This video is part of an advertising campaign for eCampus.com made by my J321 group over the summer. The focus of the video was to reincorporate Gilly the Goldfish into the company’s brand identity while swaying students unaware of online textbook rental towards eCampus.com. I acted as the director and editor of this video (alongside providing the questionable voice-over for Gilly the Goldfish).

Entrepreneur brings Fresh Air to Bloomington

For my J201 class I wrote a profile on a Bloomington entrepreneur who brought a business idea home with him after living overseas. Check out the article!

Volatile gas market proves beneficial, for now

With an unexpected few months of erratic gas prices, I wrote an article about the effects the prices had on local businesses along with some explanations and predictions. Read it and feel free to comment!

"On the second floor of WonderLab, a volunteer worker informs Jaron Newton that the hot-air balloon exhibit isn’t working. After a quick survey of the balloon, which is supposed to rise to the top of the building, Newton looks slightly puzzled."
— My first Indiana Daily Student article. Read the rest here.
Respect the Que!

I finally took the time to get all of the camera phone pictures from my three weeks in Europe onto Flickr.

We kicked off this summer with a whole lot of failures at the local airport.

Ruckus Not The Answer to Campus Downloading

I don’t pay for my music. Ever since Napster became a household name, I’ve been leading a life of crime and greed. When a new album comes out, I don’t wait in line at Sam Goody, I just go to the right website and click the right link. No artist has seen royalties from me since I was eleven. To record companies, this is a problem.

At first, they tried to crush our resources. I have seen the demise of many peer-to-peer file-sharing applications by the hands of the record industry, and have seen just as many rise immediately after. As a teenager with moderate resources, it’s not hard to find the new place to download music for free.

Then, they tried to crush us. Headlines telling of poor little Suzy being sued for 150,000 dollars for downloading an N*Sync song forewarned “piraters” that their nasty habit had nasty repercussions. Privacy issues were raised, and many of the cases were dropped. Music downloading applications found new ways to keep users anonymous and downloading continued.

Now, they want to work with us. Online stores offering 99 cent song downloads allow both the consumers and the record companies to strike a compromise. The iTunes Store has proved widely successful in this model, selling over 3 billion songs to date. Though online stores such as the one Apple offers are very convenient, they still don’t offer that price point people like me look for in our music: free.

In an attempt to cater to those with a similar opinion, Indiana University has partnered with Ruckus to provide free and legal access to over 1.5 million licensed songs. Though IU’s attempt to bring an affordable music vendor onto campus to help deter illegal downloading is a good concept, choosing Ruckus as that vendor muddles the entire idea.

Ruckus boasts free, legal downloading of songs. What Ruckus fails to mention is the extreme limitations placed on these songs. First, all songs can only be played on the Ruckus Media Player, forcing users to replace iTunes or Windows Media Player with the advertisement-laden application provided by Ruckus. If you want to play a downloaded song on an mp3 player, you are forced to pay a monthly fee of $4.99. Even then, the songs won’t play on an iPod or Zune, the two most popular mp3 players on the market. If listening to CD’s is more your thing, you’re still out of luck. CD burning capabilities are reserved for the purchased songs only.

The limitations render these downloads almost useless to most music listeners. With the inability to listen to songs anywhere other than the computer, Ruckus has ignored the technology that spurred online downloading in the first place. Nobody downloads music to be heard exclusively heard on the computer; as Apple recently selling their 100,000,000th iPod indicates.

Giving away music for free can’t be the main focus of a successful anti-pirating campaign. This battle isn’t against the students who have grown up illegally obtaining music. It’s too late for them, their illicit ways too familiar. Paul Imbody, a sophomore, exemplifies the mindset of the veteran downloader: “I can’t pay for something I know I can get for free, it doesn’t make any sense.”

The focus must instead be placed on offering an affordable service to the students unversed in the world of torrents and newsgroups. The same students willing to try a legal service are usually the ones willing to pay. Michael Nahmius, a student that uses Ruckus says the real appeal is the service’s legitimacy, not its price point. “I’d definitely pay to download music that I could burn CD’s with if it was cheap. Right now it’s too expensive so I just use Ruckus,” says Michael.

Instead of working with the substandard features of Ruckus just because it’s free, IU has to look into some of the other subscription-based music downloading services available and work out a financial agreement. Online music store eMusic offers packages of $9.99 per month for 30 downloads or $14.99 for 50 downloads with no restrictions. Offering a service such as this at a reduced price (much like IU currently does with student software) would be more appealing to students than Ruckus, which offers free but essentially useless music.

Though I am part of the problem, I would like to see a solution. If IU takes the correct measures in offering a quality downloading service at an intelligent price, the benefits of being legal might finally outweigh the benefits of pirating. If not, at least the students willing to pay will feel less cheated on their decision.

(OpEd 1, J200)

Work

Various articles written for journalism classes and fun:

Woodward Packs Auditorium for Speaker Series

“Work at night.” The biggest piece of advice Bob Woodward gave to a packed ground floor in the Indiana University Auditorium on Monday evening.
Woodward is the first of three speakers in the School of Journalism Fall Speaker Series, an opportunity for students to meet some of the top professionals in journalism. Though the series is aimed at Indiana University students, the auditorium filled with people from all around the community, both young and old.

Sophomore Joel Hakimzadeh was excited to see such a big name at his school. “It’s great that I had a chance to hear from a piece of history, and on top of that it was free.”

Bob Woodward came to fame when he took a major role with his partner Carl Bernstein in the investigation of the Watergate scandal. His connection with the informant “Deep Throat” led to the resignation of President Nixon and also in winning his newspaper, the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize. His career continued with 11 best-selling non-fiction books including his latest, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III.

The presentation began with Woodward’s investigation of Watergate. After a brief summary of his experience, Woodward focused on the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon once he took office. He recalled the moment when he heard about the pardon from his colleague, Carl Bernstien, over the phone. Bernstein simply said, “the son-of-a-bitch pardoned the son-of-a-bitch,” which Woodward explained was enough to understand what had happened. Woodward then spoke of his exclusive interview with Ford 23 years after the controversial pardon. To his surprise, during the interview Ford persuaded Woodward to change an opinion he had held for over two decades. “Ford convinced me that it was the right thing to do…what Ford did was right and courageous.” Brogan Lee, a freshman majoring in Photojournalism, remembered this moment the best. “I always thought that Nixon’s pardon was a scam, it’s really interesting to hear a different side of the story.”

After Watergate, Woodward’s presentation focused on the Iraq War, the main subject of his recent books. After being given one year to find out why the nation went to war by his publisher, Woodward reduced his investigation into a 21-page memo for the President to read before it went to press. After reading it, the President granted Woodward a two-day, three and a half hour interview; the longest interview with a president over one topic ever. When speaking of the interview, Woodward asked the crowd to guess how many questions he asked. When an audience member suggested two, Woodward joked, “that would be if it was Bill Clinton.” In the course of the interview, Woodward asked President Bush over 500 questions. “He gives short answers,” quipped Woodward.

As the presentation came to a close, Woodward spoke of the importance of investigation in media. “Democracy is dying in darkness,” Woodward warned the audience. He asserted, “Journalism is the barrier, the antidote to secret government.” Woodward also commented on the current lack of investigation in broadcast media, or has he put it, the concept that “I know nothing, but I’m here LIVE.”

After his presentation, Woodward took a couple of questions that the audience had written prior to coming into the auditorium. When asked about his greatest wish for journalism, he hoped that media could lose its current “sense of arrogance, celebrity, and smugness,” and instead be the watchdog it is intended to be.

As for his greatest piece of advice, “work at night,”? After re-watching the movie based on his best-selling book, “All The President’s Men,” Woodward noticed that almost all the scenes took place at night. When looking deeper into the matter, Woodward realized that 20 minutes in an office versus 4 hours in a house during the evening is the difference between a cold reply and a great interview. Though Woodward claimed his wife might not enjoy his epiphany, he hoped it could help future journalists.

 (Event Coverage, J200)

La Casa Home to More Than Just Cultural Center

With Halloween’s mysterious aura surrounding Indiana University, urban legends and ghost stories charge people’s imaginations. Though some tell of “a friend of a friend” and others take place at “a campus out west,” others find their home a little more locally.

On the busy streets of 7th and Woodlawn, the Latino Cultural Center also known as La Casa inconspicuously sits between other small homes turned into offices. Inside, the center displays various Latin trinkets hung on the white and beige walls with pamphlets advertising organizations and events scattered all around the desks and shelves. Though not the description of a traditional haunted house, La Casa’s stories are just as ghostly.

Lillian Casillas, director of La Casa, first suspected something was afoot when a male student told her of something he had experienced the night before. The student assumed he was alone in the La Casa, but had heard a typewriter being used in a room upstairs. When he inspected the room, he saw that it was empty. “The typewriter was unplugged, so it couldn’t have been a short,” Casillas said.

Casillas also said lights would randomly turn on throughout the house, something she originally accredited to the home’s aging wiring. She contacted an electrician who found no problems.

Casillas’s curiosity was finally piqued when a student came to her with yet another closing story. As the student locked up La Casa, he looked in an upstairs window and noticed he had forgotten to turn off a light in an upstairs room. Along with the glow of light he also saw a woman’s figure through the window.

The student refused to close up alone anymore.

Afraid that the woman in the window may have been an intruder, Casillas investigated the issue and began hearing stories from students and around campus about a woman who was said to haunt the home when it acted as the center for the Student Association before being turned into La Casa in 1976. Casillas said alumni from the 60’s even often visit the building, asking “Is she still here?” which is a relief to her. “I don’t want people to think just the Latinos are crazy,” she said.

After being informed of the houses supernatural history, the incidents continued to pile up.

A student told Casillas that as he had been closing he turned off the downstairs lights first and headed upstairs. As he finished turning all the lights off upstairs, the student headed back down to see that all the downstairs lights had been turned back on. Annoyed, he turned them back off and closed up.

Casillas once again contacted the electrician who once again found no problems. “I drove electricians crazy,” she said.

Faulty wiring couldn’t be used to explain everything that was happening in La Casa when a student was having some trouble and staying the night there. Casillas stayed upstairs while the student slept in the living room downstairs. The next morning when Casillas spoke to the student, he asked if she had been checking up on him the night before. When Casillas questioned why he asked, he said he had seen her in the doorway. She had never gone downstairs.

Most students that have come in contact the woman in La Casa know nothing of her story. Casillas says she doesn’t like to tell people of the haunting to keep their imaginations from getting the best of them. “I don’t want to belittle the thing,” she said. Usually it is after students experience something at the house that Casillas informs them of the woman. According to Casillas, she tells them the story to “validate experiences” and let them know that they are safe. “The woman has never done anything bad, she just likes picking on people, especially men,” she said.

Casillas says that the spirit in the home has become more of a family member than a horror. “She connects with us,” she said. So much, that last year during La Casa’s Day of the Dead celebration, a student created an altar in her honor. According to Casillas, as long as La Casa is around, the woman will always have a place to stay. “She is a part of our home, part of La Casa,” she said.

(Halloween Assignment, J200)

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Themed by: Hunson