10 RSS Feeds You Need

For some, the whole idea of using really simple syndication feeds has yet to catch on. However, these feeds are a great way for you to quickly browse what new information a source has put out since the last time you visited its Web site without actually ever having to visit the site. A quick search will reveal plenty of ways for you to collect the feeds, and some people use feed readers that collect hundreds of RSS feeds. However, to avoid getting to bogged down, I get some news via Twittter, Facebook, e-mail updates, and I use RSS feeds only to check about 10 sources. This way, I diversify the ways I get information in hopes of not missing something that I might not get if I used only RSS feeds.

Now, when you are following only 10 RSS feeds as I am, I have found that the perfect way to do this is to use the "View Feed XML" link that you normally see when you click the RSS button on a Web site. Here, you can get an option to add the feed to Firefox's toolbar, which leaves me with 10 feeds in my Web browser's tool bar that I can quickly and easily drop down to check for new content. In case you are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, basically what I see when I drop down is a listing of the most recent posts on that site in headline format. Then, if I decided I actually want to read one of those stories, I can click the link and open up the actual page. Otherwise, I'm caught up on what that source has to say for now, and I know I haven't missed out on a story that might have interested me.

So if I had to narrow down to only 10 feeds to recommend you start out with in terms of RSS? I would provide the following list:

1. Relatively Journalizing
2. Your local newspaper. For me, it's The Roanoke Times.
3. A friend's blog. This will help you stay updated on their life and keep in touch.
4. A second friend's blog. You do have another friend, right? If you don't you could follow No Use For a Headline.
5. Your favorite sports team or conference. I keep updated on the ACC and my Virginia Tech Hokies via ESPN's ACC blog's own RSS feed. Virtually everything on their site has a separate feed you can follow.
6. If you're in college, recently graduated or just like the perspective of young creativity, I recommend Student Bloggers. Otherwise, your favorite nonprofit, political cause or professional organization is sure to have a feed.
7. Journerdism.com
8. The Quad (NY Times' blog), especially for college sports fans. And who isn't?
9. 10,000 Words, where journalism and technology meet.
10. Be flexible here. If you don't follow CNN on Twitter, maybe you want to get their RSS updates. You can even get Facebook updates via RSS. Perhaps your profession has some blogs you want to add here or put in place of the journalism ones I mentioned above. The point is, be diverse in your media intake and don't be afraid to try out something that might sound scary at first such as RSS feeds!
    

What I Learned: Part 8 (The Finale)

This blog post is the eighth in a series where I go through my college transcripts, class-by-class, to determine what exactly it was that I spent six years learning. Come with me on this magical journey that might lead me to the promised land of employment and the American dream! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.)

What I Learned: The Finale — Top 10 Things College Taught Me
If you've missed the story so far, check out parts one through seven at the links above. In this final installment, I'll group the conclusions drawn from the original seven posts and expound on them here to determine exactly what I spent six years learning while earning my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

1. Plan ahead when you take courses and jobs as a teenager. Try your best to determine how much you will actually be able to use the related skills learned in the future. Are you potentially wasting time?
2. Have fun, and forge a few good friendships. Don't miss out on opportunities when you are young that might not present themselves when you are older.
3. Destiny has a sense of humor, and we can't really predict the future in terms of what to pay the most attention to now in order to prepare for the future. Take life as it comes, and realize that everything is eventually interconnected. Don't ignore any details.
4. Take the good with the bad, persevere, adjust fire, and go on down range again.
5. Practical, hands-on experience with specific skills are the most valuable courses one can take.
6. Exposure to new, sometimes disturbingly unfamiliar, things can often help you reap great rewards.
7. It make take a while to find what you are truly passionate about and good at, and it might take even longer before that's actually what you get to spend your life doing.
8. Education is not a job guarantee, regardless of what the trumpeters of academia have society convinced of.
9. Again, don't waste time. Ever. You can't get it back.
10. Good research skills are the first needed attribute in just about any profession.
    

The Bubba Files: Meteorology Fail

We haven't had a Bubba Files to write about since the feature's inception, and who could've known that the second time around would also involve a cellphone snapshot of something funny on a car? This one is coming to you off I-81 in Virginia, right before the I-66 exit.

It appears that the van in front of me was on its way to Cooperstown, N.Y., likely for some sort of sporting event for a team called the Hurricanes. Immediately, I thought about the hockey team of that name in North Carolina, but with the NHL season well over (especially for the Hurricanes), I can only surmise one of three things:

1. This car hasn't been washed in a long time.
2. These people clearly didn't write the game schedules down correctly.
3. There is another, even smaller, crappier sports team in North Carolina called the Hurricanes.

However, none of this really matters in terms of what makes this hilarious and ridiculous. I doubt anyone will "Fear the Storm," especially when you can't figure out what sort of storm exactly you want them to fear. Notice the "Hurricanes" written on the window, but then take a closer look at what is actually drawn on the window. Yeah, those aren't hurricanes — they're tornadoes.

You see, a hurricane is not cylindrical, my meteorologically inept Tar Heel friends, it actually looks like this:

Note the circular shape with the eye in the middle, which looks nothing like the upside-down triangles you've so masterfully painted on your glass, Bubbas.

Now, please excuse me while I go cheer on the Tigers.

Oops.

What I Learned: Part 7

This blog post is the seventh in a series where I go through my college transcripts, class-by-class, to determine what exactly it was that I spent six years learning. Come with me on this magical journey that might lead me to the promised land of employment and the American dream! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.)

Fall 2007 — Spring 2009: Graduate School
I've decided to lump all four semesters of grad school into one post, considering I learned the least in grad school and racked up a lot of research and thesis hours that I obviously won't cover here. Check out the previous six parts if you are out of the loop on the story so far!

COMM 5014 — Communication Theory
I had a heck of a guy for the professor teaching this class, but it was mostly an overview of the areas in which one can study at the graduate level in communication, with guest speakers each week from various disciplines. I learned that much of what scholars call theory, I just call horse sense.

COMM 5024 — Communication Research Methods
I have one course that I didn't mention when talking about Marshall because it was technically a grad class — Statistical Methods. It went on to my VT transcripts for credit, and it was a big help in preparing me for this research methods class in communication. We did a content analysis and an experiment, ran the stats and wrote two papers all in one semester for this class. I learned a lot about experimental design, writing good survey questions, etc. This is probably in the top three most valuable grad classes I had, and the nicest, most-helpful professor in the world taught it.

COMM 5614 — Rhetorical Theory & Criticism
Why this is a required course for a public relations major, I don't even know. It should be in an English department first of all, and it is in many places I'm told. I learned nothing from this class except that some Ph.D.s have no idea how to teach whatsoever, regardless of how much they might be able to publish. The professor for this course was rude, creeptastic and gave unrealistic and vague assignments. Luckily, my adviser would later be able to steer me in the right direction regarding the application of the topics within the realm of rhetoric.

COMM 5814 — Theories of Mass Media: Agenda-Setting, Framing and Priming
Let me just say — one semester focused on only three theories? What were they thinking?!?! Now, I know agenda-setting has attributes and building levels, as does framing in some sense, but still, we ended up beating the dead horse a lot in this class. After the first few weeks, we discussed the same thing every time. If nothing else, I will say I learned how to explain these three theories very, very well.

COMM 5814 — The Political Columnist
This class had its high and low points. On one hand, I wrote a good political column each week that ended up going online with Planet Blacksburg for the whole semester. On the other, we went around each week, read our columns aloud, then listened to the same story from the professor he told us the previous week but had already forgotten he had told us. Nice guy, fun to work with and chat with, but I sort of got the vibe he wasn't too keen on having us do much work or trying to teach us much. He did require a research paper at the end, for which the guidelines were — well, there were no guidelines, so I wrote about metaphor in political columns and pulled off a great paper.

PAPA 5315 — Government Administration
I don't know who named this class, but it had nothing to do with working in the government or administrating anything. It should've been called, "Personalities and Poor Professoring 101." We talked about the MBTI personality test and how managing lots of different people takes certain types of leadership decisions, etc., but it was never anything more than common sense kind of stuff. The professor had a few guest speakers come in, none of which were very good speakers. Some classes, he just showed us some random slideshow or talked for hours on end about how great he was and how much he liked red wine. The best part was when he was going to tell us how to put together a résumé (because we obviously didn't know that by the time we were in graduate school), and the slides he showed us had stuff misspelled all over the place. Rather than actually teaching anything himself, he assigned each student a chapter from the book to teach each week, though he did rudely interrupt each presenter several times to ask odd, irrelevant questions. And thus the reasons I took no more CPAP classes at VT.

COMM 5814 — Campaigns
Don't let the title of this class fool you. Had it not been for my own go-gettering, I would've done nothing related to campaigns in this class. The subject matter was supposed to be public relations, political and public health campaigns, though we spent the majority of our time on the latter. Most of this class was just one student wasting our time by enjoying conversation time with the professor like the rest of us weren't in the room. We talked about some campaigns, but we were never taught anything about campaign development, strategy, employment, etc. We just read about them in journal articles, and we delved into communication theory a lot more than should have been done for a campaigns class. This should have been a hands-on class, which is what I made it. I got permission to do my final project as a campaign development for the local government's museum project, a capital campaign, in lieu of a final research paper. My mentor and friend who was my internship boss helped me with this opportunity where I really did a lot of my own research and got into the meat of campaign development, no thanks to the actual campaigns course. Oh, and I still haven't received a grade or comments about that final project, even though I've been graduated for almost two months and out of the class for more than six.

COMM 5814 — Crisis Communication
Other than my internship, this class is the most valuable thing I did in grad school. My adviser taught the class, and she and I really are on the same wavelength as far as learning styles, I think. She uses lots of great, real-life examples and diagrams to support and explain communication theory. I learned to really thing strategically and found my love for what I really hope to do someday — be in charge of a corporation or client's long-term strategic communication plans, especially in terms of environmental scanning and employing actional legitimation. Unfortunately, most entry-level PR practitioners (and many senior ones) never get to do this sort of thing, but I can always dream.

COMM 5814 — Communication Studies Seminar in Pedagogy
The three-hour credit was actually spread in one-hour credits across the course of the first three semesters of grad school. It was usually right around lunch time, which made it sort of an annoyance, especially for those who had no other reason to be on campus that day. Most of what we did could have been done via discussion board and e-mail, and the graduate teaching assistants were the ones enrolled, and they all already had a separate required meeting each week where we rehashed the same stuff. That's not to say I didn't learn some good things about what to do and not do as a teacher, but I really didn't need three semesters to grasp that. Plus, experience is the best thing in learning about that sort of thing. I had a good professor here who was friendly and made it go smoothly, but I'm glad to hear that they've changed this to just a one-semester, optional course in the department.

COMM 5904 — Project and Report
The single most-valuable part of graduate school for me wasn't a class at all. It was this, my internship. I got to be involved at least minimistically with a very wide array of projects to get an idea of how to actually work in a public relations setting. My previous PR experience was media relations and events only, and other than that, I was all journalism. This internship helped me see advertising and PR working together, as well as more-strategic realms of PR such as helping corporate clients get themselves out of messes or project-based tasks such as creating annual reports for other clients.

COMM 5514 — Public Relations Theory & Practice
This class was pretty much Campaigns, Comm Theory and Crisis Communication all rolled into one. There was a lot of rehashing theories and very little practice. Wait, I think there was no practice.

COMM 5894 — Final Examination
I chose to do a combination of internship (with an 80-plus-page paper incorporating my experiences into theory) and final examination (comprehensive exams) in lieu of a thesis. I'm glad I did because all of those thesis-track people have a thick slab of paper that might, if they are lucky, see partial publication in a journal someday. On the other hand, I got valuable work experience and a chance to demonstrate my mastery of all of the subjects covered during my two years in grad school.

COMM 5974 — Independent Study (Research Task Force)
So I actually persuaded my adviser to let me do an independent study where I wrote nothing wholly new, but instead I did multiple revisions on papers for conference/journal submissions. I figured the submissions would be a big help if I ever want to go on for a Ph.D. I got three journal submissions out, and I have a few papers nearing completion of another revision. Perhaps once I get a job, then I'll start worrying about all of that stuff again and try some publishing in my spare time. What I learned? The peer-reviewed world of publication is harsh, and Ph.D.s who teach at research institutions must be nuts trying to get published all the time when they could just go teach somewhere (oh wait, see Rhetorical Theory & Criticism professor notes above).

So what did I learn in grad school?

1. Exposure to new things, such as communication theory outside the realm of journalism-school curriculum, helps you think at new levels.
2. There is no substitute for hands-on, practical experience, and today's academics just don't seem to understand that.
3. Graduate school is a nice distraction from the real world for two more years after college, especially if you have an assistantship for funding purposes, but the M.A. won't guarantee you a job over someone who can show they've been working in the field full-time while you were learning about McCombs and Shaw.
4. People waste a lot of time researching and writing about stuff that country boys just call common sense.
5. I learned to become a much better researcher, which is handy when developing any sort of strategic plan.
6. Going to a football school is a heck of a lot of fun. Going to one with some really down-to-earth, nerdy classmates just adds to the fun.
   

What I Learned: Part 6

This blog post is the sixth in a series where I go through my college transcripts, class-by-class, to determine what exactly it was that I spent six years learning. Come with me on this magical journey that might lead me to the promised land of employment and the American dream! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.)

Fall 2006 & Spring 2007
We've finally reached my senior year, the final two semesters of undergraduate education at Marshall University! Let's see what I learned on my way to figuring out what would be the next step, which ended up being grad school (and I'll talk about those classes in the next post in the series).

JMC 302 — Advanced Editing & Design
I was the managing editor of the student newspaper when I had this class, which was basically supposed to teach you how to be a copy editor, the people I was overseeing. I pretty much just did my actual job while the professor was in the newsroom teaching the other students in the class and got credit.

JMC 304 — Computer-Assisted Reporting
This class was probably the biggest pain out of all the ones I took in college. I never did so much work for one class, even in graduate school. And it was all tedious work with databases and spreadsheets and such. To make it even worse, there was group work. However, I can't say everything about this class was bad because it gave me a prep in statistics, and the in-depth stories I got out of this class turned into some really great clips and earned me an in-depth reporting award.

JMC 360 — Digital Imaging for Journalism and Mass Communications
All I can say is this is one of the most valuable classes I have ever had. I learned the principles of photography, magazine design and video editing here. I can only wish that the class had focused a little more on convergence than having projects assigned by major. I'm told now that the class is much more converged so that everyone, even print majors, are doing video projects in addition to their print final projects and such. This class was made even better because my wonderful adviser was the professor.

JMC 430 — Magazine Article Writing
I think this class met maybe two or three times. We did most of the work independently and just met outside of class with the professor as needed for advice on our two big magazine article projects, for which we were required to do quite a bit of research. I really liked that format, especially during my busiest semester of undergrad.

JMC 490 — Journalism and Mass Communication Internship
I interned in the university's Office of Communications and Marketing, as a public relations intern. It was here I began to realize I liked the variety of PR more than hardcore journalism.

PSC 433 — Public Administration and Policy Development
This old guy who looked like Mr. Rogers taught this class where the only assignment the whole semester was one paper. He gave reading assignments too, but we never really discussed them in class. He always just talked about the U.S. Forest Service and no one really knew what he was getting at. I wrote my final paper on the leadership style of Jim Sinegal vs. Sam Walton.

ENG 360 — Creative Writing
Another English elective here, and what a fun one it was! There was a lot more poetry involved than I liked, but we did get to write two short stories in peer-review fashion, which was helpful and interesting. This class was just more writing practice, and a chance to get away from the concise, boring writing of journalism.

JMC 414 — Public Affairs Reporting
I think I did my project for this class as an in-depth piece about whether or not athletes are good role models for children, comparing NCAA and professional athletes. This class only met a few times, and we just checked in with the professor as needed for guidance on our projects. As long as we finished our list of assignments by the end of the semester, we were good to go. This was a great format for me because I worked really hard to turn in everything on the list by mid-semester, and then I didn't go to the class anymore or have to worry about it.

JMC 440 — Ethics
The dean of the journalism school taught this course, where we discussed Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant and others in terms of ethics and how they relate to journalism. We often had to turn in papers examining ethical issues in the media, and we generally had some good discussions. The class ended with our senior capstone papers and a group debate about various ethical issues.

I'll admit, I got to do a good bit of shamming at some points during my senior year. Some classes were very loose as far as having solid meetings, and others I had already basically completed through other means and were just there as a formality. I learned to persevere when the going gets tough, like when I had computer-assisted reporting and was also working at the newspaper 30+ hours a week. I also looked back and realized I had done pretty well at this college thing and that maybe I should look into graduate school. And, of course, I began to get a taste for public relations and open up to exploring the "dark side" of journalism, as some call it.