I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Talk of more federal stimulus aid is increasing in Washington as federal officials realize that many state governments may be worse off after federal stimulus money disappears, Stateline.org reports. Like many other states, New Mexico is looking at a “revenue cliff” when federal stimulus money runs out Dec. 31, 2010, especially in Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program. But as Stateline points out, approving more federal stimulus dollars is a tricky matter and surely will provoke a vigorous, emotional debate.
Remember Matthew Shepard? I sure do. He was the kid who was killed in Wyoming in 1998 because he was gay. Invoking his memory Thursday, 237 Democrats and 44 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation, according to the New York Times.
We bombed the moon this morning. O.K., not really bombed. It was more of a long-distance rifle shot. Scientists sent a piece of space junk slamming into a crater at twice the speed of a bullet to try and determine if water exists on the moon. As this New York Times story reports, “The data could play into the debate over where NASA’s human spaceflight program should aim next, whether to return to the Moon or head elsewhere in the solar system neighborhood. The presence of large significant amounts of water could make it easier to set up future settlements with the ice providing water and oxygen.”
I continue to find news from post-Katrina New Orleans fascinating, especially this New York Times story about swarms of inquiries swirling around that city’s police department and how its officers responded to situations immediately after the hurricane. The inquiries already have provoked an emotional debate in New Orleans.
Apparently going without a hot breakfast is deprivation for upperclassmen at Harvard. At least that’s one of the complaints from Cambridge, the New York Times reports, as the country’s most recognizable Ivy League university looks for ways to trim expenses. Harvard’s endowment has shrunk in value by nearly 30 percent.
Conde Nast, the magazine publisher that announced it was closing four magazines this week, could lose up to $1 billion in ad revenue this year, Newsweek reports. Newsweek says that through August of this year the company’s ad revenue was already down $600 million compared to a similar period in 2008. The losses provide the strongest rationale for Conde Nast’s decision to close the magazines, Newsweek says.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and China’s president Hu Jintao dueled over the role of media in a society at the World Media Summit, THR.com. reports.
Hmmm. The folks at the New York Times are doing some serious R&D in an attempt to identify the Next Big Thing (or Things) to deliver news to consumers, Editor & Publisher reports. One of the researchers tells E&P that he “envisions a future in which a reader might be reading or watching something on the Times’ site via a desktop computer, but seek to go elsewhere and continue on a laptop. Later, he or she would be in a car and eventually at home watching TV. An article, podcast or video could follow that person, he explains, through all of these devices with relative ease on the reader’s part.”
Yep, folks it’s a brave new world.
