The Nashville Associated Press bureau (located in Brentwood) is searching for a news editor. Like the rest of the media (and the rest of us, for that matter), the AP is shifting on the fly to figure out how new technologies and the evolving media landscape are continuing to change how news is prepared and delivered:

Candidates must have a commitment to all media platforms … Applicants need to understand the growing importance of multimedia news and be able to coordinate with AP staffers from other formats.

Submit an application or your resume online if you’re interested.

If you can resort to this, you really have zero shame left:

Here’s a tip for the guy who beat up a 101-year-old woman in a walker and took off with her purse: Get out of New York.

The vicious mugging, caught on surveillance tape, has sparked outrage in a city where people are accustomed to hearing about strange and violent crimes. Police have launched an all-out manhunt, but it’s not just the cops who want the villain’s head. “I could hold him, and let the woman beat him up,” said Joe Sarju, 59, who lives in the Queens neighborhood where the attack occurred. “I’d love to beat him, but then they would lock me up.”

The heartlessness of the March 4 attack is clearly conveyed on the grainy, black-and-white videotape, which has now been broadcast well beyond New York. In it, 101-year-old Rose Morat is trying to leave her apartment building to go to church. The mugger, a man who looms over the senior citizen and is holding on to a bicycle, pretends to help her get through the vestibule.

Then, he turns to grab Morat’s head and delivers three hard punches to her face, and swipes her purse. The dazed victim tries to reach for her purse when the mugger hits her again, pushing her and her walker to the ground.
He got away with $33 and Morat’s house keys. She suffered a fractured cheekbone and spent time in the hospital. The attack didn’t break Morat’s spirit, though: She has said in the days since that if she had been just a bit younger, she would have gone after the guy. “I’m a very strong woman,” she said. “I’ve been that way my whole life.”

The New York Times reports that the city’s entire police force has been briefed about the incident and the assailant:

Every officer working yesterday in all 76 police precincts in New York City was shown the same thing: a grainy 45-second video of a 101-year-old woman being punched and robbed in the lobby of her Queens building on March 4.

Showing the video at roll calls to a patrol force of about 25,000 officers — including those assigned to the subway system and public housing complexes — was part of the Police Department’s intensifying effort to catch the attacker before he strikes again, the police said.

I trust that the officers are continuing to go about their other duties as well, but I sure wouldn’t want to be this guy.

According to researchers involved with the latest results in the annual Narcissistic Personality Inventory (link leads to PDF with detailed info), which has published an assessment of college students’ sense of self since 1982, today’s college students are more self-centered than their predecessors. The experts blame a “self-esteem trend” that began in the 1980s and technology innovations such as MySpace and YouTube.

Maybe they’re right, but I wonder how people of all ages would fare on such a study these days. If we are becoming more self-centered–and there’s plenty of evidence to support the theory–I wonder whether it has less to do with being in college and more to do with being a 21st-century American. I have a feeling that college students from the 60s, 70s or 80s would answer the survey similiarly if they were exposed to today’s me-focused pop culture.

The Tennessean didn’t post this Associated Press story online, but it did run it on today’s front page and included an interview with MTSU vice president of student affairs Bob Glenn, who has worked on campus for 36 years. He disputes the findings:

“Everybody wants to make out this generation as worse than previous generations … I don’t see this particular group of students as much more narcissistic than those in the 60s, who were engaged in a whole variety of interesting behaviors … I see a surge in a lot of things that are optimistic … I see them doing a lot more service activities. I see these students being much more inclined in doing things that have positive impacts on their communities. I don’t want to be too quick to label them and hesitate to write them off because of what one group of researchers said.”

I’m sure this study is worth noting, but I’m also weighing it with a grain of salt. Why? I remember very well the outcry over my own “Generation X” in the early 90s: We were slackers who were apathetic about everything, and we were going to ruin America. Well, at least that was the most exaggerated of the criticisms leveled against my generation, and in my opinion they’ve turned out to be wrong.

It seems to me that generations in American society tend to have a natural rivalry that evolves over time, and it’s a common pastime for older ones to call out rising successors for their ills. Sure, my generation has its shortcomings, and so do the Boomers and even the Greatest Generation.

There may well be some validity to the study, but I think we’d all be better off looking at how we can change ourselves for the better than trying to nudge our older or younger peers a little further down the generational hill.