In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

NPR.org has a story today pointing out that “more American colleges are offering classes that teach students to deal with a shrinking and increasingly dangerous world.” I’m posting the article because a) it’s an interesting phenomenon and b) to me, it just underscores the fact that government officials should not be afraid to raise “scary” [...]

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Andrew Ostrow of Mashable had an interesting post pointing out how the new Twitter Lists have already become excellent resources for the public during emergencies as was demonstrated last week during the Ft. Hood shootings.
The Lists allow Twitter users to organize the feeds they’re following into groups. And, Ostrow notes the work of several news [...]

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The National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB), National Public Radio (NPR), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in collaboration with three public television stations, and the Integrated Media Association are developing the Station Action for Emergency Readiness (SAFER) project, a plan to help public broadcasters serve their communities when disaster strikes.
SAFER will develop customizable plans [...]

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A book with the title The Chaos Scenario seems perfect for this blog. The cataclysm described, however, has not happened to a place or a people but instead to an industry. It does though give me a great segue to recommend the new book — whose subhead is Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice [...]

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I wanted to bring to your attention two news stories from this week that highlight the significant role the Chinese public is having in the nation’s response to their major earthquake and how this may have a major impact on citizen involvement in their government generally. 

The lead story by Maureen Fan on the Washington Post’s front page Thursday, “Citizen Groups Step Up In [...]

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NPR’s Melissa Block had an interesting story about how many Chinese throughout the country communicated with each other directly after the earthquake using text messaging:
The first word about the massive earthquake in China did not come from the news media. In China, some 600 million people have cell phones, and when the quake hit, many reached for them — but not [...]

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A brief detour from the usual topics this weekend to mention that NPR’s On The Media is replaying a story I did a couple years ago about my attempt to train for a career in television punditry. Among those who tried to help along the way are Nipsey Russell, Joe Nocera, Paul Begala, as well as “the Jedi Master to television pundits”. You can be the judge on [...]

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