Reflections on last days of summer

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Classes at the MU started Monday. I’m sure you, dear reader, have noticed the influx of college students into Columbia last week. I’m from a college town, Ann Arbor, Mich., so the rhythms of the university are as natural to me as the seasons, and move-in weekend heralds the promise of the end of air so hot and humid you may as well be swimming in it.

Unfortunately, it also heralds the end of the quiet. I like Columbia in the summer, and not only because the yelling at 2 a.m. outside my apartment window is kept to a minimum. Without the sheer numbers of MU students crowding things up, a peace settles over the town. The kind of peace that means you can get a coffee without waiting 10 minutes in line or just sit in the park on a lunch break without having to overhear the gory details of someone else’s night out.

I’m a summer person. I thrive on beaches, swimming, reading and doing nothing in the sun.

Like the first real day of fall when the Missouri humidity breaks and the air just smells like the cooler seasons, it is always a bit of a shock to the senses to be living adjacent to a full campus again. But, it’s refreshing. All the heat and peace and quiet can start dulling the senses. The heat makes me want to lie in the sun reading a book. But fall is, like the coming of all new things, exciting.

I am supposedly entering my last year of formal education. Leaving the seasons of the school year is a little terrifying. Not defining life in terms of semesters and professors and homework seems nonsensical. Colleges, college towns and kids who grew up in these towns are intricately tied to these structures.

I may bitterly complain about the trappings of the new school year: the thousands of students; the noise; the lines; the workload of classes; the reliance on caffeine; the eyestrain from staring at a computer; even football Saturdays are causes for annoyance.  But the rigor, academic and otherwise, of the school year is really part of the appeal. After the lovely heat-induced stupor of summer, fall is fun.

So, going back to class doesn’t seem so very bad. My brother, Jake, who started fourth grade this month, is more prone to mourning the loss of video game time along with unilaterally refusing to do any homework in cursive handwriting. But I have mellowed in my opposition to the first day of school, maybe because I can type all my assignments. (Actually, it’s because I am no longer being required to memorize multiplication tables.)

It’s a scary thought, but I can see the end of this academic road. When you’re a fourth-grader like my brother, the end is INFINITY AWAY. Meanwhile, I scheduled graduate school commencement into my planner — by May 15, 2010, it’s over for me. I am excited about the possibilities of a life not so caught up in the college lifestyle. I think that I am ready to get out.

I do like summer, but autumn means that the school year is rebooting. I guess that other towns are not so tied to this heartbeat, but it's as good as any way of life that's out there. If you so choose to live in a college town, it is a nice lifestyle. It’s like school is always in session.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on August 26, 2009.

Today's 20-somethings have reason to envy the '60s

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

We deny it, but I think my generation of 20-somethings is jealous of the kids who came of age in the 1960s.

This week, the third season premiere of "Mad Men," a cult TV hit about an advertising agency in this illustrious decade, coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. The virtual second coming of the Beatles in the form of a video game will be arriving in early September.

Coincidence? I think not.

The '60s have been thoroughly mythologized as a time of change and revolution — the good kind. Young people believed in their causes, and peaceful protest worked. The causes had an immediate moral weight, because they were so basic and just: civil rights, anti-war and the beginnings of the women's movement. They say that America was naive in the '60s, like it’s a good thing.

And maybe it was. The myth of the '60s, with free love and Martin Luther King Jr., walking on the moon and Jimi Hendrix playing the electric guitar with his teeth at Woodstock, is quite glorious. My feeling is that the young folk today (that means me, too) just can’t measure up. I mean, what are Youtube videos compared to the March on Washington? Or, the Internet compared to space travel?

Don’t get me wrong; the Internet is awesome: It’s practically made libraries go the way of outhouses. My mom thinks it’s funny that I think a newspaper on microfilm is fun and novel. But the material point is that the '60s are now 40 years in the past, and a new wave of nostalgia is rising.

Not that the '60s were all that great. The rampant sexism and racism must’ve been awful. The draft and thousands of Americans dying in Vietnam stunk. We chose to remember the “redeeming” qualities for a reason and forget that life was just as gritty then as it is now.

Generally, I think that my generation is jealous because of the sense of unified purpose, or unified outrage, our parents say they had. Even more, I think we’re jealous that the movements in the '60s had a measurable and memorable effect — not just at the time, but an effect that is still felt 40 years later.

I was 14 when Sept. 11 happened and the perception of our world changed. Many of us in college and straight out of high school can barely remember the pre-Sept. 11 world; taking our shoes off in airports is normal. The political consciousness of a generation was made during years in which fear of terrorism overwhelmed the country and the nation accepted, even applauded, massive curtailments of civil liberties.

This does not exactly foster a sense of faith in America among young folks.  

And this, I believe, is what we are most jealous of: that there was ever faith that the United States could rise above its current condition and live up to its ideals. And not just America, that we ourselves could be better. Sure, we got Barack Obama elected, but the president (even the first black president) is a symbol, not a movement of epic proportions that fundamentally changes the fabric of the county.

Despite the fun to be had playing Halo, this is something that has been lost.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 19, 2009.

A town without a newspaper

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

My hometown no longer has a newspaper.

Ann Arbor, Mich., is a town not unlike Columbia — the population hovers around 115,000, and the city is the home of a flagship public university. The main employers are the University of Michigan and two hospitals. Located about a 45-minute drive west of Detroit, Ann Arbor has seemed to weather the economic troubles that plague the rest of the state. Time described the town as Michigan’s “beauty queen.”

And yet, the Ann Arbor News published its last edition July 23.  The paper had a circulation of about 45,000. Two hundred seventy-two people lost their jobs.

While the Ann Arbor News was beset by the same problems that pretty much every paper in the industry is currently suffering, the shock is that Booth Newspapers, a subsidiary of Advance Publications, decided not to cut the number of print publications and furlough journalists to maintain profits, but to abolish the News altogether and start fresh.

And now, my beloved hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., is the first major U.S. municipality to be completely without a newspaper.

In the News' place now exists AnnArbor.com — a site that deliberately feels more like Twitter than a traditional newspaper site.  There are now 32 journalists on staff, along with 22 staffers working the advertising side of the site.  To my personal dismay, only two people on the staff list are described as a photojournalists. AnnArbor.com also uses 70 community bloggers, who are mostly unpaid, to produce supplementary content.

In a letter to readers, Publisher Laurel Champion justified the switch to online with the Ann Arbor population’s high education and technology use rates: “92 percent of the community has the skills and technology set-up for online news. And we're committed to working with everyone in the community, especially those who have limited online access and familiarity,” Champion wrote. I think, perhaps, that the eight percent who don’t have the online news skills are those who need the news the most.

I’m sure the lower overhead costs of drastically reducing the workforce and eliminating printing were appealing as well.

But my cynicism about the motives for the destruction of a venerable paper with a 175-year history in Ann Arbor is tempered by the stark realization that for journalism to survive in America, a new business model must be found. The New York Times lost $74.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, and like it or not, that is America’s newspaper of record we are talking about. Advertising revenue and circulations are down across the board among newspapers, and between the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it has seemed like the Newspaper Apocalypse in the past year.

But Seattle and Denver, despite the catastrophic loss of a newspaper each, had other newspapers to keep the light alive. It has even been reported that the Seattle Times is benefiting from the end of the Post-Intelligencer by gaining its former rival’s market share.

I know it’s only a few weeks old, but AnnArbor.com seems like an experiment in buzzwords gone terribly wrong. The mix of professional journalism and amateur blogging is confusing, and any hierarchy of news value is completely abandoned in favor of the most recent post.

Until I moved to Columbia to attend the University of Missouri five years ago, I read the Ann Arbor News almost every day since I could read (along with every other publication I could get my hands on). My childhood friends almost all had their first job delivering the News after school. The News chronicled all my swim meets and water polo matches in high school — it was an accomplishment to have my time in the 500-yard freestyle listed in the results.  I adored the News' building on the corner of Huron and Division streets. Maybe it's misplaced nostalgia, but I lament the end of the Ann Arbor News.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a graduate of the Huron High School class of 2004 in Ann Arbor. Go River Rats!

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 12, 2009.

The problem with Facebook photos

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I was an early adopter of Facebook.com. It became popular in 2004, my freshman year of college. This was before all the colleges and universities in the U.S. were able to register, and a few years before Facebook was open to everyone. So, most of my kind-of-adult social life has been influenced by the social networking culture that Facebook has spawned.

This means almost constant awareness of the danger of Facebook photos. Any photo taken of me (or you) in any condition, can be uploaded and shared with the world, regardless of my (or your) preference. Facebook, in its own way, encourages the proliferation of images, no matter how inane or embarrassing the images might be.

Most people I know who are not members of the photo nerd brigade upload as many photos as they can to Facebook — unlike other digital photo upload sites such as Flickr or Photobucket, Facebook does not have a limit. Some people literally upload every frame they take with their digital cameras, without restraint.

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing — which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art,” author and critic Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  “It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety and a tool of power.”

Facebook is the equivalent of being stuck in a friend’s vacation slideshow. Do I really need to see every photo someone took at a party, including images of one person with their arms around every single person in attendance? Or, every single frame of a friend’s vacation to Iowa City?

“Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had,” Sontag wrote. “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” This is a shame.

Photography should not be a means through which a person experiences life. It takes a person out of the moment, and anesthetizes the life experience, putting distance between the person behind the camera lens and their life. I am in the business of providing photographic proof for this fine newspaper, the Missourian. I know aspiring professionals who live and breathe photography — and I know a few who can’t function without a camera in their hands and their eyes looking through the viewfinder.

Why do people need indisputable proof that they had a good time? And furthermore, why do people need 120 frames of said photographic proof?

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” Sontag wrote. “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” It is a socialized compulsion to photograph one’s life. There is a sense that if it is not photographed, it did not happen. Facebook plays into this insecurity — if the photos are not on Facebook, it must have been a boring evening.

But any serious documentary photographer knows that things happen outside of the camera’s gaze all the time. Photographers speak of capturing “the moment” or “the peak action” of an event — the best and most visual slice of time, with the most visceral visual emotion, the 1/125 of a second that tells the story. This is a hard task. It is more than having your friend say “cheese” or standing under the Gateway Arch. There are no do-overs, no posing. Photographers miss the moment all the time, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

So I ask for some discretion from the public. No one needs to see 200 photographs from the party last night. Take it easy, shutterbug. Pick, say, five images. Or better yet, leave the camera at home and have a good time without it.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a Facebook user, but posts photos to her blog.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.

Health care’s better Down Under

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I have one overarching life philosophy: When in doubt, do as the Australians do.

The Aussies have fashioned themselves a very nice, if not perfect, health care system.  It merges the benefits of a government-run universal insurance and care scheme with the flexibility and choice of private insurance rather successfully.

The news media on this side of the Pacific Ocean have obsessed over the process of passing American health care reform through Congress but not the details of the actual bill. President Barack Obama’s remarks of late have been platitudes about lowering costs, giving everyone preventative care and stopping insurance discrimination for preexisting conditions. These are not things to which anyone objects. But how we are to accomplish these things is left unsaid in the debate.

So I propose we look to the Southern Hemisphere. According to World Health Organization statistics, the total Australian health care cost in 2006 was $3,316* per capita. Comparatively, the U.S. spent $6,714 per capita on health care in 2007. Meanwhile, Australia also enjoys a lower per capita government expenditure on health care: $2,227 in 2007, as compared with $3,074 in the U.S.

Medicare Australia is the government universal health insurance program.  Australians enjoy this lower expense through a network of public hospitals, which are free for all Aussies. Australian Medicare also subsidizes medical specialists, general practitioners, and prescriptions, dentists and participating optometrists. This is paid for by a 1.5 percent income-tax levy.

Australian Medicare also strongly encourages those who can afford it to buy their own private health insurance. Anyone who buys private health insurance is entitled to a 30 percent rebate from the government. And then there is the Medicare levy surcharge, to encourage better-off Aussies to buy private hospital insurance. So singles who make more than about $58,100 per year or families that make more than $124,500 per year can either buy enough private insurance or pay a 1 percent additional tax for Medicare.

Conversely, Australians with an income of less than $14,800 don’t have to pay the Medicare tax, and those under $17,400 pay a reduced tax. There are also reductions for seniors and pensioners. But everyone gets basic Medicare, regardless of income.

And because everyone gets Medicare, private health insurers need to stay competitive. The largest private health insurer, Medibank Private, is actually owned by the government but is subjected to the same regulations as non-government owned health insurance companies. A few health insurance providers in Australia, such as GHMBA and HCF, are even nonprofit.

The private and public health insurance systems working in tandem provide cheaper health care that avoids many of the common complaints about “socialized” universal health care. Because the wealthy are so strongly encouraged to have private health insurance, there are rarely wait times for procedures. And since all Australians are in Medicare, it’s good, efficient and cost-effective health care. While the government won’t cover everything — the basics are taken care of and subsidies keep patients' costs down — what isn’t covered isn’t all that costly.

I have lived in Australia and used its health care system. I had to buy international student health insurance through Medibank Private. I needed doctors to re-issue my American prescriptions, to update my tetanus vaccination and to fix a dislocated knee. The system works, in practice, much like the American system for those who have good health insurance. Only, instead of just working that way for the insured, it works that way for everyone.

It’s a good system. I suspect it’s such a good one because with the jellyfish, crocodiles, sharks, funnel web spiders, dingoes, six of the ten most poisonous snakes in the world and a giant hole in the ozone layer, Australia is hazardous to your health. But our fair American congressmen and congresswomen should take a lesson from the Lucky Country: Health care is better there, and America would do well to emulate it.

*All dollar amounts have been converted to U.S. dollars.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. She has lived in Australia on two occasions, for a year as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student during high school and a semester abroad in college.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Saturday, August 1, 2009.