Yummy

   With racial violence and controversy heavy on my mind, it was a surprisingly cheerful experience to listen to Rashod Ollison and Michelle Zenarosa, the SFJ Diversity Fellows this year. He qualifies as diverse by being gay and black. Michelle is a feminist, a new mother and GenX. 

   Since there are more women than men, you might think that would make her a majority member, right? But no, GenX is sandwiched between two bigger demographics. And she’s Filipina.

   With 15 years experience in our field, she’s been an editor at Fusion Media and New America media and worked on Maria Hinojosa’s program America By the Numbers. Today Michelle is managing editor of two publications, Everyday Feminism, a digital media site, and Woke, a digital media startup that will feature life stories from less well covered sorts of people. 

    “Social media is played out,” she said. Everybody’s mining it for stories and so everybody’s diving on top of the same pile of bodies.   
   She also uses it to find stories: She looks for cool Instagram accounts, takes tips from friends and RSVPs to everything she’s invited to, whether she attends or not, so she can see who went. Those people can become subject-expert sources. 
   She builds Twitter lists of people who have hundreds or thousands of followers, creating a database of influencers who can tell her things or share her work.

  Rashod said he finds his stories “by instinct,” because he has 20 years invested in looking for stories. He knows one when he sees it.

  Rashod is from Little Rock and might have started his career at our newspaper had we been inclined to notice him. He told me didn’t even get an interview when he was looking years ago, even though he’s friends with Shereece Kondo. 
   Too bad, he’s a hoot. Don’t feel sorry for him, he’s done awright without our help: Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News ... We did review his book, Soul Serenade.

  These days he’s based in Norfolk, Va., and working as culture critic for The Virginian-Pilot. 
   Poot, I forgot to ask him where in Norfolk. We lived there when I was little.

  I love that Rashod no longer has to do weekly celebrity phoners because one day he decided, and said, “I don’t care.” 

  A cool thing he did recently was discover a soul-food-cooking grandmother who has been using YouTube as her recipe repository, because she wants her granddaughters to know their heritage. He was following her for some time before something the girls said on air alerted him that she lived near him. He went right over there and got some food, wrote her up. 

  Look her up at chris cook 4 u 2.

   

Last words

   Jim Haag told us its podunk to end a story with a quote. Why would we give up our voice to someone else?
  You know why? Because sometimes, that other person said it better than we could.

‘Research is essentially detective work’

   Candice Millard wrote The River of Doubt, a nonfiction account of how Teddy Roosevelt led companions to their deaths, was almost eaten by cannibals and wanted to kill himself in the Amazon. She also wrote Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine & the Murder of a President, about the assassination of the brilliant James Garfield and the frantic efforts to save him.
   Her most recent book is about Winston Churchill and The Boer War — Hero of the Empire.
   So I sat up straight and paid attention.
   She delivered an anecdote-illustrated listicle of advice for nonfiction writers who want to dive as deep into their subjects as she’s been able to do.
   Advice bullet points are lame, I know, but here is what I have.
   • Don’t rush into a story. Before you make a commitment, be absolutely certain it is for you. You must have massive piles of primary sources. You must be able to document what circumstances suggest happened — it’s not good enough to convince yourself. You need to be drowning in source material.
   She told us about a book she spent a year pursuing, about 15 years Benjamin Franklin lived at 36 Craven Street in London with the widow of a surgeon, and the piles of human bones found recently in the basement there. Ben wasn’t a serial killer. 
   The late doctor was an anatomist, and he worked with grave robbers. Also, there was a tunnel connecting his basement to a gallows practically in his back yard. He would barter with the condemned for the right to claim their corpses — a new suit of clothing for their hanging, for instance.
   But did Ben go down there? Surely he did, he was a scientist and insatiably curious. But she hasn’t found a primary source to put him in the basement, so she dropped the book project a year in.
 
•  Never send someone else to do your research. Not only will you be at the mercy of their work ethic or lack thereof, but you will miss the wonder of discovery. 
   In the archive that houses Garfield’s effects, including the bones of his killer (in the same drawer with bones from John Wilkes Booth) she opened an unimposing envelope and out fell hair — fine, pale hair. It was a lock clipped from the dead president’s head.

• Find the expert. For the Amazon book, she wanted to know what tribe attacked Roosevelt’s party. Other historians hadn’t found out. She found the right anthropologist, the one with a dusty map of Amazonian tribes. He was able to poke his finger on the very tribe it had to have been.
   
• Whenever possible, go to the scene of the crime. At the least it will be an adventure. 
   She took a hair-rising flight into the jungle and met the very scary tribesmen, who had every reason to want to kill outsiders because they live in a diamond-rich area and are besieged by make-a-buck thugs. The state is too far away to defend them, and so they defend themselves. With poison-tipped arrows.
   Not long after she visited, the tribe killed people. She recognized some of the dead as having helped her, but she didn’t feel all that sorry for them.
   She told Rashod Ollison (who raised his hand before I did) that her funding comes from the book publishers. She sells them the idea, not the book. They pay in three installments, one up front to allow her to travel. After publication, if it sells, there are royalties.
   How does she know when she’s got the story and it’s time to publish what she has? “I always say my only boss is fear,” she said.

Google searching tools

   Abigail Edge, a freelance journalist who does Google News Lab training in Google Tools speaks quickly and with a British accent.
   First up, she recommends a site I hadn’t seen: https://www.journalism.co.uk
   A recap of the training session is at bit.ly/abigail-training.
   She walked us through the basic Google advanced search tools, the categories you can use without extra typing from the Advanced Search page. She showed us how to set them up in the basic Google search line:
   We can use more than one or two double quote phrase blocks:
“sleeping dog” in “Winslow, Arkansas” and “Kansas City” brings up something.
   
I think we all know we can use the asterisk as a wildcard in searches: “a * saved is a * earned” oddly doesn’t lead to pages about how to conserve our precious endangered asterisk supply.

And simply subtract to exclude cars when you are looking for big cats: jaguar -car, -motor, -automobile

   To restrict mentions to those on a particular website:
site:kansascity.com "Eric Greitans"

site:.gov "Eric Greitans"

   To search for sites related to a site:
related:kansascity.com
(That does not pull up the stated site.)

   To search for documents that might impress the editor, such as pdf, xls, etc.:
filetype:csv "glenn close"
Search says: (A CSV is a comma separated values file which allows data to be saved in a table structured format. CSVs look like a garden-variety spreadsheet but with a .csv extension. Traditionally they take the form of a text file containing information separated by commas, hence the name.)
   The more you know.

   Look under Tools for more qualifiers.

   "Google in 1998" shows results as though it were 20 years ago

   Since 2015, more searches take place on mobile than desktop devices.

...

Image search and verification:

   One of the options under the Tools menu in Image Search is usage rights. That’s a crucial tool to use if you are trolling for images to repurpose. People who make images can search for every iteration of their work online, and they can track you down.

   To verify images, go to her bit.ly link and figure out what Google says about that, I am tired.

...

   To really impress the editor, look for sources at scholar.google.com . You  can select articles or caselaw.

......

Public data explorer is just sitting there being versatile at  publicdata.google.com

You don't have to understand coding experience and it works off data from trusted sources. You can take the graphics it generates and embed them into any website.
Sweet.
....

Google Trends

https://www.google.com/trends/?

• huge size of the database. 170 times the population of the earth per day.
• people are honest with search engines
• search for topics rather than search terms

Google trends has a twitter feed @googletrends as well as github.com

Sirens explained

   My cheerful SuperShuttle driver explained last night's disturbance. A large furniture store burned down. The pink lights were firetrucks.
   "I think my wife and me, we even bought some furniture in there once," he said.

   According to the Fire Department Twitter feed I found just now, while killing time in the St. Louis airport (a place containing more salad greens than I saw in three days at KC), 32 units were there. No wonder I woke up.
 
   He also explained the pink fountains.
   “It starts out where they are red, for the Chiefs. But then they run the water and dilute and dilute it down.”
   It’s down to a cancer color now, for October.
 
   So my vision of Kansas City gains focus: Midwestern banking and shipping hub decorated during the past century by the hobbies and preoccupations of its grand captains of industry, who loved trains and fountains. A city slathered in sugared barbecue sauces, whose waters bleed a red that fades to a cancerous pink, and whose fire department heroes conduct lifesaving work while intermittently strobed by the aura of Barbie’s Dreamhouse burning to the ground. A city where, were it possible to tally and then average the Nutrition Facts of all the restaurant fare served up to all its tourists, offers about 1 gram of fiber per capita, per day.

   But that is of course unfair. It is only what I experienced in my three-night stay at the Westin Crown Center and not the Kansas City loved by the people who actually know the place.

Sirens

   After more than 10 minutes of sirens going off somewhere out beyond the window, I got out of the warm bed and I flattened myself to slip behind the curtains. Batting my way, I passed a bulky rounded-square cutout that Who Knew? was in that wallpapered drywall, and then I stepped against the vast rectangle of night-chilled glass. 
   NO traffic in the luminous gray below, no cop cars streaking past; but in the middle right hand distance, through a crevice of roofs and walls, a cluster, a sloppy asterisk of neon pink flashing, flashing. 
   Back in the warm bed now, I am thinking that must not have been the scene of the emergency, that must have been some tourist-amusing decoration spot, like the Power&Light district’s over the top power-wasting lights.
   Surely not even in this city, which is trying much too hard to be upbeat, cop cars won’t wear hot pink emergency lights. 
   Maybe that jazzy area is one of the fountains the tourism lady told us about, one of the “more than any other city in the world except Rome.”
   Supposedly there are 200 officially registered fountains in the metro, not counting those at corporation or subdivision entrances, inside offices and on private grounds. Here’s the official list, from http://www.kcfountains.com/fountains.
   While I've been typing, the sirens have stilled, replaced by a sound that makes soothing sense, the linear pulsing hum of a freight train. On and on, a calming sonic cradle endlessly rocking.
   Rome has about 2,000 fountains. It has trains, too, but their brakes screech and fart. Rome doesn’t leave a person remembering the comforting white noise of trains. 
   You’re trying too hard with these fountains and sirens, KC. You have trains. Go with that.