Daily
Herald
the Brown
vol. cxxii, no. 15
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Since 1891
Pulitzer Prize winner discusses future of journalism By Shefali Luthra News Editor
Rachel A. Kaplan / Herald
Rohde advised students interested in a career in journalism to “keep writing.”
W. BBAll
By sona mrkttchian Senior Staff Writer
The women’s basketball team bounced back from halftime deficits against Columbia and Cornell this weekend to grab two key conference victories. Despite struggling offensively both nights at the Pizzitola Center, Bruno (14-8, 5-3 Ivy) utilized an aggressive defense to defeat the Lions (2-19, 0-7) 7263 Friday and the Big Red (9-12, 3-4) 60-49 the following day. Brown 72, Columbia 63
Entering the first game of the Ivy weekend, the Bears held a .500 Ivy record at 3-3 and were looking for a weekend sweep to move up in the Ivy standings. But in the first half, the Bears struggled to find the basket. They shot just 32 percent from the field and 33 percent from behind the arc, while the Lions shot 41 percent from the field and 50 percent at the three-point line. This difference put Columbia in the lead heading into the locker room 31-29 and just 20 minutes away from its first Ivy win of the season. “On Friday, Coach (Jean Marie) Burr said that we were ‘waiting to continued on page 5
Mayor Angel Taveras stressed the importance of making sacrifices as the city faces the looming threat of bankruptcy during his annual State of the City address last night. In an unprecedented gesture, Gov. Lincoln Chafee ’75 P’14 attended the speech, standing behind Taveras as he spoke. “Providence is in peril, and we must work together to save our great
city,” Taveras said, addressing the city’s budget crisis.
city & state Taveras compared the city’s financial situation to a black hole. “We stare into that black hole because some have yet to sacrifice,” he said, noting the role tax-exempt institutions play in the city’s financial crisis. In total, such establishments — the University included — own
$3 billion worth of city property, preventing Providence from collecting a potential $105 million of property tax revenue each year. “No one is exempt from the sacrifices that need to be made to save our city,” Taveras said. “Tax-exempts must be part of the solution, not the problem.” Taveras announced that an agreement with Johnson and Wales University for additional contributions continued on page 5
Job board restored yesterday Students can now access the CareerLAB Student Job and Internship Board after an outage that lasted from Thursday afternoon to Monday afternoon. The failure was caused by a “critical hardware outage on the part of the vendor” Symplicity Corporation, said Andrew Simmons, director of the CareerLAB. CareerLAB staff worked with employers to ensure students would not miss application deadlines or interviews they had scheduled, Simmons said. “I want to emphasize that our staff has been working very, very hard to mitigate any potential impacts on students,” he said. Approximately 1,000 other colleges and universities that use the system were also affected, Simmons wrote in an email to the student body Monday. It took slightly longer for the University to repair its job board because of its password authentication system, Simmons told The Herald. “It was just annoying,” Scott Freitag ’14 said. “There was no information about why it was down” on the webpage, he said. “These things do happen,” Simmons said. “These are large databases that are subject to occasional failure.” — Kate Nussenbaum
Amorous alums play matchmakers By jordan hendricks Senior Staff Writer
Some Ivy League students may be single this Valentine’s Day, but they don’t have to be. Two dating websites started by alums in the past two years are helping Brown students and others find love.
Feature For those who hope to meet “people who value creativity, intellectual curiosity and drive” from dozens of cities around the world, IvyDate, a selective dating site cofounded by Beri Meric ’06, is here to help. Membership to the site requires an extensive application, including questions about users’ favorite philosophers, things they like to spend money on and what they would do if they were president. If approved by IvyDate’s member-
Co-Occupy
Student protesters across the state join the movement campus news, 4
ship committee, users receive five matches per week, based on an algorithm that analyzes their preferences on location, age, religion and ethnicity, Meric said. For students seeking love locally, Kai Huang ’11 and Arune Gulati ’11 have left their legacy on campus with Prospect and Meeting, a site on which users list their “prospects”— people in whom they are romantically interested. If two people list each other as “prospects,” their names are exchanged, prompting a “meeting.” ‘High-end’ dating
IvyDate now has more than 17,000 approved members internationally whose ages range from 18 to about 35. The site states that it is not exclusively for Ivy League alums, but rather is “the Ivy League of dating.” The membership committee seeks “intelcontinued on page 5
Courtesy of IvyDate
The new online dating service, IvyDate, offers matches for selective singles.
Security
Lauren Scheimer ’12 trusts MCAT takers opinions, 7
weather
MADELEINE Wenstrup Sports Staff Writer
inside
continued on page 3
Taveras declares Providence ‘in peril’
Bears net two league victories
news..............2-3 CITY & State........4 Sport s............5 editorial...........6 Opinions.............7
“You’re going to feel hopeless,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Rohde ’90 told a room of almost 50 students and community members last night. “You’re going to feel there’s no future in journalism. Breaks will come.” Rohde, adjunct professor of English, shared his experiences pursuing a career as a journalist and seeking “ground truth” — on-the-scene news reporting — in a lecture in the Brown/RISD Hillel’s Winnick Chapel. The talk was the third in a lecture series hosted by the Nonfiction Writing Program. One of the founding editors of the College Hill Independent, Rohde said he was inspired to pursue journalism because of a nonfiction writing course he took his senior year. But the road to reporting was not easy. After
graduating, Rohde pursued a “series of unpaid internships” at newspapers and TV stations. As a secretary at ABC News, Rohde picked up drycleaning and helped his boss’ seventh grade son write a book report. Rohde then decided to teach English in Lithuania. A coup broke out in the Soviet Union that year, and Rohde spent his time stringing for the Associated Press and the New York Times. Upon returning, he covered local news at the Philadelphia Inquirer and later moved to the Christian Science Monitor, where a position eventually opened up in foreign correspondence. He jumped at the chance. Two Pulitzers, one kidnapping and two books later, he left the Times — where he worked as a night reporter and then as South Asia bureau chief — after 15 years to become a
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