#muckrackers

[nouhabelaid]

Let's Explore Media in #MENA-Exploring the Journalist-PR Professional Relationship in 2024: Findings from Muck Rack's Survey

In a rapidly evolving media landscape, understanding the preferences and challenges faced by journalists is crucial for both media professionals and public relations practitioners. Muckrack’s comprehensive survey of 1,106 journalists sheds light on the nature of journalism in 2024, providing valuable insights into the working conditions, production trends, and dynamics of media relations. Nature…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"CHLORINE AND TAR GIVE WATER THAT BAD TASTE," Toronto Star. September 9, 1912. Page 1 & 13. ---- Star's Chemist Able to Produce That Flavor Which Puzzled the City Hall. ---- CHLORINE ALONE WILL NOT DO IT --- Several Sampled the Concoction, and There Was No Mistaking the Likeness. ---- IS ALL RIGHT TO-DAY ---- Cutting Down Quantity of Chlorine Has Produced Quite a Difference. ----

"The tar-covered sand boxes in each of the 12 filter beds have nothing whatever to do with the carbolic taste so apparent in the city water." - COMMISSIONER OF WORKS HARRIS. "I believe that the carbolic taste is due to the action of the chlorine in the water on the tar which was coated over the sand boxes since the plant ceased operations some months ago." - DR. HASTINGS, Μ.Ο.Η. "There may be something in the filtration plant which is causing this unpleasant taste in the water, but we don't know yet."- DR. NASMITH, DIRECTOR OF CIVIC LABORATORIES.

Chemical experts of the City Hall have failed to explain the carbolic taste which rendered the city water unpalatable last week. A temporary remedy has been found by decreasing the amount of colon-killing chlorine to the danger line; but the use of the amount of chlorine formerly employed to give sterile water may bring on water troubles at any time. No solution has therefore been reached.

In the make-up of the filtration plant the only change which has taken place since the plant was closed down for cleaning purposes is the addition of liberal coats of tor to the outside of twelve sand boxes which stand in the filter beds. Has the presence of this tar in the filter beds caused the carbolic taste? Three answers to this interesting question are given above.

Star's Chemist Produces Taste. Let the question be put in another form which to many readers may appear to convey a distinction without a difference: "Will a mixture of chlorinated water and tar give a carbolic taste?" To this question The Star can give a most positive answer in the affirmative.

Remsen's Organic Chemistry under the subject of tar says: "Wood tar, contains small quantities of carbolic acid, chemically known as phenol.

Dr. Hastings recently stated: "The difference in the taste of carbolic acid and of chlorine is as great as light is from darkness."

Both these statements are amply borne out by the experiments of a chemical student of the University of Toronto, who devoted Saturday afternoon in The Star office to the mixing of water, chlorine, and tar, in varying quantities. For three hours The Star's chemist continued to make mysterious movements with a series of test tubes, mixing bowls, and his own organs of taste and smell. He then emerged with a quantity of what appeared to be ordinary drinking water in a test tube. It was his treat, and the receptacle was passed around the office for each man to take a nip, and a nip was as good as three fingers.

"Water gone bad again?" asked one.

"Same old carbolic taste," said another.

No Mistaking Flavor. All agreed that the taste was identical with that found in the city water on Thursday and Friday. The chemist explained that this flavor had produced by mixing water and chloride of lime in the ratio about two parts of chloride lime to about 1,000,000 parts of water, and one part of tar to about 3,000 parts of water. The tar used was in liquid form. whereas the tar found in the filtration plant is hardened. This is the only difference in conditions in the filtration plant mixture and in The Star Office laboratory.

The Experiment Without Tar. Five persons detected the carbolic taste in the first sample. An experiment was then made without tar, but with ten times the amount of chloride of lime used in the previous experiment. There was absolutely no carbolic taste; but the chlorine experiment had a decidedly different taste from that of the former mixture.

Differing causes may bring the same results. These experiments establish the fact that tar, chlorine, and water, produce a concoction similar in taste to that mixture which was recently served up to the citizen through his house tap. These same ingredients are to be found in the filtration plant. Whether they were the cause of the carbolic taste so apparent a few days, the civic chemists must be left to decide.

How Water is Chlorinated. That the bad taste in the water for the past few days did not develop at the chlorination plant is the opinion of the men who have charge of the water-drugging process which is stationed about 200 yards across from the ferry dock at Hanlan's Point. The chlorination goes on steadily and the men say there has been nothing wrong with the plant.

The chloride of lime that "purifies" Toronto's drinking water, does not go in in the solid state. It is first dissolved and the solution is then run in from a tank. The pipe from the filtration plant to the John Street Pumping Station runs straight from the plant to the Chlorination Station, opposite the ferry dock, and thence across to John street. Out on the sand bar where the little isolated shed stands, a man is kept constantly on duty attending to the chlorination of the water.

Three Men On Duty. Three men divide the work into three eight-hour shifts. Their work consists chiefly in making the chlorine solution, and keeping the tank full. Making the solution is simply a matter of mixing the hypo-chloric powder in water, and this concoction is slowly but steadily run into the great pipe that conveys the water across the bay. Thus every gallon of water gets a little drop of the chemical. None of it escapes, but the result for the past week has not been good water. At the chlorination plant they say it has been working steadily for months without interruption, and if that is so the blame cannot well be laid on the men who watch the machine that drugs the water.

"Fine To-day," Says M. O. Н. "The water is fine this morning," said Dr. Hastings, M.O.Н., to The Star. "We have had no complaints this morning about the taste." The Doctor stated that they were using about the same proportion of chlorine to-day as on Saturday when the proportion was 112 per million.

[kurtsascot]

question for klainenation:

how can we encourage ppl to share their opinions in the tags of klainepolls? what do you guys want to see? we have the Sue Awards but…. is there anything else we can do to invoke passion…..

[jdunlevy]

From the archives: A roundup of old “Did you read” blog posts

I've gone back and gathered links to old Chicago Reader “Did You Read __________?” blog posts that I contributed items to from 2012 to 2016. These posts were all “authored” by “Reader staff” with attibution to the individual contributors appearing in the body text next to their contributed items. So like some other things with the top-level byline done in this way, they don't appear on individual contributors’ author archives pages.

I got the post URLs using Google Search and then wrote a PHP script pulling all the URLs from the Search results into an array and fetching each post’s headline, subheadline, and publication date, sorting it all in reverse chronological order, and then outputting a useful list of links in nice HTML for presentation on the web. It’s probably most but not all of these posts that I contributed to.

(Among possibly other things, this let me add these to my Muckrack portfolio.)

“Did You Read __________?” [snapshot in the Wayback Machine at archive.org] was a topic series—you can think of it simply as a blog—that started in January 2012 in The Bleader blog (previously “The Blog,” sort of a single-company blog network or parent blog under which individual blogs or sub-blogs existed) on chicagoreader.com that ran initially as a more-or-less daily place for Reader staff to share interesting things, usually articles, from elsewhere on the web, sort of quick-hit link sharing. It shared links to “stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us.”

It was the successor to “What the Reader’s Reading” [Wayback Machine snapshot], a regularly updated feed of links from early 2010 to late 2011 powered by a news-aggregation platform called Publish2 that the Creative Loafing folks were especially excited about but did actually do some cool microblogging things including tagging and categorizing content and, if I recall, also had some rudimentary social media-type features built in. Links shared this way were presented in various places on the site, especially on the Reader homepage and on section-specific posts (e.g. music-tagged links [Wayback Machine] on music posts) and on section table of contents [Wayback Machine] pages.

Later, the idea of daily “Did you read” posts as compilations of staff contributions was dropped and freelancer Kate Shepherd wrote all the posts for the rest of the series from January 2016 until it was discontinued after Valentine’s Day in February 2018—at a particularly tumultuous time in the Reader’s history.

[waitformethistime]

Alternate s2 where Kurt and Sam kiss during 'Spin the Bottle' at Rachel's party (Blaine and Rachel still happens), but now Sam has to deal with the fact that he liked it a little too much and realize that maybe his hurt at Kurt pushing him away in 'Duets' had something more behind it.

Meanwhile, Kurt (who's self esteem is already in the pits) has to deal with the fact that even the one out gay dude he knows would rather attempt to date a girl than him and that stings quite a lot (wish we'd delved into that more), but also had his second kiss with a dude be Sam and he'd be lying if he said he hadn't imagined it at some point before that party.

Sam does try to ask him out because of the party. "idk if I'm gay but the kiss felt really nice" but Kurt kinda freaks out a little because it's all just too similar to what's going on with Blaine ("You were drunk, Sam, of course it felt good.") and he's just so frustrated because it seems like no one is taking him seriously and unlike Blaine and Sam, he doesn't get the luxury of holding hands with a girl like a normal guy and having people believe it. it's not a game to him.

It's not until shit hits the fan in Rumours and Sam gets inadvertently outed by the Muckracker that Sam's like "look I'm stone cold sober now, it's been months since that party, and I really want you to give me a chance" because he's basically been dragged along with everyone else's bidding the whole year and he didn't even get to process his own sexuality before everyone treated him like the town pariah so he might as well just do what he wants at this point.

And what he wants is Kurt.

And they live happily ever after, amen.

(Also, Kurt never gets with Blaine because after Rachelgate, he realized he loved the idea of Blaine more than the boy himself and rejects him later.)

[kurtstephensonofficial]

Je suis maintenant sur Muckrack https://muckrack.com/kurtstephenson

[trans-ralsei]

if there's anything that AI has really helped me with (apart from wasting huge amounts of water), it's with basically selling the concept of me as an employable person.

I rarely use AI outside of work and I don't use it to generate images. But what I've asked it to do is to try and write summaries and cover letters because there are a billion fucking jobs out there and it's so fucking dire. I really can't stand trying to apply for 20 jobs per month after hours of draining work only to have no one fucking call back.

And it's doing a better job at projecting this confident version of myself, this confident Ellis, than I am. In effect I have to water down what it says 90% of the time (as a sensible writer I do not fucking copy and paste what it says)

read this part of the biography that i asked it to write for my muckrack profile which i eventually omitted:

Throughout my career, I've developed a specialised toolkit that includes verification techniques, geolocation, chronolocation, and various technical platforms like Google Earth, Baidu Maps, and SunCalc. I'm also proficient in media monitoring tools including X Pro (formerly TweetDeck), Weibo, CrowdTangle, FlightRadar24, and MarineTraffic.

This is such a fucking lie lol. All I did was to spend like two weekends putting together geolocation quizzes for the new folk joining my team, and that was. what. four years ago. crowdtangle is also dead, so selling that seems so weird. (FUCK meta.)

but yeah you gotta sell yourself, your brain and your body, so...

[chadayach]

Chad Ayach - A Versatile Aerospace Engineer | Muckrack

Chad Ayach, EiT, is an aerospace engineer nearing PE licensure, with experience at NASA’s JPL and dedication to STEM mentoring.

[crystaldawnthompson]

Crystal Dawn Thompson - A Licensed Professional Counselor | Muckrack

Licensed Professional Counselor Crystal Thompson enjoys helping others, live music, cooking, sports, and time with her mini goldendoodle and loved ones.

[grantmentis]

are there good journalists on the woho beat you'd recommend?

Sadly a big problem we have is that a lot of very good reporters end up not being able to stay in womens hockey for a long time because a lot of outlets haven’t had a dedicated space for it, and so much is changing, but here is who I think is the best that are consistently on in no order

Here are my recommendations!

Erica Ayala and her outlet Black Rosie Media I think is THE standard in women’s hockey. Ayala had done bylines for women’s hockey in various outlets and also appeared on a few different locked on networks which can be found in muckrack here

The Ice Garden is the longest running women’s hockey blog. It’s a rotating cast and I like some authors way more than others but I think if you’re just looking for start and probably has the most extensive coverage. It’s one of the only sources to get English language coverage of international league play and a lot of times players or former players will guess write. I am also a fan of the analytical work that An Nguyen has done, for example this article. Some stuff is paywalled, some isn’t, some is paywalled then becomes available later.

Kyle Cushman has recently been on the PWHL beat specifically, including some more long form / deeper look articles as well as being at practices with information, and I’ve enjoyed his work. He mainly writes for The Score

Christine Roger of Radio Canada is probably the main French Canadian reporter for the PWHL and team Canada

Hailey Salvian of The Athletic is usually pretty credible, tho it’s very clear that she is very careful not to be critical of her inside sources in the PWHL and I think had sometimes been a little bit of a PR arm she’s not going to say something straight up false or anything and is pretty in line with hockey reporters on that stuff. That said the athletic is usually paywalled and I really do not like the athletic as a paper overall just from a “owned by the New York times who is constantly spreading transphobic misinfo.” But if you just follow her socials and stuff you’ll get the breaking news and she’s usually accurate there.

Not a journalist but if you’re just looking for an aggregate of roster transactions and rumors pwhlreport on most platforms will do that for you, I’d say they’re accurate a solid 85% of the time and it’s little opinions or anything just who what when where and why

More statistical analysis than news but I enjoy Giants in the Crease for all things goaltenders and appreciate that they do a good job with the ncaa and international goalies as well

Women’s sports highlights on twitter will get you literally every single women’s hockey highlight from every tournament ever I swear it rules. Unfortunately am unsure if they’re on other platforms

I don’t think he’ll be writing anytime soon because of his new job, but if you want to get into the data world, the PWHL Montreal director of analytics Mikael Nahabedian has a substack page

EDIT: Karissa Donkin of CBC is a recent addition to the best I’ve enjoyed!

These are just some I like that I think do a good job of keeping it straight. Unfortunately I am limited by my own language barrier and haven’t found really anyone consistently covering the SDHL or other leagues in the English language that I’ve enjoyed, but if any of my followed from other countries have their own writers who I may be missing because of this language barrier please share

[christianmarcosramos]

Christian Marcos Ramos - A Seasoned Wealth Management Expert | Muckrack

[shituationist]

I have some more scalawag posts in the works, including articles about civil war unionism in Louisiana, oil spills in Caddo parish which local news dropped the ball on, and the ongoing squatters struggle in shreveport. Now that my job fired me, I'll have time to dedicate to political troublemaking, but I have no funds and no budget.

If you wanna help out, toss a few bucks my way on ko-fi. It would motivate me to muckrack and help me land on my feet as I simultaneously look for work.

[samevans-wmu]

{ PRIVATE } Hey there, cutie. I know we have an unspoken mutual agreement that the Muckracker is about nonsense, but I just wanted to clarify that the last gossip post in particular, was also nonsense. I’m with you - only you - and I would never do anything to try and risk that. 🩷

{ PRIVATE} And here I was ready to offer to officiate yours and Dave’s wedding.

Hope you weren’t stressing when it comes to me believing that stuff. Gotta remember I’ve been mentioned a few times. I don’t get a stamp on this Muckraker card I made since I wasn’t actually named in it this go around.

[spookyc00chie]

i need to make a writing portfolio so fucking bad dude, my substack is DRIVEL and my muckrack is WELL IT'S OKAY I JUST NEED TO MAKE IT UP TO DATE

[stonerbrettbukowski]

🎵I'm gonna trade this life for fortune and fame, I'd even cut my hair and change my name. 🎶 (rockstar by nickelback plays automatically when you go on brett's blog)

LIMA LOSER? OR IS THAT BRETT BUKOWSKI? THEY MIGHT EVEN PASS FOR CALEB LANDRY JONES IN THE RIGHT LIGHT. THEY'RE TWENTY-ONE, BUT STILL STUCK IN LIMA AT MCKINLEY. THEY'VE BEEN CALLED THE BURNOUT DEALER, BUT PREFER TO BE THE ROCKSTAR. MAYBE IF THEY FIX THEIR AESTHETIC AKA BREAK UPS AND MAKE UPS WITH HIS LONG TIME GIRLFRIEND, HAZY NIGHTS SPENT IN THE WRONG PAIR OF ARMS, AND SCREAMING ON STAGE TO LONELY SOULS IN A CROWD THEY'LL GET THEIR WAY. WORD ON THE SHOW CHOIR BLOGS ARE THEY'RE… NOT IN ANY GLEE CLUB???? SO GOOD LUCK TO THEM!

THE BASICS:

name: brett bogumil bukowski.

nicknames: stoner brett, bukowsk, babe, triple b.

pronouns: he/they. though tbh i don’t really care?

gender: genderfluid, i guess.

birthday/zodiac: june 27th, that makes me a cancer.

birthplace: lima, oh born and raised.

relationship status: single on a bad day. taken on a good day.

sexuality: bisexual?? idk man. everyone’s hot.

occupation: frontman for the band high road. drug dealer.

sports/clubs: art club, astronomy club, ceramics, cooking club, drama club, environment club, painting club, international/foreign language club, photography club, digital media club, the muckracker, gay/straight alliance, improv club.

major/minor: art, ceramics.

languages: english, ASL, spanish, russian, polish, japanese, and french. i’m learning german and i want to learn chinese.

social media handles: brett42069 everywhere.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE:

height: 5‘10’’ i’m not going to front.

build: slim?? imagine if i had a sleeper build though.

eye color: blue. 

hair color: ginger baby.

piercings: i got 00 gauges, yo.

tattoos: man, i got too many probably. i got a pot leaf, stars, sparkles, a disco ball, a fish, a pair of glasses, some books and anime panels… and i did most of them myself, with a tattoo gun or with the trusty ol’ stick and poke method.

other distinguishing features: i got freckles literally everywhere?

style: you know that tiktok look that’s like… adam sandler? it’s like that but more punk clothes.

PERSONALITY/INTERESTS:

traits: well… i asked sam and he said empathetic, artistic, funny, supportive, upbeat, lazy, careless, gossipy, and greedy...

likes: drugs, weed especially, video games, midnight drives, magic, money, rapping, dottie and jacob.

dislikes: people harshing my vibes, assholes, bullies, people who don’t pass and filthy bongs.

fears: going to prison.

skills: apparently i scream pretty decent and i know how to play the guitar, i’m trying to learn the piano. i know a bunch of different languages and my memory is like… super good unless i fuck it up with drugs, which i do kinda, but still. i can remember fun facts. i’m a super good cook and i’m good with locks. i’m also a magician and i can go so hard at the knife game.

quirks: i bite my nails a lot and my lips, i guess i have like an oral fixation?? people say i talk in my sleep, which i can do practically anywhere. and i guess i fidget and play with my hair a lot too? 

hobbies: making music, painting, photography, learning languages, stargazing, getting high with my best friend, giving my gf flowers.

music tastes: i like it all, man. why only listen to one genre? ♪♫♬

myers-briggs: who is that?

kinsey scale: is that a type of drug scale?

strengths: i can lift a lot, not as much as one of the dudes on the titans, but still.

weaknesses: drugs probably.

What? This club's my community service.