Sean's Jack-o-Lantern

We went to the poor man's pumpkin patch yesterday. The big cardboard bins at Fred Meyer.
Oh, I've made that Be a Good Mom syndrome trip to the cute pumpkin patch and paid an outrageous price. One year I think I spent close to $40-some on a couple of pumpkins and a carving tool set which promptly bent and broke after about a minute of cutting into the pumpkin.
Right.
Sean carefully chose a pumpkin from the three bins, we paid our $3 and brought our new friend home. When we were ready, he drew the design he wanted. I transfered it to the pumpkin and we got to work.
I believe I have carved a pumpkin with my kids for about 18 or so years. Some years we had more than one because the elongated shape lent itself to ghostly faces, and the squat ones more of the traditional creepy snaggle toothed types.
It is pouring rain as I write this. Predicted weather for Halloween? You got it, pouring rain. So I think we will choose an inside gig.
We usually have a huge decoration in the yard that I got on super sale at Big Lots a few years ago. We call it "The Great Pumpkin," and it rises in our front yard. It's one of those popular ones you plug in that fills with air. Not sure he'll make it to our yard this year with all the rain.
But this little guy will be on our porch and we'll attempt to keep him glowing.

Do you see what your children are seeing?

In the past I have been a big fan of children's movies. In more recent years I've been disappointed by the quality on several levels. But there is one thing I didn't see and it took Sean to show me that what some people have been saying for years is really true.

He enjoys movies. He loves Peter Pan, and has for a while now. We recently found the old movie, "Hook," at a thrift store and he watched it for a few days. It's the story of Peter Pan all grown up, who has to go back to Neverland and fight Captain Hook again to save his children. But really it's about a dad who is way too focused on work and worldly things instead of being present for his kids. It's cute.
For years people have been saying that Disney movies are produced in a racist way. The good guys are always white. Bad guys are black, and sometimes the black animated characters (such as the crows in Dumbo) are portrayed with a Southern accent and obvious black dialect.
I could see it, but also always said people can take anything and pick it apart and make it into something to support their agenda.
Sean is a brown child, with brown eyes and very dark brown- almost black hair.
Recently he started saying things like, "I wish I had white skin." We talk about that and how God made him brown, and God believes he is wonderful just the way he is, and I do too. I love his brown skin and think it is beautiful.
Another night as I put him to bed he said, "I wish I had blue eyes." I asked why, and he said because in the movies, the one the movie is about always has blue eyes and they're the good guys."
He has noticed it in other films too, and cartoons.
Now my job is to subtly replace those with more healthy options, if I can FIND ANY! I could do away with movies and cartoons all together, but I don't think that is realistic.

It's a Wild West out there

Danna, Rodika, Irene and myself at Seattle University 

for the Northwest Journalism Conference.

The campus was very nice, and I love the fall colors.

I attended a Journalism conference yesterday in Seattle and it was AWESOME. All three of the sessions I attended were incredible, filled with some of the best minds and best journalists around. A bunch of the former P-I guys have launched a non-profit online news site, and there are several others that have cropped up as well.

You should check these out: westseattleblog.com

That one is run by a woman who used to be a newsroom manager at a TV station years ago. She and her husband manage this site 24-7 and do it in shifts. It is for profit and they're bringing in 6 figures a year.

pubicola.net is run by a guy who was an editor of a city paper called The Stranger. publicola started with what it did best, politics in Olympia, and then expanded to include other topics. The amount of coverage for Olympia dropped from 30 reporters to 7 since the cutbacks in newspapers.

crosscut.com  also does some politics, but more analysis type stuff. They just recently went to non-profit.

Another bunch of P-I people launched invw.org, an investigative news site.

Sounded like all of these guys link to each other's sites too.  Journalism is becoming much more cooperative, and I've seen that out in my area as well. A quasi-competitor of mine and I frequently share story ideas, photos, etc.

There was a guy at the event named Mark Briggs who used to be the online tech guy for the Tacoma News Tribune. He has written a book that is being used in college classrooms now called Journalism 2.0. He has another one coming out soon and he also has some great info about what to do and not to do online.

The publisher/owner of the Seattle Times provided a question answer during lunch, and actually said the newspaper business model is solid, and there are other factors in the mess that people don't realize and understand. Big business conglomerates that own newspapers have tacked on debts that are pulling the newspapers under. Seattle Times is a family owned paper, one of the last in the country. 

He said he doesn't believe the online news has a good business model. But the west seattle blog lady seems to be doing something right.

Several people said Seattle is a great case study for what is happening in journalism right now.

What I saw was optimism and excitement about the endless possibilities. The theme of the day was try it and fail quickly. If you fail, do something different.

Another theme: All students graduating need to know the fundamentals of journalism, ethics, etc. but also all of the online tech tools, how to operate a video camera, edit that content, and know some html. crosscut.com and publicola.com editors both said they incorporate video into their news site.

As the former editor of the Spokane Spokesman Review said, "We're back to the Wild West days," where anyone who had a passion for getting the information out to the people could do it and they weren't considered professionals nor did they need to be.

Questions about credibility, how to identify a credible source online, and whether there should be some way to tag credible sources was discussed in one session. A big caution to where the information used in stories comes from was given. One example: information that was taken from Wikipedia and used as fact in a story. It was wrong. Also discussion about how information can travel so fast, and be wrong.

I'll end with this quote that was mentioned:

"The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue."

Edward R. Murrow

And I got that quote from a source called thinkexist.com, which also provides an icon under that quote that says, "suggest a revision." A shame Ed isn't here to correct us if we're wrong on that one.