Alabama news on the ‘net

Many of the papers across Alabama —including The Star — have reduced their print deliveries as they focus on digital content. This story, published on the front of today’s Star, looks at the readers who are affected most by the switch to online.

I knocked on doors across rural Alabama, compared stats from the U.S. Census Bureau and National Broadband Map and talked to leaders in our state’s news industry for my story to reach this conclusion: Rural communities — including the elderly, poor and black in Alabama —- are left behind as some newspapers focus on digital production

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Photo by Steve Gross

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To go or not to go?

Do you need church to be a Christian?

A recent Pew study suggests that, increasingly, Americans who identify themselves as Christians but don’t affiliate themselves with organized religion say no.

Here’s the story I wrote for this week’s faith section in The Anniston Star : To Go or not to go: More Americans than ever don’t attend church

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Photo by Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star

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The stories of the people

On this blog, I tend to highlight my enterprise work — those big investigative pieces that come to fruition after weeks and sometimes months of culling statistics, interviewing official sources, comparing their comments to those affected by whatever law or problem or situation I’m writing about at the time.

The mother of slain Anniston police officer Justin Sollohub, hugs President Barack Obama as her youngest Blake stands by at a national fallen officer memorial in Washington D.C. Photo by Byron Morris.

It’s rewarding but perhaps not as refreshing as those other stories I write — the features, the one that tell people’s stories, develop with a (seemingly) more natural narrative. The features I’ve written over the past year for The Star have been some of the best to work on. Favorite to write, to report. Favorite stories to have told to me, to pass on to others.

A few of those stories below:

Heart of slain Anniston police officer gives grateful Florida man a new chance at life

Mamre Baptist and Motes family recover after storm

Lipscomb family holds on to lessons from parents lost in storm

Siblings’ lives changed with loss of parents on April 27

 

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50 shades of cheating

While I focused on area construction jobs in my story on the front of The Star last Sunday, the Life section also featured my work — a localization of all of the recent national talk about cheating in schools. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

“¿Puedo ir al bano?

That’s “Can I go to the bathroom?” in Spanish — the only phrase that a local high school senior really remembers from his two years of foreign language class.

The 17-year-old took the course during his sophomore and junior years.

For homework, he and his classmates had to translate English sentences into Spanish — or vice versa. They were supposed to first attempt the work themselves, he said, without any help.

Instead, everyone “cheated,” and nobody learned much more than the basic phrases.

“Everyone just used Google translator,” he admitted. “Most everyone did it — at least once or twice — including myself.”

(The Star is not identifying the student in order to protect his chances of getting into college.)

Cheaters trending

Cheating among students has been a hot topic in recent months with proof of widespread dishonest behavior surfacing at well-known institutions like Harvard and the Air Force Academy.

Also contributing to the conversation are several recent studies that show students across the country are cheating more than ever before — especially as new technology becomes increasingly available.

Administrators and teachers in Calhoun County say they haven’t seen a significant increase in cheating in recent years. And education officials think their institutions have clear “academic honesty” policies in place.

Still, some local and national experts say cheating isn’t always a black-and-white issue, especially with the prevalence of new technology.

“Just like in sports, you have to define the rules on what you’re able to do,” said Mark Jones, judicial coordinator for Jacksonville State University.

Nationally, 60 percent of high school students admit to some form of cheating, according to a 2010 survey by the Josephson Ethics Institute.

Locally, school officials say cheating isn’t a big problem.

At JSU, Jones said, the judicial affairs committee only sees about five cases of academic dishonesty each year.

In Calhoun County schools, superintendent Joe Dyar cited only one instance of cheating — at White Plains Middle School — that he remembered occurring in the past year.

Meanwhile, the Donoho Honor Council has not met at all this year to deal with any suspect student behavior, council sponsor Beverly Otwell said. Otwell, an English teacher at the Anniston private school, said it’s been years since someone plagiarized in her class.

Anniston City Schools Superintendent Joan Frazier said cheating happens in her school system but didn’t have numbers on how often it occurred.

Repeated attempts last week to reach officials at Oxford and Jacksonville city schools were unsuccessful.

“Unfortunately, we have to be vigilant about the possibility of cheating,” Frazier said. “It takes place everywhere.”

Read more:Anniston Star – 50 shades of cheating Defining right and wrong in the digital age

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Job update

Now, as the assistant metro editor and enterprise reporter for The Star, my job is part editing, part in-depth reporting of my own. I spend Monday nights at work, helping to put out content on the website and in the paper. The rest of the week is dedicated to interviews, information-gathering and writing.

I recently became the assistant metro editor for The Anniston Star. 

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October 8, 2012 · 4:46 pm

Public, private projects good for area construction

From my latest Sunday enterprise story for The Star:

“In Oxford, the new Publix grocery store looks close to complete, the construction site often busy with workers and equipment.

In Anniston, the walls of the Justin Sollohub Justice Center are rising on Gurnee Avenue. A few streets over, on the main thoroughfare of Quintard, workers already have finished the brick façade on the new Social Security building, scheduled to open this week.

There’s new construction at local military sites, too: Recently built structures at the Anniston Army Depot house updated ventilation systems and electrical wiring, while at the National Guard training center on McClellan, soldiers are sleeping in refurbished barracks and training in just-built classrooms.

The amount of recent, local construction projects has also put the area in a different kind of position: The Anniston-Oxford metro now ranks at the top of the state for its number of construction jobs, according to an August report by a national trade association that tracks statistics on the industry.

The Anniston-Oxford area’s ability to keep the number of construction jobs from dropping off between this year and last makes it the construction industry’s most stable area in Alabama, the report from the Associated General Contractors of America showed.

That’s a good thing, economic experts and Calhoun County business leaders say, because the hard-hat-wearing industry is often a bellwether for the economy.”

Read more: Anniston Star – Public private projects help Anniston Oxford area hold on to construction jobs

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Fetal Argument

Calhoun County prosecutors are now among those in Alabama who criminally charge women for giving birth to infants in drug withdrawal.

It’s a broad interpretation of the state’s chemical endangerment of a child law — one that has sparked heated debate between opponents who say it puts infants and their mothers at risk, and advocates who think the law deters drug use during pregnancy.

You can read the enterprise story, published Sunday in The Anniston Star, here.

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