The Power of the Flip

For all of my multimedia projects others have swayed me to believe in the video powers of the Flip camera, which I recently bought from Walmart. Granted it's zoom in quality's a bit low, the portability and simple button layout make it a great low-tech gadget on-the-go. Right now I'm crafting an awesome holiday movie too see how to expand my iMovie skills. And it's seemingly infinite range of multimedia potency I have yet to fully discover. Seen here is a twin of my camera. Note: Pink was the color that gave me a camera at the lowest price :)

Social Networking Site

So for my advanced multimedia class I made this web site (from scratch I might brag and add) about social media, which includes an interview with this fabulous digital media expert and Twitter media consultant. I'm still learning about location-based social media (i.e. FourSqaure GoWalla). Doubt if I have time to use it as changing location requires much leisure money. But, I find the whole topic fascinating and encourage all to try it and report.

An Angry Journalist

As a neophyte journalist the following exerpt from a Gawker feature sort of upsets me It's about those in my profession succumbing to monetary temptations from the PR machines that try to feed us what THEY want to see in the paper. All too often I've felt others have used me for their motivations as a reporter for various outlets. And if what gets printed doesn't portray them in the right light, sources are less than eager to talk to me. Well here it goes. Poor language choices, but I agree with the overall notions behind this terrible rant.

Read here: http://gawker.com/5714779/comment-of-the-day-an-angry-journalist-speaks

La Frustrated Femme

Next to the Newsuem's new Elvis exhibit lies an expansive chronological catalog of American newspapers and magazines. The journalistic reservoir includes newspaper clippings from the 1700s until the present. In one of the drawers of glass preserved newspaper covers I found Ms. Magazine with a picture of a giantess superwoman running over war and destruction. The heroine represented Hillary Clinton in this Ms. Magazine edition that ran during the 2008 presidential election.

Not quite sure of the entire back story behind this image, the cover still intrigued me. I found it captivating because this women exudes some sense of traditional male characteristics, sans the choice of clothing. Her aggressive footsteps countered her worrisome and I daresay look of motherly worry.

This look might be suggestive of what writers of letters of recommendations often call female applicants: "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a "supportive colleague." A study revealed these words did not appear as frequently upon male letters. The reputable National Science Foundation supports the study.
How do I react to this study and the superwoman cover? Let's just say not compassionate, caring or supportive. Just masculine frustration.

Tweet Tweet: A personal one-on-one session with Twitter guru

The number one Twitter obstacle for Tweeters everywhere is not necessarily the fail whale when a mind-blowing tweet comes to mind.

Members of the Twitter cult are having a difficult time finding the accounts most worth following with more to say than they ate a tuna fish sandwich today. Future Twitter changes will address this searching dilemma, said Robin Sloan, writer and media inventor for Twitter.

Over the next year, he said, Twitter will explore ways to enable eager Twitter followees to find the “good stuff.”

“One of the big challenges in Twitter is finding the lots of really cool and smart relevant people with accounts,” said Sloan.

Twitter receives 90 million tweets a day, which Sloan says is both good and bad for the company and its users.

Sloan’s favorite followers include Ezra Klein from the Washington Post and Ellen McGirt, a writer for the Fast Company Magazine.

On the Job

Of course, my journalist background prompted me to ask the Twitter representative if the company was hiring. Turns out Twitter is indeed hiring, at a rapid pace even.

Each month the company hires about 30 people a month. Now the company stands with a social media army of 300.

“It’s crazy to have literally a new face everyday,” Sloan said.

Oddly, he said, the Twitter work environment resembles the site itself. He trades e-mails more times a day than he can count and he senses a great sense of transparency, he said.

“I have found the culture of communication at Twitter really open and fast pace,” he said. “It’s a nice mix of code and content.”

Journalists Tweeting

While Sloan knew little about Muck Rack, the hub for tweeting journalists, he did mention that it was valuable one-stop site for journalists looking for other professionals to follow based on their beats and interests.

“I think it’s more effective as a way to find people than anything else,” he said.

Muck Rack hosts a number of journalism Twitter accounts with a live feed in its home page and separates its tweets and users by beat, links, photos and location. It resembles other Twitter searching sites such as Wefollow and Tlists, said Sloan.

“What’s the appealing thing about the [Muck Rack] platform is that journalists can become real people,” he said.

Witnessing the "Dream" in 2010

Supporters at the National Action Network's rally at Dunbar High School, the first African American school.





Midway through Sharpton's "Reclaiming the Dream" march.

Photog

My old point-and-shoot Canon from my 18th birthday simply will not produce the type of pictures I want for this summer's trip to Austria.

Let me rewind a bit here. Four years ago (cue a flood of high school memories) my parental units gifted me a nice digital ISO camera. Three years later I used it to make a photo slideshow on my own story Web page in my introductory class to online journalism class.

In short of six week I will embark to Europe for the Salzburg media program hosted by my university, which covers global media literacy. I hope even more timely blog posts then, by the way. Now I need help choosing an affordable camera that will take mesmerizing pik-churs for me. I'm leaning towards a Pentax, but as a clueless photog-to-be I need advice. I especially love those vintage shots that look straight from the 70s. Not sure whether that's a filter on a photo software like Photoshop or a camera setting?

Questions aside I hope to take wonderfully, journalistic photographs.

Excuse the Delay...It's Oil Spill Time

These Gulf oil spill images on the Web are breaking environmental hearts everywhere. There's the image of the pelican drenched in oil with its sparkling blue eyes darting at the camera. And then the lonely fish floating to the top of Gulf waters. While a Earth-devastating oil spill might produce wonderful photography, it's killing more than animals and livelihoods. The spill is lessening hope in humanity. Then, we have the videos comparing the spill to a tipped cup of coffee, alleviating the minds of all. I'll save my judgements about BP and the Obama administration and simply point out that this oil spill represents more than the an acceleration of the Earth's eventual demise, but a perfect example of the evolution of multimedia.

Torrential Clouds in the Global Skies

While researching for an article about education in Africa at my State Department internship, I stumbled upon the book, Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. It's written by two NYT journalists and highlights female discrimination rampant in the developing world. I bought it as my inspiration read during my winter break. As of now I'm about halfway through it (no pun intended). Reading some parts I feel somber and at the success stories I smile. It's an emotional yo-yo read, yet so fundamentally necessary to see the ways other cultures treat women. The authors successfully intertwine individual anecdotes with real statistics. Journalists often overlook these issues because these societal diseases remain hidden, caked over with bureaucratic repression and wanton politics. It's the media's responsibility to work around these obstacles.

From Raking Muck to Muck Rack Networking

Although I am not a member of the elite smart phone toting bunch, I do visit my Twitter almost everyday through the Web. I already follow CNN's Sanjay Gupta and Christine Amanpour; Out of the pair Gupta stands out my favorite, particularly for his Twitpics. I've always wondered how other journalists Tweeted and now I can find many of them through Muck Rack, a haven for the tweets of journalists. Have yet to fully explore the site and pick the ones I want to follow.

Champion of News Aggregation: The Daily Beast

Copying information from another source is okay, well as long as you cite it right? In the world of academia and beyond, citation is the ultimate savior from allegations of plagiarism. Many student like myself start most of college research with Wikipedia, which expertly cites most of its facts so students like me can fact check.

However,I digress to present the best online journalism version of Wikipedia, The Daily Beast. Headed by Tina Brown, a personal favorite of mine, the Beast has outperformed many of its numerous competitors as the go-to news source. It's Cheat Sheet is a regular read of mine. The "Cheat Sheet" allows people like me to emotionally voyeur on to a place of sinisterly wonderful newsworthy summaries of excellent articles from great news sources, such as the L.A. Times, Washington Post, etc.

Their Web design and graphics figuratively kill the competition. The Beast indulges people like me with hard-core news topics, like the Yemen embassy crisis, alongside feature caustic and witty stories and photo slide shows that wonderfully, translucently pop out. Another added bonus includes their wonderful "Book Beast" section, which unlike the heavily clouded NYT literature montage points me to the recent best reads.

More importantly they have recruited a range of journalist/columnist newbies and conquistadors, like Gerald Posner, an award-winning investigative detective and writer, I suppose. Let's simply consider that I could keep writing more about their online savvy for a lot longer then anyone might bother to read. It's a site you have to see to believe.