Posts tagged college
There was no Lennay Kekua.
Lennay Kekua did not meet Manti Te’o after the Stanford game in 2009. Lennay Kekua did not attend Stanford. Lennay Kekua never visited Manti Te’o in Hawaii. Lennay Kekua was not in a car accident. Lennay Kekua did not talk to Manti Te’o every night on the telephone. She was not diagnosed with cancer, did not spend time in the hospital, did not engage in a lengthy battle with leukemia. She never had a bone marrow transplant. She was not released from the hospital on Sept. 10, nor did Brian Te’o congratulate her for this over the telephone. She did not insist that Manti Te’o play in the Michigan State or Michigan games, and did not request he send white flowers to her funeral. Her favorite color was not white. Her brother, Koa, did not inform Manti Te’o that she was dead.
Koa did not exist. Her funeral did not take place in Carson, Calif., and her casket was not closed at 9 a.m. exactly. She was not laid to rest.
In a bizarre investigative report, Deadspin discovers that the dead girlfriend of Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o was a fabrication.
As (mis)reported by ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, CBS, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times and The South Bend Tribune among others, the Notre Dame football star carried a heavy heart throughout the 2012 football season when both his grandmother and Lennay Kekua, his girlfriend, died hours apart on the same September day.
Kekua, supposedly, due to complications from leukemia.
Turns out, Lennay Kekua is a fiction. Te’o, who says he met Kekua online, claims he is the victim of an Internet scam.
For the news organizations reporting on — and building up — the sad tale, let’s bring you back to newsroom 101 and the importance of fact checking: Just because one outlet reports it doesn’t make it true.
Read the piece though. A bizarre tale.
For more, ESPN does a follow-up.
Tis the season of negotiation and for college students the option is this: carry textbooks or give up sex for a year.
According to Business Insider, 25 percent would just as well go the celibate route:
Education software company Kno found that students would make surprising sacrifices to get out of lugging around heavy textbooks. In fact, 34 percent would prefer to stay in every Saturday night for a semester… Even more surprising, 1 in 4 college students said they would give up sex for an entire year to not carry around textbooks.
Business Insider notes that 71% of students surveyed will switch to digital editions if and when available.
Maybe when Oklahoma State University’s School of Media and Strategic Communications offered iPads to students last fall it had more than learning on its mind.
Salt, Meet Wound
The Daily Beast lists the twenty most useless degrees.
Topping the list (or bottoming it out, as the case may be): Journalism.
I'm not sure if you'll ask a question from a pesky college student looking for answers on choosing the right decision for the future. I am an aspiring journalist, worked on my high school newspaper as editor-in-chief for two years, and had fierce competition from my junior editor-in-chief my senior year. I went to a B-rated college. It's not as great as many may consider. My junior EIC got into Uc Berekely. Sh's a year younger than me - but I feel my passion is still emerging. Does it matter what college I go to? Will she have better, bigger oppurtunities than me??
p.s. Sorry for the illiterate typing. I can't see what I'm writing bneccause your ask box is too small for my question! — Asked by Anonymous
Have you ever read Cary Tennis? He’s the advice columnist for Salon and the reason I ask is because reading your question reminds me of him. It reminds me of him because he has the astute ability to read between the lines of life’s quandaries.
I don’t pretend to be as astute as Cary but I am going to read between your lines.
And here’s what I find: you feel burned.
You’re not only an aspiring journalist but took it seriously enough to not only work for your high school newspaper but become its Editor in Chief. You worked hard, you stayed up late, you stressed out but you did it. And then along comes another who’s a year younger but hungry just like you and the two of you butt heads over story ideas and angles and assignments and comma placement and heds and deks and everything else that goes into creating a newspaper.
And this pissed you off.
And it still pisses you off because you ended up at what you call a second rate school while she’s sitting high and mighty at one of the best colleges in the land.
Here’s what you need to do: let it go.
Will it matter that you went to a “B-rated college”? Not really. You’ll find that once you’re a few years out of college no one really cares which one you went to, or if you even went at all. What they care about is what you can actually do.
So don’t be bitter and don’t be pissed. These battles are well done gone and it’s time to move on.
And here’s what you should do: Join your college paper or — perhaps even better — find like minded collaborators and create something of your own. Then report the hell out of your subject.
Be tenacious. Write short form. Write long form. Take some multimedia classes and create in that form too.
And learn a bit of code. I can’t tell you how valuable it is to know a bit of code.
Build a body of work for yourself so that when you leave college you’re defined by the awesome that you created in college.
And then hustle. And then network. And start making yourself known to people and organizations that you think you’d like to work with some day.
Do all that and opportunities will come, regardless where you went or what’s printed on your diploma. — Michael
Communications is the second most popular basketball major, with 72 players studying it. Although communications and its variations are extremely popular, only four students are majoring in journalism. This is all the evidence you need to confirm that basketball players are not stupid.
Justin Peters, Slate, Are You Sports Management or Communications?
In which he explores the majors that college basketball stars pursue.
Deadline for SPJ Student Journalism Awards
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards honors college students in print, radio, television and online journalism.
The deadline for submissions is January 26 and the contest is open to college students studying in the United States.
And, of course, good luck to those who apply.
