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.