for his creation of a fictional Irish saloonkeeper by the name of "Mr. Dooley." "Mr Dooley succeeded Dunne's Colonel Malachi McNeery, a fictional downtown Chicago barkeeper who had become a popular Post feature during the World's Fair of 1893"(Fanning). Dunne used Mr. Dooley to comment on news in a satirical manner, often providing readers with 750 word dialogues in a think Irish brogue.
Up until 1898 Mr. Dooley was only known to the Chicago community, however, during the Spanish-American War in 1898, Mr. Dooley's satirical coverage of the war brought him to the attention of people outside of Chicago. It got to the point that by the time Dunne moved to New York in 1900, Mr. Dooley was the most popular figure in american journalism. In 1906 Dunne became the editor of American Magazine, where he worked until 1913. He then proceeded to join the staff of Collier's magazine, eventually becoming the editor in 1917 where he worked until 1919.
Some may consider Finley Peter Dunne to be a journeyman journalist, however, his creation of Mr. Dooley, and his use of him to portray realistic sketches of urban ethnic communities in the late 1800's and early 1900s was pioneering and vital to American journalism.

Information from:

Fanning, Charles. Finley Peter Dunne. Cengage Learning Home Page. Accessed on 30 September 2013.<http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/late_nineteenth/dunne_fi.html>
AND
Ritchie, Donald A. American Journalists: Getting the Story. Oxford University Press. New York. 1997.

Media Participation Project: The Maryland Cow Nipple

For my media participation project, I decided that I wanted to write satirical news and have it published on campus. After talking to a writer for The Diamondback, she expressed that I could possibly start writing columns for them and encouraged me to attend the next meeting. After walking a mile to south campus and quietly standing during the hour long assignments meeting, I approached the editor with my satire pitch only to hear a, "sorry, we don't do that here." 

 

Disappointed, I walked back to The View and began researching possible satirical publications on campus only to stumble upon, The Maryland Cow Nipple, the school's dying satirical newspaper. Although I would definitely be given a smaller audience, I decided to try it out and contact the editor. He informed me of the first meeting as the staff of four met to discuss story ideas. In discussing story ideas, we really had to take a look at the recent trends and current events not only on campus, but also in pop culture. We tried to come up with story ideas that people can relate to and they might find humorous. 

 

The ideas we came up with varied from an article about the inner monologue of a freshman trying to find his class, to President Obama's conflict with Syria using the lyrics of Miley Cyrus. We came to the conclusion that the first issue should be called "The Freshman Issue." 

 

The Freshman Issue will run many stories about the cluelessness, innocence, lack of direction (physically and mentally) of the freshmen class of 2017. After discussing many story ideas, I came up with the notion of a freshman that is hiding in the tree because his parents told him to branch out in college. 

 

Immediately following the meeting, I went back to my room and wrote the article before having the pleasure of reviewing it with the rest of the staff the following week. 

 

So far, I have really enjoyed this experience and plan on continuing to write for The Cow Nipple for the next four years. 

 

At our meetings, just the ability to analyze societal trends, poke fun at pop culture, and depict realistic campus life not only makes for amazing conversation, but will also translate into hilarious articles that everyone can relate to.  

 

 

Thomas Paine

    The daring, dauntless, and ever disputatious Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737 in Thetford, England. His Quaker father made corsets and at thirteen, Paine left grammar school to join his father in apprenticeship. Paine opened his own corset shop Sandwich, England. Paine eventually became a customs official. Collecting taxes gave him a piercing look into how the burden of taxation affected people. He was soon dismissed as a tax collector and his shop failed, making him especially eager to emigrate to America and start a new life.
     He arrived Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Robert Aitken of the Pennsylvania Magazine hired Paine as editor of the publication. Paine did not just limit himself to his role as editor. He also wrote various poems, essays, and political pieces for the magazine using a myriad of pseudonyms.
    Among his works is the famed Common Sense, published in 1776, in which he argued that the British system was not the most perfect government in the world and sought to "rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free." Paine's ability to write in a clear, direct manner made Common Sense, and all of his subsequent pamphlets, accessible to a broader audience. Paine enlisted in the army upon the Declaration of Independence and during his time in the militia, he wrote The Crisis, a series of pamphlets whose purpose was to rally the public's support of the war effort. Paine later found himself in Europe amid the French Revolution where he composed yet another work: The Rights of Man. In The Rights of Man, Paine argued that the American and French Revolutions would lead to a world revolution that would overthrow all monarchies and aristocracies. This work faced staunch criticism and began the dwindling of his once scintillating flame of popularity. He still continued to write, though, publishing The Age of Reason, which he began writing while imprisoned in France. But by the time he published his Letter to George Washington, in which he criticized President Washington for his conservatism, it was too late. What little was left of Paine's popularity in America had now perished.
     Paine died a lonely man with soiled image on June 8, 1809. The New York Citizen so aptly encompassed American's opinions of him in a mere sentence from Paine's obituary: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." He may have died with a tainted image, but his legacy is now held in high regard for he did, indeed, play a significant in the American Revolution. Never did he cease to challenge all forms of tyranny in defense of liberty and freedom from oppression.  Not only that, but he created a new type of political rhetoric that appealed to the masses, a then unprecedented undertaking.

Source:  
-American Journalists by Donald A. Ritchie
-http://www.biography.com/people/thomas-paine-9431951?page=3

Obama's Syria Speech

On Tuesday night President Obama addressed a nation divided on whether or not The United States of America should intervene in Syria. In the speech, Obama made his case for intervening

The one point that really hit home to me was when he discussed the repercussions of not intervening in Syria. Obama made that statement that "if we do not intervene then the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons." This continuing usage of chemical weaponry would create a sort of domino effect among other dictators, who would think it acceptable to use chemical weapons as well. As a result of this domino effect our troops will again be in danger of facing chemical weapons just like they were during WWII.

After reading multiple reactions to Obama's Syria speech, most of the reactions were positive, however, there were a few negative outcomes. I watched a video on CNN where Dem. senator Tom Udall says that he still is not quite sure what exactly the President wants to do by intervening in Syria, even after the speech. This stood out to me primarily because, after watching the speech I felt the same way. So, while the fact that Obama gave the speech is being well received, it didn't seem to answer the major questions about what his goals are.

News Source:
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/politics/2013/09/11/exp-lead-intv-senator-tom-udall-syria.cnn.html

Arunah S. Abell

Arunah S. Abell was born on August 10, 1806 in Rhode Island. His first employment experience was as an apprentice at the Providence Patriot, where he learned the newspaper business and mastered the cast-iron hand press. His most notable accomplishment was his creation of the penny paper along with his other colleagues, Azariah H. Simmons, William M. Swaim, and Benjamin Day. At first he laughed at the idea of selling a penny newspaper to the general public. But Day argued that this paper would cover the ordinary things people wanted to hear about, such as crime, weather, and local oddballs. In 1836, Abell founded the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

In 1837, Abell founded The Baltimore Sun newspaper and the first issue was published on May 17, 1837. It was an independent newspaper, but it leaned towards the ideals of Jacksonian democracy. Abell experienced much adversity in starting up The Sun, considering that Baltimore already had six daily papers and America was still recovering from the Great Depression. But within the first seven months, The Sun had 12,000 daily readers. The Mexican-American War established The Sun as a great paper. Abell created a communications network to New Orleans including steamships, stagecoaches, railways, and telagraph lines. This intricate network aided Abell in discovering the Mexican army’s surrender in the siege of Vera Cruz. Abell is credited with notifying President James K. Polk, before the War Department, that the Mexican army had surrendered and effectively ended the Mexican-American War.

Abell created a newspaper that was successful in ways that other newspapers of the time were not. American newspapers at that time served explicitly as bullhorns for political parties or commercial interests. The newspapers had a target audience in mind: society’s elite. But Abell’s Baltimore Sun was successful in providing its readers with news, whether or not it conformed to Abell’s prejudices. Abell's obsession with getting news the fastest helped make The Sun Baltimore's leading newspaper. 

Sources:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/sun-magazine/bs-sm-arunah-s-abell-20120513,0,5422224.story

American Journalists by Donald A. Ritchie

President Obama's Plan for Syria

President Obama's speech Tuesday night took the two-sided argument inside of every American's head and spelled it out for the American public. Should we intervene in Syria? If we do, we might get caught up in entangling alliances and possibly start another war. Plus, we need to focus on the problems at home: the economy, jobs, education, ect. However, if we don't intervene, what kind of message would we be sending to countries around the world? Are we just going to stand idly by as we let Bashar al-Assad's regime use chemical weapons?

President Obama's key point was that we are not going to simply stand idly by as Assad's regime breaks an international agreement on the banned use chemical weapons. To those who are against intervening in Syria, Obama first stressed the terrible nature of what happened on August 21, and then assured the American people that Syria is not a threat compared to the strength of our military and that of our allies. Furthermore, Obama declared that we are not the world's policeman, yet "we must stop children from being gassed to death."

The media's response to Obama's speech was positive for the most part. According to a CNN poll, 61% of Americans agreed with the president on his plan for Syria. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the American public are optimistic that the situation in Syria will likely be resolved through diplomatic efforts, while the other third disagree. However, if diplomatic effort fail, the American people are divided on whether Obama made a convincing argument for U.S. military action in Syria.

Media Source -> http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-69-of-americans-viewed-obamas-syria-speech-positively-61-favor-his-approach/

William Lloyd Garrison

The journalist I was assigned to write this blog about goes by the name of William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was born on December 10, 1805 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. From a young age he worked as an abolitionist of slavery and even the Union. In fact, Garrison was just thirteen years old when he started working for his first newspaper, the Newburyport Herald, and it was there that he realized writing was his passion. Two years after his apprenticeship with the Newburyport Herald ended, in 1828, Garrison met with antislavery editor of the Genius of Emancipation, Benjamin Lundy. It was then that Garrison was offered the position of editor at the publication, and also joined the American Colonization Society.

            From then on much of Garrison’s work promoted the societal freedom and well being of blacks’ through his critic of the Constitution, his backing of the political views of Abraham Lincoln, and the startup of his own antislavery group called the New England Antislavery Society. Without the work and dedication of William Lloyd Garrison the 13^th amendment, which outlawed slavery in the US, may not have come as quickly as it did after the Civil War ended in 1865. He is an inspiration to all future journalists and people alike in the way that he never gave up on his beliefs even when the majority of the nation was against him. He risked his reputation as a writer and as a person to stick up for what he believed in, and that is what made him so admirable. From his ability to instill the meaning of dedication and pursuit of what you believe in, I too hope to one day be as passionate and forceful with my writing as Garrison was.  

"Our country is the world—our countrymen are mankind." – The motto of The Liberator

Obama on Syria

In President Obama’s address on the subject of Syria this past Tuesday, he made it abundantly clear that the United States, along with 189 other world governments, does not tolerate the use of chemical warfare. He is well aware of our past military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and in no way wants this to turn into a full-blown war. His mission by going into Syria is to notify the Assad-regime of just how wrong chemical warfare is. One statement by the president that really struck a chord with me was when he said

“That's my judgment as Commander-in-Chief.  But I’m also the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.  So even though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress.”

In this statement he never says anything along the lines of  “we’re going into Syria right away and handling this with brute force.” The New York Times even made note of this in their paper on Wednesday September 11^th by saying:

“Mr. Obama did not detail the steps that the United States would demand from Syria as proof that the diplomatic efforts were more than a delaying tactic to avoid a punishing strike from cruise missiles and American bombers.”

Obama's Speech on Syria

In his speech on Tuesday night, President Obama insisted that he, like the majority of Americans, is against starting a war in Syria, but believes that some military action must be taken to protect our allies and national security. He said his plan is to issue a “targeted military strike” as opposed to sending American troops in Syria and starting another war, seeing as he’s spent the last four and a half years ending wars. President Obama said that his goal is not to take down another dictator and deal with the aftermath, just to send a message to Assad that will steer him away from using chemical weapons. His key point is to resolve this issue with as little military action and as much diplomacy as possible.

An article on The Huffington Post quotes Rep. Michele Bachmann as saying, “President Obama’s muddled foreign policy has demonstrated incredible weakness around the world, and his Administration’s handling of the situation in Syria has been stunningly incompetent and incoherent. From the outset, the Obama Administration has failed to articulate an identifiable American national security interest or a clear strategy for success, which is why I remain adamantly opposed to the use of military force in Syria.” 

Attached to the article is a way for readers to vote for their opinion. 4% of the poll takers (48 people) support taking military action, while 96% of the poll takers (1287 people) are opposed to taking military action.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/obama-syria-speech_n_3902146.html

Presidential Address

When President Obama addressed the nation of Tuesday Night, he only spoke for fifteen minutes. One point I took away from the short, but necessary speech, was the issue of morality. President Obama spoke specifically about why we, as a nation, are morally obligated to intervene in Syria. Although it was stated by Mr. President that the United States’ job is not to take on the roll of “world policemen,” we, as human being, are obligated to take a stand when innocent people fall victim. President Obama’s point reiterated the statement that being a bystander and allowing evil to act can be just as morally unjust as committing the evil.

            In response to the speech one Washington Post writer, Chris Cillizza, highlighted a similar “takeaway.” Cillizza described President Obama’s message as, “a moral appeal.” Cillizza agreed that President Obama was arguing for morality and specifically cited President Obama when he said, “when dictators commit atrocities, they depend on the world to look the other way.” Cillizza continued to analyze President Obama’s moral appeal as one aimed at prevention. Cillizza explained that President Obama was insinuating that if we turn a blind eye to the Syrian injustice now, world dictators and terrorist will continue to push farther with what they are able to get away with.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/10/4-takeaways-from-president-obamas-syria-speech/