Bloggers and Independent Media Gaining Clout

As members of the mainstream media find themselves confronting economic woes, they also must face the emerging clout of bloggers and other independent media. Mainstream media must now compete with independent media as more people look to these sources for quality journalism on the major issues of our time.

"The crisis inside mainstream media, especially daily papers, is economic - but also cultural," says Jeff Cohen, director of the Park Center for Independent Media and associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College.

"Many successful bloggers and new independent media are building active communities; they don't see their readers/viewers as mere 'audience' or 'consumers' or 'customers.' Blogger Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, for example, relied on his community to help uncover the still-reverberating story of political firings of federal prosecutors by the Bush White House. Marshall won the Polk award http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/business/media/25marshall.html; Attorney General Gonzalez lost his job," said Cohen.

Recently Ithaca College announced the first-ever Izzy Awards for special achievement in independent media, naming Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now!" http://www.democracynow.org/ and blogger Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ the winners.

"[Goodman and Greenwald] have each built loyal, active communities desperate for accurate, quality journalism that sparks civic action on issues like civil liberties and racial justice," said Cohen.

The voices of independent media existed before the Internet, but new technologies have expanded their reach and ability to engage their readers/listeners/viewers as interactive communities. "No longer can mainstream media dismiss independent media voices as 'unprofessional,' instead they find themselves struggling to catch up and learn from the independents," said Cohen.

How Verb Aspect Influences Memory and Behavior

If you want to perform at your peak, you should carefully consider how you discuss your past actions. In a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists William Hart of the University of Florida and Dolores Albarracín from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveal that the way a statement is phrased (and specifically, how the verbs are used), affects our memory of an event being described and may also influence our behavior.

In these experiments, a group of volunteers were interrupted prior to finishing a word game and were then asked to describe their behavior using the imperfective (e.g., I was solving word puzzles) or perfective (e.g., I solved word puzzles) aspect. The volunteers then completed a memory test (for the word game) or a word game which was similar to the first one they had worked on.

It turns out, the volunteers who had described their behavior using the imperfective aspect were able to recall more specific details of their experience compared to volunteers who had described their behavior in the perfective aspect. The volunteers writing in the imperfective aspect also performed better on the second word game and were more willing to complete the task than did volunteers who used the perfective to describe their experience.

The authors surmise that when we think about our past behavior in the imperfective (e.g. what we were doing), we tend to imagine that behavior as ongoing (and not completed yet). This enables us to easily think about what went into that behavior and may help us improve performance on similar tasks in the future.

The authors note that these findings may be relevant to behavioral therapy. They suggest that "decreasing the frequency of unhealthy behaviors might be facilitated by discussing these behaviors in terms of what I did. In contrast, increasing the frequency of healthy behaviors might be facilitated by discussing these behaviors in terms of what I was doing."

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. Website: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/

American Political Science Association Offers Expert Sources for Journalists Writing on Politics, Obama Administration

The American Political Science Association invites all journalists writing on politics and the Obama administration to use its MediaConnect service to find expert sources and scholars that can help provide context and analysis for ongoing or breaking news stories or topics related to politics. MediaConnect provides U.S. and international journalists with easy and rapid access to the expertise of hundreds of political scientists on all aspects of politics at the local, state, national, and international levels.

MediaConnect draws on a growing, self-selected pool of scholars that are members of the Association and who are interested in responding to press inquiries. This pool is diverse in terms of research topics -- including the full range of American and international politics -- as well as geography, gender, ethnicity, and type of institution of higher education.

Journalists interested in using this free service can contact the Association by emailing press@apsanet.org or can visit http://www.apsanet.org/content_1478.cfm?navID=7 for more information. Requests for sources or experts must include the following: name and affiliation of the requestor; contact information; relevant deadline; and brief description of the story.

Ghotit Revolutionizes Writing Experience For People With Problematic English Spelling

More than 1.5 billion people around the world are using English as their Second Language (ESL). In today's interconnected world, the most universal means of written communication is English. Business people and students are required to write documents and emails and participate in chats (instant messaging) all in English in order to successfully execute their jobs and assignments. People with problematic English writing who can not communicate effectively may be left behind.

Ofer Chermesh is a one of Ghotit's founders. He is both a dyslexic and has adopted English as a Second Language. The struggle of producing readable text is well known to him. "I have no doubt that the people who designed regular spell checkers did not have in mind people with really poor spelling. Regular spell checkers are targeting people with good spelling that occasionally make spelling mistakes, not bad spellers like myself" says Ofer Chermesh.

Regular spell checkers are designed to correct spelling mistakes that are relatively close to the correct spelling. In order to identify the correct spelling of a poorly spelled word, the context of the sentence needs to be analyzed. Ghotit offers novel patent-pending context spell checking technology tuned for people with bad spelling. Using these algorithms Ghotit can pick up and correct not only really bad spelled words but also misused words, words that are spelled correctly, but are written out of context.

As a solution designed by people with problematic English spelling, Ghotit has integrated into its spell checker unique features aimed to radically change the writing experience of bad spellers. Ghotit has integrated a dictionary service so that all suggested words are presented with their meanings. In addition, Ghotit has integrated a text-to-speech service so that the user can make sure that what he wrote is exactly what he intended to communicate.

Ghotit launched its Online Free Service on February 2008 and spent the past year optimizing Ghotit context-sensitive algorithms. It has a demonstrated around 95% successful correction of poorly spelled text. In February, 2009 Ghotit released its Microsoft Plug-in for Microsoft Word for Windows. Once the Ghotit Plug-in is downloaded, it is installed as an extension to Microsoft Word, providing an integrated user writing experience.

"Ghotit spellchecker was designed for people like me, people who have completely lost their confidence in writing in English. With Ghotit, I now write confidently, continuing to misspell as I always have, but with the confidence that Ghotit is there with me to review my writing and offer the right corrections" says Ofer Chermesh.

Ghotit has demonstrated success for people with writing and reading difficulties such as people that use English as their Second Language (ESL) or Foreign Language (EFL), and English Language Learners (ELL) enabling them to move to main stream English Writing. Ghotit offers its services free to educational institutes worldwide.

For more information, visit www.ghotit.com

What Are the Most Frequently Used Sources of Information for News Stories?

Reporters and editors queried in a year-end survey by Cision, in conjunction with The George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management and Don Bates, adjunct professor with the school and PR veteran, reported that: Websites, submissions from public relations professionals, and press kits were among their most frequently used sources of information for stories.

These were followed by conferences and events, industry newswires, trade journals, blogs, social networking sites, and podcasts. One hundred percent of the respondents said they regularly use Websites for editing and reporting; 94 percent said they use information from PR professionals; and 87 percent said they regularly refer to press kits.

"I was surprised by the admission among the respondents of the high degree to which they depend on public relations professionals and the tools of PR," said Bates, founding director of GW's strategic public relations graduate program, which launched in 2008 and is now headed by Larry Parnell, associate professor. "The survey makes it clearer than ever that journalists can't do without public relations professionals any more than public relations professionals can do without journalists. It's a symbiotic relationship." Click here for survey analysis and report (http://us.cision.com/journalist_survey).

WEB USE BY JOURNALISTS SIMILAR FOR ALL AGE LEVELS

The survey of newsgathering methods also contradicted the perception that younger members of the workforce use online tools more frequently. It found that editors and reporters in all age brackets are now heavily dependent on the Web, with more than 90 percent using it as their primary tool overall in editing and reporting. In fact, respondents who reported that they use the Web "all the time" was highest, albeit by a slim margin, among those 30-49, with those 50 and above the second-heaviest users, followed by those 29 or younger. Added Bates: "Our findings confirm that journalists of all types and ages are quickly adapting to the new media landscape by utilizing multiple online sources for editing and reporting. The challenge for PR people will be keeping up."

JOURNALISTS LIKE PR, BUT NOT HYPE AND SPAM

"It's extremely important to note that, as reliant as journalists are on public relations assistance, those who responded demanded that PR professionals adhere more strongly to best practices," McFarland said. "Many of the traditional complaints by journalists about too much 'hype' and e-mail 'spam' from the PR community came through loud and clear on the verbatim commentary to the open-ended questions."

While acknowledging heavy use of submissions from the PR industry, the journalists also strongly endorsed a list of proposed improvements in "pitches" by PR professionals, including calls for clearer writing, less promotional material, more newsworthy submissions, and a better understanding of the journalists' individual beats and areas of interest and expertise. "Clearly," said McFarland, "PR professionals have to work a lot harder to deliver credible ideas and information."

MAJOR SURVEY FINDINGS

• Website usage "all the time" for editing and reporting is highest among those age 30-49 (94%), followed by those age 50+ (92%), and then those age 29 or younger (91%).
  


• Social networking sites and podcasts are used least often for editing and reporting compared to other sources overall, and most often by editors/journalists younger in age and experience. Blogs are used almost as often as trade journals, overall.
  


• Of the nine sources examined, submissions from PR professionals are used by more than 94 percent of editors/journalists.
  


• For identifying or developing story ideas, Websites are most important to editors/journalists, followed by submissions from PR professionals. Social networking sites and podcasts are rated as unimportant. For monitoring responses to stories, only Websites and blogs are considered important; conferences, trade journals, industry newswires, social networking sites, and podcasts are rated as unimportant.
  


• Editors/journalists agreed with seven of the eight improvement statements for e-mail pitches from communications professionals. Being more relevant to their beat/area of interest and being less promotional struck the strongest chords. Over half of the editors/journalists responding wanted to receive unsolicited e-mail pitches from communications professionals as simple text only.

Top Ten Criteria That Make or Break a Resume

What are the most important pieces of information recruiters expect to see in an executive-level resume? And how do you design a resume to deliver them effectively? TheLadders.com, the world's leading online platform for the $100K+ job market, sought input from the experts, surveying 564 recruitment professionals on the top criteria they look for in every resume, and asking certified professional resume writers their advice on how best to package that information.

RECRUITER SURVEY

Following were the top ten resume criteria named by recruiters:

-- Areas of Expertise: Recruiters said that demonstrating a strong area of expertise is what sets a candidate apart from the pack.

-- Relevant Industry Experience: Recruiters want to know instantly that a candidate has a solid track record of success.

-- Leadership Capabilities: Has the candidate managed a business unit? A sales team? Recruiters in the $100K+ job market are looking for proven leaders.

-- A Strong Professional Summary: Akin to the liner notes on a best-selling novel, a succinct and engaging professional summary is one of the first things recruiters read on a candidate's resume.

-- Education Credentials: Recruiters want to know where candidates went to school and how well they did when they were there.

-- Professionalism in the Presentation: An effective, well-organized resume helps recruiters quickly and easily focus on the candidate's qualifications.

-- Strong Quantitative Accomplishments: Candidates must demonstrate quantifiable accomplishments and results that show how they contributed to the bottom line.

-- Technical/Business Skills: What certifications does the candidate have? If a candidate has a strong skill set in a particular area, make sure the recruiter has the technical details.

-- Stability at a Company (Tenure): Has the candidate job hopped every other year or do they show a consistent track record on tenure? Commitment is important.

-- Summarized Job Descriptions: Rather than providing a bullet list of duties, a candidate should summarize key responsibilities and focus on measurable results.

"The job search has never been more competitive and a generic, passive 'job description' type resume simply will not make the cut in this job market," said Tina Brasher, Certified Professional Resume Writer. "Due to the large number of resumes they receive, recruiters need to see an instant connection when reading your resume. What are your quantitative results that set you apart from your competition? What have you accomplished and for whom? How did you positively impact the bottom line? These are the most important points that you need to show to make your case."

"The vast majority of people facing career changes are immensely better qualified than their self-written resumes reveal", said Bryan Newman, Certified Professional Resume Writer. "An important key to writing a successful resume is to tell the reader what you have accomplished that makes you a better candidate for the job than others in your field. Recruiters look for candidates whose resumes are crafted around a solid list of career achievements.

Website: http://www.theladders.com/

'Collywobbles' - One of the 100 Funniest Words in English

The Lexiteria has publsihed The 100 Funniest Words in English by Dr. Robert Beard, AKA Dr. Goodword on the alphaDictionary.com website. This book examines what Dr. Beard considers the funniest of the 2500 words he has described and e-mailed daily to 200,000 people over the past 8 years.

After a short essay on what makes words funny, Dr. Beard examines the pronunciation, meaning, usage, and history of each funny word, giving several creative examples of its use. Dr. Beard's selection of the funniest words includes the likes of "absquatulate," "bowyangs," "collywobbles," "gongoozle," "hemidemisemiquaver," and "snollygoster."

"This was what I was born to do," Dr. Beard said in connection with the publication of his first trade book. "After 40 years of scientific research in the workings of words, I finally felt that I was ready to take my thoughts and ideas to a world-wide general audience."

Dr. Beard taught Russian language and Linguistics at Bucknell University for 35 years after completing his PhD in linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1966. "I feel that teaching linguistics at an introductory level for all those years put me in a position to talk about the intricacies of words on an authoritative but jovial level anyone can understand and enjoy," he added.

The book not only discusses funny words, it does so in a funny style. The examples given for each word rely on a cast of characters developed by Dr. Beard in the alphaDictionary "So, What's the Good Word?" series. They include the lady's man Phil Anders, Robin Banks (who works for the accounting firm of Cooke, Books & Hyde), a clothes horse, Maude Lynn Dresser, her friend, Lucinda Head, not to mention their overly expensive lawyer, Susan Liddy-Gates.

The book is available now in paperback and in electronic form on line at Amazon.com in the US and UK, as well as at the websites of Alibris and AbeBooks. Lexiteria promises a sequel to The 100 Funniest Words in English titled The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English later this year.

Website: http://www.alphaDictionary.com/

Facebook Should Write Contracts in Plain English for Its Users

"The uproar among Facebook users, fanned by management's decision to change the terms of their service agreement earlier this month, will lead to a transformation of turgid, impenetrable online contracts into readable documents," says Alan Siegel, one of the founders of the Plain English and Simplification movements and Chairman of brand consultancy Siegel+Gale.

Co-author of WRITING CONTRACTS IN PLAIN ENGLISH (West Group), Mr. Siegel taught the first law school course in plain-language writing and has simplified complex legal documents for banks, businesses, and the federal government -- including the IRS.

"While hardly anyone outside the legal community doesn't yearn for simplicity, clarity, and functionality in contracts, consumers have continued to blindly agree to whatever is placed before them. They feel there is nothing they can do to force companies to transform loan agreements, insurance policies, mortgages, warranties, etc., into Plain English.

"At a time when there is a call for transparency and honesty in all sectors of society and business -- online and offline -- clearly Facebook showed an initial lack of sensitivity to the interests of their 175 million users when they changed the terms of the privacy provisions in their terms and conditions contract.

"While they put a note on the company blog that said the company 'simplified and clarified a lot of information that applies to you,' users were not asked to agree to the new terms or even alerted by e-mail about this rather significant change. Facebook merely added this line to their terms: 'Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.'

"This generated such a strong negative reaction from Facebook users that Facebook announced they were reinstituting the terms of the original agreement.

"This about-face clearly demonstrates the power of the Internet that will force companies to communicate with clarity in their contracts with their customers. Companies will no longer be able to hide behind impenetrable contracts that provide unfair protections or conditions. It looks like the Internet and its legion of bloggers will be the stimulus for an upheaval in legal communications that is long overdue.

"This Facebook uproar will transform online -- and offline -- contracts. The days of consumers blindly signing whatever is placed before them are clearly over," Mr. Siegel concludes.

Scientists discover oldest words in the English language

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What's more words like 'squeeze', 'guts', 'stick', 'throw' and 'dirty' look like they are heading for history's dustbin – along with a host of others.

Evolutionary language scientists from the University of Reading, one of the world's leading centres in this field of research, have been investigating how languages evolve, and whether that evolution followed any rules. Until recently they believed they would not be able to track words back in time for more than 5,000 years, however their new IBM supercomputer has enabled them to go back almost 30,000 years, and finally provide the answers.

The scientists have been able to analyse the family of Indo-European languages -- of which English is a modern-day example -- reconstruct the rate at which words evolve and predict future changes to our vocabulary. The oldest words we use today have been in existence for at least 10,000 years.

Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered - numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as: 'and', 'or', 'but' and 'on', 'over', 'against' evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals. 'Throw' which is expected to evolve quickly, has a half-life of 900 years, there are 42 unrelated sounds for it across all the languages. In 10,000 years time, it will likely have been replaced in 10 of them – possibly including English, unless of course we all do our part to keep the word in circulation.

"50% of the words we use today would be unrecognisable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. If a time-traveller came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble" explained Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.

The IBM supercomputer at the University of Reading, known as ThamesBlue, is now one year old. Before it arrived, it took an average of six weeks to perform a computational task such as comparing two sets of words in different languages, now these same tasks can be executed in a few hours.

Professor Vassil Alexandrov, the University's leading expert on computational science and director of the University's ACET Centre¹ said "The new IBM supercomputer has allowed Reading to push to the forefront of the research community, it underpins other important research at the university, including the development of accurate predictive models for environmental use. Based on weather patterns and the amounts of pollutant in the atmosphere, our scientists have been able to pinpoint likely country-by-country environmental impacts, such as the affect airborne chemicals will have on future crop yields and cross-border pollution".

Caroline Isaac, Deep Computing Executive at IBM said "Supercomputers are enabling the world to become increasingly interconnected, instrumented and intelligent. We have now reached a tipping point in price/performance that's allowing breakthroughs in university research that were previously unimaginable".

The Indo-European languages are most of those originally found across Europe, the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent. Examples include: Celtic, Roman, Greek, Germanic, Nordic (with the exception of Finnish), Slavic, Armenian, Iranian, Afghan, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Napali and Kashmiri, and of course modern-day derivations such as English and Spanish.

Researchers call words that persist relatively untouched across the ages 'cognates,' which means that the words have a systematic sound correspondence that proves their common ancestry. For example, cognates meaning "water" exist in English (water), German (wasser), Swedish (vaten) and Gothic (wato) – read them again and you can discern the 'aht' sound common to all. The most resilient cognates, the numerals, have not changed significantly in their entire history.

The half-life of a word is the expected amount of time for there to be a 50% chance for that word to be replaced by an entirely different word.

The research has shown that word types evolve in the following order (from slowest to fastest): numerals, pro-nouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions.

When the IBM supercomputer was installed it was one of the most powerful in the country. It consists of a JS21 cluster, comprised of 700 servers, with a total of 2800 Power PC processors running at 2.5GHz and delivering a peak performance of 28TFlops (28 million million) floating point operations per second.

Website: www.ibm.com/deepcomputing

Top 5 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Resume

In this competitive job market, how can you make your resume stand out? TheLadders.com, the world's leading online platform for the $100K+ job market, has asked Wendy Enelow, author of 30+ books on executive resume writing, cover letter writing, and interviewing, for the top 5 tips for writing a recession-proof resume.

As the foremost educator of resume writers in the country, Wendy has developed an exclusive training program for TheLadders.com's professional resume writers. Wendy emphasizes the following 5 steps to give yourself a strong and distinct position in today's remarkably competitive job market:

1. Sell your success. Resume writing is all about sales, marketing and merchandising. You're the product and the resume is the sales piece that you'll use to merchandise your achievements. Remember, past behavior is indicative of future performance; be certain to showcase your achievements so that prospective employers can read about all of the wonderful things that you'll be doing for them!

2. Be a specialist; not a generalist. Although you might think a more generalized resume would attract lots of different types of opportunities, the exact opposite is true. Companies want to hire individuals with a specific area of expertise. Don't make a prospective employer have to "dig down" into your resume to find relevant experience. They won't!

3. Write to the future. When writing your resume, write "to" your objective, showcasing your skills, qualifications, training and achievements that are related to your current career objectives. Don't focus on things that you've done that have nothing to do with your current goals. Re-weight your skills to emphasize those most supportive of your goals and move them to the forefront of your resume.

4. Brand yourself for competitive distinction. What can you do to distinguish yourself from the crowd of candidates, all with the same skills and qualifications, all vying for the same position? The answer: A branding statement, prominently positioned near the top of your resume, that highlights your unique value proposition; the one thing that you do better than anything else.

5. Use the right keywords and keyword phrases. In today's electronic job market, chances are your resume is going to be scanned by a computer long before a person ever lays eyes on it. As such, you must be certain that you have the "right" keywords for the position and industry that you are seeking.

Website: http://www.theladders.com/