New Website!

I am so excited the launch of my new website! Check it out:  www.alicialegg.com. The design was created by my beautiful friends, Liviu and Aline. 

 

Here you can see Aline actually hand drawing the art for the site.  Isn’t that amazing?   

God bless Liviu for his endless patience and his amazing website expertise.   I am just so grateful to them both, because I love what they did for me.

A warm thank you goes out to Joan Hefler for her beautiful pictures as well.

Now I will officially be blogging from this site.  If you are receiving this message from an e-mailed blog subscription, it will be your last unless you subscribe to my new blog site.  I know you couldn’t live a full and happy life without my periodic posts, so here is the link  to subscribe to the new blog so can continue to receive your updates when I post without interruption. 

Important:  After you sign up for the blog subscription, you will have to respond to the e-mail that FeedBurner sends you to validate that subscription.

Thank you to all of my dedicated followers who have followed me for almost a year now.  I can’t believe a year has passed already.  My new semester has begun.  Here in the Northeast, we have been just pounded by an obnoxious amount of snow and already school has been cancelled twice and it just started.  Yet already there are so many things I wish to share with you, about school and the ScareMeNots. 

I am looking forward to sharing a great year with each of you in 2011.

Damn, the winter break sure went fast!

I'm an optimist

I’d like to cultivate some excitement for the new semester to inspire each of you who are embarking upon this adventure or are considering it.

Yes I would.

I have tried to manufacture that enthusiasm for about a week now.   I attempted to do this with a healthy regiment of denial that vacation is over, followed by the dread of the work before me and then an attempt to get excited for my new classes.

Repeat every four hours as symptoms persist.

I love school.  I could be a student forever.  Sometimes however I do not always enjoy the work that accompanies that commitment. 

Last semester was positively the worst that I can remember.  Because that memory did not yet have time to fade, it has tarnished my excitement for the beginning of this one. 

There is one glimmer of hope – I am excited for the line-up of professors that I have.  Unfortunately, I will be faced with journalism again.  While I do not have any fun confronting my weaknesses, I will try to remain positive that I can do better this term in journalism.  I am also excited for my PR class.  I hope to learn something that will translate to great success for my ScareMeNot team.  I do so love them.

If my blog posts become riddled with typos and become nonsensical – well more than usual – do not fret.  It just means that the semester is not turning out as I wished and I have resorted to drinking excessively as a coping mechanism.    

That’s how all college kids cope, right?  I am just trying to fit in.

Pictures taken from Google Images

I wish I was as pretty as my facebook picture

After many years, I was reunited with a childhood friend.  Her children and my son attend the same school – so I see her every day. 

One morning we began chatting about some of our other friends from high-school.  One of them in particular looks fabulous now.  FABULOUS!  Even better than she ever did in high-school.  I’d love to hate her for it if I didn’t love her so much.  I mean how does that happen?

Discussing this made me acutely aware that the same could not be said of me.  My idea of primping is a comb through the hair and a quick application of mascara as I am driving.  Honestly, I rarely go through all that trouble.  As I stood speaking to my high school friend, I was in ripped jeans, a sweatshirt, hair in haphazardly piled atop of my head, no make-up and sleep marks still on my face.  Lovely.  If any beauty routine requires more than 3 consecutive minutes of my time, is highly unlikely that I will stick to it on a regular basis.

Over the holidays when I ran into a guy I used to date, I regretted that I never put more effort into that area.  He looked great.  I didn’t.  Ugh.

As my friend and I stood outside of my son’s school, we started discussing some of the people that we lost touch with and as we went through the list, I realized that all of these flippin people looked great.  And you know how I know this – because I have a Facebook account.  Facebook, where we all look like supermodels and rock stars. 

I have a friend who is gorgeous.  When we go out people stare at her – she is that beautiful, and she always looks great.  But when I “tag” a picture of her on Facebook, she instantly un-tags herself if it isn’t what she considers a perfect picture.  She drives me nuts with this.  Then I realized that I do the same thing.  I really don’t care what I look like or what people think of me in real life, but on Facebook, I care a great deal.  Why is that?

The whole population would really be a lot better looking if we put the same amount of effort in ourselves as we do on our FB profile picture.

Myself included.

ScareMeNots!

Where have you been?

You must be thinking – hey, Alicia!  Where the heck have you been?  Whatcha been up to?

I am excited to announce that I have just become part of something pretty cool.  I am the newest member of the ScareMeNot team.

And this is how this beautiful tale unfolded:  I have to create a “capstone” in order to graduate.  This is where we pull together all that we have learned in the master’s program into one large project to showcase our newly acquired knowledge.    

So my awesome professor (to whom I owe my second born – I can’t part with the first) introduced me to her friend who created ScareMeNots.  Maybe I could help them and somehow craft a capstone out of it.

The website said they were Monster’s for your Monsters – something you could give to your child as a protector of night-time fears.  Sounded like a good concept. 

Then they gave me a couple of these monsters to bring home to my son.  This is the child who has been driving my husband and I completely bonkers at bedtime because he is afraid of things lurking in the dark.  My son instantly loved these cuddly guys.  When he went to bed that night with a firm grip on Guardian Gus and Knockout Ned he didn’t say a word about the room being too dark.  Ten minutes later, he was asleep like a baby.  And so it went each night as our collection of ScareMeNots continued to grow.

Do something for me, I will be grateful.  Help my son in some way, hell I’m yours forever. 

And that is how ScareMeNots became my new religion. 

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Check out the FAVORITE.

It really helps that I absolutely love every member of the team. I feel like an adopted member of their family.  

Here is the coolest part.  Mark my words now – this is going to be the next big thing. Each day we are planning and strategizing the future of the ScareMeNots and I get to be a part of it!

One of the team members is the former Creative Director of Warner Brothers and DC Comics.  He is responsible for everything BATMAN for the last ten years.  And I get to work with him! 

We will be creating bedtime stories called ScareMeNot Bedtime “Tails”, Twitter “Tails”, and so much more. 

Recently I have thought to myself;  I get to work with really great people (one of whom is a superhero) and do something I love.  Can someone pinch me? 

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter because soon we are going to be announcing the launch and man you won’t want to miss it.

A sure fire way to win a Pulitzer Prize

In our journalism class, our professor asked an ethical question:

If you were a journalist and saw a man set himself on fire, would you help him or would you record the story?

WHAT?!!  Is this even a question?

Apparently it is.  Some journalists will capture a story without helping a victim and do so without the slightest regret.  Based on the discussion that ensued after the question was posed, it seems that this practice is quite common.  The examples of these horrific acts were numerous.

Are these people human?  Is this what it has come to?  If I want to be successful journalist and win a prestigious award, I would not interfere with a person who needs immediate help.  I would stand by, record the suffering, watch the death while cold blood pumps through my heart in my empty tin chest just so I can further my career. 

There should be a human cruelty law against this practice.  It’s sickening.

Related Articles

• Journalists’ Code of Ethics: Time for an update? (stevebuttry.wordpress.com)
• https://alicialegg.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-war-photographer/

Ode to the laundry

I have so much going on now that things are starting to slip.  Some days it is so challenging to balance it all.  For example yesterday, I was looking for my favorite wool sweater and I just couldn’t find it.  Last night, I found it in the washing machine.

Look how cute it is.  It is so small it is absurd.  As a frame of comparison, I have a normal sized sweater on the left.  I am actually quite impressed with how small wool gets when water hits it. What would have happened if I wore it during a rain storm?

All of this inspired me to write a ballad to my arch-enemy… the laundry.  I have several evil villains in the domestic category, so I suspect that the “Ode’s” will be a recurring theme in this blog.

Ode to the laundry

This arranged marriage of necessity
Is not really working out for me
Your incessant demand for attention creates quite a calamity

The wash… the fold
It is all getting really old

You rebel with missing socks
And wool sweaters that shrink… A LOT

An unwanted wrinkle if kept waiting too long
Forces me to resort to the dreaded iron

A hidden red in a load of whites
Oh, I am on to you alright

I fantasize of having an affair
With the Wash N’ Fold in the market square

The clean smell, the happy faces
Of the patrons leaving these places

One day I’ll poke in and inquire
To free myself of this burdensome mire

The daydream of something new
Sure beats the misery of tending to you

Oh the temptation… the desire
Makes my pulse quicken, my heart afire

Yet since my wallet is thin,
I’ll find myself content with you again.

With my ball and chain I will keep my wishes at bay,
I shall toil and fold and put away
All while dreaming of a better day

Online Journalism may just be the death of me

This class is wiping me out.  It is just such an odd fit for my personality.  I have to force it each week. 

And I feel so guilty about that.  Here I have a wonderful professor who LOVES Journalism.  She is so excited about it.  The fact that I do not share her passion for the profession makes me feel as though I have a dirty little secret. 

Her passion does at least give me an appreciation for it.  That is the best she can probably do with me.    

The trouble is that this class is consuming my life.  If am not doing work for it, then I am stressed because I am not.  We have 3 books for this class and I am always behind in the reading.  I had this idea that we were going to be passively learning about the profession of journalism.  I don’t know why I would think that.  Saint Rose is nothing if they are not hands on. 

We have to actually write interesting stories to publish.  It is an insane amount of work.  Writing an article for a news story is inherently different than regular coursework where you read a book, and write a paper.  For a news story, you have to research your subject, research it some more, interview people, get annoyed when they don’t call you back, call some other people, change your story because the people you wanted to speak to either weren’t available or they didn’t give you the angle you were hoping for and then write and re-write. 

I went through this process and handed in my “story” thinking it was a gem.  I had put so much of my heart and soul into it that it just had to be good, right? Ha ha ha. When I received the graded paper, it had so much red ink from the corrections the professor wrote that I am positive she used the entire pen grading my paper alone. 

Grade?  B+.  Yippee.

Despite all of that, the relief that I felt when I had the story published was overwhelming.  I spent 5 full minutes enjoying that reprieve before the panic/terror overcame my body when I realized that my next “story” is due… on Monday.  You know in four days.   The celebration time after you get a story published is practically nonexistent.

Welcome to my world of journalism.  Now you know what I have been doing with all of my “free” time.   

Related Articles

• Does blogging devalue journalism? (onlinejournalismblog.com)
• Using the Inverted Pyramid Style of Writing for Ad Agency New Business (fuelingnewbusiness.com)

Irons in the fire

I realize I have been somewhat spotty about my blogging in the past two weeks, but there are great reasons for that!  I have been working on some things that I am pretty jazzed about.  I had an article published on our local newspaper’s website, I have teamed up with with an exciting new business and I have been actually making some decent strides in what has turned out to be the most challenging semester of my grad school experience so far.  I also have a few guest bloggers lined up that will be writing in to give another perspective about life as a returning adult student. 

I plan to bring you up to speed this week. 

Thanks for hanging in!    

Related Articles

• How to Balance Family and Grad School (brighthub.com)
• 5 reasons Gen Xers should consider grad school (jenx67.com)

Blogging is Beautiful

What is the point of blogs? 

Blogging is a great new way to vet ideas and have a conversation that connects people clear across the globe.   As a blogger, I am delighted to receive comments to my blog posts.  I crave for them and get so excited when I receive an e-mail that tells me that I have one.  It makes my whole day!

I moderate my comments.  That means if you are new to my blog and you make a comment, I must approve it before it is posted.  Only comments that I physically approve make it for all to see. 

I haven’t yet declined to post a comment.  Yet.  I’d like to think that I wouldn’t delete any comments. 

What if someone writes in a comment that I am a sniveling, frakin, retched, ugly wench?  Hey, that’s good stuff and may be even true some of the time. 

To approve or not approve, that is the question. 

If the comment was free from obscenities and took aim at me alone then I would probably put it out there.  That is the point of the blog – to let everyone have a say who would like one.  It is a conversation, with similarities to what you would have in person.  You don’t always agree with the person you are conversing with but you can’t simply delete what they are saying as they say it!

There is a distinction between journalism and blogging.  Journalism has an ethical obligation to report events of interest with credibility and honesty.  The ethical obligation of a blog is individualized to the morals of the blogger who hosts it.  Blogging is a form of entertainment.  It may rub elbows from time to time with journalism, but primarily it is forum for personal opinions and the dialogue that it inspires. 

In the case of my class where we use the blog for journalistic educational purposes, I respect that my professor reserves the right to delete comments.  This blog was the only medium that she was offered to post the journalistic work of her students in the local newspaper so she had to take what she got.  She is now using the blog in the same way that she would run a print newspaper.  Since it is a blog however, I think we should have a comment policy to refer to so that the reader has the expectation that their comment will be evaluated before publishing.

However, if a true blogger deletes comments because they don’t like the perspective then they only want one side of the issue to be viewed – their own.  That is quite boring indeed and defeats the point of a blog.

As Americans, we have this amazing right of freedom of speech.  Why would we willingly censor ourselves?

Trashing comments on blogs: A form of censorship?

I need some feedback fellow bloggers.  In my journalism class, we use a blog hosted by a local newspaper to publish student produced journalism stories.  Our professor, who is a former journalist herself, is the mediator and administrator for this site.  As such, she uses in the same way she would if it were a print article being published in a newspaper.  Yet it is on a blog. So we receive comments.

Some are quite colorful. 

We received one this week that was more of a rant, and it was hardly constructive.  Likely it was also filled with half truths.

Our professor posed the question:  Should this comment be approved for the entire readership to see?

We debated this for most of the class period.  There are two schools of thought in this sharp divide:

One group feels we should approve the comment.  It is a blog after all and blogs are intended to foster open dialogue and everyone is allowed to their opinion.   Since the blog was free of obscenities or profanity – put it out there.  If you start deleting comments, then you are only publishing comments that share your perspective.  By doing so, you are shaping the topic in your own way and this a form of censorship.  Even though we use it for journalistic learning it is a blog and we should allow all perspectives to enter into the dialogue.  Even if we may think it the comment is absurd. 

The second group feels that we should maintain the integrity of our journalistic endeavors.  Since we will not be investing our time to investigate any of the accusations in the comment we cannot ethically publish them.  We should not give an audience to this type of authorship.  A newspaper does not publish every letter to the editor, and we shall run this blog in the same discriminating spirit.  This comment may invite another and it may run away from us in an acerbic dialogue that will take away the value and the good writing of the original piece.

Before I reveal my thoughts on the matter, tell me which side of the fence do you fall on?

 Image taken from:  Google Images, Censorship