Write a description of someone in this room. No name, no clothes, no hair color.

 It took me about a week before I realized I had most of my classes with him this semester. I don’t know how I missed him; he towers over most of the class and is usually the first with a comment or question, an answer in a silent lit class, or first comment on a blog post or discussion board. A gentle giant with big doe eyes, we commiserate over Faulkner and long form nonfiction. With a voice to match his size, he sits one lanky leg crossed over the other in the back of a classroom and adds intelligent commentary that I wish I had thought of first. Tracy Kidder, Joan Didion, John D’Agata, and Jon Krakauer, we survived them all, my English major comrade. 

online school...

Unfortunately I couldn't find an embedding link for this piece but I thought I'd share it either way. Last week's On Point had a story about online high school and how more and more students are choosing to ditch the classroom and take their classes online from the comfort of their own home. I thought it was only fitting especially in our own class.

new storytelling

Ira Glass is already at the forefront of storytelling in this day and age but when looking through the archives of This American Life, I stumbled on this piece from May in which Ira does something new even for him. In this episode, he does the week in stories, several small snippets from all over the country. As always, he uses people's personal stories to talk about something much bigger and because of that, makes it all the more relatable for the listener.

Foreign Correspondents

The New York Times has just recently begun publishing photos that were previously anonymously done under Samuel Aranda's name. He was working in Yemen as a photo journalist and for his safety, all of his photos were being published anonymously. What I love the most about the story is the fact that in a place where he had to hide his camera from soldiers and state officials, the local Yemeni photographers assisted him in dressing in local garb and avoiding being arrested. As someone who would love to work as a foreign correspondent it's really great to read stories that show that not everyone hates America and that most people are kind and willing to help.

Some of Aranda's work from Yemen.

herman cain suspends.... too much media for ya mr. cain?!

Is he blaming the media here? It's an interesting argument and debate on where the media should stand during political times around elections but if there's a story, it's going to get published. Looks like Cain couldn't take the accusations and front page headlines and scandals this election. Maybe in 2016...

New York Times gets chippy

The New York Times has done it again, with another incredible interactive story. The story is centered around the late Derek Boogaard, an 'enforcer' on the Minnesota Wild in the NHL. Along with the story, is a three part video series with footage of Derek playing hockey and interviews with his former teammates and opponents and even his parents. The third part in the series will be published tomorrow. The story also has a series of photos and this map (below) that shows how Derek made it to the NHL from his birthplace in Canada.

storyifying rebecca skloot

my official class-wide contest entry! whether it wins or not, it's still an honor for rebecca to even be taking the time to look at our work and i hope we can help her make sense of her live chat yesterday.

byliner writers

My first choice of author to follow on Byliner was Ernest Hemingway. Besides from a weak attempt at reading The Sun Also Rises in high school, I have yet to read any Hemingway and as lame as it may seems, I'm currently reading the novel The Paris Wife which is all about Hemingway's first wife and early life in Paris. What I do know about Hemingway is about his emotional and charismatic personality and I really want to see if that comes across in his words or if he's a different person on the page.

My second choice was David Sedaris. I have never read one of his books, I have only heard them as a book on tape in the car on road trips with my mom usually back and forth to Pittsburgh. No matter what, we are always laughing at his stories, whether we can personally relate to them or the fact that he's just hilarious. Hearing an author read their work is a very different experience than reading their words on a page and I'm looking forward to exploring and discovering Sedaris in a different way.

The third choice of author was Elizabeth Gilbert. I had no idea until I saw her name on Byliner that she was a journalist. I just took her as the Eat, Pray, Love author and nothing more. I really like seeing authors that have more to them than just some cheesy self-discovery memoir and I hope she'll prove my thoughts and opinions about her wrong when I read some of her more journalistic pieces.

New forms of storytelling:

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.

Our topic is Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh and one aspect of telling the story of the casino could be doing a 24 hour stint in the casino and observing, participating etc.

1. The experience of spending 24 hours straight in the casino could be portrayed in a play format. Those who conducted the 'experiment' in the casino could write the script and either star in or cast actors to play the parts. The play could be just one scene from the 'experiment' or it can be a time lapse from the whole entire 24 hours. The set would include slot machines of course and music of course would be the music that the casino plays and the sounds of a casino, from the bells and ringers of the machines to the drop of coins and the yelling that goes along with winning...and losing. All these aspects would come together to help put the audience in the casino with the 'experimenters'.

2. Instead of a typical comic type strip format, the story of 24 hours spent in the casino could be done in clay-mation, the classic format for so many children's movies. The scene could be similar to the play but it's just a different format to convey it and easier to post online for a wider audience than a play would have. Making the story much easier to tell as a found strictly online type of journalism with more a more media interactive format.

3. Another way to tell the story could be a simple timeline, maybe the 'experimenters' could take a picture of themselves, every hour, on the hour, no matter where they are or what they're doing while in the casino throughout the 24 hours and create a timeline out of these photos with a short description of the time, and what was happening. This would also make it media interactive for an online site. It could be viewed as a slideshow or a basic timeline with notches to show the time elapsed and the photo to go with it. 

48 hour mag

Topic:
The River’s Casino
Mainly personal stories with facts sprinkled in for solidity/humor
Online Magazine for video snippets

We’d cover our 48-hour magazine during the weekend of one of the Peirogi eating contests

Length:
Use tumblr as our format to keep updating after our 48 hour deadline

Articles:
1. Gambling Problems/Addiction
2. Seafood Buffet/Free Drinks (pop)
3. Entertainers-Journey Cover Bands
4. Winning and Losing stories/Range of Emotions
5. People, NRA convention-Time Lapse of a certain table/machine
-Convention Center events that draw in crowds to the casino
-How the people in Pittsburgh see the casino vs. other cities in US (Vegas and Atlantic City dress up)
6. Slot Machines, different types, penny machines (kitty glitter-a cat themed slot machine)
7. How to get banned from a casino: Using a fake ID
8. Policy on counting cards: could be a how to illustrative guide, how to play the games, count cards, etc
9. Employee’s outfits and funny stories
10. Card members and Player’s Club (bios on people who have these)
11. Dealer School- story about how to become a card dealer
12. Pro Poker players, any famous people from Pittsburgh seen there?
13. Recent Jackpot Winners!
14. How bad of an idea having a casino credit line is

Art wise:
Photography
Illustrations, cartoons, diagrams, labeled parts
Videos (time lapse and short interviews)

Stats: 

Short blurbs/side bars/cartoons
About money dropped
How much the employee’s make
How many people go there

Slate & Grantland

Slate's social media:

• the Slate website itself,
• the Slate Facebook,
• the Slate Twitter 
• Slate Magazine app download
• Slate podcasts on last.fm
• Slate wiki!

Grantland social media:

• Grantland website
• Grantland podcasts and podcast download for itunes
• Grantland Twitter
• Grantland Facebook

nonfiction facebook

The two nonfiction facebook pages I joined were:

IHT Female Factor
and the classic,
NY Times 

nonfiction social media interaction

The twitter stream I found was for Creative Nonfiction, the quarterly magazine edited by Lee Gutkind. The interaction on the twitter doesn't go much beyond just RT-ing tweets at them that are relevant or where they are hashtagged. I think their retweeting of every tweet in which #cnftweet is way too much and tweets like that tend to clutter my time line and generally annoy me, sometimes enough to unfollow. I think it's important to interact with readers but only to a certain extent.

As for a nonfiction writer's twitter, I chose Maureen Dowd but because it's one of those twitters that makes you ask, 'what's the point?'. Every tweet is merely a link to her latest op-ed piece. For someone who's incredibly opinionated, it seems strange and almost uncharacteristic of her to refrain from voicing anything on twitter. So in her case, maybe it was a 'my publisher made me do it' type of thing but I don't know if I think it's the best idea for her if she wants to interact with her public.

october 5 lab

1. Link to William Faulkner's nobel prize acceptance speech with text.

"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 the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

2.Thanks to Samuel Pepys' journal, I know that January 1, 1664 was a Sunday "the Lord's day" but I can't find what the weather was on that day in Pennsylvania...

3. The five deadliest hurricanes in US history were: 

1. Galveston, Texas, 1900: 8,000 deaths
2. Lake Okeechobee, Fla., 1928: 2,500 deaths
3. Katrina (La./Miss.), 2005: 1,800 deaths
4. Cheniere Caminanda, La., 1893: 1,100 - 1,400 deaths
5. Sea Islands (S.C., Ga.), 1893: 1,000-2,000 deaths

4. Falling Water blueprints

5. Ernest Hemingway's 1923 passport photo in which he looks quite sullen in a black suit jacket and white button down with tie and vest. The actual passport looks so much less official than those used today, the photo is stapled to the page and crookedly stapled at that and it looks like he signed his name right on the photo. 

10 new follows on twitta!

01. @Poynter
02. @NewYorker
03. @BBCBreaking
04. @TheAtlantic
05. @TheByliner
06. @PittWriters
07. @Grantland33
08. @NewYorkObserver
09. @NYTMetro
10. @PittsburghPG

storify me

my rant of the day...storified (is that how you spell it? is it a verb? am i allowed to use it as a verb?)

nylon mag

All throughout high school, the best day was always the day that my Nylon magazine arrived. I would generally drop everything and grab it from the dining room table or kitchen bar and sit down still in my school uniform to take in everything it had to offer. Generally, I'd try and read it close to a computer because so much of the magazine directs the reader right to their site for more interactive aspects to stories published in the magazine. These aspects included everything from video footage of the cover star being interviewed, mp3's to download or listen to of featured artists in the magazine. 

Nylon even offers up a blog which although associated with the magazine, has completely different content than the site and magazine itself. It gives daily updates, quotes, fashion advice, music videos and movie trailers. Because of the blog format, it's easier to stay current, almost like a daily arrival of my precious Nylon Magazine.

Nylon successfully integrates technology into the reading experience that only enhances the reader experience (as long as they have internet and a computer!). The interactive site is fun and easy to use and I think is a great example of a 'traditional' form of publishing expanding to the web to reach more readership. 

student housing in pittsburgh

To begin, you gotta start off from where you come from, and that's university housing. The university provides a comprehensive site that covers everything from floor plans to digital tours of on campus dorms to how to get rid of those pesky bed bugs.

The university also provides a guide to moving off-campus that can help you find the best places and even links to a survey the student government board did of landlords in Oakland. Helpfully, they also provide landlord/tenant laws which most college students are not familiar with and tenant rights.

The website landorslum.com was actually founded by two graduates of Pitt after several bad experiences with landlords and off-campus living. It provides a rating system, much like Rate My Professor and allows students to weigh in on landlords on their college campuses.

Last year to deal with the overflow of new students, Pitt placed almost 50 freshman in the Wyndham hotel. The PittNews covered the story very well throughout the year as the situation progressed.

This student guide to Pittsburgh living provides listings for top real estate agencies in Pittsburgh for students looking to make 'the big move off campus'.

A USA Today story from a few years back that mentions a Pitt student death in off campus housing but generally about the correlation between college students deaths in fires and alcohol.

cred report

I remember many a late night's at our desktop computer at home in high school researching for long, boring research papers and searching for any scrap of information I could find. Often times, these little tid-bits came from places that I definitely shouldn't have been using in the first place. Looking back now, after learning the ins and outs of the Pitt library system, I think I've figured out who and what not to trust when looking for a source.

I am a NY Times and NPR junkie and in my opinion, they are the best of the best when it comes to news and accuracy. They are definitely the standard for comparison for any other nonfiction news source and I try to always go there first when I'm trying to hunt down a story. Although, I have been known to just search it on Twitter which is a dangerous game to play. Yes, to initially hear of something via Twitter isn't so harmful but to use it as your only source and not follow up with some research from more credible sources is the harmful part. Twitter is a live Wikipedia of sorts. Any old Joe Blow can say whatever they want, when they want, and how they want to without any monitoring or fact checking and it's immediately up for public consumption on the internet.

Although Twitter has become a great new way for news sources such as the NY Times and NPR to get news out in a quicker fashion, and it has been used for some on the ground, in the moment, not-so-professional reporting, Twitter can be misleading because there's no fact checker for your 140 characters. Yes, I may have been on the scene at the G-20 riots two years ago, but I saw what I saw from my dorm room window and I had no idea who the rioters were and what they were protesting. And that is what makes me pause when it comes to getting my facts and news from places like Twitter and Wikipedia because most of the time, it's people like myself that are putting the 'news' out there and it's certainly not their job so there's nothing on the line for them. We just see one aspect or view of a story - our own - and don't need to find out any more than that. I put my trust into credible news sources because the people who are reporting need to find out everything about the story because they are The news sources, they don't have the room to screw up.

september seven assignment

Growing up with a journalist mother, I was constantly being kept up to date with the goings-on of the writing world. It seemed only fitting that I would follow in her footsteps but it was a very different and evolving world I was entering than the one she did almost 30 years ago. Technology is key, understanding it and utilizing it seemed to be her mantra to me when I began school and thinking about studying writing.

This class is the perfect opportunity to work on my skills as a writer in this new and exciting world where your work can be published in an instant and paper is slowing becoming a thing of the past.
In past nonfiction classes, I've almost always worked on personal memoirs and as much as I like to write about myself and my feelings and experience, it comes easy to me. Never once did writing a memoir challenge me and I'm definitely not going to get a job straight out of college writing my own memoirs. I'm looking for the learning experience of writing and reporting in a controlled setting like the classroom and learning to integrate technology as well.

One of my favorite nonfiction writers is Dave Eggers, I can't say this has always been true though. I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last semester for another class and I hated it. It was his personal memoir and was scattered and confusing, often transitioning to rambling thoughts and hypothetical situations that didn't make sense. But, this summer I read his work Zeitoun, the story of a Muslim family in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and loved it. His use of details and the simplicity of his words and structure made the book so compelling that I couldn't put it down. He utilized detailed flashbacks to create vivid characters that stuck around long after I finished the book. I respect Eggers much more after reading Zeitoun. 


My second favorite nonfiction writer would have to be Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle. I actually read the book many years ago but the story and her writing has stuck with me since. Her memoir is haunting and I cannot even imagine the courage it took her to actually sit down and write about her childhood and growing up homeless for parts of her life. I think experiences like that can either shape who you become or can be something that you push to the back of your mind and hope it doesn't resurface. In either case, Walls escaped her family and didn't let what they were and what she used to be affect what she wanted to become and her memoir is a true story of courage.