Because nobody else appreciated it as much as me when it happened, I wanted to share this quick tid-bit with my blog readers, most will get the humor.

Someone was showing me a jib-jab video where local candidates’ heads were set to a night of the living dead/republicans/democrats storyline. It was funny. It was also randomly posted as a single blog entry on a blog that was apparently created solely for that purpose, with no other posts or information on it.

So I asked, “Who made it?” figuring, even though I didn’t see any obvious bio or anything, the person showing me might know because obviously someone had shared it with them.

Then they said something that made me both want to laugh and cry: “Whoever Adam is.”

And, not seeing a name, I was like, “Adam?” And told them to click the name to see if there’s a profile.

They click the link at the bottom of the page, which brought up the Atom feed. Atom not Adam. I explained what that was, to a few eye rolls from the peanut gallery.

I don’t have anything profound to say today, but there are several random things floating around my head that I figured I may as well share. Feel free to add your own. This could be a fun game.

• UPDATE, I forgot the most important lesson of today. What happens when you go to make cop calls and get a busy signal. You hang up and finish calling the rest and then head back to the busy number? What happens when that number still rings busy. And half an hour later? Still busy. So, then you call the city (housed in the same building), and guess what, it’s busy? Well, I decided something was up. But since I couldn’t just call down there to find out, I did what any enterprising, curious reporter would do. I walked there and found the IT director. Something was majorly up, apparently there was a huge statewide phone outage. Our police, city and the two city school districts both went without phone service until about 3 p.m. as did several other businesses in our community. Just goes to show, there really will never be a true replacement for face-to-face, shoe-leather reporting. There’s no way I could have worked that story through the phones.
• Over the past few weeks I’ve done two different stories involving outages with two different phone companies. In light of this, I really think phone companies need to evaluate their media relations. Neither of the phone companies made it easy to a) locate a media representative, b) locate any live person, c) get a phone number that didn’t start with 1-800 and end with my hanging up after getting stuck in a loop of computer mis-guided menus. To sum up my editor’s response to the first of these stories, “The phone company doesn’t have a phone number on its site?!” And then a laugh and attempt to prove me wrong, as if I would seriously admit both my computer savvy and Google prowess had let me down without first ensuring it was worth throwing in the towel. I’m just saying. In both cases, I now have the phone number, name and e-mail of the person I need to talk to should anything else arise. But why make it so difficult?
• I learned a new word today: akimbo. Apparently it means to put your hands on your hips and bend your elbows. (Think annoyed teenage girl yelling, “But mooooommmm!”) I’m only including this here because I told my editor I would blog about the new word I learned. lol. He used it to describe the “sassy” pose one of the girl’s auditioning for the Purdue Play Boy edition had in her photo.
• This story, which I first saw on Romensko (and first commented on in my education tumblelog — which is off to a good start, thanks for asking) makes me nervous about ever writing about the ISTEP or other major tests. The reporter wrote a light feature about the testing and inadvertently included the essay topics that many students hadn’t yet written about! Now all the kids have to retake the test. Although, reading his explanation, I’d have to say I do understand he didn’t know he couldn’t include the topics — and really he shouldn’t have been let in the classroom and the teachers and administrators should have flagged it for him not to repeat test questions. Still, I’m not sure I like his defense. I think he’s trying to point fingers by his blog post, and really what it boils down to is, yeah, that’s hella embarrassing and really messes with a lot of kids, but take responsibility and go ahead and say, “I screwed up.” Not doing so is just as embarrassing.
• I have decided that while I could work the 6 a.m. shift, as in I am capable of waking up, getting dressed and being at work to start posting and picking up cops stuff from overnight, I reaaallly don’t envy the guys who have that regular shift. Yes, it would be nice to have a set shift that didn’t fluctuate from 8 to 4 through 3 to 11 virtually every day depending on meetings and assignments, and getting off (theoretically) at 2 p.m. is so appealing. But if a wonky schedule and a few late nights a week is the price to pay for getting to work during daylight hours, it’s worth it for now. I am way too tired to actually do anything with the rest of today. And as I told the business reporter when he came in at 7:30 a.m., I’m too young to be up at 6 a.m.
• That’s all I can think of for now.

Last year about this time, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions by the time it was all said and done) of college students protested the addition of the news feed to Facebook.

Since then, there’ve been mere ripples as the site was opened to our parents and bosses. Barely a peep was made as external applications were added forcing us to constantly ignore requests to be bitten by a vampire or take quizzes about our friends. Now we’re asked to declare our top friends and scroll for ages down our BFFs profile because he/she added so many applications that reading their wall (not the super wall or wiki wall or advanced wall) now requires you to hold down the down arrow and wait — for a long time — to eventually reach the bottom where the old-school wall has been relegated.

Now, I’m not saying these additions are horrible. They aren’t. Not all of them at least. Some are fun, some make it more useful. Others are annoying. I guess as long as it doesn’t degenerate into MySpace, I can live with the changes.

One change, however, that caught my eye when I logged in today was this:

Yes my friends, per Facebook, we may soon be Googleable. Where’s the backlash on that from all the privacy-protecting college students who a year ago freaked that their friends would know when they added a new favorite movie?

Clicking on Read more…

Since your search privacy settings are set to “Everyone,” you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren’t yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.

In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook. Learn More.

OK. Fine. I don’t care that people know I’m on Facebook. I don’t have anything to hide, a few of my editors are even my friends on Facebook. I wouldn’t have my privacy set to being searchable by everyone if I cared. Several old friends have found me through this feature, which is why I leave it on. But I don’t know, I’m somewhat leery about the idea of anything Facebook being searchable through Google, etc. I know, I know. The privacy settings are the same. I can up them at any time, or I could just sign off the site all together. I won’t over this, but I do think that they’re chipping away, bit by bit, at our tolerance. One day I’m going to wake up and this will be the top hit when you search for my name in any search engine.

The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

Fine. But, I’m still not sure mixing job-hunting and Facebook is a good idea. Check out this release from CareerBuilder.

But, what do I know?

Only the Wall Street Journal could take beer pong and make it this classy.

It’s been awhile since I’ve actually sat down with a print edition of WSJ (except the occasional items pointed out by the county reporter whose father bought him a print subscription for his birthday — hey my parents aren’t that thoughtful!). But I do get the CollegeJournal e-mails every day. Mostly it’s recent stories or Q&As from the WSJ. But it’s free and targeted pretty much to my demographic: soon-to-be grads and recent grads setting out in their jobs as new young professionals. I dig that.

My favorite part of the story — other than reading about young people capitalizing on the interests of other young people, (hey why not?) — is the accompanying graphic. I imagine a CEO sitting behind his desk, reading the paper and studying the inner workings of beer pong. That thought makes me smile.

They also have a video (though the audio on it is really wonky, at least it came across that way for me?). I had to watch the video because I wanted to see how you could create a video about beer pong that wasn’t like made for YouTube/Facebook. But, again, there they go making the drinking game classy.

I’m always a little creeped out when someone ends up here at Meranda Writes by googling my full name. I mean, yes, I Google people several times a day. But the idea of someone else googling me creeps me out. There was a hit from this weekend that was just a google search for “meranda watling.” Curious, I clicked through to see if there was anything interesting that pops up.

On the third page, I saw this post:

High School Awards Student with a Car - Associated Content
Meranda Watling, “Perfect attendance key to a big reward.” Journal & Courier URL: (http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? …
www.associatedcontent.com/article/257564/high_school_awards_student_with_a_car.html

I was confused because at no time have I ever written anything for Associated Content. I’ve seen their postings on job sites and such before. I always thought it was a scam, and was never really desperate enough to do it. I don’t know what it is or isn’t. But I do know this “article” is bad. Basically, it took the quotes, details and background from my story. Padded it a bit with context (where Benton Central is, etc.) gleaned, judging by the “sources” listed at the bottom, with some info off the school’s Web site. What the heck?

I’ve posted before about how I find it interesting to watch a story go out on the AP wire and how everyone handles it differently, sometimes reworking, sometimes adding and deleting content, sometimes localizing, etc. I’ve also been asked to “localize the AP story” or “write through with local reaction” on a wire story. You know, find local people affected by this trend, or replace people elsewhere with someone here, or use this to build a bigger enterprise piece off, or whatever. But we always credit the wire, whether it’s a double byline or a Contributing tag (for our reporter or for the AP/GNS reporter, depending on how much was local and how much was wire) or a simple “STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS.”

This Associated Content story here does say “According to the Journal & Courier” several times and credit the original article at the bottom as a source. But I’m not sure that story is in the spirit of either the AC Web site or of fair use. It’s not like there’s original reporting, or this was localizing a trend, or that they are a sister paper or member of the AP. It’s watering down and repackaging what I wrote into a boring story.

I took a look at the author’s article list to see if this was her normal practice. I’m really not familiar with Associated Content, so i don’t know what’s “normal” and what’s not. This person could be the exception or the norm. I don’t know, and this is the first author’s list I’ve looked at.

What I saw was there were a lot of articles I skimmed to see how much was reporting and how was just speculation/rehashing others. I quickly skimmed a few other authors to see if this was a trend. Here’s an article about getting a truly vegan tattoo, which is an interesting topic, but I’m wondering where the writer got her information or inside knowledge. Then there was this article about a dog sinking a car, which seemed to be like the story someone rewrote of mine, a mere rehash of an AP story on USA Today that was a rewrite from the Spokesman-Review story.

The best way to sum up what I saw was that it was a lot like a middle school term papers. You know, your teachers are still worrying about mechanics and are less worried about making sure you appropriately cite sources. So, it becomes common knowledge how many couples will wed on 07/07/07 or you become an expert on whether to take your child to a funeral or how to make them value their education. Either that, or you’re an all-knowing genius. I’m willing to bet it’s neither, and the sourcing and citing is just really spotty.

The bigger question I have about all this is: Do the readers notice or care? Do they hold these “citizen journalists” to a lower standard or could we slip by with half the work ourselves? If this is the future of news, should we be scared? Because looking at the comments on those articles, they range from “great advice” to “excellent article”. And I know as a working journalist I have higher expectations of my own and others work. Am I just old school for expecting to see a story that is appropriately sourced and original reporting? What does that mean for the future? Just something to think about.

So, I post this as a warning. And as an admonishment on my part. For, I made a seriously huge mistake this week, and I’m glad my boss took it in stride.

I have been working on this package about the state of superitendency in our region. Several of our superintendents are retiring this summer or have announced their intent to retire within the next year. More than two-thirds of our superintendents have 30+ years of experience in education (translation: it won’t be much longer).

As a part of my package, I wanted to see how long each of our local superintendents had been in his or her position. This involves calling out to 26 different school corporations. My everyday coverage usually encompasses three of them, with a bit more emphasis on one other. But for the most part, I don’t stray too far out of this county except to monitor the boards and make sure nothing crazy or important happens.

So, imagine my shock when I call one of the distant corporations Tuesday afternoon and am told by the secretary: “He’s no longer the superintendent. So & So replaced him — in April.”

I almost cried. It was all I could do to stifle my shock and stay composed enough to ask for the spelling of the new guy’s name and what happened (at least it was retirement, not something else crazy).

The problem, as if dropping the ball and completely missing a new superintendent in one of my districts wasn’t big enough, was my boss wasn’t having the best of days. And I was NOT going to break the news that I’d missed that story to him while the odds were stacked against me. I asked another reporter for her advice, and she concurred. Come in early the next day and catch him then.

The next morning, I rolled in about half an hour early. Sat down, turned on my computer, checked my e-mail and glared at the notebook with the superintendent story notes. Ugh. I knew I had to tell him, even though every ounce of me wanted not to know how disappointed he’d be.

I wanted to check and make sure I wasn’t catching him at a bad time, so I went to send the reporter a note via iChat, which is on each of our computers. It read: “Is (he) in a good mood today? Or is now a bad time to tell him about the new superintendent in (that district)?”

Two seconds after I hit send I look up and realize, to my absolute horror, that it said across the top: “Chat with (My Editor).”

I could have cried, and those tears would have been much worse than the ones about a missed story.

I jumped up immediately and dashed across the office to his desk, where he was sitting and as I approached reading my iChat to him.

Ugh. Talk about odds stacked against me. So I had to apologize profusely and truthfully not only for dropping the ball on the story but also for the misdirected im.

Luckily, I guess, though the discourse did involve at least one profanity and a pen being thrown at the desk a little harder than necessary, it softened the blow on the superintendent being named months ago without my notice. And, to be honest, my editor did get over it relatively quickly. Though, because another reporter made a similar mistake a few weeks ago in an im intended for me, I think he probably thinks we talk about him all the time. We really don’t. (I swear!) I was just trying to test the waters to make sure it wasn’t bad timing.

The point of relaying this is to warn you all. I am about as tech-savvy as they come, and it was a stupid mistake. But, as those of you on my facebook or twitter friends list know, “Meranda is never talking about her boss on iChat again — especially if it might accidentally be sent to him, oops.”

You’ve been warned. Though my co-workers all had a great laugh about it, I’ll bet that goes on my review. Eep.

I love my MacBook. I rarely leave home without it. It is my radio. It is my DVD player. It is my portal to friends scattered throughout the world.

And it’s going to need a new plug. ASAP.

I was sitting here with it plugged in because I’d all but drained the battery power earlier, and I noticed the screen flicker and dim. I thought, maybe I knocked the plug out. With the magnetic plug, I frequently seem to pull it out by accident. I checked the wall and it was still in, so then I checked where the plug goes into my computer, and I almost had a heart attack I couldn’t get it out of my computer fast enough.

My plug is melting. How does that happen?! Luckily, it seems I caught it early. It’s not frayed, no wires exposed or burn marks or anything. Nothing to compare to some of the photos I just found in a quick “macbook plug melting” Google search.

Those photos are enough to sufficiently freak me out, however. And as soon as I finish this post, I’m going to figure out a way to get Apple to replace it ASAP because this is not cool. No pun intended.

When I first got my MacBook last summer, I don’t think disappointed could possibly describe how I felt when it arrived, in their terms “dead on arrival.” It worked spectacularly, if you overlooked the fact that the combo drive wouldn’t read CDs. I couldn’t, so after waiting most of the summer to save every dollar I could afford to from my internship to purchase it, I had to send it back and wait another week for a new one to arrive. (And the delivery fiasco that resulted in me driving back to Findlay a week after leaving and then up to Toledo to pick it up was only the cherry on top.)

Since then, other than the occasional “mooing” from the fan and the fact that some of the plastic around the edge where my hands rests came loose, it’s been pretty indestructable. Until now. I can overlook a lot, but not a piece of equipment melting, especially when it is attached to a machine that took a whole summer of savings to afford.

I think I’ll just go easy on using it this week and take it to work and borrow one of our MacBook plugs there to charge during the day so I can get a few hours use each night.

UPDATE: I got a new plug. Apple was pretty reasonable. After explaining to the first woman what had happened, she sent me over to the safety department, which asked a bunch of questions about “How long did the incident last?” and “Was there any other property damaged?” Either way, they sent me out a new plug Monday (it was late Saturday when I called) and it arrived Tuesday. Seems to be working fine. Though I’m still a little creeped that my plug melted.

I usually don’t rant, as I know they’re unproductive. I especially know this topic of rant will never change and I will just need to deal, but seriously, give me a break.

I just checked my J&C e-mail and saw a forwarded e-mail from a reader to the ME to my editor to me. (Don’t know why the person didn’t cut out the middle men and save us both time.)

I hear a lot from people, when I’m out on assignment, when I’m covering meetings (during meetings from patrons and officials), in my e-mail, my voicemail, even doing man on the street. They all say we are always writing negative stories about (insert your school of choice here, though mostly it’s one H.S. in particular, even though the “officials” involved would tell you we’re not picking on them and are fair).

Usually I’m able to shrug it off by pointing out, often within the same edition, some “positive” story about the schools. And often times, the stories I write aren’t negative. They’re the news. I can’t help it if your school performed poorly on state tests or if there was a major problem there that we covered. I don’t make these things up, I just write about them. And the thing is, I probably write 9 to 10 more stories that are “positive” than “negative.” (I put them in quotes because I actually aim to be neutral, though obviously writing a story about a kid scoring a perfect ACT is more positive than a story about a hit list at a high school.) You just don’t remember them.

But today, for some reason, this comment got under my skin. It was from a reader, who is not even related to this academic team competing for the national title this afternoon. The person complained that, “Why isn’t this team being covered? If they were a sports team or from another local school they would be on the front page!”

I had to re-read and make sure they were talking about the team I thought they were. The team about which I posted a half dozen web updates last Monday when they were competing for a spot at today’s competition? The team about which WE DID run a front page article last Tuesday? (note that we only run three stories on the front page.) The team about which we have a brief in today’s paper telling people to check out jconline today for coverage and reaction from Orlando? Yes, I lined this all up ahead of time with the coach.

And then, the person complained about us not including photos. Well, I’m sorry we didn’t send a photographer to D.C. and Orlando. And I’ve already discussed photos with the coach. And, yes I know the team is being honored this week at the school board meeting, which if you attended many meetings you’d know is actually quite common. I knew before you. It’s on the agenda, and the coach already let me know a bit ago. When the team gets back (they were gone half of last week and half the team was out of town the second half of the week elsewhere), I am planning to do a feature on them.

Usually, I just let comments like this pass without giving a second thought. But maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but did they even read the paper or Web site? I think the real issue for me is just that this is one of the instances where I did do it right. And people still complain. Ugh.

I just don’t understand what prompted this person to complain. Every thing they say was wrong. I do get some legitimate complaints throughout the semester about us not covering this or that, or giving more coverage to this program here and not so much there. Often times, the reality is I can’t cover things I don’t know about, and some coaches/advisers are just better PR people for their groups. If nobody tells me something is happening until it’s a week past and you’re sending me a whiney e-mail, there really isn’t much I can do at that point. That is part of the reason we’re creating microsites for the schools, so that those things that fall between the cracks now can land somewhere. So as much as it sucks, I can’t possibly cover every single team, club and event at each of the schools here. It’s just me on this beat, and I work as hard as I can. Ten of me couldn’t get it all, and even if we could, we don’t have room in print. Like everything else, we have to decide and allocate our resources — whether its my time or column inches. Thing is, this time, the complaints came even though we allocated in favor of this group. And that set me off.

I’ve heard some ridiculous things about people’s photos on facebook and myspace or other sites causing them to lose a job they have or otherwise would have received. I’ve even heard of police and school administrators using the sites to track underage drinking, on-campus violations, etc.

But THIS is the first time I’ve heard of a college denying a student her degree over an “unprofessional” photo. (There’s a picture posted there, and to be honest, compared to a lot of photos I’ve taken or even been in, that is really tame. You can’t even tell she’s drinking alcohol or that she’s drunk except, apparently, a silly caption. She’s also of legal drinking age.) To read the full story, go here. She was apparently given an English degree in lieu of her education degree and certificate.

PERSONALLY, I think it is more than fair for a company to use any means necessary to screen a candidate. Once you become an employee, for better or worse, you are representing that company. If you’re projecting an image that they don’t want to be associated with, then they’re better off knowing before they take the time and spend the money to bring you on. (Though, I still don’t think this image alone would or should be enough for anyone to rule out a candidate. Any company that takes itself that seriously is probably not the type of place you’d want to work.)

As for a college, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to judge a student based on their photos. Administrators are just being hypocrites for trying to ban students from using these sites or posting their photos. Whether or not they are posted or taken, colleges should and do know that students will drink and have parties. Forcing students to go underground isn’t going to change that; it’s just going to make it harder to enforce legitimate rules and push kids towards more dangerous behavior.

I blogged in detail about this earlier during my own job search: Managing your online identity

(I also posted this on a livejournal community of college students to see what they thought. If anything interesting pops up there, I’ll update it here.)