Israelis are pushy

… but I love them!

So I know that I have been awful with my posting, but Israel is absolutely amazing. We’ve been all over the place for the past couple weeks, mostly traveling up north. We went hiking in the Golan which was beautiful, went to Galilee, Tel Chai, and spent some time in Haifa, which I loved. Haifa is the city that I most see myself living in in Israel, but I haven’t seen much of Tel Aviv, so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

We got to Tel Aviv today! We’re staying at this amazing hostel in Yaffo, just north of the city right on the beach. I come home in six days, which is crazy because I feel like I just got here.

Plans for Tel Aviv: A PeaceNow rally tomorrow, a walking tour of Yaffo, the big art museum, the beach, shopping, Critical Mass on Tuesday (!), and all sorts of other stuf. I will be home eating Mexican food on Thursday night!

My Hebrew is terrible.

So many things have been going on this past week! This weekend, we went to Eilat, which is on thevery southern tip of Israel, on the Dead Sea. It’s where Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi all come together, which is cool because you san see them all from sitting on the beach!

Eilat is very hot. Very, very hot. My friend Sonya who has been there before said that it feels like you’re in one giant hair dryer, which is a pretty accurate description. It was around 115 to 120 degrees in the hottest part of the day.

On Friday, we left Be’er Sheva at 6 am and got to the beach at around 9. We were all grumbling about how early we left, but in hindsight it worked out well because we got primo beach spots and had the whole day there. I was there for a couple of hours and multiple sunscreen applications when I decided that I couldn’t sit outside anymore. Yossi, an Israeli who went to Northeastern and designed this trip as his senior thesis, was with us and him, Tess, and I went into town to walk around. Eilat is literally the Vegas/Cancun/Varadero of Israel. Tons of tourists, expensive hotels, a boardwalk, and this crazy mall with a ton of designer stores. After a while, it was time to go back to the hostel and nap!

On Saturday, we all took a four-hour boat ride on a wooden boat. We anchored and then there was a water slide and some floating tubes and we all jumped off the bow into the bluest water I have ever seen. I know, I know, I’ve said that before about Mexico, and Bali, and a zillion other places. But this water wasn’t blue-green, it was so clear blue. It seemed really clean to me, but apparently the pollution is getting pretty bad. I guess I’m just used to looking at the Charles all the time.

Sunday we had the long trek back. We were supposed to leave early, but our busdriver was opperating on “Bedouin time” which apparently is like Thai time, or Cuba time, all of which are late. So we didn’t end up leaving until around 12:30. Since it was the heat of the day, we couldn’t turn on the air conditioning because the bus would overheat. So there we were, all 26 of us, with Andrea suffering from food poisoning in the back, in 115 degree heat. Needless to say, none of us were happy. But we survived, and took showers and hung out in air conditioning for a while, no worse for the wear.

Today, we are touring bedouin villages, which will be amazing. Our lectures on the Bedouins have had some issues because of language barriers, so I’m hoping that today will shed some light on the things I don’t really understand. Tomorrow, we leave at 3 a.m. to hike up to Massada and then watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea! And then swim/play with the mud. After that, we head to Jerusalem! Such a packed week.

I’m currently suffering from a stomach bug/food poisoning thing, but I think I’ll be over it soon.

I’m hoping to upload some pictures onto Flickr soon so you guys can see what an amazing place this really is.

Israel update

After a grueling 30-hour trip here, we landed in Tel Aviv at midnight Sunday night and got to Ben-Gurion University in  Be’er Sheva at around 4 a.m.  Needless to say, lecture was a bit rough that day, but only in terms of the jet lag.

I know it’s still early in the trip, but so far, this has been the most rewarding academic experience of my life, and this includes this past semester which, while difficult, was absolutely amazing. Cuba was wonderful, but my classes were bordering on unbearable; it was the country itself that made my time there so worth-while.

Anyway, I have learned so much in only four days! I don’t get much computer time here because I want to be doing other things, but I will try to update as much as possible. I also plan on doing separate posts about lecture topics I have found particularly interesting.

Right now, I’m in the town of Be’er Sheva, which is part of the Negev, the southern desert area of Israel (I say southern, but Be’er Sheva is somewhere in the middle of the country). Israel is about the size of New Jersey. Be’er Sheva is a pretty small town (some Israelis have said it’s in the middle of nowhere), but it’s kind of nice because it allows more time for group bonding and the like. Ben-Gurion is one of the best universities in the country. I am living in a suite-style campus housing with two other girls from my trip (Heidi is from Norway and Andrea is Brazilian) and one student who is Palestinian but an Israeli citizen (I hope to get more into this complicated issue of citizenship in another post). 

Tomorrow morning (at 5 am!) we leave for Eilat, which is on the very southern tip of the country. Apparently, it’s usually around 110-115 degrees Farenheit there. Needless to say, I will be wearing a ton of sunscreen. We were supposed to be going to Petra in Jordan as well, but it turned out to be super expensive so we had to cancel! Which I am upset about. Instead, we’re going to be taking some sort of day-long boat ride/snorkel trip, because Eilat has amazing coral reefs and things. So that will be super fun as well.

We come back to Be’er Sheva on Sunday night, and on Tuesday we are going to a local Bedouin village and going to some sort of party/dinner they are hosting for us (our bus driver invited us to hang out with his family, apparently he lives there). That will be super cool becuase we’ve been learning a bit about the Bedouin minority here in the Negev and the “undocumented villages” they live in. On all official state maps of Israel, these towns are no where to be found, but they have thousands of people living in them.

Today, I went to the grocery store to stock up on snacks for the trip. You all know how much I love super markets, but this one was nothing special. A big store with everything you could possibly want, including shoes, housewares, sheets, etc. That was kind of weird I guess. They also make their own pita! We got some that was still warm. We got a giant tub of hummus that I of course already cracked open. Even the packaged hummus is better here than what we have at home. Yum.

The new word of mouth

This year, the Student Government Association at Northeastern received more votes for the presidential election since they switched to the direct election system four years ago. With a little over 3,500 votes, 24.85 percent of the student body was represented, according to Matt Soleyn, the former director of public relations for SGA. In recent years, SGA has had trouble reaching the required 20 percent mark (20 percent of the student body must vote either for a candidate or “no confidence” for the election to count) during presidential elections. So what was so different about this year?

Similarly to how President Obama used Facebook to reach the younger demographic during the presidential election in 2008, social media played huge role in our own elections. Twitter, Facebook, Google Chat, and personal web sites allowed candidates to reach students who are abroad or off campus, continue their campaigning deep into the night, and answer questions from students in a timely and succinct manner. But talking to candidates and members of SGA this week made me rethink just how far social media can take you in the world of politics.

Click on this image for more photos from the campaign.

During elections, there were really three campaigns going on simultaneously. Amanda Sabia and Ryan Fox were campaigning hard for president, while SGA was trying to get out the vote to students. SGA used everything from Twitter to Facebook to reach students and encourage them to vote. SGA also uses social media throughout the year to get in touch with students.

“The best part was students would tweet us issues that they had on campus,” said Matt Soleyn, who held his position up until election night. “So if their classrooms didn’t have enough seats, they would tell us and we would get that worked on by whatever committee handles that. If the dining hall didn’t have something one day, they could tweet it at us and we would get the people on the food advisory committee to look into it … The dialogue back and forth with the students [was great]. So students wouldn’t have to send an e-mail or come to the SGA office or come to Senate. They could just tweet it to us. And they’d see that their issue would get looked in to.”

During the election, SGA held a debate over Twitter, using the @SGANortheastern account to direct questions to the candidates.

“I think it was successful because it got both candidates to show what their positions were on a few issues and where they were different and where they were the same,” said Soleyn. “It was also good for people who were outside Boston and couldn’t come to a debate so they could see them on Twitter.”

Amanda Sabia, the current vice president of academic affairs who had an unsuccessful run for president, had some logistical issues with the Twitter debates.

“It was interesting,” she said. “For the first two or three days, I was using the @Sabia4President Twitter account, separate from my own personal Twitter account … they were linking my personal one. And I had no idea because I was checking the other one and I was like ‘Oh, I guess they’re not starting up yet.’ But those debates were interesting and also the most frustrating. I remember sitting in my apartment trying to answer the questions … wishing that I had 180 characters.”

Ryan Fox, SGA president who was just elected for a second term, used the 140-character limit to the fullest extent.

“I ended a lot of mine with a link for more information,” he said. “I wanted to link it to more text … but I didn’t do that, I just linked it to more information on that topic.”

Amanda Sabia said that her Google Chat status helped her in ways that she never imagined.

“Surprisingly, setting my Gchat status to updates throughout the campaigning was more impactful than I thought,” she said. “A bunch of the people who were not directly involved with my campaign were able to update what they were telling their friends about the election based on my status updates.”

But she also said that Twitter and Facebook can only get you so far. The personal connection, which you can’t create over the internet, is still the most important part of a campaign.

“For me, I spent a lot of time talking to people, I knocked on dorm rooms, sitting in lobbies and talking to people,” she said. “I would be interested to find out who out of those people I talked to, who actually went out and voted. I spent a lot of time on personal interaction.”

Fox was wishing for a longer campaign to see how big of a role social media could have played.

“A lot of the social media is hard, because its such a short campaign that at the same time you have to use it,” he said. “Its hard to build your own branded network, but you have to use what you have already, what you already built up.”

To manage all of the social media aspects of his campaign, Fox used CoTweet to link his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In the future, Fox, Sabia, and Soleyn all see social media playing a big role in elections.

“It shows that we’re embracing the new technologies,” said Fox. “So much of it is word of mouth. But word of mouth is not just word of mouth anymore.”

Entrepreneurship

Considering I can barely spell the word, entrepreneurship is not something I had ever considered might be a part of my future. But in class, we’ve talked quite a bit about entrepreneurship and what it could do for my future in journalism.

Today, Dan Gregory from the School of Technological Entrepreneurship, came to talk to out class about this. He teaches graduate students in a year-long program where they don’t have lectures in text books. Instead, they launch businesses. He is also a the faculty adviser for IDEA, the Inter-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship Accelerator.

He started off talking about disruptive technologies. In the field of journalism, these could be anything from the internet to smart phones, both of which changed the way people consume news. Disruptive technologies can put older people out of work, like people who work at the post office who are being replaced by email. Gregory also mentioned that these technologies can be scary for people like me, who are paying thousands of dollars to study a field that is drastically changing.

But in the midst of all of this disruption, there is something that stands out: talent.

“What underlies all of that technology and floats the boat is the talent,” said Gregory. It’s the people that causes those technologies to be successful.”

We made a list of skills that the people in my class have from the j-lism classes. Things like clear, concise writing, knowledge of new media, and good interviewing skills were all on the list.

“The skill set that’s in this room today is incredibly important,” he said.

He gave an example of a project that he is currently working on, called Nick Nack Publishing. This is an internet based self-publishing model, and they are currently in the beginning phases. They are looking for people over 50 who have a story to tell, and this model will help them do it. He said that eventually, they will be looking for journalists to act as editors, graphic designers, and public relations specialists to sell this idea.

I never saw entrepreneurship as a possibility for me, but now I’m starting to feel differently.

“Be flexible to find a role that fits your skill set, your career is long ahead of you,” he said. “Having an entrepreneurial experience will make you feel really positive about your skill set, even if its not your dream journalism job”

Are comments worth the hassle?

In class today, we were talking about the current controversy in Cleveland about commenting. Judge Shirley Strictland Saffold is suing The Plain Dealer (the local Cleveland paper) because they exposed her as the poster of a bunch of supposedly anonymous comments online. She posted numerous comments disparaging a local lawyer, talking about current cases she was presiding over, even going as far as to say that one person didn’t get the death penalty because he is white and not black.

The Plain Dealer looked up her email address and it was confirmed to be Judge Saffold’s. They then exposed her on the front page of their paper. She is suing the paper for violating their privacy policy; they say they haven’t. She claims that her daughter made some of the comments online using her email address.

I don’t think the paper did anything illegal. But unethical? Yeah, probably. The fact that they used information that only they could have gotten to expose this woman is kind of iffy. In class, most people think that the judge is in the wrong: she should have known that the Internet is not a private place. And I agree, I think she was naive in thinking that there was no way these things could get back to her. But my professor was uncomfortable clearing The Plain Dealer of blame and honestly, I am a little as well.

I think that anonymous commenting is dangerous, but if you allow it, you should honor it. I am not saying that if you find a suspected murderer or something that you shouldn’t cooperate with the police. But I do think that a paper could lose some credibility if they violate this general understanding. I think that making people sign up with a real name is the way to go. If people have to attach their name to what they are saying, maybe they will think twice before they press enter.

Howard Owens, of The Batavian, thinks the same thing. In a recent blog post, titled “The why and how of a real names policy on comments,” he spells out exactly why real name commenting is necessary.

The editor of The Plain Dealer gave an interview to her own paper (I feel like that’s weird, but whatev.) where she said that perhaps they shouldn’t have gotten the info the wya they did but “but once we did, I don’t know how you can pretend you don’t know that information.”

Math? No thank you.

I am currently working on a story for one of my classes that involves so many numbers and figures and stats that my head spins every time I open our spreadsheets. I don’t think that I am alone in my fear of numbers; most journalism students only take one math class while at Northeastern, and it’s usually algebra.

But numbers are often a huge part of a story, and figuring out how to display them in a way that makes sense to readers can be really important. Enter Matt Carroll: the database journalist for the Boston Globe.

“Database journalism is important and understanding Excel can give you big boost,” said Carroll. You can see his handiwork at Boston.com in the “Mass Facts” page, where he has organized data ranging from gun licenses by town to Dunkin Donuts locations.

Carroll showed us how to do some of this stuff ourselves, using the website “Many Eyes.” This free site is super easy to use and can make graphics of all kinds. It allows you to choose the most effective way to present your data, from word clouds to bar graphs. Carroll matches quality graphics with the stories he writes to present the data in the most honest way possible. I say honest because to the untrained eye, data can be very deceiving and biased.

Another thing that I have recently learned about the number side of journalism that Carroll backed up is it doesn’t take much to completely screw up the data. He told us about this one time where he messed up “A.M.” and “P.M.” which totally mixed up the data for a story about  the time of day most car accidents take place.

Serendipity

Kevin Sites, the original backpack journalist and author of “In the Hot Zone: 1 Man, 1 Year, 20 Wars,” spoke at Northeastern recently for the Karen Fischer Memorial Lecture. Karen Fischer was a journalism graduate student at Northeastern who was killed in 2006 in Afghanistan.

Kevin Sites is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard doing research on sustainable web-based reporting, but his interest in using the Internet to get his message across started a long time ago. He has been covering wars for most of his career, reporting from almost every area of the world, and doing most of it himself. Being a “backpack journalist” (also called a SoJo, or solo journalist) means that you do everything yourself with what you have in your backpack: write, take photos, take video, edit sound, send it back to your editors, etc.

Sites was Yahoo! News’ first war correspondent and covered every major war in 2005-06. He often covered stories that weren’t reported in the mainstream media, focusing on what he calls the “collateral damage” of war.

“Combat is the smallest feature of any war,” he said. “It seduces us to covering was in an inaccurate way.” He said that he would rather “cover combat than a refugee camp” because it’s more exciting, but that it “doesn’t tell the whole story.”

In 2004, Sites was the focus of a controversy when working for NBC. He recorded the shooting of an injured but very much alive Iraqi insurgent by a U.S. Marine. NBC chose to air the video not in full but stopping as the Marine raised his gun but stopped it before he pulled the trigger. But the video was aired around the world on various other news outlets. Sites received both praise for showing the realities of the Iraq war and criticism for betraying the Marine unit he was embedded with and his country. Sites still feels that NBC made the wrong choice in choosing to censor the video in the U.S.

“We decided it was too costly to tell, when it was actually too costly not to tell,” he said. “When we decided to censor the video, we failed the American people.”

But this brings up the point of what is appropriate for the media to show. Most major newspapers and many major networks do not show dead bodies, people being killed, things like that. But the video that Sites shot was such an important turning point in the war, that maybe it should have been shown? I’ve been talking about this a lot in my ethics class lately, and I’m still not sure how I would deal with this kind of stuff if it was my decision.

NewsTrust

I’ve been lurking about on NewsTrust for about a year now, but never took the time to sign up. A class assignment to explore the young site this week forced me to become a member, and now I am wondering why I waited so long.

NewsTrust is a nonprofit organization that features news from a wide variety of sources- major newspapers, blogs, independent sites- and invites its users to review stories and rate them based on fairness, facts, originality, and other things that are important to good journalism but are sometimes forgotten.

In the days of a 24-hour news cycle, it can be hard to determine which news is trustworthy and reliable and which news is less so. NewsTrust uses the power of the crowd to determine the answer to this question.

For this assignment, we had to post and review three stories:

My first review is of a piece that was published on April 5 in the New York Times. I chose this story because it is about a topic I have never even heard of: Moebius syndrome, a condition that causes facial paralysis. Since I was considering reviewing it for NewsTrust, I was paying extra close attention to the details. But after about three or four grafs, I was so engrossed in this woman’s research about this disease which she also has, I completely forgot about the assignment, I figured that meant it was a good choice. The writing is clear and concise, making it very easy to follow.

I chose a piece from the Christian Science Monitor for my second review because a) I don’t read it as much as I should considering its from right down the street from school and b) my prof recommended it to us because there usually isn’t a lot of the Monitor’s content on NewsTrust. It comments on the new Nike commercial featuring Tiger Woods and the voice of Earl Woods, Tiger’s deceased father. I had seen the commercial prior to reading this article and I felt that it covered it with a different approach than I would have thought to take, and it worked very well. The contrast between the potentially new Tiger and the same old cheating Tiger is interesting and affective.

GlobalPost takes the cake for my third post. I reviewed a piece about Japan’s whaling industry that talks about how despite what we might be told, the country doesn’t really eat whale meat. I found this article very interesting and while I am aware of this controversy, I didn’t know all that much about it. The author backs up his words with a variety of extremely reputable sources, which makes the reader more confident in the writing.

In theory, NewsTrust is a valuable resource. I am hesitant to believe that it would become popular outside the small community of journalists, news junkies, and intellectuals. I am unsure that the average person in America would sit down in from of the computer and instead of going to the LA Times or the Wall Street Journal, they would come to NewsTrust. But nonetheless, I am glad it is here for me to use, enjoy, and learn from.

Biking around Northeastern?

For those of you in the Northeastern community who prefer to tool around on two wheels, you probably know about Back Bay Bicycles. But if you’re new to the area, the biking community, or somehow haven’t found it yet, then listen up.

All of us have gotten a flat tire at one point. And it’s terrible. You’re either out for a ride or about to go out when all of a sudden, you’re immobile. And to go get a new tube/tire, you need to be mobile. And once you’ve been biking, there’s no going back the the wretched T. So what are you going to do?

Back Bay Bicycles on Mass Ave and Commonwealth.

Luckily for us Huskies, Back Bay Bikes in within walking distance. The folks inside are really nice and so knowledgeable. I don’t know that much about bikes, and I feel totally comfortable going in there and asking for help. It’s also clear that they deal with a lot of students because they are pretty cool about helping you save some cash. If you’re looking for some new pedals but only want to spend X amount of dollars, they can find something within your budget and be really nice about it.

Back Bay Bicycles has everything from helmets, lights, bicycles, apparel, and more.

They have everything from $8000 beauties to used bikes, and will even help you sell your old Peugeot if you’re looking to get rid of it.

Back Bay isn’t the cheapest bike shop in the city, or even necessarily my favorite, but the laid back vibe and great service, plus its location, makes it one of my first stops when I need a quick fix.

Back Bay Bicycles is open Monday through Saturday 11-6 and Sunday 12-5 and can be reached at 617-247-2336. They are located at 362 Mass Ave, at the corner of Commonwealth Ave and Massachusetts Ave, on the inbound side of Commonwealth. The shop is not handicap accessible.