Workout at the ARC

Drinking at 18?

When you turn 18; you're allowed to vote, you're allowed to smoke cigarettes, you can serve on juries, you can get married, you can be prosecuted as an adult, and you can join the military. Though you can't go to a bar and order yourself a nice cold one after a long day or to hangout with friends or watch a game. When you turn 18 this is supposed to be the age when you become an adult and start making decisions for yourself, but apparently not decisions about drinking. 

Shortly after prohibition most of the states established their minimum legal drinking age as 21. Since then there has been debate about lowering the drinking age. In the 1970's we saw a number of states actually lower their age, even if the majority of them eventually ended up raising them back.  For a better understanding of the history of the drinking age check out The Week.

 The main reason for the drinking age being restored back to 21 were the results of several studies showing that the number of motor vehicle accidents among teens increased significantly with a lower minimum legal drinking age. The American Medical Association says that the 21 legal drinking age saves more than 1,000 teen lives a year. 

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is an advocacy group trying to stop drunk driving and as you can imagine supports having 21 as the minimum legal drinking age. MADD explains that teens react to alcohol differently than adults and "naturally overdo it." They claim that more than 25,000 lives have been saved due to minimum legal drinking age of 21. On the MADD site you can find out more about their support of 21 as the minimum legal drinking age.

The Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) though says that the 21 year-old minimum legal drinking age doesn't stop teens from drinking and claims that more than 90% of high school seniors find it fairly easy to obtain alcohol. The SSDP claims that teens could benefit and learn to be more responsible drinkers with a lower drinking age. Teens that drink underage are usually drinking in unsafe environments, like the kid's house with the out of town parents. The SSDP says that with a lower drinking age kids won't have to hide their drinking and could be supervised and therefor learn to be more responsible. They also suggest classes in school teaching students to drink responsibly rather than teaching them to not drink at all.

Mac McCann of The Daily Texan wrote an article on why the drinking age should be lowered to 18. In it he claims that with the legal drinking age being 21 we are trying to enforce a law that is unenforceable. He says that regardless of the age, teens are still drinking and all the law is doing is punishing young adults. He believes law enforcement time and money should be spent more on cracking down on abuse and DUI rather than trying to catch a bunch of kids for drinking underage.

Regardless of your opinion on the topic there are many pros and cons to lowering the drinking age. If you are looking to learn more about the drinking age debate check out Drinking Age ProCon for a good list of pros and cons of lowering the drinking age.

China's Zuckerberg?

Charles Chao is the 46 year-old President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board for the Sina Corporation, which is China's leading internet portal. Chao received a Masters of Professional Accouting degree from the University of Texas, a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in Journalism from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He first joined Sina Corp. in 1999 as Vice President of Finance and worked his way through the ranks before becoming President in 2005 and then took on the role of Chief Executive Officer in 2006. In 2009 China's government became concerned with how quickly and widespread news could be transferred through online media so they blocked Twitter and other sites like it. Chao devised and backed Sina's own microblog site called Sina Weibo and was able to get the Government's approval by keeping sensitive material off of their site. Chao calls the site a "mashup" between Facebook and Twitter and now has over 350 million registered users. He is now using Sina to support public welfare in China by setting up a public welfare platform called the Yang Fan Public Welfare Fund. Ernst & Young named him one of the 2012 Media and Entertainment Entrepreneurs of the Year. My first question for Charles would be, "What kind of impact has the new Welfare Fund had on China since its establishment and where do you see it going?

Sina Corporation
I chose to use the Sina Corporation site itself to get background information about the company and to read Charles Chao's profile on the company site.

Forbes
I used Forbes because we used it in class so I knew that it was a reliable source to get good information on important people.

TIME
I chose to use TIME Lists because we used to get Time magazine at home back when I was younger and I know that Time magazine has a reputation for reliable information

Ernst & Young
Is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. I chose to use this site because I found it interesting and important that he was named an entrepreneur of the year.

The Next Web
I chose to use this source because its a relatively recent article after Chao became Chairman of the Board and it gives you some stats about Sina and tells you a little about what they are doing.

Gotta Start Somewhere

My name is Colton Powden and I'm a senior Communications major at Slippery Rock University looking to pursue a career in journalism. I've never had a blog before nor have I really ever read any blogs so I'm pretty new to the blogging world. I am creating this blog as part of a requirement for my New-Media Journalism class.

Before this class I never realized how big blogging is in journalism. I had always just thought of blogs as someone just spouting off about whatever they want trying to get attention. Through the first 2 weeks of this class I've already learned that blogging is a very important part of the journalism industry. From this class I am looking forward to learning more about blogging and other new forms of media so that I can have an understanding of how to utilize them for a future career in journalism.

One of my favorite forms of traditional news media is CNN. I first started looking at CNN my freshman year because of my International Relations class. In that class we looked at issues that faced the world and my professor would bring up CNN.com just about everyday to show us a specific story or a video. I like CNN because I like the way their site is set up, they have a good balance between articles and videos and I feel like they do a solid job of covering the news.

Bleacher Report is a form of new-media journalism that focuses on sports. I first found out about the site through Twitter, someone I followed re-tweeted a link to a story on their website. I see a lot of links to their site on Twitter and the more stories I read the more I started to like this site. I like this site because its all about sports and if you sign up for the site you can set up a list of your favorite teams to make finding news about your team easy.

I can be found on both Facebook and Twitter. I'm excited to get a start in blogging and other types of new-media journalism in this class as I prepare for a career in journalism.