It seems completely counter-intuitive to send study abroad students to a completely different place for their first week of orientation, only to shuttle them off to a completely new town with completely new family.
It’s paramount to doubling the culture shock, antithetical to IFSA’s promise of “More culture. Less shock.”
But, by George, it works. Transition to university has been easier than I could have imagined, no small thanks to my time in Liberia.
washingtonpost.com front page, Aug. 5, 2013
The Washington Post announced this afternoon that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will buy the venerable paper and a number of other Post Co. newspapers for $250 million.
For any D.C. denizen, and for journalists across the world, this will come as a shock with a mix of apprehension.
I’m most certainly in that camp. Granted, it’s not surprising that The Post would need drastic change to survive the Internet age, like other newspapers across the country.
But the fact that the Graham family would sell the paper, and to the guy who founded Amazon to boot, seems just a little bizarre.
But let’s put this deal in perspective. The reporters and editors of The Post will still produce incredible journalism. All of the top management people are staying, including Katharine Weymouth, the fourth generation installment of the Graham family, who has owned The Post for 80 years. Bezos said he won’t even be involved in the day-to-day workings of the newspapers he just bought. And to clarify, Bezos is the sole owner of The Post, not Amazon. It seems The Post’s tradition of proprietary ownership is alive and well.
The Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I’m extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on.
– Jeff Bezos
Who owns the company won’t change the paper’s reporting excellence.
Especially over the past four decades, The Washington Post has earned a worldwide reputation for tough, penetrating, insightful, and indispensable journalism. With the investment by Mr. Bezos, that tradition will continue.
-Katharine Weymouth
To be blunt, not all of Bezos’s investments have worked (see Pets.com and Kozmo.com).
However, according to the Washington Post:
Amazon’s sales have increased almost tenfold since 2004 and its stock price has quadrupled in the past five years.
It’s easy to see why. Bezos founded a company that has revolutionized more than one media industry. Just think about “Earth’s Largest Bookstore,” the Kindle, Kindle Singles (Amazon’s own brand of journalism).
In naming Bezos its “Businessperson of the Year” in 2012, Fortune called him “the ultimate disrupter…[who] has upended the book industry and displaced electronic merchants” while pushing into new businesses, such as TV and feature film production.
People much smarter and more well-informed than I will bring new facts to light and new analysis over the next few days. Take those predictions, and my own, on the future of D.C.’s hometown paper with a grain of salt. If somebody had the secret potion to make journalism profitable, we haven’t heard from them.
I’m optimistic that Jeff Bezos is just what The Post and affiliated newspapers need to thrive, not just survive.
Full disclosure: I am a daily print subscriber to The Post as well as an avid Kindle user, despite that one time Amazon failed to send me a book after I paid for it (don’t worry, I got a refund).
Sources
I’ve been asked a lot recently — by friends in the U.S., by American friends in Costa Rica, by Costa Rican friends in Costa Rica — why I’m continuing my internship at PBS MediaShift while studying abroad at la Universidad Nacional.
It’s a two-pronged answer, one answer more honorable than the other.
Adweek was right: “bone-crushing 6 minutes of awesome.”
Google Glass could have a transformative effect on journalism, especially as we watch Tim Pool from VICE use Google Glass to report on Turkish protests. But it’s important to examine the shortfalls as well as all the great new advancements, both real and prophesied. Special guests Rackspace’s Robert Scoble, Veterans United’s Sarah Hill, CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis and USC Annenberg’s Robert Hernandez, all early adopters of Google Glass as well as social media and journalism experts, will talk about their experiences with the device and what they see as its strengths and weaknesses for its potential future in journalism. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser hosts, along with Ana Marie Cox from the Guardian and Andrew Lih from American University.
Watch or listen to the podcast here, and tune in every Friday at 10:30 a.m. PT / 1:30 p.m. ET.
Despite all the advances in location-based computing and smartphones, so far there has been very little done to take advantage of these technologies when it comes to the news we consume — in part because none of the traditional media companies have put much effort into it. But now one major news provider is experimenting with exactly that: according to a report at Quartz, Google (s goog) is testing a local news product as part of its Google Now service.
Christopher Mims, a writer with the Atlantic Media-owned business news site, says a Google staffer mentioned the beta test of location-based news during an interview with him recently about what new search products the company was working on, including aspects of its Google Now service. According to Johanna Wright, vice president of search and assist:
“One thing we’re testing right now is a very local hyper-local news card, which…
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Non-profit newsrooms, and the organizations that fund them, stand to gain a great deal by knowing the impact of their reporting on local communities.
But impact is not easy to compute, according to a recent report from the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.
“There is a discussion that has been going on now for a few years … There’s still not a complete consensus,” said Chuck Lewis, co-author on the study. He is the founding executive editor of the non-profit IRW, the largest university-based reporting center in the country.
Zach C. Cohen 