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.”
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Miserable video via Periscope
I tried Periscope in a brighter space and learned it focuses best about 10 feet out.
If you plan to save the vid, hold the camera horizontal. You can rotate it later in iMovie or Premier or whatever editing program you use.
If you don't need to broadcast live, use a better videocamera app.
If you plan to save the vid, hold the camera horizontal. You can rotate it later in iMovie or Premier or whatever editing program you use.
If you don't need to broadcast live, use a better videocamera app.
Up Periscope
I almost accidentally created a dot above Louisiana on Friday.
During her talk at NewsTrain Monroe, presenter Deb Wenger suggested we could get some use out of Periscope, a live-stream app that's related somehow to Twitter. So I downloaded Periscope, gave it permission to access my Twitter contacts (I unclicked all my contacts, just in case) and location services. Then I pushed a button and aimed my cell at Leigh, a cooperative woman seated next to me.
Darkness, darkness! And then in spidery gray letters, a demand to know what I was looking at.
So I typed in "Monroe NewsTrain."
I decided not to hit "broadcast" quite yet. But the darkness eased a bit so I could see the unlikely to record well scene I was taping. After a while I got bored and hit stop.
It let me save whatever it had recorded in that dark conference room to "camera roll" — to my normal camera roll but also to an in-app camera roll.
Later I was able to edit the video, which involved rotating it to horizontal, even though I'd held the camera horizontal during my "broadcast." Here's a bit of that, saved as a very low res file so it won't take up too much space in this blog.
You aren't supposed to edit Periscope video. You're supposed to let it stream on out into the ... wherever. People following you might accept push notices on their phones so they'll be able to drop everything to gawk whenever you "go live."
In practice, receiving such notices is so obnoxious I doubt we'd use this except on unusual events and without publicity before: maybe for a massive crowd of unconsciously cosplaying tweens outside Verizon. Maybe we could interview strangers at a concert with it ... so long as we didn't record the music, even ambient music, because broadcasting stuff like that's probably copyright infringement.
The serious application would be reporting from the scene of a catastrophe or black Friday door rush. We could have Periscoped the Outlets opening.
During her talk at NewsTrain Monroe, presenter Deb Wenger suggested we could get some use out of Periscope, a live-stream app that's related somehow to Twitter. So I downloaded Periscope, gave it permission to access my Twitter contacts (I unclicked all my contacts, just in case) and location services. Then I pushed a button and aimed my cell at Leigh, a cooperative woman seated next to me.
Darkness, darkness! And then in spidery gray letters, a demand to know what I was looking at.So I typed in "Monroe NewsTrain."
I decided not to hit "broadcast" quite yet. But the darkness eased a bit so I could see the unlikely to record well scene I was taping. After a while I got bored and hit stop.
It let me save whatever it had recorded in that dark conference room to "camera roll" — to my normal camera roll but also to an in-app camera roll.
Later I was able to edit the video, which involved rotating it to horizontal, even though I'd held the camera horizontal during my "broadcast." Here's a bit of that, saved as a very low res file so it won't take up too much space in this blog.
You aren't supposed to edit Periscope video. You're supposed to let it stream on out into the ... wherever. People following you might accept push notices on their phones so they'll be able to drop everything to gawk whenever you "go live."
In practice, receiving such notices is so obnoxious I doubt we'd use this except on unusual events and without publicity before: maybe for a massive crowd of unconsciously cosplaying tweens outside Verizon. Maybe we could interview strangers at a concert with it ... so long as we didn't record the music, even ambient music, because broadcasting stuff like that's probably copyright infringement.
The serious application would be reporting from the scene of a catastrophe or black Friday door rush. We could have Periscoped the Outlets opening.
Notes from Monroe NewsTrain in 2015
This NewsTrain was a one-day workshop on digital journalism and social media Oct. 15-16 in Monroe, La. Three pros presented six hour-or-so talks on ethics, tools and uses of social media. The workshop was made possible by the American Society of Media Editors. Admission cost $75, including all meals, thanks to underwriting.
A friend of David Bailey at Shreveport had prepaid for more people than wound up attending (someone died) and he offered us a slot. I was standing next to Kim when David suggested she pick somebody.
You'll be happy to know that Gavin is too advanced to need to attend a workshop like this.
The presenters included:
• Daniel Victor, a New York Times senior staff editor who got out of school in 2006 and came up through several hyperlocal journalism jobs and ProPublica to be NYT's social media editor. He now leads reporting projects. He's lively and fun.
• Manuel Torres, enterprise editor at Nola.com — he focused on the wonders of Excel and data-driven blockbuster stories. Although he had a cold and although his was the last presentation, it was inspiring, and it made me appreciate what Chad Day has been doing for us on cityside. I want to learn to use Excel and make charts.
• Deb Halpern Wenger, a broadcaster turned multimedia instructor and author, who helped write SPJ's Newsroom Training Program. Mostly she showed off a few social camera apps and some gear — similar to what Val showed us back before we tried Arasma ("arasma B draggin"). The catered lunch arrived very late; all the afternoon sessions were time-pinched, and so we didn't do any hands-on with her. But the other track of attendees reportedly got a wingding hands-on.
The coordinator was Linda Austin, who recently returned from a four-month stint in Burma (she says Burma) teaching journalism as a Fulbright teaching fellow. She used to direct the Reynolds center for business journalism at Arizona State.
I'm guesstimating about 50 mostly collegiate people and their teachers came, also a few broadcasters and at least one ruefully, recently jobless copyeditor from El Paso, Texas. Pretty much anyone my age was either a teacher or a local host. That might be inaccurate, but it was my impression. I talked to a few working reporters and listened to several who sounded mighty with-it, but they were a third my age.
The grownups all evaporated as soon as we disbanded, so there was no going out to dinner with merry middle-agers on Friday night. So in addition to learning things I did not know, my bennies were pretty much limited to $5 worth of soba noodles at the Pecanland Mall, the chance to spend six hours listening to NPR in a Ford Focus and two nights in a convenient and not excessively noisy business hotel. I finally got to watch Snow White and the Huntsman with commentary/ads every 10 minutes or so. Score!
I'm writing this now because, over the next week or two, I'll be posting about the tips I remembered to scribble in my notebook, when I wasn't shivering. There is no cold more unexpectedly cold than the cold of a conference room in a Southern city on a sweltering summer day. It's not summer, but forget that and remember this: I bitch because I care. Please at least scan my blog.
A friend of David Bailey at Shreveport had prepaid for more people than wound up attending (someone died) and he offered us a slot. I was standing next to Kim when David suggested she pick somebody.
You'll be happy to know that Gavin is too advanced to need to attend a workshop like this.
 |
| Daniel Victor |
• Daniel Victor, a New York Times senior staff editor who got out of school in 2006 and came up through several hyperlocal journalism jobs and ProPublica to be NYT's social media editor. He now leads reporting projects. He's lively and fun.
• Manuel Torres, enterprise editor at Nola.com — he focused on the wonders of Excel and data-driven blockbuster stories. Although he had a cold and although his was the last presentation, it was inspiring, and it made me appreciate what Chad Day has been doing for us on cityside. I want to learn to use Excel and make charts.
• Deb Halpern Wenger, a broadcaster turned multimedia instructor and author, who helped write SPJ's Newsroom Training Program. Mostly she showed off a few social camera apps and some gear — similar to what Val showed us back before we tried Arasma ("arasma B draggin"). The catered lunch arrived very late; all the afternoon sessions were time-pinched, and so we didn't do any hands-on with her. But the other track of attendees reportedly got a wingding hands-on.
The coordinator was Linda Austin, who recently returned from a four-month stint in Burma (she says Burma) teaching journalism as a Fulbright teaching fellow. She used to direct the Reynolds center for business journalism at Arizona State.
I'm guesstimating about 50 mostly collegiate people and their teachers came, also a few broadcasters and at least one ruefully, recently jobless copyeditor from El Paso, Texas. Pretty much anyone my age was either a teacher or a local host. That might be inaccurate, but it was my impression. I talked to a few working reporters and listened to several who sounded mighty with-it, but they were a third my age.
The grownups all evaporated as soon as we disbanded, so there was no going out to dinner with merry middle-agers on Friday night. So in addition to learning things I did not know, my bennies were pretty much limited to $5 worth of soba noodles at the Pecanland Mall, the chance to spend six hours listening to NPR in a Ford Focus and two nights in a convenient and not excessively noisy business hotel. I finally got to watch Snow White and the Huntsman with commentary/ads every 10 minutes or so. Score!
I'm writing this now because, over the next week or two, I'll be posting about the tips I remembered to scribble in my notebook, when I wasn't shivering. There is no cold more unexpectedly cold than the cold of a conference room in a Southern city on a sweltering summer day. It's not summer, but forget that and remember this: I bitch because I care. Please at least scan my blog.
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