Spot Leonardo strutting:
Via the always entertaining chinaSMACK: a collection of Photoshopped images of Leonardo diCaprio strutting. Some really great ones in here.
In my many Google Alerts is one for “citizen journalism.” I get some interesting material from it and most often it’s people picking on the subject in defense of “real journalism” (which I do not have a Google Alert set up for.)
Hence I found myself reading a college op-ed bemoaning the possibility of the University of Colorado, Boulder phasing out their journalism program. There’s more to it, but that’s not what I’m interested in.
I was pulled in via this phrase: “I’ve long subscribed to the belief that citizen journalism is akin to citizen dentistry. With little oversight concerning journalistic ethics and the transmission of concise, accurate reporting, there is little guarantee of the profession and its watchdog role being upheld in the coming decades.”
Of course there’s the expected anti-citizen journalism vitriol in the preceding paragraph (“…when anyone with a case of Diet Coke, mild carpal tunnel, a working knowledge of design programs and a laptop can be considered a “citizen journalist…”), and the dentistry analogy is supposed to drive that home – but it actually set me brainstorming in a different direction.
To borrow and change this metaphor a little – Let’s say journalism is a bit like medicine. You’ve got your general practitioners and your specialists. And citizen journalism is akin to citizen medicine. Which is not a bad thing! You only want a well-trained licensed doctor to perform surgery just in the same way it’s preferable to have august, credentialed and venerated minds at a place like ProPublica conducting your investigative reporting. But trust me, it’s of great valuable to society for everyone to know a little bit about first aid and to have a few folks around who are trained in CPR.
What simplistic arguments against citizen journalism do is conflate CPR with open heart surgery, bandaging a cut with re-attaching a limb.
What does this give us to work with? Perhaps we should extend this analogy to education.
With the same ubiquity as posters in the workplace that teach citizens how to perform first aid, perhaps the media should start to include little tips and tactics of performing one’s part in journalism? Forget branding it citizen journalism, forget starting formal programs that you can join as a “[vowel]Reporter”. Just offer weekend training sessions for the truly interested, online tips for proper cellphone photography, and easy-to-navigate ways to become deputized in a greater effort.
(Thanks to Mr. Jake Begun at The Badger Herald for the kick-start to the brainstorm.)
Pinktentacle posted a collection of Japanese medical woodblock prints from the mid-nineteenth century that are awesome. Many of them seem to essentially be advertisements for different medical products. I particularly love the personification of disease. That cholera beast! Here are a few of my favorites.
Pills for syphilis and gonorrhea:
Defeating cholera:
Chasing measles away:
I know it’s basically already the weekend, but here’s a little data porn (SFW) to lose yourself in while you’re sneaking whiskey from your filing cabinet to wind down the late afternoon hours.
Zach Seward pointed out this big giant data dump from Mint! From anonymously collected transactions they’ve put together averages for venues in cities around the country. Here’s one from San Francisco for Rainbow Grocery:
[Ugh. Embed fail. Here's a link. The salient point here is that the average Rainbow Grocery bill is 75.54.]
Now I’d expect Safeway, the not-so-granola grocery chain, to come in with a higher average. They sell meat, for example. And meat is more expensive than vegetables, right? But Safeway comes in at a $40.11 average. ‘Spensive produce at the old Rainbow. (Though I think that has more to do with the fact that Safeway sells booze and all those folks are in there on the weekend buying twelve packs of Corona before the BBQ (#youbrosknowwhoimtalkingabout)).
Go play with it. Awesome.
Gawker’s got an “emotional timeline of 9/11 courtesy of Wikileaks”. This is based on an analysis of 573,000 pager intercepts. (Yes, “pager” intercepts.)
Well that’s for all of you who, like me, are probably going to spend the first night of your weekend hunched over your laptop trying desperately to eke out a few thousand words on your novel of ridiculous scope.
For everyone else – enjoy the weekend:
Burt Herman of Hacks and Hackers fame has a new toy for us to play with called Storify. It’s a smart and flexible way of collecting sources from around the Internet into a living story. I’ve been meaning to do a practice run with it and have been even more inspired reading Tim Carmody’s experiment on Snarkmarket this morning. So here you go: Hurricane Earl.
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BUMMER. I can’t seem to get the embed to work. Thoughts anyone? Javascript on a WordPress platform?
Sad news for citizen journalism: OhMyNews International, the global English-language version of South Korea’s OhMyNews, is shuttering its program, becoming instead a site about citizen journalism.
“The new OMNI is a guide to what citizen journalists, academics, and even professionals are thinking about how everyone will collaborate on the news of the future.”
But it was so successful? Why shut it down? Because of its success:
The paid editors for OmN found it increasingly difficult to verify facts because stories poured in from all over the world. OmN receives as many as 225 articles per day from a pool of 70,000 citizen journalists. “Fact checking is one of our core principles,” according to the OMNI team.
This is, in my experience, a problem you only ever dream of with a citizen journalism effort: too big to maintain. But it’s an important thing to plan for, as the closure of probably the biggest international cit-journ platform in the world emphasizes.
How do you plan around it? I think you either alter your standards for publication (label some stories un-verified) or, even better, you get your contributors to help you out. Start by attracting your best contributors to be volunteer fact-checkers/editors. Then build a vetting system within the community that lessens the amount of employee time spent verifying stories. Imagine a simple comment-like interface that appended various approvals from trusted users to a story – the story wouldn’t get to staff editors without three of them.
OMNI is encouraging its contributors to keep writing – pushing them to write for local efforts or for their own blogs – posts that OMNI will likely aggregate. It may be that on the global scale aggregation is the only scalable method – but I like to think it’s not. (Go Demotix!)
Amid the many benefits of un- self-employment is that if it’s necessary for me to spend August away on the road, I can do that. That’s right, all of August (roughly). It’s been a great and relaxing trip so far and I’ve just finished a five-day jaunt to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. Turns out Canada is real pretty.
I find that I get inspired when I travel. Writing-inspired. On day two I was careening through the plotline of a possible novel set in Port Hood (that would of course require me to spend another few months up there for research). But I’m deep into Part Two of Project Lazarette, so The Port Hood Novel went to the Notes file.
It’s the textural details that really get me. The incongruity of a beautiful chapel inside the camouflage of simple red bricks. The perfect little island sitting just offshore with the oft-attempted but now ruined causeway almost crossing the channel to it. The silver oaks that get their name from the color on the underside of their leaves, the color the trees turn when a storm’s coming. I think the impulse to write for me starts with the details, with wanting to collect them and string them all together.
Traveling for me is actually a great fount of short story writing. “Meet, Prey, Kill” in 48 Hr magazine was the product of one of these inspirations. The key is to capture as many details as possible while you’re still there.
The Kickstarter Blog has just posted an interview with me about Andrew vs. The Collective. Here’s a quote of myself, in block quotes from another site, selected by myself:
The way I see it, each Kickstarter project’s backing period plays out like a story. You have the main narrative arc (“Will this project reach its funding or not?”), but in order to keep attracting new people, you have to build in some subplots. Some story beats.
Andrew vs. The Collective was essentially a seven-act story: the introduction and then each of the six short stories. Each week the narrative was: “Can Andrew finish this week’s story?”
Meanwhile Project Lazarette is going swimmingly. The book is outlined in detail and I have been cranking through the word creation. It is, like its subject, a monumental task that requires a lot of time just working on it. No silver bullets, just hours of work.
This is what I can tell you so far: There are two main characters. Their names are Daniel Penn and Meg Percy. There are three total parts to the book. I am, today, closing in on the end of the rough draft of the first one.
Word count: 32,093.
I watched a lot of local news last night with the Mehserle decision coming down. And thanks to that I saw this ad a lot:
It’s a pretty intense hit-job on the once and future Governor, but I’ll say this: it’s really, really well-produced. Where most political ads slide across and away from my consciousness, this one caught and held my attention.
I don’t think the audience for this ad is the independent vote that could decide the race (though I’m sure Meg’s camp would be happy to see those folks won over), the real audience is the hip, urbane, young Democratic base in the media-savvy enclaves. The message of the ad is not “Vote for Meg” it’s simply, “Hey young Dems, just don’t bother voting.”
And I think that strategy could actually work. Brown was unopposed in the Democratic primary. An unopposed Democrat in California! Did you have your eye on a rising party star? (Newsom? Villaraigosa?) Too bad. You got Brown on the ballot and Brown only.
I would argue, contrary to the standard political wisdom, that not being contested in the primary will hurt Brown in the long run. No one had a chance to get excited about Brown – and excitement, we saw in the 2008 Presidential, is crucial to energizing the young Democratic base. (And also to ginning up one of those small donation money machines like Obama had.)
And so despite the independent voters the pundits will talk about everyone chasing, Meg (who doesn’t need anybody’s money except Meg’s) just has to do one crucial thing between now and November: Disinterest the Democratic base.
And with media buys like this, I’d say she’s off to a good start.
(Caveat: The X factor in November will be legalization. There are an awful lot of those same young Democrats who, smokers or not, will want to cast their vote on such potentially historic legislation. And maybe, just maybe, pot will save Jerry Brown in the end.)
For my research on Project Lazarette I needed to get a good sense of the political ecology of Washington. Alexis suggested I needed little more than The West Wing.
How fortuitous that there are seven whole seasons of it and I’ve never seen an episode!
I’m almost at the finale of season one and I’ve really been enjoying it – and outside of all the familiar faces (oh hey Peggy from Mad Men, the President’s daughter and Ron from Parks and Recreation, the flannel-wearing wildlife expert) – I’ve found the series both incredibly resonant and dissonant.
Resonant: The series is obviously based on an idealized Clinton White House. (Former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers is their consultant.) But where Clinton was sullied with a sex scandal and some ugly political tactics, the Bartlet White House are reliably the good guys. The staffers are politically pragmatic but ultimately idealistic. They hew to good strong moderate policies but they still believe in the power of government to change the world for the better (in fact they talk about it in those terms with one another). So why is that resonant today? Because it sounds a hell of a lot like an Obama White House (perhaps with the subtraction of Rahm Emmanuel). An idealized, centrist egghead Commander-in-Chief and his young, idealistic staff who are there to change the world. (And surely I’m not the first to point out the Jon Favreau/Rob Lowe similarity.)
So how is it dissonant? As relevant as the series may seem on the political front, it looks and feels like the product of a long-gone age. Little things: the plot of the first episode revolves around an accidentally-exchanged beeper and one of the hot-button issues of the day is flag-burning. But also the production itself: Where nearly every network drama these days pulls from the cinematographic playbook of NYPD Blue with shaky, urgent, hand-held follow shots – The West Wing (which was a late contemporary to Blue) is all smooth dolly shots or Steadicams. And the music! The score is exactly what you would get from a music library search for “Presidential” – all martial drums and inspiring horns. More than any other element in the series the music draws my friendly snickers. A heavy line of dialogue before the break will go unanswered and then the music will swoop in like a flag-bedecked eagle to remind you that these are Important People Doing Important Things.
Let’s go back to resonant. It’s not hard to imagine that many an Obama staffer were following along with those swoops before and after commercials and with all the trials and tribulations of the Bartlet White House. And in some way (perhaps un/sub-consciously) it’s easy to think those same staffers are today emulating those same idealistic fictions.
But if the arc of The West Wing is resonant with the present administration (and possibly presents an unconscious roadmap for its staff) – is it possible that the very idea of an idealistic centrist Democratic administration is as quaint and dated as the rat-tat-tat of the snare drums that open each episode? We no longer think the closing monologue of a Deputy Director of Communications deserves soaring orchestration – or if it did, it would be in a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington fit of political naivete.
Season One shifts with the Bartlet Administration making a big gambit of its own idealism: stirring things up and tacking away from a centrist focus on reelection. Their poll numbers are down because they don’t do enough (and indeed, I wonder if in the real world of 1999/2000 the ratings for the show were down due to their inaction). So they decided to do something about it. As we look at the Obama Administration’s flagging poll numbers I can’t help but wonder how many of its members are calling back to that first season of The West Wing and quietly arguing in the break room that that’s what they need to do. Take a stand! Shift peoples’ opinion in their favor!
But, watching this series today I can’t help but ask: If the Obama Administration unleashed the full force of its election-season idealism upon the present-day DC, would that feel as quaint and hokey as the credit music of The West Wing?
