Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Lady on the mission

My next stop is Austin, Texas after the DC. To my surprise, Texas is a quite enjoyable city with nice people who think of the world in a quite ambitious way. As the former "Lonely Star", Texas is quite famous for its arrogance to the other American states. But the good side is that they turned to think of the U.S. policy from a very neutral and unbiased way. It is easy to meet some academic who is very concerned on U.S.'s future, or the working journalists caring about the neglected stories by mainstream media.(Like this one: Texas Obeserver, with very intelligent editors, and supported with an very interesting business model: financing by a non-profit organization)

Topics discussed included U.S. news media, immigrant issue, politics and online media. Of course, I am most interested in the last one. It's amazing to find that so many American media have been concerned on the competition of online media, or even overconcerned, I would say. We visited one of the largest city newspaper here: to my surprise, there is a Web Intelligence Report attached after their daily budget(the story list for editors to discuss every day). "Online is the future to the newspaper", I heard many people are repeating this sentence these days, however, the one making more sense is "online media is one of the pipes to deliver the information, just like the print media". The technolgy is not that advanced now to make print media immediately digital still keeping in the format of "paper", so holding a newspaper on the way is always needed, though the demand is not as much as before.

Austin is not a big city, but is the capital of the country's largest state(the size is bigger than any European countries). Here you could have nice Mexican food, live music and more importantly, a group of nice people welcoming you to their home. I got a red stylish "cowboy" hat, and they now call me cowgirl, haha, cool.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Amy,
Texas is the second largest state in the states, second to Alaska

Amy Gu said...

Hi, thanks, Lening. I forgot Alaska, that oil-rich field.