The Challenges of New Media

I just wanted to share this YouTube video I came across related to new media. I thought it was especially appropriate for those of us who may be experiencing frustration as we learn how to blog. Enjoy.

The start of Opus Dei - Recreating a moment

(Writing a scene in history through narrative nonfiction)

When Father Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer arrived in Italy on June 22, 1946, he was hungry.

It was 11.30 p.m. and the last he had eaten was coffee and a few cookies thirty-two hours before when he left Barcelona. Most of those hours were spent crossing the Gulf of Lyon during a violent storm on the J.J. Sister, a thousand-ton postal steamship, which lurched and plunged as waves swept the deck. Everyone on board was seasick, but Josemaria stayed in good humor, eagerly anticipating his first visit to Rome, which would become his home. His reason for relocating to the holy city was specific: To urge Pope Pius XII to bestow pontifical approval on the organization Josemaria had founded, Opus Dei.

On the wharf in Genoa, Josemaria, a 44-year-old man with a small build, round glasses and hair combed over from an extreme left-side part, broke into a smile at the sight of his friend, Alvaro de Portilla.

"Here you have me, you rascal! You got your way," Josemaria said in a lisping Spanish, teasing Alvaro, who had pleaded with him for months to come to Rome and talk to the Pope directly even though Josemaria had been struggling with diabetes. By the time they arrived at their hotel at about midnight that night, the kitchen had long closed. The only food Alvaro could offer Josemaria was a chunk of Parmesan cheese he had saved from his dinner.

At 7:30 a.m. the next morning, Sunday June 23, Josemaria and Alvaro said Mass at a nearby Church before setting off for Rome in a rented old-model car that had a strong rancid odor. They arrived on a clear evening as the sun was setting.

Their destination was an attic apartment in the Piazza della Citta Leonina, immediately outside of the brick wall surrounding the Vatican. After climbing the five flights of stairs to the sparely furnished apartment, Josemaria stepped out onto the roofed terrace to behold the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica in the fading twilight. Taking in the long-anticipated view, Josemaria spotted the lighted window of the Pope's private library. His heart swelled and the exhaustion from the long journey melted away. He knelt and prayed, holding vigil on the balcony all night.

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Here's a great writing exercise. Choose a random day before you were born and find an event that happened on that day. Collect all the details (using newspapers, diaries, etc.) related to that event and write a 400-word narrative scene based on the event.

If you try this, please share it with me by posting it here. Thanks!


Sources:
I based my writing/recreating of this moment in history on the following sources, which featured details cited of Josemaria's personal dairies and letters as well as audio of his speeches and photographs Josemaria and of the important moments in his journey to Rome.

Web sites:
Josemaria Escriva in English
Josemaria Escriva in Spanish

Book:
The Founder of Opus Dei: The life of Josemaría Escrivá, Volume 2: God and Daring
by Vázquez de Prada, Andrés

This I believe: The power of making lists

I believe in making lists. All kinds of lists. I make daily, weekly and monthly to-do lists. Grocery-shopping lists. Before-I-die lists. Gift-idea lists. Story-idea lists. Lists of questions to ask people, of recommended books to read, of homework assignments, of new vocabulary. And of course, lists of New Year’s resolutions.

I can’t think of a more appropriate way of explaining my belief in the power of making lists than by making a list of my top reasons. So here they are.

1. If you write something down, it gets done. There’s even science to prove that if you say you’re going to do something and then you write it down, the chances of it actually happening increase exponentially. So making those life-goal lists is especially important. Here’s my anecdotal proof: Since I made my first of this kind of list, I’ve been able to put a checkmark next to the following things: Learn another language fluently, downhill ski in the Colorado Rockies, live abroad, skydive and sing on stage.


2. Making lists almost always saves time. Sometimes I “forget” that my life runs on lists. Once in a while I’ll say to myself, “Okay, you can forgo making a shopping list this one time. It’ll be fine.” But whenever I do, I end up coming home with another bag of basmati rice when I already have three bags in the cupboard. And I’ll have forgotten that the toothpaste tube has reached the critical level, which means another trip to the store, during which I cuss myself out for ever denying that I must make lists.


3. Lists allow you to accomplish more. This may be an obvious one, but I learned it the hard way after wasting too much time at work. Now I keep a running task list on my computer, so that I always have a bunch of possible jobs to attack. If I don’t feel like doing a certain job, I have ten others to choose from. And when I have a spare 30 minutes before an appointment, I can scan my to-do list for a job that will take me 30 minutes or less.


4. When you accomplish something on your list, you get to do something even more fun than making lists: You get to cross an item off the list. Crossing off items can be so satisfying that I admit I sometimes even make lists of menial tasks I’ve already completed, just so that I can cross them off.


So that’s why I believe in making lists. I suppose my list-making obsession isn’t for everyone. That’s okay because I also believe in knowing thyself.

I know I need lists. I know they motivate me to start a project and complete a project. And I know that by putting pen to paper to make my lists, I’m capturing my thoughts and dreams before they flitter away. My lists become plot lines on a grid, setting my course and showing me all at once the person I was and the person I hope to become. With my trusty list in hand, I’ll know where I’m going and where I’ve already been.


Gabcast! I believe in making lists #1




To learn more about NPR’s This I Believe project go to: This I believe

Joe Sacco: Comics as storytelling’s new medium

For the past few years I’ve been attracted to new high-tech media and their power in storytelling, but last week my eyes were opened to the potential of the old-fashioned medium of comics.

Joe Sacco, a comics journalist, spoke at the University of Oregon last Friday afternoon to a group of comparative literature students. The class has spent the term considering how different forms of media have unique effects on our collective understanding of the content. They’ve looked specifically at work related to genocide, including such media as prose, poetry, films and finally comics.

The students read Sacco’s most popular work published in 2000 called Safe area Gorazade: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, a 240-page examination of a small Muslim village in war-torn Serbia. It’s unlike anything I have seen. It looks like a graphic novel, but it’s all based on facts and is a first-person account that tells the untold story of Bosnia in a way we’ve never experienced it.

When Sacco first developed his unique hybrid of eye-witness journalism and comics, he wasn’t sure that anyone would take him seriously. He hadn’t learned anything like this as a journalism undergraduate at the University of Oregon. A few years after he graduated, Sacco realized he knew nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I decided to educate myself and it just came to a point where I thought, if I don’t go and see for myself, I’ll kick myself for the rest of my life,” Sacco said. So he got a travel visa and went on a trip through the Middle East. Sacco had always drawn cartoons, and while if felt silly to draw them of what he saw on his trip, he just decided to go with it.

When he was abroad researching, he steered clear of other journalists and had a hard time explaining to his sources what he was planning to do with the material he was gathering. But after publishing his first major work, Palestine, in 1993, Sacco could show the book to his subjects and he found that the images were immediately understandable in a way that a book in straight prose isn’t.

Cartoons, like photographs, are universally readable. But there’s a big difference between the two forms, Sacco pointed out.

“Photographers hit the viewer with all the relevant information at once, which is powerful, but not necessarily complete or true. As a cartoonist, I’m trying to create an atmosphere through multiple images,” he said.

It’s closer to narrative nonfiction prose than anything else I’ve seen. But I have to admit comics journalism has something that even literary nonfiction doesn’t have.

Sacco pointed out, “A prose writer will describe the setting once, and the reader may forget. But as a cartoonist you get to bring the setting in again and again by drawing it in each scene. The background is always there.”

So the reader is immersed in the setting constantly reminded of how the place looks. That’s powerful.

Another intense aspect of Sacco’s work is that he includes images from his fieldwork that almost no mass media outlet would publish. Sacco’s sketches of dead, decaying bodies in Safe area Gorazade are shockingly detailed.

Explaining, Sacco said, “I decided I would depict things you don’t normally see. I’m using comics to portray violence realistically. I want to confront the reader with real violence as opposed to movie violence.”

To the room, Sacco asked, “You can tell me if it’s effective or not …”

As we looked over the images of skeletons with sunken frozen faces, we sighed almost collectively in resounding affirmation.

And one student spoke for all of us, saying, “We watch a lot of movies and see a lot of this stuff and it’s not that often that we cry a little when we see it, but with this I did.”

Now that’s powerful journalism.

For more information on Joe Sacco click here

Interviewing by email? by blog?

Email interviews can be dangerously attractive for both journalists and sources.

Here are a few reasons why they’re attractive: Email-formatted interviews can happen at anytime of the day. They require no scheduling. The reporter simply shoots off a list of questions. The source can take his or her time answering, thinking of exactly what they want to say so they get their response just right. Personally, I would much prefer being interviewed by email because I’m more articulate and thoughtful when I write than when I’m talking off the top of my head. From a reporter’s perspective, it’s lots easier to cut and paste quotes into a story, than to transcribe a recorded interview or type up notes.

So it’s no wonder more and more interviews are being conducted this way. But I chose the phrase “dangerously attractive” because I think getting comfortable with the by-email-only terms some sources are demanding is a step a journalist can take toward working mindlessly.

“Wait, wait, wait a second,” this is a voice inside my head, which has just reminded me of an interview I conducted by email just last week. Here’s the backstory: I’ve met with this particular subject in person probably a half dozen times over the past month for an immersion journalism project I’m doing. Mostly I hang out and ask a question here and there, but she’s been a little cagey and not detailed in her responses. So I tried a different track. I sent an email with just a couple questions. The next morning I opened my email to find a lengthy and exceedingly honest response. Wow, I thought as I emailed her back asking for a clarification of a few things she mentioned and posing a few more questions. And within a few hours she sent an opus, an emotional, highly detailed account of the past few years of her life. By the end of the email she was thanking me for asking and showing interest.

So I guess I can’t completely write off the email-formatted interview. Now that I think about it, the more comfortable we become in communicating through electronic media, the more it will be like communicating face-to-face. In fact, when I think of what people willing to put on their MySpace pages, it seems like people are already more comfortable with sharing the details of their private lives through electronic media than in person.

Here’s what that got me thinking about this in the first place: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote a column
this week about how electronic communication in general and blogging specifically is changing the way the journalistic interview is being conducted.

Here are the opening paragraphs:
Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007; Page C01

The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.

It is a transaction that clearly favors the person asking the questions. A print reporter writes down someone's answers, then picks and chooses how much, if any, to use, how to frame the quotes and where to put any contrary information. Television correspondents slice and dice taped interviews in similar fashion.

But in the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

"The balance of power has shifted," says Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University. "Everyone used to be landlocked, and the media was the outlet to the sea of public discussion. But now there are many routes. . . . Readers have more power because they have more sources, and sources have more power because they can go direct to readers."

The greener side of news blogs

The Business of Green, a blog put out every two days by the International Herald Tribune in hopes of creating a global dialogue on the environment, is worth looking at. What’s interesting about this blog is how much the emphasis is on starting a dialogue. Each posts begins by introducing an issue and ends with a question. The questions are posed directly to “you,” the reader.

The authors, Libby Rosenthal and James Kanter are both award-winning journalists. Kanter covers European and global business for the IHT and writes a weekly column called the Business of Green. Kanter often uses the blog to continue the discussion he starts in his column, asking specific questions in a less rhetorical and more direct way as he does here:

From Kanter:

“…In my Business of Green column this week, Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University, says we’re going to ‘need technologies that at first light seem like silver bullets because the scale of the climate change problem is so large.’ Lackner also says that on current trends, the earth is only 35 years away from the point at which global warming would be impossible to reverse and that ‘we need to throw everything we can at the problem.’

“What do you think about so-called geo-engineering projects that could someday save the planet? Do you think politicians are taking enough responsibility in case there is climate catastrophe in the coming decades? And do you think scientists at the most recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel were right to reject geo-engineering as untested and unproven?”

And here’s a comment responding to Kanter’s questions by a reader in Hanoi, Vietnam:

“We should take the most pessimistic conclusion based on good evidence and analysis for the allowable gases and particulate matter. And a solution consistent with the laws of nature that will keep us below that. Whether it is “traditional” things such as limiting emissions or non-traditional ones that can actually work to lower the effect of the pollutants. The latter as contrasted with actually limiting them.

“But in all this must remember something: using our present societal system based on coercion we have never solved even one of our basic societal problems in 5,000 years.

“And we can not expect that this system and the people using it who have not been able to make healthcare, pension and school systems work, will be able to solve the much more complex and contentious problems related to global warming.”


And with that, we’ve got a thought-provoking discussion that couldn’t have happened in the traditional media formats. The discussion is rising to new levels of detail rather than just skimming the surface. But there certainly is a balance in this blog and it seems to be the co-blogger, Rosenthal.

Rosenthal has written for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times usually on topics related to health care as she also went to Harvard Medical School. So sometimes her posts don’t feel as smart as commentary from people who have more of a background in environmental issues. And folks who comment on her posts sometimes end up providing more revealing and thoughtful fodder for discussion than she does.

For example, in her May 18, 2007 posting on the mayors of 500 U.S. cities protesting the nation’s lack of support for the Kyoto treaty since it was introduced at the turn of the century, she simply sums up the news and then she asks:

“Isn’t it odd that a nation like the U.S., which is so green in so many places, can not commit to a stronger national plan of action?”

In my opinion, she’s thrown out a highly pedestrian question that people have been asking for nearly a decade. And the resulting discussion peters out after three comments.

So now I’m wondering… does the technique of introducing a topic and then posing an open-ended generic question work? Is there a better format? You tell me.