On Friday April 19, George Mason University president Ángel Cabrera hosted an open forum on the website Reddit. The forum offered Mason student “Redditors” the opportunity to ask Cabrera questions regarding Mason life.

Courtesy of newsdesk.gmu.edu

Cabrera’s “Ask Me Anything” (often referred to as an “AMA” by “Redditors”) was posted on the GMU Sub-Reddit. Sub-Reddits are sub-sections of the site with content dedicated to a particular genre or subject.

As of writing this, the “I am Ángel Cabrera, President of George Mason University. Ask Me Anything!” has accrued a total of 69 up-votes from Redditors, making it the most popular thread on the GMU sub-Reddit.

I personally thought that the AMA was a successful effort by Cabrera to reach out to Mason students in a bold, innovative fashion. Cabrera has shown himself to be social-media-savy in the past, such as through his twitter account, and this AMA seemed to be a natural progression of his social media presence.

I particularly enjoyed his response to the question of whether or no GMU is trying to distance itself from it’s “commuter school” notoriety.

“The commuter/residential distinction doesn’t capture what we’re about or what a modern university will be about,” Cabrera said. “We serve residential students, and working professionals; career starters and career switchers… some live on campus, some commute, some take classes online.”

We’re a comprehensive research university, committed to finding ways to serve people’s needs whatever those are…can’t fit us in an easy category!”

Courtesy of www.nelson-atkins.org

Last February, Mason librarian Joy Suh educated our class on using the GMU library tools for our stories. Her “Library_Resources_for_Comm_361”  PowerPoint is loaded with such advice, including a reference to using journal databases for supplementary research on our topics.

Suh mentioned several databases and elaborated on their significance. These included LexisNexis Academic, JSTOR.

LexixNexis Academic is a resource for students to locate past newspaper articles and breakdowns of legal cases, according to Suh. This service has a specific focus on topics of legality.

“LexisNexis Academic helps students and faculty members at colleges and universities save valuable research time by offering them quick, easy access to more than 15,000 of the most credible business, legal, and news sources available in a single location,” according to their website proclamation.

The JSTOR  resource, meanwhile, has a much broader focus. This database contains a plethora of  journal articles that cover a wide range of topics. These articles are accessed through a clean, simple interface that makes it even more inviting for students.

These attributes could explain its apparent popularity. According to the site’s about page, there were a 151 million searches conducted last year using the database.

LexisNexis and JSTOR are just two of the useful databases that Suh introduced in her presentation.  Check out the rest of her PowerPoint for more golden nuggets!

Courtesy of www.largefm.com

In retrospect, I felt that Kevin Goldberg’s presentation was a humbling experience. His message was a grave reminder of the dangers of shoddy journalism. The “Seven Deadly Sins” approach was  a simple, evocative means that set the tone for that message.

Goldberg also crafted a dense PowerPoint for his presentation, which can be found in our course shell on Blackboard. One particular nugget of information from that PowerPoint intrigued me: Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. It reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This legal jargon imbues website operators and other such internet providers with a legal immunity from the liabilities of their users. The protection “covers defamation and privacy claims, as well as negligence and other tort claims associated with publication,” according to the Digital Media Project.

Upon further research, I learned that section 230 is particularly beneficial for bloggers such as ourselves.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bloggers are considered users in the sense that they edit and post content through a ISP. They are also providers, however, in that they allow third parties to comment on these posts and add content of their own.

“Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider,” according to the EFF website. “This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it”

So there you have it, bloggers. While section 230 of CDA doesn’t create an immunity from all of the legal troubles blogs can be fraught with, it does give us protection from the malice of those pesky trolls commenting on our content.

As evident by the following Goldberg example (which he appropriately categorized under “Lust”), those comments can be truly venomous:

“These sluts from sigma kappa are an absolute joke. They stole first place in bar night from us last night, god knows what they did to bribe the judges because they looked like a bunch of cracked out whores dancing at a rave, that girl who was hypmotized at speaker night danced better than those bar night girls. We all know they cheated last year and rumor is that the two girls from Sigma Kappa on GWLT tried to rig banner so they would get first and got called out, haha what a bunch of jokes. But in the end of the day if I was in a house full of butter faces and a bunch of overweight strippers I would try hard in greek week too, because thats all they have going for them…”

Inspired by the photography theme of last week’s class, I looked at the photos attached to the stories published on Connect2Mason.com with a whole new perspective. This gallery includes three particularly impressive photos from various stories published on the website. Each one of them effectively captures a powerful photography technique.

The picture on the left is a snapshot of Mason’s Sherrod Wright leaping for a bucket in Mason’s win over William and Mary’s tribe. Through both angle of the shot and the body language of all the players, the photographer created a fantastic sense of motion in the still frame.

The middle shot is from a story about Mason baseball’s first home series of games, and the 2013 season in general. I admire the emphasis the photographer placed on the scoreboard in this photograph. This emphasis is accentuated by the two blurred baseball players that are dwarfed by the scoreboard.

The last photograph in the gallery is of the capital building in Washington D.C., but it honestly doesn’t seem like a legitimate photograph to me. The gorgeous, mildly cloudy, and deeply blue sky in the background makes the photo seem more like a painting. That sense of surrealism gives it awe.

Professor Miller devoted last week’s Online Journalism class to learning more about the specific roles in each group. He delivered his lecture through a brief-but-effective PowerPoint presentation that he titled “Collaborative Journalism”. The PowerPoint presentation includes helpful descriptions of each distinct role in the groups.

I am a member of the Fairfax Transportation group (aka The Transporters), and I am acting as the data journalist for our first story. This means that “I want to tell the truth behind the facts,” according to Miller’s lecture. Miller included useful tips in his PowerPoint for discovering that truth, including this handy flowchart.

Paul Bradshaw, onlinejournalismblog.com

I’m going to treat Miller’s “Collaborative Journalism” PowerPoint as the Rosetta stone for understanding each individual role this semester. For this story I’m a data journalist, but for the next story I could be a network journalist, multimedia journalist, editor, or community manager. The PowerPoint helps make that transition easier.

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The first thing you’ll notice about this media pyramid is that it’s not actually a pyramid. This was by design. I try to keep my media consumption balanced, and I thought that a hierarchical pyramid shape wouldn’t convey that. So I instead decided to construct my assignment as a collage.

courtesy of www.elca.org

As I am writing this, It’s coming up on 1 o’clock in the morning. Which means this is the perfect time to think about the next few weeks of Comm 361.

I’m going into my third class this Tuesday afternoon, and my group is still needs a blog page. That blog page is the first of several goals that I will be trying to accomplish starting tomorrow.

The second step will be to coordinate a schedule for meetings with my group. This part has always been the most difficult step in my past project groups. Everyone has a different schedule of classes, homework, and part time jobs, and finding synchronicity between each group member is almost inevitably a nightmare.

But I must admit that I am optimistic about planning with my group members tomorrow. Each of us were in Steve Klein’s New’s Writing and Reporting class last semester, so there is a sense of confidence about each person’s group participation. It eases my paranoia about any of my group members slacking on their end.

After we agree on a schedule, we will have to decide on the blog’s theme.

I narrowed down the list of options to my three personal favorites: Job Hunting in Fairfax, Hidden Fairfax, and Neighborhood Renaissance program. I think that each of these options have great story potential, and I would enjoy investigating any of them over the semester.

Furthermore, I think that my flexibility with the final choice for the theme will make the final group decision much easier. I’d prefer a cooperative group over my personal theme pick.

Blog site, group schedule, and blog theme. Those are my goals for the next few weeks of this class. I am curious to see how they pan out.

photo by Alex Perry

Draw(n) Out is a recently opened art exhibition located at George Mason University’s Art and Design building. The exhibition features a wide range of artwork by artists, art professors, and even by the curator herself, Mason’s Kariann Fuqua .

According to the Draw(n) Out brouchure, this exhibition is meant to challenge contemporary art themes and convey aspects of time.

“The exhibition will focus on pushing the boundaries of the instituional definition of drawing,” according to the exhibit’s brouchure, “while simultaneously exploring themes of process, evolution, decay, and change.”

Draw(n) Out officially opened on Jan 22 and will remain open to the public until Feb 15.