The Salty Report

Important words.

jaymug:

Never give up.

(via tee-rad)

Why is my heart beating in my throat so hard when all I have to do is hit the send button? Ahhh. Did this little ditty with my grandma as part of my application to my favorite show in all the land, Snap Judgment. 

As I’ve said before… you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. 

This short story is about my grandmother’s experiences during WWII, with some sound effects fun thrown in. Hope you enjoy. 

Coastal Cities Summit: Sea level rise no matter a question of if, but when. For WMNF news. Run time: 6:35.

bishopia:

Hey everyone. I’m hiring a Senior Designer to work for PBS KIDS Interactive! The job post was a little dry so I decided to make a VISUAL JOB POST that would appeal to someone like me who has the skills but doesn’t read anything :D

Abdulhadi Alkhawaja is a human rights activist, currently on his 55th day of hunger strike. His daughter, Zainab, is also an activist. During her most recent arrest, she wrote this poem about her father.  

I watch in horror as, the sultan digs my father’s grave.
He digs it deep and makes it narrow,
smiling that one day he shall live in a towering castle
surrounded by the deafening silence of miserable obedient slaves.

I watch in horror, and I call to him:
“Gravedigger, dig! But make the grave a little bigger.
Dig for two and not for one.
Make it so it fits us both,
for I could never step on the ground,
if my father is buried under.”

I hear the sultan cursing,
his face all red with fury. 
He has found another seed he knows my father planted.
He crushes the life right out of it,
and into the grave he throws it.
Yet as he digs a home for death,
he’s blind to the seeds of life growing all around him.

As tears of anger burn my cheeks,
I feel a hand around my shoulder.
I look into my father’s sad eyes.
I see him smile, a sunrise.
“Don’t despair,” my father whispers.
“You witness victory. Celebrate.”

As the sultan sits in the dirt,
tired of all the digging,
he sees around him bones and bones,
of sultans, emperors, kings and queens.
He sees with fear skulls and skulls,
but no more crowns.
A question arises:
how to crawl out of a hole
that he had dug and dug and dug so deep?

From in his grave he looks up high and in the sky.
The sultan sees a vision.
With giant wings rising to the heavens,
a man who is only skin and bones
and big dark eyes and a tranquil smile.

SOURCE: Democracy Now!

(Source: mossteph)

Florida has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. Yesterday, MoveOn.org members and others rallied at Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Ybor City. The group hopes to sway President Obama to make changes to current foreclosure system.

About fifteen protesters gathered as part of a larger national day of action called Save Our Homes. They held signs with the messages “Dump DeMarco” and “Throw homeowners a lifeline.” Chris Radulich is council organizer for MoveOn’s Tampa branch.

”We’re here today to try and get homeowners relief. 63% of the mortgages are owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they are not included in this last deal to write down mortgages and all? And the acting head, who is left over from the Bush administration, Edward DeMarco, is against giving them a break and writing them down like other people. And we’re here to try to move the president to change the policies of his administration at this time.”

As part of the recent settlement with state and federal investigators, banks will have to pay $26 billion to reduce the principal for more than 1 million borrowers. None of the eligible loans are from Freddie and Fannie. Reducing principal for these mortgages would likely increase the burden on taxpayers because they are supported by the federal government. Radulich says up-front investments in homeowners will pay off in the long run.

”The next step would be to actually allocate money to help people write down their mortgages so they can afford to stay in them. It’s probably cheaper to do that in the first place, than to put them out in the streets and have them go on food stamps and welfare.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are under the direction of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and DeMarco is the acting head. To put it plainly, the protesters want him fired. The group says he is standing in the way of making progress. Walt Seely is a member of the MoveOn Tampa council and says the federal government hasn’t done enough to help those underwater on their mortgages.

”The banks have been bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars. And yet nothing has been done for the people. Other than to say well we can give you a lower mortgage rate, which does nothing for people whos homes are not worth what they paid for.”

A few members of the community shared their personal stories on dealing with foreclosure. A common theme was the lack of transparency between home owners and lenders, and the unwillingness of banks to budge on loan terms. Long time Tampa resident, Nick Strippoli, is currently dealing with foreclosure.

”Now mediation in my definition, is the two parties come together. They meet and try to work out a settlement. It was nothing like that. Mediation was scheduled for October, we went to the mediation meeting, and it wasn’t mediation, it was an ultimatum. Pay us everything you owe us, plus all the fees, or nothing. We’re going to foreclose on you. And that’s when we learned at that point, that our mortgage was actually owned at this point by Freddie Mac.”

Strippoli said even though his mortgage is now owned by Freddie Mac, it’s still managed by the original lender, Chase bank. Chase collects any fees and penalties for late payments that accrue. He said this gave Chase a financial incentive not to make a deal. Another Tampa resident and MoveOn member, Sylvia Landis, concedes that even homeowners making diligent mortgage payments end up footing the bill for Fannie and Freddie mortgages.

”And we have a very high rate of foreclosures in this community. And then basically the banks are taking these assets illegally from homeowners and then they’re being transferred to Fannie and Freddy, where they’re being put on the books as assets, and we’re paying the bill. Not once, by loosing our homes, but twice by putting Fannie and Freddy on life support.”

Two hundred separate gatherings were planned across the United States as part of the Save Our Homes day of action. The Ybor group also delivered a petition, with 60,000 signatures from Florida residents, encouraging President Obama to replace DeMarco. Chris Radulich delivered the stack of pages, wrapped in a red white and blue ribbon, to the local Obama Campaign headquarters.

”And this petition is actually if you looked at it, more than just a list of names. It’s also they’re stories, what they’re requesting of Obama, and it’s a great deal of heartbreak, for everybody on this list and everybody who knows those people.”

Foreclosures aren’t the only housing problem facing Tampa residents, another is affordable rentals. For example, future urban development along Tampa’s riverfront may displace 1,700 residents of North Boulevard Homes, the city’s oldest public housing. Tomorrow community activists and Occupy Tampa will rally with these residents to encourage Tampa officials to include West Tampa residents in their considerations.

Related: U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor calls Florida bill to speed up foreclosures not appropriate

photoj:

futurejournalismproject:

Photojournalism v. Instagram, The Battle Continues?

A few weeks ago, photographer Nick Stern expressed his grievances against Instagram, chiding its inauthenticity for eroding the value of professional photojournalism:

Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all. It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image.

Yesterday, Heather Murphy, Slate’s Photo Editor, produced a rebuttal in which she pointed out the journalistic value app-driven photography actually creates:

Instagram is not a threat to photojournalism. The real threat is that photojournalism professionals are refusing to engage with the platform. If they spent a bit more time with it, they’d see that Instagram is about much more than these faux-vintage-filters. It’s a community of millions of photo addicts, eager to embrace their work, journalistic standards and all. 

The FJP: The app-photography v. photojournalism debate is not a new one and you can get the full breadth of Stern and Murphy’s arguments at the links above. At minimum, Murphy agrees with Stern that Instagram should not be a substitute for more formal outlets of presenting photographs. We agree too. Well, Michael did, back in October:

The results produce very interesting documentation but I don’t think you can call it photojournalism. There’s just too much fabrication going on.

But perhaps the debate sheds light on a more interesting trend. In that same post, Michael wrote of the iphone-as-camera as a tool. Nothing less, nothing more. And in the future-of-journalism light, tools are often fascinating means of creating new communication cultures. Murphy addresses this well. Not only does Instagram “help novice photographers get their feet wet,” but it creates an environment to aid transparency for journalism at large, much in the way that other social media outlets (like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook) do for news outlets, individual journalists, and writers. Murphy writes,

Reporters like Parker are learning about photography while sharing behind-the-scenes tidbits. Campaigns, we all know by now, are big charades; little deconstructed moments like the directional tape on the floor help make them more interesting, accessible, and real.

I can experience photos from photojournalists I admire (the handful who are on the platform), just a few seconds after they took them. I can leave them a question in the comments—and they might answer. They might even like my photos back.

So, if we stray a bit from the need to defend the integrity of photojournalism, we can re-locate the debate hashed by Stern and Murphy in a larger conversation on the tools that allow journalism, particularly the process of journalism, to become more transparent, interesting, and accessible to its audience.  -Jihii

(photo via Slate)

Great read on the iPhone photography app vs photojournalism debate.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

Hydrofracking is the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock under the Earth’s surface. The New York State Attorney General is bringing charges against the Army Corps of Engineers to crack down on the lack of regulation of the process known as fracking. Two of the main players spoke about the lawsuit to students, faculty and members of the public at Stetson Lawyesterday.

Mauricio Roma is a geologist who works on the case for the New York State Attorney General Office. He said studies have shown evidence of radioactive material left over from hydrofracking fluids.

“The way it works… we have this vertical well then it goes horizontal for 4000 feet, the pipe is very narrow, it’s about maybe 5 inches in diameter, not that much, and they have to inject through that pipe, 5 million gallons.”

Philip Bein is lead council for New York’s lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers. Concerns have been raised nationwide about ground water contamination with fracking. But Bein said air pollution is also a major concern.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that the problems or risks to the environment posed by this new technology go beyond water. And air pollution is a significant issue. In Wyoming, which we think of as a pretty, pristine, clean state… the air was good for ozone, until they started developing natural gas using this technology, and they’re now in nonattainment.”

Bein said many states have a “drill now, regulate later” policy. He said Pennsylvania has suffered because of this strategy.

“That approach has led to significant pollution incidents of both surface and ground waters. The Monongahela River which provides drinking water to over 300,000 people, was contaminated by waste water affluent from natural gas drilling, that was sent to publicly owned treatment works, which essentially are unable to handle this waste stream.”

Bein said a major problem is the lack of EPA regulation of oil and gas companies which are not held to the same standards as other industries.

“And in 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, referred by some as the Haliburton Loophole, in a pejorative way, but what that did was to take hydrofracking out of the regulation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. And therefore that federal law intended to protect the purity and safety of our drinking waters, just doesn’t apply.”

He hopes the current court case will close that loophole and wants to compel more inspection from federal government. Roy Gardner is Stetson Law’s interim dean and said it’s important for lawyers to communicate with scientists.

“If we’re really going to solve any of our environmental challenges, lawyers need to take an interdisciplinary approach to the problem.”

Monongahela River Among America’s Most Endangered Rivers™ 2010, AmericanRivers.org

Gasland, a documentary about fracking

Originally posted on WMNF News

reuters:

Reuters photos: Life and death in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

(via producermatthew)