Marketplace radio has a story about the soaring price of
palm oil, corn oil and other vegetable oils.
The Marketplace story says about one third of the world's vegetable oil comes from palm trees. For
the last decade, palm oil has traded for about $450 a ton. Now it
sells for more than double. Palm oil is
the cheapest vegetable oil. Prices rose by 40 percent in 2006.
Eventually, consumers will pay the price in higher costs for everything from margarine to salad dressing. The real expenses are to companies that use these oils in large volumes, such as bakeries and restaurant chains.
Don't overreact to the story. Americans only spend about 7 percent of their income on food. There are other issues, however. Palm oil is being used in biodiesel fuel production.
Ecologists worry that with high palm oil prices, forests and wildlife habitats will be destroyed in favor of palm oil cultivation.
Join Me Tomorrow for a Live Webinar
Don't miss my Webinar,
"The Electronic Election: Covering the 2008 Vote," tomorrow. I rehearsed it yesterday and am so excited to show you some of the newest ways that journalists are covering the election, along with cool tools you can use to juice up your coverage. Hundreds of you have told us you want more of this kind of easy-to-use, low-cost and highly practical training. This is perfect for individuals, newsrooms and college classes.
We are offering the live Webinar twice tomorrow to help those of you working early or late shifts in any time zone. Please register now. The deadline for registration is 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) today.
Dates: 10 to 11 a.m. or 4 to 5 p.m., EST, Wednesday, Nov. 14.
When you
register, select the session you plan to attend to reserve your seat.
Registration deadline: 6 p.m., EST, Tuesday, Nov. 13
Cost: $19.95, plus the cost of the long-distance phone call. We have financial assistance available from the Harnisch Family Foundation, so don't let money get in the way of this opportunity. To apply for a scholarship, send an e-mail of no more than 250 words to scholarships@newsu.org explaining your financial need. Think about it: For $20 bucks you can train an entire newsroom or class -- just project the image onto a screen.
What will I learn? The 2008 election will be
different from every election that has come before, and the Internet is
a big reason why. In this hour-long Webinar you will learn about the latest Internet tools you can use to
strengthen your election coverage.
Specifically, you'll learn:
- How social networking and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook will affect the 2008 election.
- How newsrooms are finding creative ways to explore election issues and display candidate profiles.
- How to track candidate spending and campaign contributions.
- How to build interactive maps and tag clouds quickly, easily and free.
By the way, after the Webinar, we will e-mail you a summary of all of the Web sites and links I show you in the presentation.
The Star Car -- How a Small Town Newspaper is 'Doing the Net'
I should disclose right off the top that I did some online consulting work for
The (Shelby, N.C.) Star a couple of years ago. Back then the paper, under the direction of Skip Foster, was trying to figure out how to do something meaningful online.
In two years, the 114-year-old paper (15,000 circulation) has gone from having zero interactivity to becoming a poster child for the Freedom Newspapers chain. The site is populated with
interactive crime maps, user-generated videos, reporter blogs, community blogs and podcasts.
But now the paper is trying something that it hopes will get the town talking. It has launched what it calls
"The Star Car." Think of as a live truck, like the kind that TV stations use, only this one is for a newspaper that wants to be able to put news online from anywhere, right away. The Star Car has a live Webcam, and it can create a wireless network bubble around itself and travel about, making heads turn. I asked Foster to tell us more about what he is up to.
Q. What is it that you are trying to accomplish with this wired van?
A. Nothing, other than change the way we cover the news after 114 years. The Star Car puts an array of multimedia tools at the disposal of the journalists using it. From a dashboard-mounted camera that can -- a la "COPS" -- stream video from the scenes of stories, to an onboard scanner/copier/fax that can quickly send documents back to
The Star or
shelbystar.com, to complete Wi-Fi access through audio, video and text, journalists can do it all.
The car is both a symbol and a tool of our commitment to fuse the print and online disciplines. It's now about publishing to the Web first, then worrying about print. And, as a 15,000 circulation newspaper with fewer than 20 journalists in our newsroom, we're proving you don't have to be big to embrace and utilize new technology.
Q. How will this improve journalism, or is it just a promotional thing?
A. Of course, The Star Car improves journalism by improving the speed with which we can report. The Star Car is a sort of Batmobile, into which reporters and photographers can hop when important news breaks. On the other hand, we make no apologies for using The Star Car as a promotional tool. We plan on taking the car to schools and other venues to show off its technology.
Q. How much did it cost and who paid for it?
A. The total cost was around $60K (I wonder how many of these you could buy before you got the price of one TV satellite truck?) The project is a partnership between
The Star's parent company,
Freedom Communications Inc., and the
IFRA Newsplex at the University of South Carolina. IFRA chose
The Star over every other news organization in the world to launch the project.
Q. What can this thing do that I could not do with a laptop, a camera and a wireless phone card connection? A. Streaming dash cam video, a Wi-FI cloud surrounding the vehicle for remote access, a document scanner and a GPS tracker so that
shelbystar.com users can follow the travels of the vehicle would head the list. But to really answer your question, I defer to Randy Covington, of IFRA's Newsplex. When asked this same question, he asked: "How many reporters are actually using those things?"
The Star Car institutionalizes the use of multimedia devices to report on the news.
Covington also says: "I think that the same thing was asked when somebody came along with electric lights. Why do we need light bulbs when we have gas lights? Or when the horseless carriage came along. What can a car do that a horse and carriage cannot? It is true that gas lights can provide illumination, but light bulbs do it better. It is true that a horse and carriage can take you to the grocery store, but a car does it better. The same with The Star Car. It does a lot of the same things as a 3G cell phone or Wi Fi laptop, but it does them better.
Q. What has the community's reaction been so far?
A. Very positive. In a small town like Shelby, to see a TV-station-like-vehicle roaming the streets generates lots of attention. Now that we've formally unveiled The Star Car in the paper and on our Web site, we are already receiving requests for visits. A group of Korean journalists visited
The Star just last week and enjoyed seeing The Star Car and how we have incorporated technology into our newsgathering.
Q. Catch us up on the other Web initiatives at The Shelby Star. What has worked well so far?A. We're
moblogging very successfully. After Gardner-Webb University's big upset of Kentucky (GWU is in our coverage area), our sports reporter headed to campus after midnight and
blogged what he saw.
Our photo blogs are doing especially well. We're also working hard on video and on constantly updating of stories. We actively participate in community conversation, such as on our
message board, which continues to be our site's highest traffic driver, other than the home page. Traffic continues to soar. In the October traffic stats for Freedom Communications newspapers,
The Star ranked No. 1 in user engagement (page views per unique visitor).
Other coverage of The Star Car:
Hotel Rooms Without Bibles
Newsweek reports that increasingly, upscale hotel chains are not allowing religious groups to place bibles in rooms. The story says:
Across the country upscale accommodations are doing away with the
Bible as a standard room amenity. And in its stead have arrived a slew
of "lifestyle" products that cater to a younger, hipper (and presumably
less religious) clientèle. Since 2001 the number of luxury hotels with
religious materials in the rooms has dropped by 18 percent, according
to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. The Nashville-based
Gideons International, which has distributed copies of the Christian
scripture to hotels since 1908, declined to comment on this trend.
High Schoolers -- Paid Now, Serve Later
One of the ways the Army is trying to recruit soldiers
is through the Future Soldier Training Program. The military is recruiting high school seniors, who will be paid $1,000 a month from the time they sign to the time they ship out for basic training after high school.
The Dallas Morning News reports:
The Army designed the
program for high school seniors. It's brand new. Promotional materials
haven't been printed yet, but recruiters are talking it up at schools.
The program pays students $1,000 for each month between signing the
commitment contract and leaving for basic training after completing
high school. The Army pays an additional $1,000 for high school
graduation.
For example, Christopher Keen enlisted in late
October and plans to leave for basic training in late June. He'll rack
up $10,000 in bonus money for his nine months in the program, including
the $1,000 graduation award.
The Army almost missed its
recruiting goal for the year that ended on Sept. 30. It began the new
year on Oct. 1 with fewer men and women signed up for basic training
than in any year since it became an all-volunteer service in 1973.
The new bonus program for high schoolers is "obviously intended to
increase recruitment" but isn't necessarily a reaction to nearly
missing national recruiting goals last year, said Kim Hanson, a public
affairs officer for the Dallas Army Recruiting Battalion.
The story also explains a new program that pays a premium to recruits who are willing to leave right away after signing up.
Another program, the Quick-Ship bonus, pays recruits up to $20,000 if
they agree to leave for training within 30 days. The future soldier
program balances Quick-Ship because it banks personnel for later use,
Ms. Hanson said.
Sgt. Robert Cotner, a recruiter at the Greenville, Texas, Army recruiting station said it's ideal for fence-sitters, not those who have never shown an interest in the military.
"There's a lot of people that say they want to [join]," he said. "But
they want to wait until after high school, so this gives them kind of
an incentive before they have the chance to get into trouble or get
into an automobile accident or one of life's misfortunes that happens.
"We're trying to go ahead and secure their future for them."
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning
Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other
materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and
analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it
will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The
column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of
the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be
corrected.
Juli Bridgers wrote: First they ban any mention of God...
