Monthly Archive

I have a funny picture of Victor that I’m not going to post right now because it’s too much trouble when I have a logic exam (my last exam ever!) in half an hour. But it got me thinking that technology is going to be awesome in the future. Someday I’ll be able to take a picture with whatever camera I want and the picture will appear in Photoshop instantaneously so I can post it immediately with little effort. All my electronics will communicate with each through the air. What’s great is that this isn’t that far off. A lot of phones already do that sort of thing, though not with great quality. The next technological innovation I’m excited about is the elimination of cords. If I want to be mobile with all my journalist tools, I need to have a phone charger cord, a separate camera battery charger with cord, camera connecting cord, and a laptop power cord (not to mention batteries for my audio recorder). If I had a video camera to carry around, that would be another cord or two. Someday all that will be gone, and I am excited.

I dove back into the archives today for my 499 special project. Try to guess the answers:

1. When did the Evergreen first have AP wire?

2. When did the Evergreen first become “daily”?

3. When did the Evergreen move to its current location?
Read the rest of this entry »

This is what the end of my time at the Evergreen looked like.

Pure happiness, clearly. I remember being really sad when the seniors left last year, and it would be really hard this year if I weren’t also leaving. We’ve had a lot of good people on staff. Here are some other pictures from that night:

OK, it’s turned in to the Honors College. You can see the final thing here, minus a few pages like adviser approval and research board approval that aren’t in the PDF.

If you find any typos, errors, etc., don’t tell me. Thanks to everyone who edited, gave feedback, listened to me go on and on about depressing topics, or otherwise put up with me during this recent stretch of busyness and stress.

Some of us are at Nick’s tonight, and Allison was just informed we no longer work for the Evergreen.

“We should do something unethical,” she said with mischief in her eyes. “Let’s steal all our press kits!”

After two straight years, last night was my final evening as an editor in the Evergreen newsroom. It was a good night, putting to use everything I’ve learned here: I wrote two last-minute briefs, one staff report, complained about a wordy article, delegated work for an amibitious project I didn’t have time to finish, gave Brian a hug, coordinated art and layout, and finished a front-page feature at 50 inches – 20 more than expected – right at deadline.

I did, however, resist snapping at Christina even though she was annoyed with me all night. So that was atypical. I’ll attribute that to being well-fed.

Also I had my senior column done ahead of time.

And so today, when I woke up with Evergreen morning terrors, I told myself to cut it out. It’s over. I’m not sad – yet. I may not be. I’ve never really been sad about leaving high school or the track team or anything. I mourn minutes from the middle instead.

So today, finished with the newspaper, I am … sitting at my desk in the newsroom. Yep, time to finish up the thesis for good.

I just came across this when I was doing a Google search for one of my stories, and it’s the New York Times’ info box on WSU. It’s cool that The Daily Evergreen is listed as a resource “selected by researchers and editors.” I mean, it’s not like The Moscow-Pullman Daily News is listed, or WSU Today, or Cougster or whatever. We know we provide something no one else does, but it’s good to have it validated.

I’m making a doubletruck for Monday (the last issue of the semester) for events that occurred during the four (or five) years while WSU seniors were in college. So the best way to find some of the older things I’ve forgotten about was going through old volumes of Evergreens, and Nick kindly agreed to help. Among finding some of the perennial favorites (”Listen on you MP3 player,” the black-and-white rainbow), I found some great old clips for some of the silly things we did a long time ago.

• My first appearance in the Evergreen, a letter to the editor. My columnist gig started soon after.
• Nick’s first story, a real scintillating one about students starting school that Jacob assigned.
• Jacob epitomizing himself by writing a review of The Old Man and the Sea. (Bonus misspelled “Hemmingway” in the summary graph and a blurry vintage mug.)
• Brian’s name misspelled (and probably mispronounced).
• Victor committing a travesty to journalism by writing about the availability of Chinook yearbooks. (Does Jacob get credit for assigning that one, too?)
• Nick bringing out the drama of a multicultural program fundraising dinner. The second graph deserves to get quoted:

“Recognition and awareness reverberated from table to table throughout the evening, as hundreds of Cougars, young and old, raised forks and glasses to multiculturalism on campus.”

There were some pretty golden headlines along the way, too:

• “Board of Regents approves WSU changes”
• “Ceremony honors graduates” (i.e. “graduation”)
• “Athletes are people, too”
• “Montana county sheriff IDs zombie party killer”

Journalist and WSU alum Edward R. Murrow would have been 100 years old today. Happy birthday!

Incidentally, the 1930 Chinook we have at Student Publications has had all of its pages including Murrow’s photo clipped out. Like five of them. It’s a shame. Only his standard senior photo is still there, so I scanned it in.

Despite how busy I’ve been, Christina mentioned a need for some paper letter-cutting skills and I couldn’t resist. So during production tonight we made her presentation poster for an Honors history class that I took last year. I did my final paper on the history of smoking; Christina is doing hers on why everyone liked President Dwight Eisenhower. She’s played this video like four dozen times in the past two days and even has a subtle little dance to go along with it.

… my thesis is written. I finished it yesterday and expect at least a few drastic changes. You should read it and give me your ideas. Tell me what works and what doesn’t. Christina already gave me a few good arrangement ideas I’m going to play around with, and some places that aren’t clear.

It’s not totally finished. I need to format the citations, fill in a few names and dates, and add in exhibits and table of contents and things. And I know there’s a major grammatical error in the headline, blah blah, I’m not going to make a new PDF every time I find a typo.

Leave comments here if you like, but an e-mail or call would probably be better. And I would really appreciate the feedback.

Nick has been really bored recently, but I’m not envious. It sounds nice at first, but it’s like walking home freezing in the middle of winter and thinking how those really, really hot summer days would be pretty nice. And then you remember sweating all the time and sunburns and how it’s not really that nice at all. Neither extreme is fun, and I’ve always preferred to be too cold than too hot anyway.

Today I decided work and stress should follow an ice-cube tray model. A certain amount of work gets poured onto each person, but it spills over to other people before anyone gets over-filled. I’ve been right up to the brim and relying on surface tension for like the past month. It’s just stupid and inefficient to have some people completely overworked and while other people have nothing to do.

It would be like communism, I guess, but only with the smart people you like and trust to do work well. Like a responsibility commune.

This SoundSlides project, which I made for class, is about how our buildings are magically clean every morning when we return to class. Hint: It’s not magic. And those of us who work late know Mike and appreciate his work even while we take it for granted. 

I’ll figure out how to embed it here later. But for now I have way too much else to do, so you can view it along with some more commentary about the project at my old/class blog.

Here’s the quick version of things that are interesting today.

First, to finish up from yesterday, this is the story we ended up printing this morning. As Christina pointed out, we’re quite the fire team. Here’s Jacob’s version from the other side of the state. We texted and back and forth all day yesterday as we traced rumors and Google tidbits and finally tracked down that one of the WSU students arrested for the fires is the son of a well-known judge in Aberdeen. At the end of the day Jacob called to say thanks for both the tip and the most awkward phone interview ever. The judge hadn’t heard about the whole thing until Jacob called to ask him about it, and I’m glad (and a little appalled) that’s included in the story. UPDATE: I should clarify, I get a certain amount of reporter delight in seeing us ruin someone’s day, as if it’s our fault. I have a simultaneous conflicting feeling of pity for the poor judge, who has an awful day and also gets to look kind of silly in the paper. I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to include any of that unless my editor really wanted me to.

Second, here’s a dumb magazine I had to make for class. It turned out alright for putting fairly little effort into it.

Third, we at the Evergreen got a copy of an e-mail the university president sent out today requesting no administrative/professional hires in preparation for economic downturn. It also said he was “not desirous of making a mass announcement to the entire WSU community in this regard.” Check out the story on tomorrow’s front page.

Finally, I got the pretty fun assignment for our “20 of the most influential students” series to write about the ASWSU president and editor-in-chief Brian. For having minimal time to write, they turned out okay. I was glad I was able to work in fedoras, puppies and democracy.

Walking home from campus around 10:20 p.m. I found myself walking the wrong direction through a swarm of people in cowboy hats and girls in short denim skirts with cowboy boots. A Dierks Bentley concert had just ended in Beasley Coliseum, and the aftermath of concertgoers sounded like this:

“That girl, omigod - and then he was like – what was she doing? - omigod - I’m in love! - whhooooAAAHHHHHHH - I mean, I’ve been drunk, but - and then when he - if I were her - hoooOOOOOOONNNNNKKK - I’m on probation ’til January! - and did you see her - omigod my feeeeeet - No I told you, he just needs stitches not staples - What? WOOOOOO - I’ve been drunk, but not like this - Who was that girl? I would’ve punched her.

So that fire thing I ran to last night turned out to be kind of a big deal. The damage doesn’t seem too extensive, but two students were arrested on five counts of first-degree arson – a class A felony – and four counts of reckless burning in the second degree. Both of them are jazz people, a saxophonist and a trombonist, which is a random fact not in the story we have online now. One of them is from Aberdeen, so I also alerted Jacob.

There have been updates all day. It would be fun if I weren’t so tired and overwhelmed with projects to get done.

It was 2 a.m. and I was going to post these pictures of late-night thesis writing when Christina called. She said Tyler said the scanner was going crazy with several fires on campus and he could smell smoke. So I put my contacts back in, dressed appropriately for running, and grabbed the extraneous heavy stuff out of my reporting bag. Then I ran to campus, it’s probably a little more than a mile to the Stephenson Complex, which turned out to be the only site of any concern. All the residents were outside, tired and cold, and we stood around for a while to see what was going on. It was nothing too serious, though a rumor that the alarms weren’t working may turn out to be something.

I should have said, “Good, I’m glad you and Tyler are handling it,” and then kept working on my thesis. But it could have been exciting if there really were multiple fires on campus, especially since earlier I’d been thinking about the string of arson fires that capped off my all-nighter last fall.

So now it’s 3 a.m.

UPDATE: Here’s the fires story they put together.

This is the last on birthdays, I promise. Nick hosted a lovely soiree Friday night attended by a number of our dearest friends. We dressed up a bit and it was a good time. With plenty of bizarre anecdotes and photos. I love this one here because it’s just so weird.

Between Nick’s yellow walls, dim yellow light, my camera’s tendency to edge yellow and photographer indifference to quality, nearly all the pictures from the party are yellow and out of focus. But it represents what actually happened.

A few more below.
Read the rest of this entry »

An extended amount of birthday revelry came to an end yesterday as Nick turned 23. Yikes. It still sounds old to me. Anyway, I made him a puzzle hunt of sorts that forced him to go around campus and solve a bunch of codes and things. He was a good sport about it and even said he liked it by the end, pictured above.

I didn’t make it that hard and I gave him lots of hints. There was very little payoff at the end, but it’s about the journey, right?

There ought to be a good word for the practice, now common at least within a certain demographic, of spending prolonged amounts of time clicking from one Wikipedia entry to the next as curiosity dictates. It would have to work as both a verb and a noun. In terms of the whole internet, a comparable term might be “browsing” or “surfing.

The obsolete version, which I remember from when I was a kid, is going to look up a term in an encyclopedia and spending the afternoon opening various volumes and reading random entries. That was organized more by letter than topic, however, so there was rarely the linear journey you get with Wikipedia.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and the best I’ve come up with is Wikiwandering. It’s awkward to say, so surely there’s something better. Clever neologism, anyone?

Brian doesn’t like doing editorial board. In his defense, we make fun of him a lot for things like lying on the table while we talk. In our defense, he does things like lying on the table – or, yesterday, curling up inside the smelly futon. Yes, that is him in the photo. Christina is poking him, because that is what you do with reluctant editors hiding in futons. And we’re still the most productive student leaders on campus.

I turned in my timecards for the first half of April today. It totaled 11 issues as copy chief, 6.5 stories and 3.5 photos (we get paid fractions for smaller things). Considering I’ve also been doing my thesis, class and birthday, it’s not a bad pay period. It might be my best ever. It’s definitely the best I’ll be getting for a while, unless I get myself employed in a hurry.

To put it in perspective, this best pay period at the Evergreen was twice the work for less than half what I got paid at my summer internship. We’re looking at about $6 an hour, and remember this is the best ever.

From Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”:

“Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

Another part was about how someone who is not involved, an outsider, can only be fascinated or bored. I think the strange thing a lot of us share, which I often call a certain type of paranoia, is the inability to be comfortable with no camera or notebook. I think nothing terrifies me more than the possibility of boredom and forgetting.

I read the Pullman and WSU police logs every day for my job. A lot of times it’s funny, tragic, disheartening and absurd all at the same time, kind of like what’s you’d expect from the messy side of people’s lives.

But this, from the Pullman Police, was just adorable.

08-P03116     Welfare Check
Complainant: Non-Disclosed
Incident Address : SW Fountain St
Responding Officers: Bill Orsborn
Disposition : ACT
Cad Comments:
Report of a small girl that was outside in the back yard crying. Officer responded. Crying because she couldn’t get her umbrella to open up.

Today in my 475 class we were looking at the inner workings of Wikipedia and definitely the most interesting part (aside from late-night rambles through entries on obscure writers’ lives and archaic technology) is the history tab on each entry. Naturally I looked up our Daily Evergreen entry, and found evidence of this risible sabotage.

It’s also kind of silly, because we’ve had more conservative columnists this year than anytime in my memory of the Evergreen.

This is for my J475 class, in response to parts of the Frontline “News War” story that we watched.

In response to the Frontline show about the news industry, I want to focus on the idea of citizen journalism that they talked about.

I loved it when Nick Lemann said citizen journalism is like a church newsletter.
“Yes, I am belittling them,” he said.

I’m all about empowering the people and democritizing the means of production, but citizen journalism is not as great as people would like to think. The one guy who mentioned how citizen bloggers don’t just report, but also do agenda-setting, did have a good point. It reminded me of the Jena 6 story that became national news through the perseverance of a few bloggers.

So there are people out there who act like journalists without working for a media outlet, but those bright exceptions do not mean most people have the interest or ability to be good journalists. I go to school with dozens of people who want to be journalists and go to classes for it and still haven’t figured out how to put together a credible story with the proper sources and no holes. I don’t trust ordinary people to write well, but that can be fixed by editors to a certain extent. What worries me is the ethics. Journalists who know the rules and have their careers on the line still make stupid ethics decisions (see Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Allan Detrich).

So while I think newspapers can foster intelligent forums and learn important tips that way, relying on citizens to do your work is a bad gamble with the future of the industry. Now, more than ever, professional papers need to set themselves apart with credibility that ordinary people aren’t capable to provide.

Admittedly I was also scanning Romenesko while we watched the Frontline piece in class. I came across “When I hear the term ‘citizen journalist,’ I reach for my pistol,” which I think sums up the argument well.

I’ve been wearing the same kind of running shoes since 8th grade, I think. They’re New Balance motion stability shoes. I’m not much of an overpronater, I just have low arches and always needed a high-mileage shoe in high school. I’ve been wearing the same two pairs of 856s since the end of freshman year, and even my mild running for the past few years added up to really needing a new pair. So my parents granted my birthday wish, and you can see the difference between my old 856s, right, and my new 858s, left.

By the way, this post is going back to to pre-journalism obsessions, so ordinary readers may find this totally dull. Oh well. Keep reading for awesome shoe lineage and a brief history of my running.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday there was real sunshine for the first time this season and no class, so Christina, Nick and I headed out to Kamiak Butte for a quick hike. It was a good time, though we had to traverse some remaining snow banks covering the path near the summit.

And I would post a better picture of Christina if she’d been smiling in any of them. She assures me she wasn’t just miserable, though.

The best thing about Mom’s Weekend is gawking at all the moms with their kids. It’s like observing a giant genetics experiment. I love it when moms and their kids look the same, or kind of the same. Sometimes they only have the same smile or eyes, but you can tell.

This delight in phenotypes is, incidentally, an interest I share with my mother.

This is the last time I’ll talk about my birthday for a really long time. I promise. It was a good one, though I’m coming down from it now and crashing pretty hard. Too much sugar and excitement. Thanks to my grandparents for bringing delicious cake, and Allison for taking these pictures! I also love this picture of Christina taunting Brian.

When I called my mom to do some last-minute fact-checking for my Mom’s Weekend column, I asked her about the giant silver pencil. It was not the kind of gift you anticipate at all, and my first impression was that it would make a great weapon. I was certain there was some sophisticated use, maybe ornamentation or something, so I asked my mom.

“I saw it and thought it would make an awesome weapon,” she said.

She wasn’t going to send it to me since it’s kind of heavy, but she knew it would be useful in the newsroom if only for a month or so. She liked how it played on the idea that a writer’s pen is her weapon. If the pen is mightier than the sword, a pencil-shaped bludgeon is clearly the mightiest.

I am now 22. It is not that exciting, but I am happy anyway because people have been doing such nice things for me. It is also the busiest day of the semester at the paper, so I get to look forward to about a dozen straight hours of editing. My most bizarre gift: a giant silver pencil from Pottery Barn, courtesy of my mother. It will make the most stellar newsroom weapon ever.

This week a fraternity is doing some Sasquatch fundraiser competition. I was cutting across the quad late for class this morning when I spotted him on the Senior Bench with a friend. He waved once he noticed I was taking pictures.

I’ve been taking some photos this semester, mostly when we’re desperate or the other photographers are lazy. I never get assignments, but I don’t ask for them, either. I haven’t tried that hard to learn the D1H well even though I have access, and I’ll be the first to say I’m not a very good photographer yet.

I’m starting to think I should stop saying that. Not because I’m any good, but because I’m decent enough to get a little respect and right now I don’t get any. I consistently disagree with which photo (of mine) is best, but I don’t trust myself enough to really argue. Everything I do might get better if I started arguing less over my writing and more over my photos.

Tomorrow I’ll have a front-page hail photo (slow art day). Which one is better?

Read the rest of this entry »

It was sunny when I woke up. overcast when I walked to campus and hailing around noon. Note all the white on the ground; it hailed for at least half and hour and covered everything.

From the NYT website. I wonder who wrote the headline.

Last night Nick had me watch “Blade Runner.” It was good, but the point I want to make here is that the ugly man replicant had the same birthday as me (or “inception date,” whatever). So it was almost festive.

The New York Times’ TierneyLab is almost always fascinating, and today is especially intriguing about awful names.

“It wasn’t easy picking a winner from more than 1,000 entries. Besides Charman Toilette, an early favorite of the judges, there was Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields, Justin Credible, Tiny Bimbo, and a girl whose father was an auto mechanic but somehow didn’t realize he was effectively giving her the name of a tire: Michele Lynn. There were girls named Chaos and Tutu, and boys named Clever, Cowboy, Crash, Felony, Furious and Zero.”

There is so much here that is relevant to my interests. I love that they call it the “Boy Named Sue theory.” Then, that list includes Felony, which is one of the original names on my Words That Would Make Good Names If They Weren’t Already Words List (along with Machete, Rival, Soviet, Parole, Debris, etc.)

Ever since Hugo Chavez tried limiting names and I learned they have approved lists in Europe, I’ve been a full believer in naming libertarianism, if not anarchy. It’s your kid, you should be able to pick whatever stupid name you want. Tons of people don’t go by the name on their birth certificate anyway.

There’s a student here who just named her baby girl Bonanza Jellybean. I mean, that’s really stretching it, but I still think it’s neat. The child will learn to cope – in the newsroom we brainstormed nicknames like Nanza or Nanzie – and then it will be an interesting conversation piece later on. I mean, at least she has a built-in outlet for uniqueness if she ever wants it. Name a child Emily Ann and you’re just begging for her to dye her hair green or get illegal tattoos if she feels too ordinary at 15.

I’ve long been a proponent of giving children unusual first names with totally normal, classic middle names. A crazy middle name is just dumb – “Hehe, look at what goofy thing we’re getting away with!” – and if they don’t end up liking the unusual first name they can go with the really classy first initial-middle name construction, like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The one that’s been giving me problems recently is Vendetta. It really ought to go on my WTWMGNITWAW List, but I just can’t let it go. It’s been months now. It could be Vetta for short.

Aside from that, names and name trends have always interested me. I wonder how you get into the celebrity name-consulting business, because that would be great. I found this site during the summer, and I think I immediately wasted like four hours looking at it. If you’re looking for names that are going to fit with the classy/upscale trends for the next few years without being overused, consider names like Garnet, Viola, Afton, Daisy or Beatrix (for girls) and Harlan, Burton, Roscoe or Cohen (for boys).

People who know me know I get pretty excited about my birthday. I don’t really like anything that special for the actual day, but I can’t help mentioning it when it’s coming up. Usually my birthday corresponds with distractions like Easter, the Murrow Symposium or, this year, production night for the annual monstrous Mom’s Weekend issue of Evergreen that I nicknamed the Leviathan last year. So I have to be excited for it ahead of time or there won’t be time to be excited at all.

This year I’ve been so busy I haven’t even though much about it. Maybe I’m getting old. It’s the last year I’ll be less than half my mom’s age. Also 22 just seems old. You’re no longer young enough to make stupid mistakes purely for the sake of youth. If you have any remaining chance of being maverick prodigy, you better already be well on the way. Plus it’s an ugly number. I hate even numbers, so turning 22 on 4/10/2008 is just awful.

Anyway, four days to go!

Last week I took a few pictures of things that caught my attention in LIFE magazines when I was looking through at WWII war photo essays. Today I took a break from the hectic pace and made a little picture out of that stuff. Here also is what the original looked like and what the woman looked like before I egotistically changed her coloring to match myself. Before she looked too much like if Jacob were a woman in the 1940s.

I had the quote from Lee Miller in my notes. She also said, to explain why she’d married an Egyptian man and moved there and then left him to photograph the war in Europe, “I want the Utopian combination of security and freedom, and emotionally I need to be completely absorbed in some work or man I love.”

Today I walked by a tour guide pointing out Stevens Hall to a group of high school students for how old it is.
“It was built in the really early 1900s I think,” she told them.

I did not loudly say, “1894 actually!” But I wanted to.

My thesis presentation will be 8 a.m. May 5, which is the Monday after commencement. That way my parents can be there before flying home after the graduation weekend. I was already presenting late and I knew they would appreciate being there, so today I asked the Honors College and my adviser and everyone was tremendously nice and accommodating.

So that’s when it will be. Everyone is invited, though I imagine the time of day will be a strong deterrent.

The new WSU police chief starts today, less than 24 hours since he accepted the job and 364 days since the university announced the search.

Thought I’d mention it as a follow-up to last week. Here’s the really short story on it with all the obvious quotes about how happy everyone is. I do think the positive comments are genuine, though, not desperation. There will be a longer profile next week after the department has time to settle in a bit.

Also, I had to think it was funny he was hired on April Fools’ Day. I resisted mentioning that in the story.

Here’s a nice little PR-type video for The Daily Evergreen, which I made for a class. I did not spend much time on it because I am so overwhelmed with everything in the past few weeks, but it’s not a bad idea to have a video answering commonly asked questions so editors don’t have to do it all the time.

My apologies to Christina, who was a very good sport about participating and not particularly pleased by the results. Later I might post the segment with uncooperative Brian. I probably wouldn’t be thrilled about being on video, though, I don’t blame him much. I did get over the “sound of my voice” thing and it’s decent enough I can actually listen to it without cringing.

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day. At the Daily Evergreen, this means just one thing: somehow messing with General Manager Al Donnelly’s office. Last year we provided an infusion of Happy Cats. We found some of those same cats tonight as we launched a new theme.

I found this in a story while being copy chief today (sorry, this will probably only make sense to journalists):

The group hopes for strong participation so these and other concerns can be addressed and discussed and a greater, more knowledgable awareness can be raised.