Lab 10/26

Think of three different ways—other than print—to tell a story. (We’ll assume that your piece has a print component.) Give a descriptive one-paragraph summary for each. Post idea by the end of class.

Okay, so I really like music and music journalism/reportage. So let’s say, hypothetically, I’ve landed my dream job and i’m covering a band on the brink of major success.

1.) Naturally, an audio component is pretty much required. But we want to see change and growth, not just the finished product. Everyone hears the final product. Let’s say this band I’m covering is in the studio, recording their new album. It’d be great to embed audio clips of, say, one song in progress - 30 seconds each of an initial demo, somewhere midway through the recording process (a click track, a rough track mix or whatnot), and a sample of the finished song. Coldplay did something like this a while back where they posted early demos on their website (I can’t find it now, though), but that was all after the fact. Being able to hear audible evolution embedded along with a story would be great.

2.) I want to know how a band with big label backing spends their money during recording and touring phases. So, I'd take the data and group it: this much spent on studio time, this much on guitar strings, this much on room service shrimp cocktails, this much on cocaine, etc. Then, I'd turn the data into pretty colored shapes, or graphic icons to represent individual categories alongside numerical data and text. As often happens, I refer to the infographics living at Good Magazine. See:

http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1105/opportunitygap/flat.html

http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1104/pot-energy/flat.html

3.)Video - Day in the Life. Train a video camera on the band (or maybe one particular member of the band; if I were doing, say, 90's Oasis, it’d be fixed on Liam Gallagher) for 24 hours, plus or minus however long they’re awake. Are they normal people going about their business, drinking coffee at Starbucks and making stir-fry for dinner? Or are they snorting Adderall off the bathroom counter in the recording studio and prank calling Zooey Deschanel at 4am? These are the question I ask; the video shall answer them. I’ll take a day’s worth of raw footage and edit it down to a manageable time frame.

Sarah Palin, Poet Laureate

Jesus, what a terrifying title.

It's hard to tell whether Michael Solomon's remixed re-imagining of the former Alaska governor is tawdry or genius. Perhaps he's straddling the line with one foot in each yard.

To be sure, it's a brilliant experiment in language, and the brunt of the work seems to be in data scouring and formatting. It forces us to simultaneously rethink poetry and everyday speech. Somewhere, somehow, the two intersect. And if you can tease that intersection out of the torrential onslaught of faux-folksy speech inflections and you-betcha religious extremism, well then goshdarnit, you can probably find it anywhere.

Reading these poems: where to start? First of all, apologies to the poetry gods for the sin of elevating Palin's verbal utterances to the status of noble wordsmithery. I want so badly to write this project off the way I would cheap political action figures and calendars sold at shopping mall kiosks.

And yet, there's really something beautiful here, in the way a few paragraph breaks can turn a lament over a conference meeting into:


    The sunshine is perfect— 

    Too bad we’ll be looking at it 

    Through conference windows 

    This afternoon.

I want to hate Sarah Palin - for her ignorance, her intolerance, her insistence that there are "real" and "not real" parts of America - but when it comes to language I sort of have to pause now. Am I so pretentious that paragraph breaks make everything seem deep and meaningful and beautiful?

Is that Solomon's whole point?

The Atavist

My first question was what is an atavist? So I looked it up. Merriam-Webster defines atavism as:

recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity.

So with that in mind, I poked around the site a bit to see what they're all about. It became apparent pretty quickly that the name is a reference to the group's goal of bringing good, engaging, well-researched nonfiction narrative back en vogue. It seemed a bit like Byliner, if Byliner only published its Originals series and didn't link to other works. As such, there are way fewer titles available on the Atavist, but I think that might be a solid business decision - if you're not linking people to free articles, they're more likely to buy the ones you're selling, right?

Speaking of buying, The Atavist makes it short and simple - all links are right there on each piece's profile page. I like that they've made an effort to offer their product in a variety of formats (even though it's one fewer than Byliner). It's an obvious and simple way to distribute their stories as widely as possible (in terms of digital distribution). Personally, I think it's important to not let media distribution become too centralized if your aim is to preserve the freest and easiest possible dissemination of information.

So, it bothered me that I miss out on the extra multimedia features just because I don't own an iDevice. I understand the constraints on a small outfit like this one, and I'm sure their development budget isn't huge. But it just seems like a mistake to only let the Apple crowd into to multimedia party, especially considering that they brag out its benefits on their about page:

That allows us to do some things we couldn’t otherwise—within our own apps—like including a free audiobook version of every one, and allowing you to flip back and forth between text and audio while the story keeps your place. In addition to each story’s unique collection of video and other media, inside the Atavist apps they have what we call inline content: maps, timelines, character lists, primary documents, and links. You can turn on the inline content to find out what’s behind the story, or leave it off to read completely distraction-free.

I'm not trying to say that the writing can't stand on its own. I'm in the middle of My Mother's Lover and it's excellent, but I keep wishing that I too could have access to the video of a pilot from Zahrt's Air Force squadron, as well as to the audiobook version. Couldn't they host it online behind a wall, and email an access code to Kindle and other ebook buyers? (For the the extra buck, of course.)

I didn't mean to whine. It just seems like if you're trying to herald in a digital publishing renaissance, it'd be wise to not restrict it by distribution platform.

Class Lab

48-hour blog lab

Theme: "WINTER IS COMING"--What Pittsburgh is thinking as winter approaches

Format: Like Longshot, we’re aiming for a publication that can be printed and/or posted online. We’ll have articles and stories that contrast each other on a two-page spread.
Each story and infographic will have its own page, making the magazine roughly 20 pages long.

Story Ideas:

"Where do the LARPers Go?" / "Where do the Homeless Go?"

• The first story will focus on LARPers (Live Action Role Players; people who re-enact fantasy situations) in the area that meet in Schenley Park and Shadyside and see where they go in the winter.
• The second story will contrast the LARPers and see where Pittsburgh’s homeless seek shelter during the winter, covering the local organization that help the needy.

"Seasonal Depression" / "Sun Lamps"

• “Seasonal Depression” will take a look at those in the Pittsburgh area effect by S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and how they cope with the city’s weather
• “Sun Lamps” will be a brief report on sun lamps, what they do and the positive effects on users.

"Ode to and Ugg Boot" / "Ugghs"

• A brief poem in favor of Ugg Boots opposite a brief poem or manifesto attacking such a vile fashion trend.

Infographic:

sunny days in winter: PGH vs. Honolulu or wherever

• Envisioned as a kind of GOOD Magazine-style infographic - where data is presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner

Jobs Won in Winter / Jobs Lost in Winter

• Profile on the employment opportunities created by winter weather in Pittsburgh: for example, Christmas tree lot salesman, Snowplow driver, etc.
• In contrast, lots of people end up losing their jobs come winter, like Kennywood employees, construction workers, etc. This profiles the hardships they face and how they endure.

Infographic:
alcohol consumption v. winter injuries

• Again, presented like the previous infographic. Data localized with regards to the Pittsburgh region

Winter Crime / Winter Charity

• “Winter Crime” will be an inforgraphic on crime rates in Pittsburgh as weather worsens.
• “Winter Charity” will be an opposing infographic on philanthopy in the Pittsburgh area during the holidays.

Weatherman / Snowplow Driver

• These pieces will be characters sketches of local weathermen and how the public feels about
  their predictions (and therefore the weathermen themselves) for Pittsburgh weather during the winter. The opposing piece will be about local snowplow drivers and how the public feels about them. It will examine how children like bad weather predictions (snow days) whereas adults are the opposite and how these roles are reversed when it comes to the snowplow drivers.

Art

The art will include several infographics (like the charts for alcohol consumption and injury rates in the winter) These playful infographics will be in the style of GOOD magazine. In keeping with the theme of contrast throughout the magazine, art will also be “dark” or “light” in color and tone.

Finally, there will also be photography throughout the magazine.

Facebook Following

I'm now following Good Magazine on Facebook, since they're on my Twitter feed too. Gotta keep my social medias uniform, right?

Number two: Vice Magazine. I keep seeing links to their incredible short documentaries posted on Reddit, so I thought I may as well follow them properly. the Vice Guide to Congo was incredible - highly recommended. Now they're on to Belfast - like their FB page to see it on the front page right now. When a story opens with a group of your children proclaiming to "hate the Catholics," it's pretty damn chilling.

Social Media Extravaganza

For Grantland:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• RSS Feed (this is maybe a stretch for social media, but worth a shot, right?)
• last.fm page for podcasts
  
  This is all I could find for Grantland. Either I'm seriously missing something, or they haven't established a huge social media presence quite yet, which would be understandable considering the site's relatively recent launch.
  

For Slate:

• Facebook
• Interestingly, Slate has multiple Facebook pages for its various sections and columns: Culture, Slate V, Double X, Slate Politics, Slate's Culture Gabfest, Slate's Political Gabfest, Digital Manners.
• Twitter - like on facebook, Slate maintains multiple Twitter accounts and lists the Twitter profiles of many of its authors. Some of them include SlateArticles, SlateForeign, TheBigMoney, DoubleXMag, ForeignPolicy Magazine, Music Critic Jody Rosen, and so on and so forth. They even list their copy editors' Twitter accounts. See the complete listing here.
• Apparently Google+ doesn't have business/corporate accounts yet, so for now Slate recommends following one of its authors and "unofficial Google+ ambassador" Farhad Manjoo. Slate also lists the Google+ accounts for some of its other writers here.
• Slate has a YouTube account in addition to their own video site at slatev.com
• Slate also maintains a page on last.fm, where it posts podcasts.
  
  I wonder if it's important for large publication like Slate to maintain many social media feeds so that their readers are more easily able to get updates on the topics they'd like to read, without getting buried in the stuff they're not interested in.

Lab 2

I've started following Democracy Now! on Twitter and Facebook. It's a nationwide, daily, independent news publication broadcast on NPR, college radio stations, and on the web via podcast (among other outlets). In an article in The Nation in 2005, professor and media critic Robert McChesney said of Democracy Now:"I think it's probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time."

Democracy Now! uses Facebook and Twitter in much the same way many news organizations do - to give updates for new and recently-updated stories. Whenever a new podcast or video production is finished, DN puts the link on their social media sites as well. The Twitter feed is particularly effective for reporting on breaking news, like the current protests in New York City. I think it's one of the best examples of a media putting something like Twitter to good use. The only downside I can think of is that sometimes they unleash a torrent of tweets on my feed, which can get irritating. They should consider dividing their feed into categorical divisions, like The Guardian.

As for an individual, I'm following Richard Dawkins, because I really like science writing and people critical of fundamentalist religiosity. Admittedly, though, his Facebook page is far from stellar; either he (or someone on his publishing team/entourage) just started using it, or he doesn't care about using it all that much, because the only post he's got up is about the release of his latest book. Twitter, however, is a different story. Dawkins uses his feed to not only publish links to his own articles and book releases, but also to articles by other authors on similar topics, in conjunction with his website. So, he's not ground-breaking in the internet department, but pretty good all the same.

My Mother is a Fish

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

-William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1950.

You can hear and audio excerpt of Faulkner's speech on the Nobel Prize website. For a text transcript, see here.

* * *

January 1, 1644 fell on a Friday, according to the Gregorian Calendar. The moon was in waning gibbous. WolframAlpha, the computational/algorithmic search engine figured it out. (More information about WolframAlpha here.) According to the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, weather in the state from January 1-10 1644 was "cloudy and rainy weather, with occasional sunshine and somewhat warm."

* * *

The five deadliest US Hurricanes, according to a NOAA report (table 2):

1. Galveston, TX, 1900, 8000 deaths
2. SE/Lake Okeechobee, FL, 1928, 2500 deaths
3. Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA, 2005, 1200 deaths
4. Cheniere Caminanda, LA, 1893, 1100-1400 deaths
5. Sea Islands, SC/GA, 1893, 1000-2000 deaths

* * *

Fallingwater Site's series of architectural drawings.

* * *

He's number 359666.

He has a widow's peak.

He is wearing a suit and tie.

It is a United States passport.

The red official stamp is off center.

Street Art Update

I've started taking my camera around with me so I can document any street art pieces I happen to find while I'm out and about. Here are some recent ones from around Oakland:

Descriptions and more photos are up on my Street Art Flickr set.

I'm also working on making a custom map via Google Maps so we can pinpoint the exact location of each piece.

One of the murals I just found today had the artist's email address at the bottom; I'm going to be shooting an email to him soon to see if s/he'll be willing to talk to us.

Quick Edit:

Forgot to put this in, but found a great site of an artist who's doing a lot with yarn and yarnbombing in NYC, here.