Amazon's New Kindle Wants to Set the World on Fire

The Tweet Beat

Here's who I've started following on twitter:

@slate - doesn't need too much explanation; it's the feed for Slate Magazine, which puts out quality essays on a pretty regular basis. I'm partial to the ones by Christopher Hitchens.

@sjf - the personal Twitter account of Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic at The New Yorker, among others. I really like writing about music, so it's good to look to some of the best for inspiration.

@Steven_Hyden - Music editor at The A.V. Club. It might be a subsection of the Onion, but their music criticism is both legit and entertaining. Which is something I enjoy.

@outsidemagazine - More and more, I'm becoming enamored with all things outdoors - skiing, backpacking and kayaking in particular. I'd like to explore writing more about this, and though I've just started getting into Outside Magazine, it's obvious they put out some pretty great pieces.

@TheAtlantic - Again, not a whole lot of explanation necessary. I do really enjoy seeing new stories pop up on my feed; that way I don't forget to, you know, actually go and read them.

@AJEnglish - Al Jazeera's English language feed for 24hr news and current events. They do some really excellent reporting and manage to cover stories that seem to slip through the cracks of the other big news agencies (like the Wall St. sit-in, for example).

@romenesko - updates from the Romenesko column on the Poynter site. I just started reading, but I like him already.

@guardiannews - Updates from The Guardian. I like getting news from the outsider perspective; at least it seems like there's less potential for bias. Or, at least it's another point of view to help average out the others. I also like how they divide their feed into individual sections. For example: @guardianmusic.

@kdmc - feed from the Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Lots of great info and tutorials for aspiring journalists looking to incorporate all that new-fangled technology stuff.

@PEJPew - found this while looking at KDMC's following list. It's the feed for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Pretty self-explanatory, really.

Don't Stay Glued to the Past

In 2010, cash-strapped Paste Magazine had an enormous decision to make. With ad sales flagging because of economic recession, the magazine, which started as a quarterly publication in 2002, could either follow its current distribution model into eventual bankruptcy, or it could radically change things up and hope to save the business. Fortunately, they went with option two.

And so, on August 31, Paste went entirely digital, completely cutting out the printed form altogether and thereby saving the farm (for now, at least.) It seems to be working well, and a digital format seems a natural fit for a publication that covers pop culture exclusively. For example, one thing Paste was known well for was its music sampler CDs packaged with the print issues. Well now, with a little web magic, presto! You've got music downloads.

Perhaps the best example of Paste's successful embrace of the "hybrid" model is its new mPlayer, now in beta. It's great because it's got a fullscreen layout like a magazine page with big, bright photos and text, but with the added bonus of embedded content. Again, this is huge for a culture publication - music samples and even videos are there right on the same page, without taking you away from the article. For example, here's a recent Clap Your Hands Say Yeah feature. It's got cool little touches, too, like if you hit the 'next' button on the media player at the top, it automatically takes you to the artist article corresponding to the song that's playing. That's thoughtful integration of new and old-fashioned media.

street art story sources

1. One of the potential aspects of this story that I'm really interested is the debate over public space, how it should be used, and who has the right to use it. This article from the New York Times profiles a group of artists and activists reacting against the prevalence of corporate advertising within public space. (publication)

2. "What is Street Art?" from Art Radar Asia gives nice, succinct definitions of street art in its various forms (including yarn bombing!), and briefly touches on questions of vandalism and legality. (blog post)

3. I was totally going to use this "Street Art, Sweet Art" article from the Journal of Consumer Research, but then I saw that Steve already did. Drat. Well anyways, here's an article about yarn bombing in Australia (EBSCO login req'd) (research resource)


4. Over here on justseeds, a local wheatpaster talks about a West Pittsburgh public art project. (there's a nice flickr feed to go along with it, too.) (expert)

5. Last of all this video is awesome, highlighting Shepard Fairey and the preparations for his exhibit at the Warhol last year. (bonus theme: the power of art to affect big change in society!) (a/v)

[Citation Needed]

I hate to beat a dead horse (I also hate that expression), but I want to join the party and talk a little bit about Wikipedia. Sorry.

Poor Wikipedia. Every single first day of class, during every professor's how-to-do-research speech, Wikipedia's treated that one uncle who went to prison once whom everyone tries to avoid at family gatherings. That sort of "Don't touch it, you don't know where it's been! Anyone can edit it!" attitude.

And it's true. Anyone can edit it. But what's often forgotten is the massive amount of editors proofing new changes to articles, software that keeps track of all new changes and allows for reversion to previous unaltered versions, as well as the site's strict insistence on neutrality and citations standards.

I think it could be argued that Wikipedia is one of the most transparent sources of information online. Though admittedly it's not the case with every article, many of them are meticulously cited, with nearly every major point linked back to an original source. I can think of few other sites that give source lists this extensive:

148 verifiable sources, and that's just for the article on Batman. Furthermore, Wikipedia has systems in place for designating its most well-written articles (see: featured articles), as well as a system of flags to designate portions where neutrality or quality of research are disputed. And because every part of the site is a collaborative effort, the argument could be made that over time, Wikipedia's content will likely trend towards neutrality more strongly than other sources with clear bias (like, say, The Huffington Post or Fox News.) It's also worth mentioning the 2005 study by Nature which found that Wikipedia's accuracy was close to the Encyclopedia Britannica's, at least in terms of science articles.

Wikipedia's not perfect, and it should obviously be used with caution and common sense; not everything it has to offer is rock solid...yet. But if we're going to talk about the rapidly changing digital nonfiction world, I think it's important to acknowledge that as Wikipedia advances in age and size, so does its credibility. [citation needed]

-- -- --

Since I mentioned the Huffington Post earlier, I'd like to touch on that a little more. I used to read it regularly, until I realized that every other top read article was about Kim Kardashian's latest wacky exploit. And even the 'serious' articles are entirely blown out of proportion:

When a front page headline is more concerned with sensationalizing fear than introducing solid reporting, I'm automatically going to call the whole enterprise into question. How can a publication even pretend that neutrality is a priority when it puts the word "FEAR" in 60 point font overtop a blown up image of a syringe, juxtaposed with a controversial politician? Editorializing is one thing, but when there are few lines dividing it and reporting, I'm going to seriously re-evaluate how much I rely on that source. To be fair, Huff Post sources a lot of its content from AP and/or Reuters, but in that case why wouldn't I just go directly to those sites for my news?

first post!

Over the course of the summer, in between yelling at the high school kids I supervised to "do some goddamned work," and flipping burgers on the flat grill at my near-minimum wage job, I had a lot of time to ponder my last upcoming college semester. Followed by graduation. Accompanied with anxiety.

It's occurred to me that the vast majority of nonfiction writing I've consumed lately has involved critical thinking about political developments in Africa and the Middle East, or has managed to take a broad topic, like gossip, and tease out four separate, compelling, and unified stories out of it. They've been podcasts and blogs and posts from news sites online, often accompanied by various multimedia, and linking to further information at other parts of the web.

The kind of writing that's made me want to read it has (mostly) had nothing to do with physical print, nor has it been content with mere memoirs and personal narratives. Discouragingly, that's precisely the direction my writing classes have taken - little to no outside reporting, and no web presence at all.

I'd like to do the kind of nonfiction writing that makes me interested enough to read - the kind that goes out and finds stories in the fascinating or the mundane, the known or the obscure. I'm bored enough with the stories coming out of my own head, so I can't imagine how a real reader might feel. So one of my goals is to practice real reporting in my writing - something I haven't really done since freshman year Intro to Journalism.

Having realized that I primarily consume writing via electronic means, namely the internet, and having seen job listings that require extensive knowledge and/or experience within the digital realm, my second goal for this semester is to become proficient in integrating my writing with technology. Specifically I'm interested in working on integrating embedded media (pictures, sound, YouTube videos, links to other sources of information) into my essays and work to create a fuller experience.

Two of my favorite nonfiction writers write now are Christopher Hitchens and Ira Glass. With Hitchens, I admire the sort of old-school Fleet Street journalism techniques in his writing - everything he writes about gives me the impression that he's done so much research he's now a veritable expert on the subject. At least, he writes so forcefully and with so much conviction that it certainly feels that way. And I particularly admire the way he integrates that reporting with personal insight. With regards to Ira Glass, well, every time I listen to This American Life I'm absolutely floored by the stories that seem to come out of nowhere. They're engaging to the point of being almost addictive, separate yet subtly woven together, introduced well in the beginning of the program and tied up neatly at the very end. I also admire the program because it's a great example of nonfiction writing in an entirely different medium. (I realize that the program is written by many authors, but it seemed convenient to use Glass as the figurehead.)

So there it is: my reasons, my goals, the examples I want to follow.