Posted in Alumni News on Mar. 25, 2009 by Bill Holder
Alberto Ibarguen ’66, CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and former publisher of The Miami Herald, was a guest recently on the PBS News Hour in a segmented devoted to the future of newspapers.
The segment aired to coincide with the move of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from print to the web. Ibarguen told the News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown that the market will find a way to “provide people with the news that we need to function in a democracy”—though perhaps not through newspapers.
Asked about the record of newspapers migrating to the web, Ibarguen called it “inconclusive.”
A model for the post-newspaper world is not yet apparent, he noted, but it will be digital, mobile, and interactive.
“So far, nothing comes close to the general reach of a newspaper, that ability to blanket a community with the same information that everybody can share, and figure out how to go forward together as a community, nothing yet,” he added. “But we also haven’t had a major city that doesn’t have a newspaper. And when that happens, I think the market will figure out how to deliver that information. I think it is that important.”
Jorge Arevalo Mateus.
Jorge Arevalo Mateus, a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology, was featured in the March 5 edition of The Middletown Press in an article titled “Global music, culture student in residence at Wesleyan.”
Mateus, a music archivist, ethnomusicologist, scholar, musician, composer and audio installation artist, is a Grammy-winning producer for Best Historical Recording.
In 2008, Mateus won an award for writing from the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, CD Liner Notes, and he has published many essays, articles and reviews in academic and popular journals, edited volumes, and other publications such as New York Archives Magazine, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies; and Centro, The Journal of Puerto Rican Studies.
In the article, Mateus says Wesleyan has one of the best ethnomusicology programs in the nation.
Richard Kendall ’74, a senior partner in the Los Angeles office of the law firm Irell & Manella, represented the National Resources Defense Council in a case involving whales and the U.S. Navy that recently was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Environmental groups had contended that the Navy’s use of underwater sonar was harming whales and other marine animals. The case arose when the Navy skipped an environmental impact statement for anti-submarine exercises planned from 2007 to 2009. The NRDC sued, and Los Angeles district court restricted the Navy’s use of active sonar. Later, a U.S. appeals court affirmed but eased the restrictions regarding location and timing of the exercises.
President Bush intervened in the case by citing national security as a reason to exempt the Navy from environmental laws at the heart of the legal challenge. In the 5-4 ruling, Chief Justice Roberts spoke for the majority in siding with the Navy, but the Navy agreed to abide by other restrictions on the exercises.
Kendall told CNN: “It is gratifying that the court did not accept the Navy’s expansive claims of executive power and that two-thirds of the injunction remains in place.”
Kendall had argued that sonar can be as loud to marine mammals as 2,000 jet engines, causing them to suffer physical trauma, stranding, and changes in breeding and migration patterns.
The New York Times said the case was the latest in a decade-long dispute between the Navy and environmental groups over the use of sonar. Environmentalists have had some success through lawsuits and persuasion in limiting sonar in training exercises around the world.
Dan Lachman '09 sports his t-shirt and laptop skin designs. (Photo by Keith Barraclough Photography)
Dan Lachman ‘09 was featured in an a Oct. 12 Washington Post article titled Making it: A college student takes aim at his future by starting a profitable clothing business”. Lachman, 21, started his company, Sharp Shirter, in 2005. He creates clothing designs and laptop skins.
According to the article, “after college, Dan plans to move to Philadelphia and continue expanding Sharp Shirter while perhaps working for a start-up company that’s further along so he can learn more about running a business. Ultimately, he wants to run Sharp Shirter online from South Africa, where his father was born and where Dan and his family visit regularly.”
Lachman was featured in a previous Wesleyan Connection online here.
