Although I am currently trying to use articles online as the basis for my posts, I would like to take a moment and just observe something in journalism. It is a trend that I have commonly seen throughout the past few years. This pertains to how many journalists approach their sources for information. Now i will say that although I am personally guilty of this as well, I feel that it should be used as a LAST RESORT and not to be used as something that should be abused or what all college students in their first year tend to use for a late assignment...AN EXCUSE. Too many journalists have talked about the complete revolution of the cell phone. Yes, I will admit it is, by far, one of the most impressive inventions of the 21st century and has continued to make our lives more convient and DEFINATELY more organized. However, the consistency of the cell phone has paved a way for journalists to use TERRIBLE ETHICS and TERRIBLE COMMON PROCEDURE when it comes a time to interview that particular source for an upcoming story. I feel that it ruins that story and all the facts MAY NOT BE THERE. Have many journalists lost their spines! Do too many sports journalists have too many FAN BOY or GIRL MOMENTS when they have to interview a sports player they view as an idol? Are their too many journalists that are SOOO SHY to face their sources without stumbling over their words? Have they no reason to go to a source and SCHEDULE with them on the phone a TIME AND PLACE to meet up and get the facts. NO. Many are referring to their cell phones via emailing, text and also (YES to a degree) standard talking in order to get, from what i see as, a hap hazard interview. 

Now many would look at me and say a few choice words. They would try to persuade me by saying that if we have the technology, use it (strange, I thought there was always an abuse phrase in that quote). Technology is great and we use it in SO MANY different ways in journalism for photos, crafting a newspaper's structure, building a website, video and audio editing....and yes writing the story. I will offer a solution to people who REALLY want to use their cell phone for an interview...how about using a webcam program that is built into the camera in order to FACE THE SOURCE? YES IT IS TRUE. Most very high tech cell phones today have webcams built into them to make this possible. Computers also have them built in. But if you are not within your budget to afford one of these devices that has one built, you could always buy one for your computer. Believe it or not, I saw a standard one at a Walgreens being sold for 25 dollars. Here is an interesting fact, according to CNBC.com (see link at the bottom of the page), nearly HALF, thats right a HALF MILLIONS homes in the UNITED STATES alone have apple products that range from ipads, Mac computers, ipods and iphones. A ton of people have a way of talking to each others...it seems to make the possibilites of talking to a source(s) endless. 

But when i see more reporters TWEETING about how they just got off the phone for an interview that took only 10 MINUTES, thats right 10 minutes; that can mean only a couple things to me. One, the interview was too structured and they just wanted the "simple" quote. Or two, the interviewee was not very exciting and much like the journalist, they both just wanted to get the interview "done and over with." Its funny cause most of these Tweets I mentioned came from acclaimed journalists that work in the Tampa Bay area for ACCLAIMED NEWS STATIONS AND PAPERS. 

The reason I post this is because when read how some journalists are using tactics that I was taught in school not to use...it makes me feel how much i think I might have gotten cheated out. When my professors say it is not okay and others are saying that it is; WHO IS RIGHT IN THIS SITUATION? My professors, who have their masters and doctorates for a REASON, or a journalist that uses techniques that may not always deliver the best story; but one to just get the job done and get paid? Here is my opinion. As a journalist, the way I have always seen it is this: When you enter a field such as this, you are required to do one thing I have always felt. YOU MUST FACE YOUR SOURCE. Study their face movements, study how they react when you ask them a question that might be hard for them to answer, or even consider looking at how they react to you asking them a question that may be too personal. All of theses movements and directives can either help you build a basis on how your story is going to go or maybe how you are going to change it and make it something totally different. 

Please I would love to hear your comments, post below.
Brad 

Link:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46857053/Apples_Are_Growing_in_American_Homes

Today, the town of Mayberry has lost one of its most beloved members. It was a man that would walk the streets and make you feel right at home. He had many names from Andy Taylor to Ben Matlock. But for millions of Americans he will always be known as Andy Griffith. Everyday when we would turn on our televisions and listen to that wistling theme song we always knew we were in for a great story as well as good times. From Aunt Bee serving one of her famous pies around the dinner table for desert to Opie telling Andy a life lesson he just learned today, Andy Griffith seemed to have an impact on us cause well....he is one of the last true American story Icons from television. It is amazing to think now that he is gone, how one man truly changed the american sitcom. In these times where we are trying to find a superhero in the form of a demi god, a metal man, an angry green monster and a super soldier, the true american hero was the one trying to get his family through a day while trying not break a sweat. Seems impossible right? Well somehow Andy Taylor (Griffith) was able to do such while playing the "pseudo" hero, a law enforcement officer in the town. He swore to protect and serve like the superheros we see in the movies today. And as we near the fourth of July, where we not only remember our day of Independence, we remember the men and women that fought to give us that independence. They are the heros. The people we look up to, the people we remember. Its funny, he played two people of law within his career. Not just Andy Taylor, but as Ben Matlock, a very unique lawyer that put away the criminals in the courtroom but had a unique way of putting a case together; along with solving it. Both men, played by one man, did such great work. So today on this Independence day remember the heros in the many possible forms and ways that they have changed the world and helped influence us. 

As with all of my posts i like to place the facts in my blog posts so that way I can look back on the facts, read them and know that they are there. Yes, sometimes I have to remind myself that this has really happened and that not just you know the information but many other sites
 around the internet. So here it is, straight off the presses: 

Los Angles Times 

Andy Griffith passing: TV's pioneers fading into history
By Rene LynchJuly 4, 2012, 8:28 a.m

With Andy Griffith's passing, America loses one of its last living links to the early days of television.

"This is a big one," pop culture expert Robert J. Thompson said. "Andy Griffith was just one person. But he's symbolic of that era. With his death, the early days of television have receded into history and the stuff of museums, and directors' commentary on DVD."

To be sure, there are a few icons left who can speak about the start of traditional commercial network programming back in 1948, such as Dick Van Dyke and Sid Caesar.


But that generation has pretty much disappeared now," said Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "If you want to learn about that time, you just can't call people up who were involved with it anymore."

Thompson said  "The Andy Griffith Show," which ran from 1960 to 1968, is easily one of the best shows -- if not the single best -- ever on TV.

"If I were to make a list of the greatest shows on TV, you've got 'Your Show of Shows,' and  'I Love Lucy' and so on," he said. "But at the very top of that heap I would put 'The Andy Griffith Show.' That, to me, is one of the most exquisitely executed series of all time."

PHOTOS: Celebrities react to death of Andy Griffith

But the biggest compliment, Thompson said, is that the show stands the test of time.

"If you watch that show today, I swear that thing goes down as smoothly now as it went down half a century ago," he said. "If you watch one or two [episodes], it's really hard not to get sucked in."

Thompson suggests trying to seek out the first season of the show. Viewers might be surprised to find Griffith playing the role of a small town sheriff named Andy Taylor with more of a goofball bent. But it soon became clear that the show's ensemble cast was the perfect showcase for the comic genius of Don Knotts, who played Taylor's deputy, Barney Fife.

Now, Griffith could have tried to compete with Knotts -- after all, the show was called "The Andy Griffith Show." But, Thompson said, Griffith was wise enough to step back and let Knotts shine.

In the end, it served both men's careers handsomely.

"Andy became more of the straight man," Thompson said. "Andy had the modesty and the intelligence as an actor to adjust.... That made his character such a paternal, fatherly, likeable, warm, fuzzy character, and that's why people responded so much to that show and that role."

Hey Everyone, just as something to start adding to my blog, I wanted to show certain articles that I have found on the internet I see as interesting, awesome and also intillictually  stimulating with certain thoughts to think about. We have all hear of particle accelerators being the doorway to understanding our future and also putting together the pieces of our past and how in someways existance came to be on the terms of science (no religion input here, sorry just the facts for now). So when I found this article, I thought of it as a good place holder to start, a place of hope and a place that well....I can begin. Scientists have discovered a footprint that the "God Particle" does exist. Yes this is the same "God Particle" that we have all read about in school and in Dan Brown's 2000 novel Angels and Demons. We were able to view the massive and immense destruction seen in the 2009 Ron Howard film of the same name, where it not only caused damage to the Vatican, but it also made many believers from the many on going spectators in the movie theater. So for all the progress that has been made in science with understanding our origins in the universe, enjoy something to read, have an open mind, and just consider this...although a "one" book says it does have the answers and has not changed for thousands of years....our own science and history books continue to change with answers. Isn't it time that we accept that our understanding is never going to be concrete and never complete.  From the Associated Press, enjoy the read. 

Jul 2, 6:49 PM EDT

APNewsBreak: Evidence of 'God particle' found

By JOHN HEILPRIN and SETH BORENSTEIN 
Associated Press

GENEVA (AP) -- Physicists say they have all but proven that the "God particle" exists. They have a footprint and a shadow, and the only thing left is to see for themselves the elusive subatomic particle believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape.

Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have nearly confirmed the primary plank of a theory that could restructure the understanding of why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight.

The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's discovery: It was there all the time before Newton explained it. But now scientists know what it is and can put that knowledge to further use.

The focus of the excitement is the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle long sought by physicists.

Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say that they have compiled vast amounts of data that show the footprint and shadow of the particle, even though it has never actually been glimpsed.

But two independent teams of physicists are cautious after decades of work and billions of dollars spent. They don't plan to use the word "discovery." They say they will come as close as possible to a "eureka" announcement without overstating their findings.

"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, `It looks like a discovery,'" said British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."

CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started.

Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: "Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery," and he thinks it is a hair's breadth away. Roser compared the results that scientists will announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: "You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don't actually see it."

Fermilab, whose competing atom smasher reported its final results Monday after shutting down last year, said its data doesn't settle the question of the Higgs boson, but it came tantalizingly close.

"It's a real cliffhanger," said Gregorio Bernardi, a physicist at the University of Paris who helped lead one of the main experiments at Fermilab. He cited "strong indications of the production and decay of Higgs bosons" in some of their observations.

Fermilab theorist Joseph Lykken said the Higgs boson "gets at the center, for some physicists, of why the universe is here in the first place."

Though an impenetrable concept to many, the Higgs boson has until now been just that - a concept intended to explain a riddle: How were subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves formed? What gives them their mass?

The answer came in a theory first proposed by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. It envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.

The idea is that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. Some liken the effect to a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.

Officially, CERN is presenting its evidence this week at a physics conference in Australia but plans to accompany the announcement with meetings in Geneva. The two teams, known as ATLAS and CMS, then plan to publicly unveil more data on the Higgs boson at physics meetings in October and December. Each of the teams involves thousands of people working independently to ensure accuracy.

The scientific threshold for discovery is high. Scientists have to show with complex formulas that there's a less than 1 in 1.7 million chance that the findings are a statistical fluke. With two independent experiments showing that there's less than 1 in 16,000 chance of being wrong, it's a matter of how their work is put together.

Scientists with access to the new CERN data say it shows with a high degree of certainty that the Higgs boson may already have been glimpsed, and that by unofficially combining the separate results from ATLAS and CMS it can be argued that a discovery is near. Ellis says at least one physicist-blogger has done just that in a credible way.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday that he would be "very cautious" about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data.

"Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday." he said.

But if the calculations are indeed correct, said John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the book "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," then it is fair to say that "in some sense we have reached the mountaintop."

Sean M. Carroll, a California Institute of Technology physicist flying to Geneva for Wednesday's announcement, said that if both ATLAS and CMS have independently reached these high thresholds on the Higgs boson, then "only the most curmudgeonly will not believe that they have found it."

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Borenstein reported from Washington.

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