Greiner’s Grumblings

I’m glad Jay Rosen acknowledges that newassignment.net is not going to save journalism.  Hearing his doubts about the project was actually refreshing.  I can’t tell if it is a good idea or not, and apparently Rosen can’t either.

Then again I don’t think that newassignment.net is anything new.  Social networking has existed on the Web since the days when Prodigy and AOL were your only options for net access and chat rooms were all the rage.  Why is newassignment anything but a glorified chat room?  Just because you call a group of soccer moms civic journlalists doesn’t make them qualified to report.  Rosen said that the only way this project will succeed is under the guidance of a young, talented chat room moderator, err, I mean, editor.  I agree with Amy that you can’t trust people to be honest reporters even when they’re trained.  Leave it to the copy editor to point out its obvious flaw as a fact checking nightmare, way to go Amy.  Joe also has a good point that citizens don’t have much to offer beyond their own interests.  And I, like Joe, want to get paid for my work.  I mean, what’s the point of going to J-school if I’m going to end up bagging groceries by day and saving journalism in my free time?

I’m not poo pooing the whole idea.  But I think we need to call a lemon a lemon. Sure newassignment might break some interesting news here and there, but big deal.  My parents won’t know about it unless it goes in the Chicago Tribune or ends up on CNN, and my folks are usually my gauge for the average American. Rosen doesn’t seem to think that would be too bad.  He said it would be great if big papers picked up stories from his site; that means it’s working.  Well it might work, but at best this project is just another tool for a professional journalist to use to report on the public consciousness.

Rosen may be overly optimistic about revotlutionizing journalism with this tool. If anything, it might give it a little nudge in the right direction.

On Monday, I’m going to attempt to keep a running diary for the Bears vs. Cardinals game.

A lot of sports publications are doing these live blog things to go along with radio and television coverage.  I’m going to give my real time writing a shot.  Since I’m not sure how exactly I can keep refreshing the copy on the same document, I’ll probably just post my thoughts by quarter.  Maybe next week I can figure out something more technologically advanced.

Is the Atlantic Yards project really the scourge that it’s made out to be.

There seem to be two camps here. Newspaper editorial boards have been lambasting the project since its proposal. This entry from The Brooklyn Papers provides a good summary of some of the issues, I especially like the by-the-numbers section near the bottom. But it still has somewhat of a negative slant.

Voters, on the other hand, apparantly don’t think having a Frank Gehry work of art on a destitute piece of land is all that bad. They voiced their opinion when they decided not to nominate any opposition candidates in this past month’s primary.

There was a similar debate in Chicago a few years ago. Gehry was slated to build a new ampitheater in Millennium Park. It seemed that no one liked it when it was, proposed, when it went over budget or when it was late. But now this amazing structure is being hailed as a brilliant success and the catalyst for a tourism explosion. I’ll be curious to see what people say once the Miss Brooklyn is complete. I think everyone will like it.

The Bears have another chance to showcase their dominating defense for a national audience this Monday night.

I think anyone interested in football expects to see a serious smackdown against the lowly Arizona Cardinals. Last week the Chicago ‘D’ made a decent Buffalo team look like amateurs. The final score, 40 – 7, while impressive, doesn’t even sum up how lopsided this game was.

Arizona is no where near where the Bills in the talent department. They’ll have a rookie quarterback, Matt Leinart, under center; an offensive line that couldn’t stop a runny nose; and their best reciever, Fitzgerald is out with an injury. This may be the worst Monday Night Football game in history. I’m going to savor every minute of it.

That said, I’m still not on board with this whole 19-0 season that many analysts, including Joe Theisman, are predicting for the Monsters of the Midway. A 5-0 start is good, but there’s a lot of football to be played. To call Grossman, our sudden messiah of a quarterback, injury prone is an understatement. If he gets hurt, the Bears could be in deep ****. Plus, now that they’ve been at the top of the power rankings for the past two weeks, teams are going to be gunning for them. I still remember when Jim McMahon, our former messiah quarterback, got body slammed in Green Bay and ended the Superbowl repeat.

The phrase for true Bears fans is “cautious optimism.” We’ll take it while we can get it, but we know that sports rarely work out in our favor.

To be honest, I don’t know how I want to use this blog.  If I want to use it at all, it would be to spout off about Chicago sports teams.  I don’t want to throw my political opinion out on the Web.  I don’t want to become some social activist or any activist for that matter.

I am still not sold on blogs.  I accept them.  I read them.  I like learning about them and speculating about them, but I’m not a huge fan of writing them.  I don’t know, maybe by the time I move on from CUNY my tune will change.  I think they reveal too much, like that old diary that falls into the wrong hands.  Who knows if my politics, love life, career, friends or any tangible aspect of my life will be the same in 10, 20 years. Once I write something, it’s permanent.  That’s what draws me to journalism: actively participating in history.  I also like the safeguards in place at a paper, such as editors, which I desperately need (any one in Svoboda’s class should agree.)

So that’s my answer: I don’t know.  If I have to write one of my own choosing, it’s going to be about the Bears, Bulls, Cubs and perhaps the White Sox.  But that’s really all I would want to use my blog for.

Could the Atlantic Yards become the house that LeBron built?

This story is a little old, but over the summer LeBron James, the basketball phenom, had a meal with Jay Z, the record producing mogul. While it was most likely an innocent meeting between two friends with great mutual respect, some NBA analysts speculated that this could be an underhanded recruitment effort.

Jay Z owns part of the Nets, which happens to be the team that will move in to the Atlantic Yards behemoth when it is finished.

LeBron’s new contract with the Cavaliers ends in 2010, roughly the same time that the stadium will be complete.

These dots might never connect, but what are the chances that LeBron will become the first marquee name on the “Brooklyn Nets’” roster? Food for thought at least, especially in an age when sports executives whine that they need new venues with outrageous luxury boxes in order to draw top-notch talent.

Having the Nets in Brooklyn is not all that strange. Neither of New York City’s two football teams actually have anything to do with New York City, both are based in the Meadowlands and rarely set foot on the island. Will the Nets change their name to the Brooklyn Nets? Who knows, but it does have a nice ring to it.

I think that this new stadium could be a final piece in making the Nets a marquee team again. They’ve been on the cusp for some time. Vince Carter revitalized them, slightly. Jason Kidd still has eyes on the back of his head and Richard Jefferson is money. But it’s still not enough. They’ve never recovered after losing Kenyon Martin, their best Big Guy. They still need more.

But LeBron doesn’t want to move from Cleveland to New Jersey. He wants to dominate New York. And that’s got to be part of the plan. Attract LeBron, win championships. I’m sure sore Knicks fans will take anything at this point.

Community board No. 6 raised its formal opposition to the Ratner Atlantic Yards project saying that the overcrowding it will produce is not good for the neighborhood.

“Within a quarter-mile [of the arena], the population will increase by 60 percent. No mitigation scheme can prevent the dangers that such overcrowding will create,” said board member Jeff Strabone….

There is no denying that having the New Jersey Nets in the neighborhood would change the face of the area. Is 60 percent a reasonable estimate though? Read More about it here.

On another front, as opposition builds against the Ratner project one of the loudest voices has been silenced. Evelyn Ortner was a long time activist trying to keep Brooklyn free of just this sort of thing. She worked fervently to protect the character of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods from over zealous developers. She passed away last week, removing what could possibly be the sharpest thorn in Ratner’s side. More about her life and death here.

I think more could have been done with this most recent NASA shuttle mission to the international space station. There were a few stories here and there, and the fact that they lost a couple of bolts got some attention for its oafishness. But all in all the coverage was, in my opinion, drab.

The space program is worth more than that. And the space station is an important project. Plus astronauts are awesome. I mean, c’mon men are actually floating above the earth with power tools, that’s really cool. There are a lot of important things that need to happen at NASA. But for the most part news about the agency is buried in the back of a science section.

The kid in me wants more up close coverage. So, since I am afforded unlimited resources for this assignment, here is my ideal way to cover the space mission.

Obviously I would want the hard news stuff. The whos and whats. I’d also like some up intimate elements.

- Streaming video from the space station or the astronauts. (I read that when the flaps opened on the new solar panels it was a fairly awe inspiring sight.)

- An application that lets the reader or listener hear mission control radio transmissions to the astronauts in space.

- Running commentary by space nuts, like astral physicists and other experts about what is going on up there in man’s final frontier.

- Information on recent missions to the station. A timeline of sorts

- Collaborative coverage of the European space agency and Russia’s agency and how they fit into the station designs. Reports on their progress.

- Photo slide shows of the amazing space views.

- Blogs, running diaries or even periodic streaming radio check-ins with the astronauts.

- Access to raw footage and audio.

It seems like all everybody wants from the Atlantic Yards Project is a little more transparency.

The politics surrounding this proposed development are mired in shallow ethics and back room relationships. According to Mole’s Progressive, Ratner went to school with Gov. Pataki, which obviously puts the two in some sort of destroy Brooklyn cabal. You can read about some of the other supposedly underhanded political dealings here.

As far as news coverage goes, Matt Sollars offers an interesting perspective on how to report on this story. Sollars has outlined a plan for comprehensive coverage that looks pretty good. Read it here.

The proposed Atlantic Yards stadium looks intriguing.  I’ll follow its progress during this semester.