Tough Times in Turner

Residents of this central Maine town remained anxious about their future after the main employer, Smurfit-Stone Paper Corporation, filed for bankruptcy on January 26^th earlier this year. The Smurfit-Stone paper mill produced a corrugated medium for cardboard boxes used by such clients as Kellogg, FedEx, Budweiser, and RCA..

Operations were supposed to resume by the first of this year, but these workers are still waiting three months later. The shutdown has left residents strapped for options.

Each month, the workers are told they will go back to work that next month. When that time comes, the deadline is extended another month. “It feels like the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing,” O’Brien said of communications with the mill.

Mike Badgero worked at the mill over for 28 years. “We just don’t know what to do,” he said at a meeting of laid-off workers. The lay-off was sudden and unexpected, leaving workers with bills to pay.

Badgero and his wife, Mary, paid off their house once already, but when his wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, they took out another mortgage to pay for her treatments. They are struggling to get by now that Mike is only making half of what he used to at the mill. He finds small jobs, like plowing driveways and sharpening skates while Mary works part time in the kitchen at Roxy’s, a local bar, The lay-off has put the responsibility of family bread-winner on her shoulders. “Still, we are dipping into savings just to get by,” Mary said.

At the office of Maine Works!, a workforce development agency, staff direct people how to collect unemployment and help them develop skills and find look for new jobs. And in their town. Harry Swanson, an instructor with Maine Works!, advises people to look for work outside of Turner. “The town’s unemployment rate was high before the lay-off, around 10 percent,” he said. Now it is around 17 percent, one of the highest in the state, according to the state’s online report.

Tom Cogswell has been village manager for almost a year. In that time, “I have seen a slower main street as families are really watching their pennies. Every business has been affected by the lay-off,” he said.

The schools have lower and lower enrollment numbers over the past 10 years. John Shiner is the principal of the Leavitt Area Senior High School. “We had around 4,600 students enrolled K-12 in 1999. This year we have 520 less,” Shiner said. “The future of the next five years will depend on the mill, or any new businesses that move into the area,” said Shiner.

Cogswell wants to highlight Turner’s natural resources to attract new business to the area, taking advantage of the governor’s 2007 Green Initiative. “But a lot of our fate for the next six months is in the economy as a whole,” he said. Production of cardboard at the mill is directly related to consumer spending, Cogswell said, so “More spending means more work at the mill.”

The latest news from the company is that operations should resume as of April 1st. The fate of Turner is the fate of many small towns across the nation grappling with downward economic spiral

Men's Ice Hockey vs UMass-Lowell

Say you are driving along College Avenue and somehow end up crashing into Alfond Arena. Chances are that you will hit a solid wall…by the name of Scottie Darling. Darling is a star on a team that, to many, has overachieved this season returning the Maine hockey program to relevance. On February 20^th, Maine will take the ice against UMass Lowell. Maine, having a wonderful season, is 11-8-2 and controls 3^rd place in the East Hockey standings. Lowell isn’t too far away at 8-10-2. This game is a real deal breaker with both teams hoping for a NCAA Tournament berth. Maine hasn’t made a Frozen Four since 2004, and you, as well as I, know that they want to make it back badly this year.

Maine Hockey has its fair share of stars and future NHLers in the locker room as we speak. In the 2008 entry draft, Nick Pryor was selected in the seventh round of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft, 208th overall by the Anaheim Ducks. One can only assume his bright career will continue to flourish. Along with Nick, Gustav Nyquist, a star forward, was drafted in the fourth round, 121st overall, in 2008 by the Detroit Red Wings. And to wrap up our future NHL players, we have Scottie Darling. He was selected in the sixth round of the 2007 NHL Entry Draft, 153rd overall, by the Phoenix Coyotes. Darling, along with the many accolades he has received throughout his career, is the only Maine goalie to record a shutout in his very first start against Alaska back in October.

A team loaded with All Star talent, a coach with something to prove, and many questions unanswered going forward, Maine Hockey is just heating up. February 20^th should be a night to remember.

Mike Mayberry

Mike Mayberry was my R.A. my freshman year. He stands very tall at around six feet four inches, and has a menacing laugh. He commands authority with an iron fist, but, with soft words and kind gestures, he’ll help you right through a tough breakup, make your room mate act right, and even help you with your history homework. Mike is an amazing person. He really helped me through a few tough situations and does it all with grace and confidence.

It took eating a dunkin donuts flatbread sandwich for me to realize all this about Mike. One day I ate a bad sandwich with rotten eggs in them. I got back to my dorm and immediately started throwing up everywhere, passed out, hit my head in the bathroom, and I was a mess. My roommate went and got mike and he sprang into action. He called UVAC and got me to the hospital safe where they gave me pain killers and really made my experience much better.

Mike really made good decisions and really helped me when I was at my worst.

The Daily Show

I guess most would consider The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a comedy, and possibly even a sketch, show, but I would have to say that it is just a reliable source for news as CNN and FOX. The Daily Show came on in the beginning of the decade and took America by storm. It was funny, had a good and intelligent host, and was on cable. All of these things are the recipe for a perfect long running comedic news show. I watched the February 3, 2010 edition of the long running program and I, having seen and enjoyed the show before, was expecting to learn a little and laugh often. As the assignment entails, the verb tenses and different uses of language are the things we are supposed to be commenting on, but the writing staff of the Daily Show must have been reading this assignment as they wrote the show.

In the business of television writing, it’s not too often that we find a blend of comedy, news, and good grammatical structure. The Show used the past tense in their reporting because all of the events that they were reporting on had happened the day prior. Since it is not a 24 hour-a-day news source, the stories are updated by the day, not the hour. This provides for easy verb tense dissection and a low chance of making English teachers unhappy. Also, the show being a news show, it can’t take a side on political issues (FOX, CNN, NBC…etc) and it does this by poking fun at Barack Obama’s name and then doing a story about how republicans are messing up the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

This even form of reporting is why people tune into him every night and will continue to until he moves on to bigger and better things. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see him on NBC. I could get used to hearing, “And now…..Jon Stewart….your host of….The Tonight Show!”

Convergance and Consolidation

Everyone, or at least I do, knows that America is eventually going to be back to a Neanderthal state with cool toys that help us survive, make other toys, and interact with each other.

We won’t be able to operate them, they will operate themselves and they will be superior. A subtle sign of this is the way we write news now. Back in the days before the Phone, laptops, and other media devices, a story was written. Maybe a picture made it into the middle of the print and the layout editor thought it was so clever the way he seamlessly got the picture below the fold. Nowadays, the layout editor is called the media integration specialist. He finds ways to put as much information as he can in one place so we don’t have to search all over the site and the internet finding more about the story. Convergence is defined by Merriam Webster Dictionary as the merging of distinct technologies, industries, or devices into a unified whole. Sites such as ESPN.com, CNN.com, and washingtonpost.com integrate technology and media into web stories.

As of yesterday, I think Apple has changed the way we read news. They unleashed a large version of an iTouch, called an iPad, that has a 9inch screen and has all these apps in place to download each newspaper from around the world everyday and store it on the device so you can read it anywhere. The iPod is known for media and the Apple Company is one of great emphasis on entertainment, so why not be the first to mass produce a perfect handheld digital newspaper. In the layout, you can click on videos, upload the articles to your own blog, and even add your own comments to the articles to debate on with anyone in the eworld. It’s a fabulous new piece of technology and can change the way we see technology and the news. It’s the ultimate tool for convergence and will change the game for a long time to come. Sorry ink and paper, you’ve been demoted.

Intro

Hey guys, my name is leland and I really love sports. any sport, and i play most of them, so hit me up if you want to bro out and make a lax session happen or batting practice or something like that. I'm a 2nd year comm student. Hope you enjoy all posts.