Interview with First Selectman

For my research project, I decided to interview Unk DaRos, the First Selectman of Branford. I thought he would be a good person to get information from because he knows a lot about the town, and he knows the financial status, new developments that are going to be going up, and answered all my questions i had to help my further my learning on my project. When i went for my interview he was very helpful. I asked questions about our our tax money, the homelessness in Branford, new upcoming developments, what we do as a town for the elderly, and mostly what our biggest struggle is financially and what we are doing to improve it. He gave me a copy of the town budget which im finding very useful. I just finalized my notes, and I'm starting to work on my final paper. I still have alot more information to gather though.

RSS Feeds

Working and researching on our projects/presentations, i learned alot from RSS Feeds and how they work. They might not be useful for everybody but their helpful for me, especially in this class. An RSS Feed is a web page of content that is constantly being updated. There's a topic, or articles, anything with information, and people can subscribe to them, and when there's no information given out, or someone knows something important to add, you can update it. So it supplies us with the latest info on what we want to learn about. Websites such as CNN, any blogs, news websites and many others are all good examples of RSS Feeds. I learned alot about how people use them, and how their helpful, and also where to find them.

Community Fights Back Against Dodd

As my previous blog stated, the fight for health care and jobs is a huge affect on people. With Dodd's idea to take away the health rights of people, people responded by protesting at his re-election. Not only was this rally against Senator Dodd but Obama as well. The community as a whole agreed that what the government is doing is unconstitutional and they feel as though their taking their rights as humans away. Kristin Ingram, who was the main supporter at the protest was asked what she would like Dodd and Obama to hear, and her response was, " I wanted them to hear our voice, they need to go back to the Constitution and give us our liberties back." I would totally agree with that. What's happening isn't personally affected me but i feel for the people who are going to most like suffer now, not only are their jobs gone, but their rights to be treated when their ill is wrong. I think what's starting to happen, and also from other sources I've read the wealthy are starting to take over, people with the upper hand tend to come first and that's what most people were protesting against: " redistribution of the wealth". A lot of this has to do with your background, and where you come from, and now a days, if your finical status isn't strong, people struggle. It's so sad but we hear about it more and more now. The protest might not have been effective, who knows, but people got their thoughts and feelings out about the rights of themselves, and they were heard which is more important then anything. The more people act out against things, the better the chance is for improvement.

Health Care and Unemployment

With the economy slowly going downhill, it's affecting people and families more ways than just losing their jobs. The loss of health care is having an impact on families because with losing jobs, more and more people are losing their benefits as well. Over 2 million jobless workers are in a terrible situation; by the end of the year all of them are in danger of losing their jobs. Any unemployed workers all around the country, was given 14 extra weeks of unemployment. Chris Dodd, Senator, is willing to give workers in the state with an unemployment rate greater than 8.5% an additional 6 weeks because their seeing how its affecting the country. In Connecticut though are rate is 8.1% so we will only be allowed to have the 14 weeks, with no extension. It is terrible what is occurring right now throughout the whole country. People are no in serious debt, losing their jobs, homes, cars. It needs to be settle people need to know how to budget because this could be the start of life long problems. It's going to be harder for families with children because when their sick with no health care, that money comes out of parent's pockets and it was a crazy amount of money, just for a doctor's visit. On estimation, over 15,000 people in CT have lost their unemployment already. This recession is affecting union workers, people who have been in business for 25, 30 years who was always guaranteed a job WITH benefits, is now jobless.

Choosing a Topic

I decide to research state and local news for my topic because i think it has a broader variety of ideas to choose from. There's a lot of interesting and important things going on lately in today's world, and right around in our local area, so i think it's good to see whats happening. I also don't have to be stuck on just one topic, I can look up and search for a lot of different issues, and i get a selection to chose from that interests me.

When I first started looking for news and events, the website i went to was the Hartford Courant. I chose to look there because their always updating information with what the latest is, and it's also local. They have a lot of different articles on a lot, not just the boring stuff on just politics, or the war. I found a lot of news articles on people who are losing their jobs due to the economy, and how a lot of companies are struggling and how much the percentage is increasing. I found that to be interesting to me because i see my family members struggling now because of that crisis, so i understood better what their going through. It was also interesting to see how other people are dealing and how it's affecting their lives. I looked more on different websites such as CNN, and Newsweek, but i didn't really find anything of interest because that isn't so much local. I read a lot about just sad stories, and tragedies happening. There's scary things going on, mostly things that are affecting children and its really upsetting. I'm going to keep researching and gather more information.

Learning from Blogging

I think blogging is a good way to learn. It lets you write down ideas, and reflect on almost anything. You also get to compare your ideas with other people's, and share your thoughts by reading and responding. It can also widen your mind and look at things from different views that people may have. Blogging is also a way for us as students, to practice our writing skills, and also with how we look and think of things.

Blogs connect reading, writing and thinking skills by letting us read what someone has to say, and then use our thinking process to write ideas down. It is also nice to be able to go back to our resources we might be writing or reading about by the click of a button. You can also connect with many different people in different ways because everybody has a different way of thinking and looking at something, so we might say to ourselves, yea wow i never look at that that way that's really interesting, and then we can go and put our reaction to it also and share what we learned.

It's beneficial because everything we need is right in front of us, there's no rummaging through papers trying to find information or work we did, its also just somewhere to put our thoughts down, and have people add to it so we can expand on our writing and add new information. I don't feel that blogs have very many drawbacks too them, and think they are very useful and creative. You get to make it your own. People could abuse blogs and be disrespectful which would be a downside.

My Progress in Journalism

I really enjoyed learning about how to create my own blog, and customize it so it's something i like. We covered alot of topics so far, and it was interesting to learn how they all fit together. The blogs is a really cool way to get my ideas down in my own way. I never realized how many elements is in a writing piece or an article. We covered alot of vocabulary such as timliness, prominence, proximity, consequence, and human interest. They all help to make a news article or any written papers successful. There's alot of things a journalist has to include to make it an actual " news article." I hope to learn alot more about what's going on in the outside world by the articles we read, and also alot more about writing and journalism in general.