"
This is Atlanta. We’re scrappy. Some of what we do lacks precision, but we’re passionate and we try and we’re not held to this unrealistic expectation of CUISINE, big type. There’s a comfort in even our high-end restaurants, a sense of community, a sense of personality that’s hard to find in the high-stakes, big money world of larger cities. This is the South, where you’re most likely to find God (or whatever you want to call it) in a strip mall. The best of what we do, the best of what we are, is hidden in the nooks. It isn’t easily found. That’s what makes it so much fun. There are places in this town, to eat, to drink, to live, that make my heart ache with pride. I haven’t felt that way since…well, since Brooklyn.
I sincerely, truly, really hope you get to that with Atlanta. We don’t want you to die down here.
"Excerpt, ”An Open Letter To Kim Severson”, by Besha Rodell for Atlanta’s Creative Loafing, 3.14.11
Beware the ides of March…
(Source: clatl.com)
"By the end of the year, everything hurts,” McNair told me a while back, when I went to visit. He has a neck like a bullock and hands like a vise and a history of working for everything he ever got in his life. “Nothing you can do about it, but keep playing,” McNair said, speaking of more than merely playing football."
More Ralph Wiley. “Hidden Heroes” from his column on ESPN2
"All a man’s got is the integrity of his work."
Ralph Wiley, lede, “White Magic In the NBA” for ESPN2 column.
"
I got the call many independent producers pray for late one Wednesday afternoon. It was Robyn Semian asking if I could do a last-minute assignment for This American Life. She wanted me to cover a first-of-its-kind conference on building a spaceship to reach the stars. It was to take place that weekend in Orlando, a four-hour drive away. Then Ira Glass would interview me about the conference for the opening story in the Adventure episode airing the following week. I swallowed my scream of joy and calmly said hell, yes.
What follows is a reconstruction of how the piece came together. I had always wondered how This American Life stories were made, and now I got a chance to have a front-row seat in that process. I got Ira’s permission to share our correspondence, but he asked me to clarify that this was an unusual, quick-turnaround piece. Most pieces for This American Life aren’t produced this efficiently, and the vast majority of his interviews aren’t scripted in advance…
"This American Life Tic Tock January 25th, 2012 | by Dan Grech
via Transom.org
(Source: transom.org)
Using Storify for reporting.
"Mercer University will hold a ceremonial groundbreaking for Phase II of the Lofts at Mercer Village on Thursday at 11 a.m. The event will also feature an announcement regarding plans for a major grant-funded community media and journalism education initiative that will fill the first floor of the mixed-use development."
"
The real difference between an intelligence agency and a newsroom (besides rendition, assassination and a few other things) is how they manage data. Intelligence analysts incorporate statistical information, demographic information and input from psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, geologists and essentially any resource a state can muster to understand the nature of the world. The end result is top secret.
The public should be provided these same services. The world is awash in data. What it lacks is understanding. The fourth estate is that it is positioned, more than any other entity, to package that information in the most persistent form to human memory: the narrative. And journalists at the forefront understand that more methods of communication only open as the technology improves: visualizations, interactive maps and charts, multimedia, and eventually, virtual environments.
"Matthew Schroyer, Data Journalist.
9.15.2011
"We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe."
This post isn’t about process. Last night I held a quick conversation about instant punditry culture, its profitablity, its shallow depth and its inevitable ennuied end.
And it happens so quickly. And checks are hard to come by.
This George Eliot quote and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ commentary stemming from it articulate the tension better than I did.
Coates adds this (excerpt):
That last section really gets at something I’ve observed in relation to the relatively meager prominence I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of years.You would be shocked how often I am offered the opportunity to hold forth on subjects of which I have only the scantest knowledge—sometimes with a check at the end. There’s a certain kind of intellectual hustle that really extends from the Ivy Leagues schools on down founded on “thin and eager” chat.It isn’t just the matter of cable talk-shows. It’s something about the market, and thus something about us. Perhaps it’s our earnest desire to actual know more, a laudable curiosity oppressed by the very forces Eliot cites. Our summer afternoons are not so spacious and we too are short on that specimen of winter evening. From that angle the writer/historian/intellectual/philosopher who speaks in the language of branding is really just feeling a need. I don’t know.
(Source: The Atlantic)
"Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency"
Edward R. Tufte
I’ve been practicing ways to display data both interactively with widgets and open source apps utlizing the Google Docs spreadsheet.
Having not used spreadsheets in the past, it’s a painful process. I’m awful at this. I’m still trying.
Since I’ve started attempting to use these methods, I’ve learned that they’re both outdated
and inefficient. :/
I still find value in learning the principles behind these approaches because they may be valueable later.
In any case, my forays into design suck. I forget everything I read when I see a happy type face or shape I’d like to play with.
I’m working on methods to clean up this process. Learning on the fly, on your own, can have an ”unknown unknowns” element to it that can be frustrating at times but it also helps to make ideas more concrete.
(Source: edwardtufte.com)
