Torrential Clouds in the Global Skies

While researching for an article about education in Africa at my State Department internship, I stumbled upon the book, Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. It's written by two NYT journalists and highlights female discrimination rampant in the developing world. I bought it as my inspiration read during my winter break. As of now I'm about halfway through it (no pun intended). Reading some parts I feel somber and at the success stories I smile. It's an emotional yo-yo read, yet so fundamentally necessary to see the ways other cultures treat women. The authors successfully intertwine individual anecdotes with real statistics. Journalists often overlook these issues because these societal diseases remain hidden, caked over with bureaucratic repression and wanton politics. It's the media's responsibility to work around these obstacles.

From Raking Muck to Muck Rack Networking

Although I am not a member of the elite smart phone toting bunch, I do visit my Twitter almost everyday through the Web. I already follow CNN's Sanjay Gupta and Christine Amanpour; Out of the pair Gupta stands out my favorite, particularly for his Twitpics. I've always wondered how other journalists Tweeted and now I can find many of them through Muck Rack, a haven for the tweets of journalists. Have yet to fully explore the site and pick the ones I want to follow.

Champion of News Aggregation: The Daily Beast

Copying information from another source is okay, well as long as you cite it right? In the world of academia and beyond, citation is the ultimate savior from allegations of plagiarism. Many student like myself start most of college research with Wikipedia, which expertly cites most of its facts so students like me can fact check.

However,I digress to present the best online journalism version of Wikipedia, The Daily Beast. Headed by Tina Brown, a personal favorite of mine, the Beast has outperformed many of its numerous competitors as the go-to news source. It's Cheat Sheet is a regular read of mine. The "Cheat Sheet" allows people like me to emotionally voyeur on to a place of sinisterly wonderful newsworthy summaries of excellent articles from great news sources, such as the L.A. Times, Washington Post, etc.

Their Web design and graphics figuratively kill the competition. The Beast indulges people like me with hard-core news topics, like the Yemen embassy crisis, alongside feature caustic and witty stories and photo slide shows that wonderfully, translucently pop out. Another added bonus includes their wonderful "Book Beast" section, which unlike the heavily clouded NYT literature montage points me to the recent best reads.

More importantly they have recruited a range of journalist/columnist newbies and conquistadors, like Gerald Posner, an award-winning investigative detective and writer, I suppose. Let's simply consider that I could keep writing more about their online savvy for a lot longer then anyone might bother to read. It's a site you have to see to believe.