The front of the UNC Tarheel Student Newspaper #SAAM
Yes! Amazing job, DTH! (And thank you sticky for sending this to me.)
Wowowow.
By her son Jacob Bernstein
In the play my mother wrote, there’s a scene toward the end, in which McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer, then a columnist at The Daily News. It’s a glorious summer day, and McAlary’s 12-year-old son, Ryan, wants to do a flip off the diving board, but he gets scared and can’t do it. So McAlary takes off his shirt, walks to the edge of the diving board and says to him: “When you do these things, you can’t be nervous. If you think about what can go wrong, if you think about the belly flop, that’s what’ll happen.”
And then McAlary does the flip himself and makes a perfect landing.
It’s a metaphor, obviously, for his view about life. And I’ve come to think it might as well have been about my mother. The point is that you don’t let fear invade your psyche. Because then you might as well be dead.
and
My mother said that she saw his career as “the end of something,” a bookend to a time when reporters could still believe there was power in the job; when Elaine’s was still one of the city’s most glamorous rooms…
This piece: journalism, New York, a brilliant and touching account of an impressive woman. Some of the best things.
Alex Williams:
But in retrospect, she might have adjusted her expectations. “The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”
Food for thought.
Also, how weird is new tumblr.
Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
“Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It’s amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.”
Also this, via futurejournalismproject
“Dear Users:
You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk.”
I have a php file. And more Javascript than I really understand.
15 hours in the office. That managed to go by faster than I expected.
Today was: texts from unknown numbers (uh oh), way too much food, making really great (or terrible) impressions on people, fully expecting to leave before 6 p.m., getting excited over every tiny Javascript success, loving people who are amazingly dedicated to their jobs and just as crazy as I am, too much laughing-turned-pseudo-crying, losing it at some point or another, learning about kernel panics (what!), singing to “Say My Name” with B because Destiny’s Child is always allowed, is it bad that an awesome text editor makes me a little happier than usual, doing so many things that wouldn’t be intrinsically in my job title and yet are. And finally, finally stopping by a drunk party to see some of my wonderful people.
So much left to do. I am going to be so excited when this project comes out. Because there’s a fair amount of code. And I want to see people outside of the office. And I would like to sleep at some point.
Also, this Sandra Fluke business is terrible and frustrating. Way to go Rush Limbaugh, for making unwarranted and hugely appalling comments.
in inverted pyramid format. Get to the point, dang it.
This blog is great.
I just spent the last week coding. Or at least, “coding” as far as a baby HTML nerd can.
Editing and color-coding world vector maps.
Inputting data into Illustrator.
Scaling circles.
Wanting to cry every time I saved a copy and (thought) Illustrator flattened all the layers in my map.
Redoing maps because of said flattening.
Becoming best friends with Dreamweaver.
Making Transmit FTP work for me.
Editing my HTML index.
Using w3schools at every single step.
Understanding divs, span, ID vs. class, z-index.
Writing CSS style page.
Meetings with Amy. Lauren. Byron.
Adopting Byron’s shiny page template instead.
Completely at a loss for what colors to use.
Meeting with Max.
Finally determining a color scheme.
Learning that Illustrator did not permanently flatten the images, just grouped them.
Trying to study for a midterm.
Drawing keys.
Copies and copies of copies of the map SVGs.
Progression of grumble noises.
Guess-and-checking the coordinates of the top 10 circles. (Really should use Chrome developer for this next time)
Formatting the article.
Fiddling with the backtoarticle box and linking within.
Getting the hang of the containers (really, brute forcing it to work).
Not sleeping for almost 48 hours. Not eating for most of the second day.
Wanting to kill my computer because I couldn’t figure out why the Javascript wasn’t working at 5 in the morning.
Trying to get the images to fade in place.
Switching to # method in the hopes that it would work better.
Finally figuring out how to get the Javascript hover+click+info detailcontainer method to work (!)
Happy noises (according to Kylie).
Writing Javascript files.
Re-editing map SVG/PNGs so the top 10 didn’t show up.
Converting circles from Illustrator to Photoshop (select, copy, paste, enter three times, delete background layer, calculate pixel size, save for web, update CSS file, save, FTP, Apple-R).
Changing the opacity of the top 10 for the hover.
Learning about font stacks and grabbing fonts from Google Web Fonts API.
The different successions of keyboard shortcuts ingrained in my brain and now muscle memory.
Three more HTML pages.
Four more CSS pages, just for the circles.
Adding to the Javascript file.
Copy-pasting so many rules and styles.
Divs within divs within divs…
Making different CSS types for the different colors. Inc, dec, nochg, etc. Actually figuring out how to utilize span also.
Columbia from “Rocky Horror.” Kyle the foreign kid.
Adding the illo. Align right div for photo so the credit would be formatted properly.
Matching the backtoarticle box to my color scheme.
So much Florence, Foster the People, Bon Iver in my Beats.
Finally successfully getting the detail container/country info exactly the way I wanted (!)
Writing and formatting country descriptors.
Five nights of Halloween (ha). Being wrapped in a comfy blue blanket and coughing everywhere.
Adjusting top and left for so many different containers.
Ignoring homework. And my two impending midterms (plus a story or two). Living breathing sleeping this project.
Creating an image header for the DB article page.
Edit, copy, paste, save for web & devices, drag into folder, re-FTP, Apple-R. Rinse and repeat.
Explaining the methodology/thoughts behind the madness. (Is it strange that I’m weirdly proudest of the methods/FAQ page?)
Am I done? No there’s definitely things that can be changed. I think I’m done. Yessss it’s all shiny and finished!
Four maps. Seven days. About two months.
Tweeting/Facebooking/social media-ing this shiz. Damn straight.
And the past two months:
Talking to Farzad.
Negotiating with Media Relations, Admissions, Office of AIM.
Talking to Machiko. Sam. Lauren. Amy. Emailing legit multimedia editors.
Geeking out over NYTimes.com graphics every time I explained this project to someone.
Getting it to work:
So incredibly exciting. Getting just the hover+click to work was amazing. Finishing the entire project was elation. So happy. It’s low-fi, but I’m still glad. Baby steps. More fantastic projects to come, that’s the goal.
This is for all the creative people out in the world… Thanks, Ira!
What a really interesting and worthwhile way to engage readers. I really like this idea, it seems like a great way to get fascinating stories and widen the paper’s presence in Tumblr circles. We need to do more cool things like this.
From crashingnightingale:
I was at the dentist on 9/11. The office ladies had the radio on as we were paying and that’s where we heard about the planes crashing. Then we got home and my parents turned on the news and I remember sitting there in front of the TV as the first tower fell on live…
Hold up, T Magazine has a tumblr (?!) Love.
Looking at the reblog numbers, it doesn’t seem particularly well-publicized. But come on, it’s The New York Times Style Magazine and these photos are gorgeous. So confused as to whether or not this is actually legit. Seems to be a very different approach (maybe that’s just me) than say, the website or the Twitter accounts.
Kevin Tachman goes behind-the-scenes at Christian Lacroix. See more photos here.
