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.
   

Guessing in Public

   This evening after our last, heart-wrenching session, with the photo chief of St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lynden Steele, I took the KC streetcar (light rail, y'all) from Union Station to the river market area.
   It proceeds very slowly, so as not to alarm the tourists.
   I sat in a single seat facing awkwardly directly at a small and elderly woman who seemed to be not looking my way on purpose. So I carefully turned away, to give her a break.
   At the second stop, she got up and left. In comes an artistic looking young woman in all black, even her skin, even a black hoodie, and she’s carrying a clear plastic glass half-filled with pink something. Pink soda pop, maybe. She seemed very at home as she sat directly facing me and placed her glass on the molded plastic hip of the car — which didn’t seem like a stable place to set a glass, but she acted self-sure.
   After a bit, she started saying quiet sentences, one at a time. These sentences were not obviously directed at me, and she spoke without looking at me but not while wearing an earpiece or looking at a phone, no. Maybe she was disturbed, but my gut reaction was that she was an art student messing with me. I really think she was. She said:
   “You are worried about your choices.”

   “You don’t have to look at me.” (I am not looking at you.)

  A few minutes later, while a gregarious stranger who was standing near us was busily telling some cute girls that he worked for the company that installed the railine:
 
   “You don’t have to look at me, it’s OK.”
 
   “You don’t have to talk to him either.”

   “It is OK that you settled for an ordinary life.”

   “You needed an ordinary life.”

   I thought about looking at her directly and giving her my best I Am A Harmless Old Lady smile, but what if she actually was nuts?
   Soon enough she got off, and I forgot she ever was there. And I did not obsess over the words she had said, either.
 
   After hiking past intriguing but closed shops and touristy restaurants, I ate on the uncovered patio at The Farmhouse, about which I know nothing except they offered more than one option without cheese or meat. Taylor, my server, pleasant to meet despite the visual violence of her nose ring, said she’s vegan, too, and pointed me to the squash ratatouille. We skipped the bread and instead gave me a java stout.
   My solo table for two was flanked by two tables for two, each occupied by two and backed up to a hip-high metal fence and light shrubberies.
   On my right was an elderly woman with a stilted manner of speech (confession 1: I eavesdrop). She was trying to keep herself looking healthy via rouge and hair dye; that was not working well for her. But when her also elderly, male companion arrived, their conversation left me wondering about the relationship. They seemed too interested in one another to be married for as long as they both looked like they might have been married, and yet they were talking about “our plumbing” and “our dishwasher.”
   On my left were two women, late 20s or early 30s. Natural looking blondes, large bright eyes, nondescript noses, slim ankles — pretty. The one I had the best view of (confession 2: I have possibly abnormally good peripheral vision) wore a sleeveless, dark blue, “I am sexy" dress affording an undesirable view of the underside of her cleavage. A black-and-white, diaphanous, unstructured shoulder drape helped her feel covered, I feel. I mean, the dress had a breastbone cut-out. Also, she wore fancy shoes, the type that is a liability in a sudden downpour.
   The other wore a sporty but not cheap looking gray ribbed knit, mid-thigh dress, a plain white sweater and pristine white sneakers with those tiny footies that try to hide below the heel counter but can’t quite do so without falling off inside your shoes.
   Was it a date?
   I tuned in as they began comparing how often they had been proposed to.
   “It depends on your definition,” Fancier Dresser said, “but six times.”
   “Six, really?”
   A list followed, including precious phrases such as “we went to high school together, it was sad, actually.”

   Meanwhile, on my right:
   “I will be so glad when we get our new dishwasher. Well, you can hear the water swirling around.”
   And he said: “You can look in your oven, but I never do.”
   Who were these people to one another?

   Wait, the women —
   “I don't want any of this. I know what I want. They have these warm nuts and marinated olives and they are sooo good.”
   “They’re doing the happy hour menu.”
   Then their waiter arrived. He was not Taylor.
   Fancier: “Is it the happy hour menu?”
   Waiter: “Yes, it is.”
   Fancier: “Is it possible to —”
   Waiter: “No, it's not. It is the happy hour menu.”

   Meanwhile ...
   “I had no problem parking.”
   “There are spaces right there.”

   Sporty: “What about Niagara Falls or Vegas. Or you could do Colorado.”
   Fancier: “Yeah.”
   Sporty: “Have you been to Vegas?”
   Fancier: “I think ... yes. But I want to use the winery.”

   Right hand:
   She: “It’s such a shame. This isn’t half as good as it used to be.”
   He: “I wonder what happened. What do you think happened?”

  Sporty:  “As your older sister I am going to say no.”
  Eureka!
  No idea what Sporty was ruling out, but she had just explained everything. Fancy under-boob was recently engaged.  They were sisters, old enough to have their own funds, talking about where to hold a wedding.

   On the way back to the Westin, I stopped in Union Station, which was mostly closed, wandered downstairs and found a gaily painted piano. In honor of my colleague Ginny Monk, I played it for a few minutes. An odd, flabby fellow who had spoken to me on the streetcar walked by and said, “You play really well.” But he kept walking.

   Within two minutes I was upstairs and outside on the sidewalk, headed for the security of the hotel.
 

Union Station, from my room in the hotel.

 
 

Digital tools

   Today Jennifer Brett showed me how to convert a desktop Facebook video to the mobile version and then download it into my desktop so it can be repurposed without using the Facebook URL — and how to edit it — assuming I have permission from the author, of course.

   Also, I learned that had I upgraded my iPhone already, I would not have needed to buy Apple TV to mirror my phone screen on a desktop. No. Newer phones have something my 4S does not, a Lightning port. That thing allows you to mirror your phone screen for free via Quicktime.
   You can use that process to save anything that’s on your phone into your desktop.
   Not me, though. I can’t.
 
   Jennifer likes a social media aggregative trend analyzer called Nuzzel (nuzzel.com) that tells you what your most active followers are talking about.

   Skitch, from Evernote, lets you draw arrows on photos or whatever. I have used Preview to draw arrows, but Previews arrows are wimpy. Skitch draws big fat arrows. 
Here's a primer:
https://vimeo.com/73420525


   Phon.to (phontograph) lets you write text on a picture — which Preview will do. But Phon.to does it better. It’s a free app but with in-app purchases. You can load 400 fonts into your phone and curve them.

   Ripl.com is like an animated Canva. It turns stills into videos and packages them with text for social media posts.

   Animoto.com is sort of like videolicious but work son a desktop. And it has some royalty free music on board to choose from, but you can import your own.

   Pixabay.com has royalty free images.

   If someone deletes his Twitter feed, you can see it if you quickly look under cachedview.com. Just paste in the URL of his Twitter feed.

   And I'm going to buy a mobile Bluetooth enabled keyboard that can connect to my phone. Called 1byone it costs $18.99 on Amazon.

   She also talked about Filmora, but my mind wandered. I have no idea what that does.

Robb Armstrong

   The creator of Jump Start made me weep today by talking about his life — by the way he talked about his life.

  Upfront, he was funny. Just funny and talking over sketches of his characters as he drew big marker versions of them on an easel tablet. The way he told us he had been on a book tour for his autobiography suggested he was tired of talking about himself and would just be amusing as heck. 

“Just buy the book, OK? Been on a book tour for a year. I have nothing more to say about it.”

   But the story is compelling and not so much about him as about his family and why he is who they made him. Once he started telling it, he became compelled. He went way over time. It seemed hard for him to stop.

   I didn’t want him to stop. I have an intellect. I am not a sucker for a story. And I was not the only weepy person in the room. 

   His poor mother! She was up against it, with five kids, as any woman would be, but this fatherless family lived in a violent time in a bad part of a big American city. 

   His older brother became a scary dude in defense of his family. Armstrong was the youngest. His 4-year-old sister drowned him in the bathtub when he was 18 months old. He had to be resuscitated. That older brother, who he described so comically and vividly I wanted to meet him, he was killed at age 13, his body ripped in half when a conductor got mad at some other black kids that had jumped a turnstile and so shut the door of an El train just as he was stepping aboard. 

   His mother got them the hell away from the El, in a row house in a better neighborhood and somehow got her youngest, who she was determined was a genius, into a private school — a private girls school. White girls were the first kids he ever saw who were fierce about education, and scary competitive. 

   Another older brother, age 16, was beaten nearly to death in a case of mistaken ID by some police who eventually, years later, were acquitted. 

   Racial injustice and just the stupidity of a system — life — that kills the people we love and need, the strong, necessary people of vision, like his mom — is too sad to bear anymore without tears. What the hell can anybody do? 

   One time, into a microphone, my Irish Great Uncle John said it: “We laugh so we do not cry.”

   But how stupid is a stupid system that kills our necessary people just because they are alive? His mother died of cancer at 49, having told him about it on the day he got into college.

   All kinds of people, maybe everybody, has lived a great story, but hardly anybody can tell it, and it’s the telling that makes it a story and great. 

Yay, for Jerry!

   Jerry McLeod won third place in the headline portfolio category. It was the first award announced, and I didn’t know the system was for us not to walk up and get co-workers’ awards but to sit politely until the end, and so I went to the front and stood in the way of everything while they fished the envelope out of the big box.
   And then everybody clapped for you, Jerry.
 

It's Not the Marbling

   The WAGYU table next to me in the hotel restaurant is talking about their association newsletter.
   “How about some profiles of ranchers?” one guy says. “That’s what I’d like to see from you.”
 

Meet and Greet

   SFJ arranged helpful snacks and an open bar for the reception tonight— crudites and crackers for me, food on sticks for carnivores. Clutching two crackers, I bailed at 9 p.m., after only three hours. 
   I would say about 20 people, but there‘s this V-chip for numbers in my brain, so there might have been more. I counted four times and forgot the count four times.
   After an afternoon wandering around this ridiculously underdocumented hotel — hello, why not list your amenities on a piece of paper in the rooms so guests don’t have to pester total strangers in your elevators with questions they can’t answer either? — It was relief to be greeted immediately by Valerie Schremp Hahn and her co-workers from St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including Gabe Hartwig and Aisha Sultan, who used to work with Charlie Frago. 
   We couldn't remember Charlie's name, just that he is tall and speaks Portugese. I promised Aisha she would recall it before I did, but I just woke up remembering, so, Aisha, looks like I win.
   Elisa Crouch isn’t there anymore. And she has a married name. Which they told me but I forgot.

   Diane Smith of King Features told me about her day to day, which she likes even though I wouldn't. It involves a lot of answering the phone. The syndicate still takes on young artists and gets them a market, in part because there are burned out artists who decide they aren't willing to work so hard for tiny income.
   Connie Nelson of the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis got here a day early and collected information for a travel story — Kansas City by light rail. Connie works for a family-owned paper.
   Christopher Wynne of Dallas Morning News says our former child co-worker Jerry Bokamper is married and no longer at the paper. Laid off, and he saw it coming. Christopher manages 8 arts critics. Eight. Critics. For now. There's writing on a wall that has him counseling some poor woman to diversify before she has to become part-time.

   Shawna Van Ness of Newsday boggled my mind with her description of a market big enough that it has restaurant wars. Because her company also owns Penny Shopper, it can guarantee delivery to virtually every family on the island. Newsday rents out its delivery staff as delivery guys for companies like Lands End. Now there’s an idea.

   Crystal Schelle of the Hagerstown, Md., Herald-Media talked a lot about the civilians she recruits as freelancers. She is proud of helping them escape life traps and use their gifts. I couldn’t figure out what kind of market she has, apparently it involves parts of four states and used to be agricultural but has now all gone over to fentanyl. She seems to be working way too many hours, but she says this is a much healthier job than she had a decade ago. 

   It was a hoot to see Terry Scott Bertling, whom I first met in 2010 on a SuperShuttle to St. Petersburg, and to be able to dazzle her with the fact that I remember sentences from that conversation. I didn’t admit I remember because I was scared, adrift and clinging to any scrap of information.

   And it was lovely to give Jim Hagg a hug — retirement has him looking rested — and to hear that Lucy Lu’s team was so inspired by his work on a history piece about yellow fever they're working up a series on polio. I’m not the only features person who has turned to digital archives out of expedience and fallen in love with all that late-breaking history.

Poky Little Wifi and WAGYU

   Here at the bustling Westin Crown Center in downtown Kansas City, Mo., we have rather slow Wifi offset by expansive views of a conventioneering area, with a downtown-shaped downtown on the photographically convenient horizontal horizon and closer up, myriad-windowed gray high-rise rectangles, a little bronze horseman in a parking lot pocket park and, once in a while, a long line of boxcars.
   The hotel has an indoor fountain about the size of my backyard decorated with enough live plants to keep an office-plant supplier in craft beer for a month.
   During my hilarious transit here from the airport, I shared a SuperShuttle with 10 people, including three gregarious guapos in town to compete in a reality TV show, Make 48. Construction worker Angel and his friend the painter were half of a four-man crew from Portland calling themselves the Mount Hoodlums. Joe of Team Believe from northern California was to meet up with his three sisters from Hawaii, one of whom was the computer nerd.
   They had not yet signed confidentiality agreements, so I learned they were paying their own way, including the Holiday Inn fees, and expected to be awake for 48 hours while trying to fabricate an invention to solve some problem the producers will spring on them as the cameras started to roll Thursday morning.
   They were thrilled.
   Beside the painter, a surprisingly secular-looking lady also from Portland announced that she worked for the Mennonite church, as did Joyce, an utterly lovely young brunette in a business suit. The contestants and the Mennonite lady bantered nonstop all the way to our hotel.
   At the Westin, Karen Martin from Baton Rouge introduced herself to me in the Westin lobby. Also an SFJ attendee, she had disappeared behind the wall of fun in the shuttle, listening quietly, which I should have been doing, too. She said she'd gathered I was also a newspaper person by my questions, which made me feel better about talking so much to strangers in a van.

   The lobby around the hotel restaurant was crowded by a scattered herd of tall Midwesterners holding beer bottles and tagged with the logo of the American WAGYU Association, which is also convening here but wearing convention badges on lanyards. They are color-coded but I couldn’t find the pattern.
   I knew you would wonder, so I asked and learned that WAGYU was not in caps for any good reason. It is an especially fat-making kind of cow associated with Japan but raised in the United States so it no longer expects to be massaged.