What Silver Spoon?

It's an old phrase used to describe people of privileged backgrounds. The kind of person who has always had everything they wanted and needed, though those two may not be the same thing.

Those are the enviable, and not so enviable, people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

They are perhaps the kind of people everyone wants to be because they don't have to worry about getting anything.

But when it comes to information, far too many people seem to think they need to be "fed" everything on a silver spoon.

I find this tendency to be quite annoying because I am a very independent woman. I don't like to rely on other people if I can avoid it. And while it isn't easy for me to do, I do know when to ask... Even if it makes me uncomfortable.

When it comes to information, if I don't know what something is or understand an idea, then I go and look it up.

Thanks to the Internet, there is plenty of information available, literally at your fingertips! You just have to be a little careful of the information you look at because sources online may not be reliable.

Despite the fact that not all the information on the Internet is reliable, it is there and easily available.

For an example, I saw a comment on an online story a while back that kind of irritated me. The story was about HOV lanes in Northern Virginia. The person's comment was basically a demand for information on what HOV lanes are. Actually it was more of an accusation that the news outlet wasn't providing enough information.

I am old enough to know what HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) and HOT (high-occupancy traffic) lanes are, though they have existed for almost twice the number of years I have been around. And with just a few quick key strokes, I was able to look up even more information than I could possible want to know about HOV/HOT lanes.

I personally believe that it is better to seek out information for yourself rather than sit around and prat that I don't know what something is because people won't tell me.

I see a word I don't know... A good old dictionary will help solve that. And if my old hard copy of the dictionary doesn't have the word (which does sometimes happen, especially since language changes - see my last post - and words come into the language or drop out), there are quite a few online dictionaries you can use.

I see a topic I don't know much about... A quick Google search will probably bring up lots of resources about that topic, which I can then peruse at my leisure.

For an example of one of these, anyone who has seen the special collector's edition of James Cameron's Avatar will have seen the scene in which Jake talks about the Hallelujah Mountains and what holds them up. He says Grace told him it was a MagLev Effect.

Now I had an inkling of what that might be, but I wanted to check. So I looked up Magnetic Levitation, because that was what I thought it was. Turns out I was right, but I still looked it up!

No one told me to do so. I did it on my own for my own personal edification.

Why am I making a point about all this?

The ease of access to information is one part of my point.

But the other part is that these kinds of comments are being made on online stories. That means who ever is posting those kind of comments is using a computer, a modem, a browser... This means that person has almost instant access to a whole lot of information.

So posting something that in essence is accusing a news organization of not posting enough information is kind of silly, don't you think?

Information is readily available. You don't need to have it fed to you. Look things up for yourself and draw your own conclusions based on what you learn.

There are many points of view you can select. Please try not to limit yourself to only things that make you feel comfortable. Comfort can be misleading and change is rarely comfortable.

Weathering the Weather

I've heard it more times than I care to count - Viewers are most interested in the weather, so even though the homepage of a given site will be the first to come up, many will click immediately on the weather tab.

So one of the main functions of a person like me is to help viewers get the information they need as quickly as possible when it comes to weather alerts.

I've seen it happen that on a day when there is severe weather, views on a news Website will skyrocket.

Where I currently work, one of our busiest online days involved a very nasty winter storm that dumped a huge amount of snow on the area. We hit more than 200,000 views on that day alone.

And the weather has been very freaky these last couple of years. From the record-breaking snowfall amounts in my part of Virginia in 2009/2010 to the kind of nasty, super humid heat you don't normally see this far inland. Now we're got the kind of biting cold I haven't felt since I moved out of New Jersey more than a decade ago.

The effects of this crazy weather will be felt on all levels of society from the outdoorsy who like to hunt but won't have as large an opportunity to do so because of falling wildlife populations, to people looking at supplies in the grocery stores where prices are climbing, to people born under that wandering star who want to get away but can't afford it because gas has gotten so high...

So I understand that people want to know what the weather's going to do. Then there are the calls from people asking, "Is it gonna storm tomorra?" Well, when they start giving you their exact address and expect you to give them a weather forecast for that location, it's just a tad ridiculous.

I think my biggest beef with weather complaints comes when I get yelled at by a viewer because the station is cutting in every 15 minutes for a weather alert, say a tornado warning, and the person couldn't watch one of his or her favorite shows. The complaint being that the warning didn't cover that specific person's area, so why was the station interrupting his or her entertainment?

Take a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for example. Or that Tornado Warning. Or a Winter Weather Warning. First off, the National Weather Service is NOT going to issue one of these alerts just on a whim!

Like people who scream "global warming" (though the newer "global climate change" may be more applicable) is a myth, that it's just a fantasy, but fail to consider that scientists must use the Scientific Method to reach conclusions and that method requires data to be replicable... There is science behind what the NWS predicts.

Predictions may not be all that good days out, but within a couple of hours or even minutes, they're usually pretty accurate. There is no such thing as a "guaranteed forecast," because that's an oxymoron!

So we've got a warning out there. Even if it's a hyper-local one, say for just one town, there is still a need to get that information out to all. Such weather developments, when they occur, can be quite fast moving, which means they may affect more than just the initial place under the issued warning.

This is especially true for tornadoes, to which anyone who has lived in "Tornado Alley" will attest as they have seen such storms tear across the landscape at breakneck speeds, wreaking havoc and destruction in their wake.

Sometimes warnings only cover one part of an area, say the eastern section of a given county. And then a second one can crop up that covers a different portion of the same county for a different time frame... So more people affected!

The sheer numbers are what matter here. Television stations want to keep people safe, so even if your favorite show is being cut off by the weather alerts, it's still a heads up, especially in smaller markets that cover a "small" area. Why? Because of the size of the area, you're more likely to be affected by the same situation.

And in truth, the Shenandoah Valley is not that big.

In order to get the relevant information out in a timely fashion, news outlets are using numerous resources ranging from cut-ins on air to text alerts to statuses on Facebook.

For the text messages, a person can sometimes sign up to get alerts for just a specific place, say the county in which that person lives. But for the on-air and online stuff, they can't be that specific.

So if I put up a marquee on the Website, a Desktop Alert crawl or a status on Facebook announcing a weather alert, everyone is going to see the same message no matter where they are. I can't assign such a thing to only show itself to people living in a certain area or using a certain IP address.

On top of that, weather situations sometimes change so quickly, no one person can keep up. On those kinds of days, I will often put up a message saying, "Tune in for information as it becomes available" rather than try to update a marquee or status with every change...

Even I know seeing a ton of similar messages gets irritating, so I try and keep such messages to a minimum if I can... Though I've gotten in trouble for both sending out too many and sending out too few... If that makes any sense.

One the one hand, some people appreciate it and the higher-ups encourage frequent messages to the viewers. Then you have the people that find it annoying and say they are going to stop watching/reading because of it...

Caught between the viewers/readers and the boss. Never a fun position in which to find yourself. And so the fulcrum continues its endless dance to find balance...

The weather is always changing, as any meteorologist will tell you. You don't like the weather right now? Out in Columbia, Missouri, people say just wait a few minutes because it'll change.

And news people like me can only try to keep up. I'm no Data! Nor am I Watson. (Not even Sherlock's companion...) So I'm along for the ride just as much as anyone else in the community.

We want to help people know what's coming and how they can protect themselves from a potentially dangerous situation. And we will use every resource at our disposal to do so.

So keep a sailor's weather eye to the sky and an emergency TV or radio nearby!

Oddities of Inspiration

I recently noticed something about my blog that somewhat displeases me.

My last three posts all say they went up November 1.

The truth is, quite simply, they didn't. Each post went up a couple of weeks apart.

However, I did create multiple posts all on the same day, November 1.

I was inspired by numerous topics on which I felt I might expound. In an attempt to not forget any of them, I created multiple posts with notes in the drafts to remind me of those topics about which I wanted to write.

I would then work on the posts as the thoughts struck me, sometimes very late at night or even hopping out of the shower and grabbing a towel in order to write something down I considered witty or well worded before it flitted from my mind, never to be written...

I have actually done this several times and am currently working on multiple posts that will eventually go up. Unfortunately, they will not truly represent the work that went into them because they will be posted by their creation dates, not their actual posting dates.

Unless someone out there knows a trick around that little problem? If you do, feel free to let me know. I would like to have my posts reflect the actual work they entailed...

As I wrote in my one post, I proofread like crazy. Very rare indeed is it that I put up a post the very day I created it because I want to make sure it reads well, is well written and doesn't contain mistakes if I can avoid them.

I will sometimes spend weeks on a single post, polishing, reworking, editing or just plain rewriting the whole thing.

As a journalist, that isn't always possible, at least not in my particular field. Each day is a new effort with new stories and more issues. You can't sit and work on a single story for days on end, unless it's for a sweeps period. Then you can sometimes work on one story for weeks, but those are not as common and you still have to work around that daily load.

For those who are not in the television field, a Sweeps Period is for the Nielsen Ratings system. Such periods occur four times a year for about a month at a time. During those periods, viewers are polled through various means to see what they are watching and when. Then the TV station gets the crunched numbers from those polls on which the station can then base its advertising fees.

Of course, this is only the most basic explanation of a Sweeps period... You would have to know more about it than I do to go even deeper...

For a news station, these periods mean reporters work on special segments, or even series, of stories that are longer, more in depth and of wider ranging topics than stories seen on the usual day.

It's a bit of a juxtaposition, but as a person of varied interests and just as varied knowledge, I'd like to include, and indulge, that knowledge and my interests in each post if I can.

I'm also a researcher, of a sort. You have to be able to do research to get any sort of post-graduate degree. What that means is I will often look up something to make sure I have it correct.

So whether I'm checking to see if I have something spelled correctly, or I'm making a correct reference to a given work, or I'm looking up a historical/scientific/literary point to support my views, I will take that time and look it up.

So, sorry about the clump posts. I do spend some time on each one. Honor the Muses for their gifts, but beware for they do strike, it seems, in sets.

Filling in...

I sometimes can't help but feel that I didn't quite explain something correctly. For instance, I feel as though I have left something out of my earlier post, some key stone that completes a thought.

It often happens that some connection forms in my head that just doesn't translate well into the written word. So while what I think makes sense (at least to me), explaining to someone else the process and the connections in my mind just doesn't work.

For instance, anyone in journalism will probably already know that it is a very detail-orientated field, but someone outside the field might not realize just how detail orientated it is. Fact checking and accuracy are just two of the words used to describe this.

When it comes to the Internet, there are all kinds of "sources" a person can access, but how do you know the accuracy of that "information?" In some instances, you can't know. Some people will simply write whatever they want without checking to make sure their information is correct. For journalists, that could almost be counted as a crime, say libel. For an online journalist, that makes it even more difficult to make sure information is accurate and correct.

Indeed, expanding into the blogosphere makes the going even more treacherous. Because a blog is simply one person writing their thoughts, beliefs and notions, those writings do not have to be checked for accuracy. There are more blogs out there than can be counted, but most are not acceptable sources of information for a professional writer.

So usable online sources are mostly reduced to Websites produced by government agencies and known organizations (certain charities, local groups or the like).

Journalistic sources try for accuracy, but they can make mistakes. That's where a person like me comes in for I'm is supposed to catch the mistakes before they become a problem. Still, no one person can catch everything. So mistakes are bound to happen.

The good thing about the Internet is that you can, in most cases, go back into the original and make whatever changes you need. There is no real requirement to print a correction or re-air a story with a correction.

While a Website like Wikipedia may not be the best resource to use for information, it is an excellent example of just this process, because members can go in and make corrections when called for without a lot of fuss. But remember the scandal that broke a while back when Wikipedia found out some of its "contributors" were lying about their credentials and similar other activities.

The Internet has its own advantages and disadvantages, just as any information source does. Being an online journalist means I'm one of the people trying to make sure the information is correct, accurate, easy to access and more.

I'm sure I'll think of more concerning what it is to be an online journalist in the future days. And I'll write it down as it comes to me.