The Black & Magenta Blog

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent the popular cereal producer General Mills a thinly-veiled warning earlier this week. The reason? Under President Obama’s administration, claiming a cereal, such as Cheerios, may drop a person’s cholesterol by ten percent or more qualifies it as a “drug”.

The FDA argues that unless General Mills “properly” markets Cheerios as a medicinal product, all Cheerios products shall have to be seized by the FDA. In addition, General Mills is ordered to submit samples for proper testing.

I wish I was making this up. Despite General Mills producing Cheerios since 1941, President Obama’s administration is the first to, in my opinion, waste time on such matters, and then follow it up by threatening to seize the cereal completely. What shall they do then, I wonder? Eat it in their offices and mock the public for their naievte? Hold public “Cheerio burnings” to destroy the so-called “threat” once and for all?

Perhaps I am overreacting, but an emphasis on such a trivial matter, when there are other, much more pressing matters at hand are the definiton of “asinine”.

Recently I received news of the death of Amy Adams, a junior here at Muskingum. Though I never knew her very well, my interactions with her, albeit limited, were nonetheless memorable.

Every Sunday when I would walk into the Kelly Coffeehouse for Mass, she would always be there with a smile on her face, ready and willing to help out in any capacity. I myself simply wanted to get through the service so I could back to dorm room and goof around before starting on my homework much later in the evening. Despite my grumblings, I never saw her once complain, gripe, or beg for more than any had ever given. Instead, she sang along with the psalms, and offered her services for any sort of need in our small congregation with her steadfast piety and humility.

To Amy’s family, I would just like to say Amy was an amazing person, and easily a role model for anyone, Christian or otherwise. She certainly inspired me to give more and be more than any inspirational speaker or story ever had. You will be in my thoughts and prayers and I wish you well these next few months. Having had lost a much younger brother six years ago, I know from experience just how hard the first few months may be.

To Amy’s friends, I offer my time and a sympathetic ear should they ever desire it. My e-mail is listed on the directory, and my Facebook account is open to any and all.

R.I.P. Amy Adams. You will be missed.

I’ve started a new blog focusing on new media: The Next Journalism. Take a look at my latest posts about Facebook journalism, virtual journalism, New Concord Gifts, and paper sentimentality.  I’d love to have you join in the conversation!

I’m writing a blog this week to get Josh Chaney off my back, so there! It’s funny though, that I’m blogging - especially after my editorial in the Black and Magenta this week that discusses my disdain for digital media. I feel like computer screens are taking away the words on paper that I have fallen in love with.

So anyway - I hate to blog, but I love to blog.  I love the instantaneous of it, the ease, and the freedom. It’s like free verse poetry - I’m not constrained by rules, meter, and rhyme. I can write about what I want, when I want. Yet, I hate it because it is slowly but surely taking away the relevance of people like me - writers who want to get paid to write, who are trained in writing, and who take pride in their skill and the need for it. It takes away Sunday mornings with the paper, scanning the headlines while drinking orange juice and eating a cheese omelette with salt and pepper. It takes away the writer’s stress of a print deadline, the smell of the stacks of paper to be delivered, the smudges of ink on your fingertips, the gloss of a magazine cover. It takes away what I’ve wanted to be and what I’ve trained to be for four years. I hate it.

Yet here I am, using the very thing I hate to tell you that I hate it. I am a hypocrite, but it is so easy.

(This post is in response to Opinion Editor Sarah Dwyer’s editorials about dating life at Muskingum in the March 13 and March 20 editions of the Black & Magenta.)

Hey, Muskies. Don’t limit yourself to this small pond of dating at Muskingum College. Some people find their partner in college; some don’t.

I highly recommend OkCupid.com. It’s 100-percent free and includes fun, personal quizzes. I met the woman that I love through this site by answering a ton of personality questions and then searching for best possible matches within a 25-mile radius of my hometown. I studied the woman’s profile and sent her an IM, which I recommend over shooting a stranger an e-mail first. A few days later, she sent a message to my inbox.

Gradually, we got to know the most personal details about each other, so when we finally met, it was as though we had known each other better than some of our own friends and family members had known us.

If you’re looking for a real, committed relationship, you owe it to yourself to check out OkCupid.com. Because online dating is predominantly, although not entirely, text-based, it forces you to connect with someone on an emotional, rather than superficial, level.

If you’re still interested, follow this link. Happy hunting!

Audra Wayco

Every NBA season, one guy stands out as the NBA’s most valuable player. Last season, Kobe Bryant got the award as he helped lead the Lakers to the finals, with the second best record in all of basketball, only to come up shortagainst Boston. This season is a little different. There are dominating teams in both the Eastern and Western Conference.

Presumably still licking his wounds from the verbal beating he took from Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart last month, CNBC’s Jim Cramer will host his show from Ohio State’s campus in April.

Cramer is the guy with the rolled up sleeves that always manages to overdo the dorky soundboard and gets all worked up over stock pickings. He will tape his April 22nd show at OSU as a stop in a nationwide tour of 13 campuses.

I’m not sure if this actually something that he normally does, but it should be interesting. According to the Associated Press, students from an investment management class will compare their stock-picking skills against Cramer’s.

As Josh talked about in a previous post, I’ve recently started an app on Facebook called New Concord Gifts. I started it as an experiment, just to see what would happen. For a number of years, I’ve been keeping a photo blog called the New Concord Journal, but I wanted to try something more interactive. New Concord Gifts is similar in spirit to my blog, since it publishes photos of local people, events, and places, but the difference is that with NC Gifts people can interact with the photos, send them to friends, comment on them, etc. The app has taken off in a kind of viral way, with over 700 users in less than a week, and thousands of photos sent so far.

I’m especially interested in this app as a kind a journalism. It lets people tell stories and interact with each other and with their community, and those activities are at the heart of the best journalism. It might be just for fun now, but New Concord Gifts could be a model for a new kind of interactive journalism. We’re in a new era in journalism, and it’s a time to re-think and re-shape our profession. I’d love to start a conversation on new models of journalism with anyone who’s interested!

What’s in a word?

A few professors asked me to consider a story on the definition and usage of the word “socialism.” If you have any access to the world outside Muskingum College, you might know the word is being thrown around using various definitions.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, “socialism” is:

1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

Obama and his massive spending plans that have, in part, purchased shares of stock in companies like AIG, have aided the fire in terms of worry and fear of a socialist society.

It’s an interesting topic. Hopefully we’ll have a story on it next week. Until then, what is your definition of “socialism?” How do you feel about the ways the word is being used?

Enjoy not having to make payments on your student loan? Don’t get used to it, because starting tomorrow that will no longer be the case for students borrowing from Sallie Mae, the bank most of us evidently borrow from.

From the story in Saturday’s Dispatch:

The company, formally known as SLM Corp., is replacing its signature loan with a shorter-term version that requires students to make interest payments while in school. For many families, the move is expected to push private loans out of reach in an already-tight credit market.

The upside is that the cost of a private student loan will be cut by about 40 percent, said Jack Hewes, chief lending officer for Sallie Mae, which is based Reston, Va.

Families also would repay loans between five years and 15 years, compared with the previous 15 years to 30 years. Despite the shorter term, Sallie Mae says the monthly bills upon graduation wouldn’t rise dramatically.

This is because the interest payments students make while in school would avoid negative amortization, where the loan balance grows because of deferred interest.

The loans will be available for the 2009-10 school year.

As an example of how the loans will work, Sallie Mae paints the scenario of a student who wants to borrow $17,000 over two years.

For the first semester of freshman year, the student would pay $40 a month. That figure would rise each semester, reaching $160 by the second semester of sophomore year. The $160 monthly payments would continue until graduation.

Once out of school, the student would owe only the principal of $17,000.

This would be paid off over the next six years at $328 a month. Under the previous setup, the student would have repaid the money over 15 years at $250 a month.

The new requirement will lower the total cost of the loan to $28,000, compared with the previous $45,000.

At a time when President Obama has promised to make college more affordable and Governor Strickland is pushing his education plan, this comes at quite a hit. This will most definately have an impact on some students’ decision to go to or remain in college.