Magzalez’s eyes on media

*Check out this blog’s new address*

Police used pepper spray on a crowd at the Australian Open yesterday. Apparently a few guys in a crowd started screaming racial slurs. The umpire of the tennis match asked the men to stop. When they didn’t, the police did their thing.

Not to condone what the men were doing, but that’s a pretty harsh punishment, not to mention they weren’t exactly helping the greater good when a few extra people, including two children, had to be treated in a hospital after inhaling the spray.

I found this story while doing some research for a blog post. I was looking to do a post on some of the online media in the Australian newspapers. I figured I could find some projects like the ones the New York Times did when the U.S. Open rolled into town, but alas, I found nothing. I’ll keep my eyes peeled though.

There are some nice stories coming out of the Australian Open though:

• Lindsay Davenport looks to win a Grand Slam seven months after giving birth (New York Times)
• Australian Open gets a new surface (New York Times)

I was perusing The New York Times’ tennis page recently. I noticed that they seem to like their tennis over there.

There are at least three interactive features on the tennis page. All of them are great. One is even funny. Check them out:

• The Master of Clay Takes Aim at the Fast Courts: I actually talked about this piece on my very first blog entry. It shows how Rafael Nadal’s spins differ on different tennis surfaces. Looking back on it, I still like it.
• Beating Federer: This is the funnier one. It’s just a bunch of quotes, pictures and some audio from different players on the ATP and WTA tours about how they would try to beat world-No. 1 Roger Federer. Jelena Jankovic’s quote is my favorite.
• Serena Williams’ Professional Career: I’m not sure what to say about this one. Well first I have to say, tsk tsk on “Williams’s.” Other than that, it’s a lot of information. It looks like it took a really, really long time to put together. The amount of information is remarkable, and the databasing behind this must be monstrous. I have no criticisms and only one cynicism: who would really want to know this much about anyone? Me.

I’m glad to see The New York Times has time to spare on one of my favorite subjects. Not very many papers have the personnel or money to have a staff devote so much of it’s time to this wonderful sport.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization based out of San Francisco. Their goal is to create a library of Web pages in order to better archive the goings on of the Internet and offer a permanent database of Web sites for researchers and historians.

I made good use of The Wayback Machine (The WBM) recently while doing research for a project in my media ethics class. I am writing a case study about a student journalist at Central Connecticut State University. In February, John Petroski, the opinions editor of CCSU’s student-run newspaper The Recorder, wrote an opinion piece titled “Rape only hurts if you fight it.” His satire did not go over well, and he eventually resigned from his position at the newspaper.

The newspaper currently has no contact information for Petroski. But, with a little help from The WBM, I was able to navigate back in time to The Recorder’s Web site just before Petroski left the paper. I found his contact information and continued from there.

It would have been a lot more difficult to find this information without this archive. It has other uses as well; check out what The New York Times was saying on Sept. 11, 2001.

I learned from one of my favorite blogs, Ponto Media–a Portuguese-language blog about Web journalism–that The New York Times has opened its archives of the last twenty years for online readers. They have done away with their Times Select subscription program.

As pointed out by António Granado, the first mention, in print, of the Web was on February 28, 1993.

This is my very first post on my very first blog. I have blogged before but not regularly.

I hope that through this blog I can show you a little about myself, my interests and my aspirations as a journalist. I hope I can find various forms of media that are not only interesting, but pertinent.

As I am currently glued to my television for hours every day watching the U.S. Open, I thought for my first post, I’d share something that brought two of my loves together–Tennis and online media.

Here is an interesting infographic by The New York Times about my favorite tennis player–Spaniard Rafael Nadal–and how he changes his game depending on the type of court he is playing on.