Daily Archives: May 27, 2011

Make Coupons Optional Plz!

Business, Economics, Technology, , , , , , , ,

I shop at Meijer’s stores for groceries. I really like it. It’s one of those grocery stores that have pretty much everything you need, and I’ve been happy with it. Unlike most supermarkets in California, this one actually sells everything. And I’ve learned to like it.

What I haven’t learned to like is how they want to force coupons on me. I’m not a coupon kind of person. I just don’t like cutting them out and bringing them in. I’ve also come to the conclusion that coupons force people into buying products they wouldn’t normally buy anyway. I might buy a package of Charmin, but just because I have a coupon for it doesn’t mean I really want to go shopping for it. If it was convenient, I might think about it, but cutting out coupons, storing them for future use and remembering to bring the right one just seems like a waste of time. Sure, you save money, but sometimes convenience of peace of mind is much more economical than actual cost savings.

But I can’t get Meijer to stop handing me a handful of stupid coupons that I don’t want. And they’re rarely for anything I’ll ever buy anyway. They’re always for things that are kind of like the thing I bought, but not exactly it. In other words, they’re trying to intice me into buying things I don’t normally buy. And I don’t play that way.

So, I’m stuck leaving Meijer each time I shop with a handful of useless coupons that I then feel guilty for having to throw into the trash can. And I don’t do it immediately because they wrapped those coupons around my final receipt, so that receipt goes into my pocket, and then a few days later, it gets pulled out with a gob of useless coupons that end up on my counter, and they accumulate because they join the other coupons I’ll never use. Basically, Meijer is contributing to more and more trash that I end up having to throw out of my house, adding to landfills in a way that wouldn’t have been necessary if they would just give me an option at the beginning that says: “Paper or plastic and coupons or no coupons.”

Simple as that. And we’d all be happy.

I’m just saying.

Why Hire Reporters? Just Have Your Staff Rewrite Someone Else’s Story.

Business, News, Writing, , , , , , ,

An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.

The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.

This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.

Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.

Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.

I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.

Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

News, Politics, , , , , , , ,

ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.