On Assignment: Arrest in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder

***Piece was written the night August 16th, though not posted until August 17th***

Vacations never seem to go as planned. And this one is no exception. Back home in Colorado for a little R & R, everything was turned upside down today.

After nearly 10 years, police have made an arrest in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder. Having covered the initial investigation and subsequent grand jury hearings, I knew my vacation was over. I write this from Boulder tonight. It's 9:27. I'll be able to catch a couple of hours of sleep before an early wake up call. Then it's over to the Boulder County Courthouse to begin live hits (live shots) beginning at 4:00 a.m. mountain time for stations around the country.

Boulder County DA Mary Lacy will hold a press conference at 10:00 a.m. , I'll be there and intend on blogging this assignment throughout. Hopefully, we'll get a better answer as to who the suspect is.

Over the course of the day, those of us who have covered the case have found ourselves asking just who is John Mark Karr?

This much we know: he was picked up in Thailand on unrelated sexual assault charges, he may have taught as a 2nd grade teacher at an elementary school in either Boulder or Atlanta, or both. Aside from that it's a name were told even the Boulder Police department was unaware of before a phone call this morning from the Boulder DA's Office. Apparently, the Boulder DA's Office Jon Benet Ramsey Task Force has been handling this development without help from Boulder PD. That's an entirely different story though. They Boulder Police and Boulder DA's Office have never had a warm relationship, making the story that much more interesting.

For news observers and observers of the media...GET READY! This is just the beginning of a prolonged legal saga...and the media circus is coming to town.

Blogging and Journalism: A New, Questionable Frontier

This marks August Skamenca's first blog entry. After questioning the relevancy of the cyber-phenomena he decided to embark on his own quest to get a better understanding of the allure of the blog.

Ask anyone in my field if blogging is journalism and the hard and fast answer is “no.” As I type this Microsoft Word even tells me blogging is not accepted as a word, as evidenced by correction red beneath the word itself. Blogger (and bloggers) are not recognized by Word either.

Wondering if I just have an outdated version of Word, I made a quick check of dictionary.com. It [blogger] is there, along with blog…blogging is not. Though it does turn up as a noun under blog.

While linguists may be slow to catch on, others have not been. Look online and the cyber-community is exploding with hundreds, probably thousands of new bloggers everyday. Blogging has become a sub-culture of the Internet community. But again, is it journalism? In some cases. Journalists do blog.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has his “Daily Nightly.” The folks over at CBS have “Public Eye,” an ombudsman’s site of sorts, frequently turning a critical eye on its own news broadcasts.

Now, this journalist has taken of leap of blind faith. I’m going to blog. Sure the word seems foreign to my vocabulary, but why not? How long will I do it? I don’t know. Will I like it? I don’t know. Whatever the outcome, blogging is a new frontier. Giddyup.

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