The Daily Jolt (www.dailyjolt.com) is back and better than ever! Founded in 1999 by a group of friends between Amherst College and Brown University, the Jolt was created for their specific campuses. From there, it quickly spread to UMass, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire, and is now at more than 200 campuses.

This fall, the Daily Jolt released a new version of the website. In addition to a makeover, updating its look and feel, the new site provides the ability for students to more easily share their opinions, thoughts and ideas, as well as creating commentary.

“The Jolt has always been the authentic voice of students on the UMass campus delivering a truly local online experience that is both at arms length to the administration and a hub for the community,” said Daily Jolt General Manager Max Woolf.

A new flyer board feature lets you upload and add images for events, announcements, and classifieds as an exact replica of a paper flyer. The site also has an enhanced marketplace and textbook exchange, as well as weather, professor quotes, a blog for students, dining hall menus, collegian news, forums and much more.

“I like that even though the site has been around the UMass campus for a few years, we're basically starting all over because its a totally new site,” said UMass senior and Daily Jolt editorial and publicity assistant Andrea Schneider. “And I think although CampusLive has a lot of the same features, The Daily Jolt seems more like a community; I feel like the people who visit the site have been for years.”

One of the most intriguing new features for the UMass community is the work that has been in the forum.

“The Daily Jolt has seen and is acting on two distinct trends in forums and message boards: one trend is for complete transparency and the other is for complete anonymity,” said Woolf.

The forum has always been one of the central features of The Daily Jolt. It allows students to have authentic and

open conversations on a range of issues relating to life, campus, and the community. With respect to offering a place for transparency, The Daily Jolt has created a “Conversations Forum” where every post includes the user name of the individual making the post. An equal but opposite “Confessional Forum” aka “JoltSecret” has been created to allow thoughts, opinions, and statements to be posted anonymously. As always, the “Original Daily Jolt Forum” will continue allowing users to choose between posting their identity or posting anonymously.

“The Jolt wants students to have a choice without restricting or restraining, while at the same time, continuing to have moderation as needed,” said Woolf.

The Daily Jolt was born out of the UMass community and continues to serve the UMass community. It is run by a total of five students here at the University, who are in contact with General Manager Max Woolf via email, phone and instant messenger.

You can view the new and improved UMass Daily Jolt at http://uofma.dailyjolt.com.

The Woolworth Building In 1978 and in 2008, the view is from the east side of City Hall Park. To the left of the early skyscraper is the Barclay Tower, and on its left is the surviving St. Paul’s Chapel.

What do you see first when looking at the old photographs on the left? Almost certainly not the intended subjects. One of the pictures is meant to show the Woolworth Building. Another is of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is supposed to depict Division Street.

But what the eye goes to today, perhaps before anything else, are those twin silhouettes, once such a familiar background in the cityscape that no photographer could avoid them. What we see now is what is no longer there — the towers that are missing in the companion photos on the right.

The photographs on the left were made in the summer of 1978 for “The City Observed: New York,” a guide to Manhattan by Paul Goldberger, who was then the architecture critic of The New York Times. Random House published it the next year. The images beside them were made at the same sites in 2008.

In the contemporary view, the Woolworth Building still dominates the southern end of City Hall Park. The glass tower to the right of Woolworth is 7 World Trade Center, the first new tower built near ground zero. On the other side of Woolworth is Barclay Tower, one of a growing number of residential projects that attest to Lower Manhattan’s changing character. Dwarfed among these giants is the little steeple of the 18th-century St. Paul’s Chapel, whose survival on 9/11 seemed nearly miraculous. The monolith rising above St. Paul’s is the Millenium Hilton Hotel.

In its current state, the Brooklyn Bridge has an American flag and a dividing line to separate pedestrians and bicyclists on what remains one of the most popular and crowded promenades in the city. The silhouette of the financial district is almost the same with a few prominent exceptions, underscoring downtown’s perpetual runner-up role to mid-Manhattan.

Looking down Division Street today is a bit harder than it was 30 years ago because trees have been added on a pedestrian island that did not exist in 1978. The Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, part of the growing governmental presence in the Civic Center, obscures the view of the top of the Municipal Building. Apart from a new apartment building on the far left, the physical character of the neighborhood is largely unchanged.

Except, of course, for the two missing towers that always seemed to hover in the background.

By Michael Crichton

I am the author of a novel about dinosaurs, a novel about US-Japanese trade relations, and a forthcoming novel about sexual harassment - what some people have called my dinosaur trilogy. But I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.

There has been evidence of impending extinction for a long time. We all know statistics about the decline in newspaper readers and network television viewers. The polls show increasingly negative public attitudes toward the press - and with good reason. A generation ago, Paddy Chayevsky's Network looked like an outrageous farce. Today, when Geraldo Rivera bares his buttocks, when the New York Times misquotes Barbie (the doll), and NBC fakes news footage of exploding trucks, Network looks like a documentary.

According to recent polls, large segments of the American population think the media is attentive to trivia, and indifferent to what really matters. They also believe that the media does not report the country's problems, but instead is a part of them. Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.

And I am troubled by the media's response to these criticisms. We hear the old professional line: "Sure, we've got some problems, we could do our job better." Or the time-honored: "We've always been disliked because we're the bearer of bad news; it comes with the territory; I'll start to worry when the press is liked." Or after a major disaster like the NBC news/GM truck fiasco, we hear "this is a time for reflection."

These responses suggest to me that the media just doesn't get it - doesn't understand why consumers are unhappy with their wares. It reminds me of the story of the man who decided to kill his wife by having a lot of sex with her. Pretty soon this beaming, robust woman shows up, followed by a wizened little man with a cane. He whispers to a friend, "She doesn't know it yet, but she has only two weeks to live."

It is this perception that the media, and our current concept of news, is outmoded, that I would like to address.

So for a moment, let's set aside the usual bromides about the press. Let's take it as given that the bearer of bad news is often executed; that all human beings have an appetite for gossip and scandal; that media must attract an audience; that bias is in the eye of the reader as much as in the pen or sound-bite of the reporter.

And let's talk instead about quality.

The media are an industry, and their product is information. And along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it.

Poor product quality results, in part, from the American educational system, which graduates workers too poorly educated to generate high- quality information. In part, it is a problem of nearsighted management that encourages profits at the expense of quality. In part, it is a failure to respond to changing technology - particularly the computer-mediated technology known collectively as the Net. And in large part, it is a failure to recognize the changing needs of the audience.

In recent decades, many American companies have undergone a wrenching, painful restructuring to produce high-quality products. We all know what this requires: Flattening the corporate hierarchy. Moving critical information from the bottom up instead of the top down. Empowering workers. Changing the system, not just the focus of the corporation. And relentlessly driving toward a quality product. Because improved quality demands a change in the corporate culture. A radical change.

Generally speaking, the American media have remained aloof from this process. There have been some positive innovations, like CNN and C-SPAN. But the news on television and in newspapers is generally perceived as less accurate, less objective, less informed than it was a decade ago. Because instead of focusing on quality, the media have tried to be lively or engaging - selling the sizzle, not the steak; the talk-show host, not the guest; the format, not the subject. And in doing so they have abandoned their audience.