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Did you know children grow up in France without ever enjoying ice cream cake or baking chocolate chip cookies? Ridiculous. I have never been happier to be born American.
But if you can’t have a childhood with ice cream cake, you might as well have it as soon as possible. So Cecile had ice cream cake, and the whole class helped out. In true newsroom style we had to cut it with plastic knives, and drank wine from plastic glasses.
This is the committee room off to the side of the New York City Council chamber. I was there reporting today on a hearing about delayed GI Bill benefits this fall for student veterans, held jointly with the higher education and veterans committees.
It’s been a while since I was in a fancy government building, so that was kind of fun.
I found the old magazines section of the Butler Library stacks. Oh boy. If you suspected that after taking this photo I got absorbed in old 1945 issues of Ladies’ Home Journal for an embarrassingly long time, you would be right. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the demo for News Tip Jar, a fake business my group presented in class today. We were assigned to come up with a plan for a new media-related business or innovation to an existing business, including the financial estimates and that sort of thing.
(There is no sound for the video, so don’t worry if you can’t hear it. I was going to add sound, then decided it wasn’t worth the time since it might not work during the class projection anyway.)
Our idea addresses the issue that sophisticated readers know quality journalism doesn’t come free, but don’t have a good way to support the variety of sites they read casually every day. News organizations, especially smaller ones, don’t have the infrastructure to establish a secure micro-donation system for their sites. We provide that connection in a simple and trustworthy way.
Or so the pitch goes. After working on the demo for a while I sort of forgot it wasn’t real.
There is actually something like this in the works, sort of. They should use our snazzy colors.
By the way, this was our final session of my business class, which is a new course added to the Columbia J-School curriculum this fall. It was a good class, though inherently depressing.
I packed the best lunch ever today (and actually had time to enjoy it): peanut butter sandwich, carrot sticks, sweet potato bisque, chocolate soy milk.
I almost always bring lunch from home, but usually it sucks.
Today I learned photography again, and I think this time I finally understand all of it. My teacher is so great. Earlier this year he explained light as water, and controlling the flow of light into the camera the same as you control a faucet. Then today he said learning to use a camera is a lot like learning to use an instrument – you have to understand the theory behind it and also practice, practice, practice for the muscle memory.
But later I was thinking about photography in a different way, the sentimental personal way. I was thinking about shared photographs, and the record of our lives now online on Facebook and other places. For someone who takes a lot of photos, I keep my online record pretty sparse. I had some Facebook albums at one time, maybe two of them, but I don’t do that anymore. Maybe I should, I don’t know.
My RW1 class finally launched The Uptowner, a news site covering the neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan. There are still a few quirks to figure out, but it’s looking pretty decent.
Remember back when I wrote about my undergrad thesis all the time? Remember when it finally ended with this?
It begins again. Below, you can see what I’m busy reading.
The produce selection at the greenmarkets is changing with the seasons. Yesterday they had these hilarious gourds at Union Square, but no more raspberries. Also it was my half birthday, but fortunately I didn’t remember until today.
Is it possible to make sitting at school editing video on a Friday evening look glamorous?
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