The Walking Dead Invade Brisbane

Last week Bruce mentioned one bloggers obsession with all thing zombie so I thought I would include one zombie themed entry as well. Over 8000 zombies were seen roaming across the Brisbane CBD district this Sunday in an effort to raise money and awareness for the Brain foundation. The annual zombie walk which began in 2004 with only 300 participants is rapidly gaining in popularity and continues to grow larger each successive year. Today's zombie walk blitzed the reigning world record held by the US city of Pittsburgh and their 4093 participants, with Brain Foundation officials declaring that they stopped counting at 8000. 

American Troops are Finally Coming home

American President Barak Obama announced last Friday that all US troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the Christmas holidays. The war in Iraq has been an obsession of the media since its outset nine years ago and this news has been long awaited by many American soldiers and their families. However, Obama's announcement has generated significant criticism and argument, especially by the Republicans, who have been supportive of the war and had hoped American would establish a permanent foothold in the unstable country. Obama's chief republican rival, Governor Mitt Romney, went as far to response that "The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government." It is likely that Obama will continue to be both praised and assailed for his decision and whether the withdrawal will be carried out by the end of December as promised. 

Photo of the Week

I came across this photograph in a catalogue of World Press Photo Awards from 2006 and I thought that the aerial angle and almost visible vibrations of the shot were simply superb. The photograph depicts a rodeo bullring with a matador and the image resonated with scenes of bullfights Ernest Hemingway wrote about in his novel The Sun Also Rises. The novel was the first time I paid attention to the popularity and artistry of the spanish traditional sport and was able to see the power and grace behind the brutality of bullfighting. The image below is well balanced and almost abstract in appearance with a flaring of red in opposite corners and the horse and rider splayed outwards in an impossible fashion. The line of white lifts the picture to give it more dimension, adding gravity, movement and tension to the powerful scene. 

World's First Double Amputee Transplant Successful

I found the following article by Lauren Keiper very interesting as I have a fascination with medical breakthroughs and accomplishments and think that they deserve to go reported. Medicine allows man to emulate the gods and the successful transplantation of two hands to a quadruple amputee is an impressive story:

BOSTON (Reuters) - A 65-year-old quadruple amputee has received two new hands in a rare double transplant operation, Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital said on Friday.

Richard Mangino got the two hands last week in a 12-hour transplant procedure by a team of more than 40 doctors, nurses and other medical staff, the hospital said.

Mangino said he's adjusting to the new hands gradually and said now he won't have to "perform a miracle" every day to do simple things like make coffee and get dressed.

Speaking at a news conference seated in a wheel chair with his arms and hands propped on stack of pillows, Mangino said he prayed for the ability to touch his grandsons' faces, stroke their hair and teach them to throw a ball

Mangino, from Revere, Massachusetts, lost his arms below the elbows and legs below the knees after contracting sepsis, a bloodstream infection, in 2002.

The complicated surgery included transplanting skin, tendons, muscles, ligaments, bones and blood vessels on both forearms and hands, the hospital said.

Doctors said Mangino independently moved fingers just days after surgery and called the results a "resounding success."

His recovery will take many months and doctors expect him to regain sense of touch in six to nine months with ongoing therapy to help him learn to grasp and pick things up.

The double-hand transplant is the second performed by Brigham and Women's, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

In May, a team performed a full face transplant and its first double-hand transplant on Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009.

The hospital said the hand transplant was successful, but the hands did not thrive after complications from pneumonia and were removed.

There are a few other programs around the country that perform hand transplants.

The first hand transplant was performed in France in 1998, and the first in the United States was completed a year later.

Doctors said about a dozen hand transplants have been done in the U.S. and believe just four of those have been bilateral.

Lecture on News Values

News values within journalism operate within a similar sphere to the principles of agenda setting. They refer to the degree of prominence that media outlets give to certain stories and the attention that is paid to them by audiences. It is hard to establish the cause and effect - whether it is the audience's interests that drive the type of stories covered by the media or whether it is the media that dictates which stories that viewers should be interested in.  News values depend on:

1. Impact - News that is interesting and that has the ability to grab attention.
2. Audience Identification - News that is interesting and relevant to the world. Audiences should be able to relate to what is happening and desire to know more about what is being shown.
3. Pragmatics - Principles such as ethics, facticity, practical current affairs and everyday concerns are an important component of news values.
4. Influence of the Source - The credibility of the source is important and journalism's relationship with public relations is also a relevant factor. PR can spin stories, control access to information and protect and shield clients. Sometimes this can happen at the expense of the truth and it is important not to be blind to this.  

Values are concerned with NEWSWORTHINESS and they differ from region to region and country to country. There are common threads of interest though, common tag lines that have become synonymous with news values include:

• If it Bleeds it Leads! - murder, shootings, accidents, trauma...the world is obsessed with the dark and twisted.
• If it's Local it Leads - people care about what is near and relevant to them. They care about what affects them.

A sense of news values should be intrinsic to journalists, as having the ability to identify what is newsworthy and what is interesting to the public is an incredibly useful quality. Good instincts can go a long way. 

Howard Evans (Editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981) believed that "A sense of news values is the first quality of editors - they are the human sieves of the torrent of news, even more important even than the ability to write or a command of language."

Many news corporations and journalists have attempted to establish common factors and news agendas within the media. The aim is to discover what news is worthy of a headline and what will garner the most attention. 

There are an infinite number of possible news values and these values are not universal. They differ within certain localities and countries and each they are subjective - different people will have different opinions over what is are the most prominent values.  

News values can include negativity, proximity, recency, currency, continuity, personality, predictability, elite nations or people, celebrity, exclusivity, magnitude, drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment, importance, controversy, unusualness and the emotional. 

Galtung and Ruge developed the following 3 Hypotheses that establish what is newsworthy and what is not (the hypotheses are essentially common sense):

1. The ADDITIVITY hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news.
2. The COMPLEMENTARITY hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other.
3. The EXCLUSION hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. 

Some of the threats that complicate the perception of newsworthiness include the commercialisation of media and social life (too many platforms to keep track of and too much useless information), public relations (obscuring and subverting the truth) and how ideals of journalism that aim to address hard-hitting and serious issues are sacrificed for tabloidy trash.  

 

Photo of the Week

In last week's lecture we addressed the field of investigative journalism and the need for such reporters to get into the thick of it and put the legwork in. It is not enough to just sit behind a computer or at a phone and do your research without leaving your desk. New forms of technology have enabled this laziness and it is certainly possible to write a good story without going into the field, but the great stories require that extra mile. The following photograph was taken by journal photographer Bill Gallagher and won the pulitzer prize. It depicts democratic presidential candidate and Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, as well as Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams. Adlai Stevenson's shoes are the focus, worn and weathered, holes forming on the soles, they are evidence of hard work and effort by the candidate himself - not just his political team or staff. 

I also found the following photo of Barak Obama which is clearly an homage to the Adlai Stevenson Photograph and can be seen to embody the same sentiment.

Is the End Approaching for the Simpsons?

It might just be a marketing or salary negotiation ploy but rumours are surfacing that Simpsons may finally be coming to a close. The hugely successful show holds the record for the longest running television series and is a core stable of many television networks who use reruns as valuable fillers. Fox is considering cancelling the show unless the voice talents behind the loveable characters, including Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardly Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, each agree to take a 45% pay cut with their current salaries totalling roughly 8 million dollars each a year. If the show were to end, Fox would still retain massive profits and income from selling old episodes and from merchandising and syndication, suggesting that the show has run its course and its value now lies in back-end profits.