Mourning the state of cafecito in Hialeah

cafecito.jpgMy hometown of Hialeah, what is likely the most Cuban-American city in the United States and a place where 92% of its residents are Spanish speakers, has been forever changed.

A Starbucks has opened. And on the big 49th Street no less.

If you’re not familiar with Hialeah, it’s a place where the tiny shot of 50-cent Cuban coffee is king. It’s a place where the tiny paper cups of hyper-caffeinated black cafecito are served up through a window, and big yellow water coolers are kept on the windowsill because the stuff is so strong. And this is no small town either; it’s the fifth largest in Florida, making it more populous than Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

starbucks.jpgThis development is akin to finding a McDonald’s in Iran or an Outback Steakhouse in India. Unsettling.

The idea of a Starbucks in Hialeah has long been a topic of rueful speculation in my family. “Will a Starbucks ever open?” we wondered. “And will it last?” We love the vanilla bean frappuccino but feel strange about having it parked too close to home.

For better or worse, it feels like the culture of my hometown is changing and that one of the strikingly unique places in this country is being whittled away.

[Photos by augschburger and presidentservelan]

Big day for the Gators tomorrow

albert-alligator.jpgAh, it feels like Christmas Eve. Tomorrow is the big national football championship game, where the righteous, mighty Florida Gators will take on the abominable minions of Ohio State.

I’m here at the Swamp –Gainesville, that is– to break out the old jersey, yell myself hoarse and hope for a repeat performance of the nightlong street festivities that took place last year following the basketball championship win.

This is like a national holiday here in Gainesville. So …er.. no blogging for a while folks! Be back Tuesday or Wednesday.

[Update 01-08-07: And check out the Alligator‘s coverage of the championship! Nice work guys.]

[Lovely Albert photo by gtmcknight]

Comics about the Iraq war

iraqcomics.jpgSlate has an interesting roundup about comic book creators who are addressing the war in Iraq. These comics are indicative of an increasing willingness among creators to tackle current events. Hopefully, modern-day wartime comic creators will address the subject better than some other stupid attempts in the past.

Why look into comics? I’ve said it before: sequential art elements can invigorate your storytelling as you try out new formats for using narratives online through graphics and photos.

Software for starving students

ramen.jpgBeing not far from my Ramen noodle-eating, credit card-maxing days, this neat software package really captured my heart. Software for Starving Students is a package of free applications designed to help you get through school without plunking down change for expensive Microsoft products.

While I haven’t delved into all the software that comes on the downloadable CD file, here’s the list:

  • 7-Zip
  • Ant Renamer
  • Audacity
  • Blender
  • BZFlag
  • Celestia
  • ClamWin
  • DeepBurner Free
  • Dia
  • Enigma
  • Eraser
  • Exact Audio Copy
  • FileZilla
  • Firefox
  • Freeciv
  • Gaim
  • GIMPShop
  • GLtron
  • GNU Chess
  • Icebreaker
  • Inkscape
  • Juice Receiver
  • KeePass
  • MozBackup
  • NVU
  • OpenOffice.org
  • Paint.NET
  • PDFCreator
  • Portable Apps
  • POV-Ray
  • PuTTY
  • SolarWolf
  • Spybot S&D
  • Stellarium
  • SuperTux
  • The GIMP Toolkit
  • Thunderbird
  • Tortoise SVN
  • Tux Paint
  • Tux Racer
  • Tux Typing 2
  • VLC
  • WinDirStat
  • Wink
  • winLAME
  • WinSCP
  • XAMPP
  • µTorrent
  • [Via Lifehacker, Ramen photo by pain_amp1013]

    5 things you didn’t know about me

    Lucas Grindley and Will Sullivan called me out in this enjoyable little game of tag everyone’s got going on. And here I was starting to feel like the chubby kid on the soccer team all over again!

    So, here we go, five things you probably didn’t know about me:

    1) In second grade, I wrote a weekly serial featuring an anthropomorphic chicken called “Chicho” (yes, I’m from the really Cuban part of South Florida). His supporting cast featured dogs, yaks, cheetahs and “Coach Roach.” His pet? Why, a dog named “Spot” , which of course is always clean and shiny thanks to the cbd dog shampoo used on this hair.

    nbajam.jpg 2) I was the Blockbuster Video game champion in 1994 for the store on West 49th Street in Hialeah, Fla, where I schooled everyone in NBA Jam for the Sega Genesis. Still got the plaque, too. Manufactured at Brass Plaques.

    3) I’m an out-of-the-closet comic book fanboy. I can tell you by heart every character who was ever in the X-Men or Avengers superhero teams. When I yell “News Team Assemble!” at work, they think I’m just referring to the ‘Anchorman’ movie…

    4) I’m an Eagle Scout who earned, among many others, the “basketry” and “farm mechanics” merit badges. Yes, I can build structures out of wood and rope, race canoes and start a fire with just sticks. Come to think of it, the first web page I ever made was at Scout camp using Notepad. Just for that, I forgive them for making me wear those foogly socks.

    bigmomma.jpg5) I’ve had an oddball work history: My first job was being the local YMCA’s only lifeguard and swimming instructor. The ONLY person I ever had to save was a woman the size of Martin Lawrence in “Big Momma’s House.” I was also a garlic roll maker, but quit after two days because my girlfriend said I reeked. In college, I worked at a billiard hall, where I fixed bowling machines. Then I tutored NCAA basketball champs Joakim Noah and Taurean Green in a freshman English class. Finally, I was a techie for “Spinal Tech” where I’d wear black, mic up rock bands and climb up two stories on a shaky, hand-cranked people-lifter to aim stage lights. Oh yeah, now I work at the Orlando Sentinel.

    Alright, time to bring the pain! You’re it, Matt Waite, Ryan Sholin, Paul Conley, Angela Grant and Roger Simmons.

    Pulitzer Prize shows love to the Web

    The Associated Press reported today that the Pulitzer Prize rules will now allow “newspapers to submit video and interactive graphics as part of their entries for the top prize in American print journalism.”

    Well about gosh durn time! That’s a long-overdue acknowledgment that serious journalism can be done on the Web and need not be exclusively a printed endeavor.

    Still, I wonder whether this will tip the hat even further toward the big papers with their huge resources and fancy video studios. Will an entry now need an amazing video package? Will hosting, say, a killer hurricane still suffice, even if there’s no Flash graphic explaining the storm?
    [Thanks to Roger Simmons]

    Dave Barry, the original crowdsourcer

    Take a gander at Dave Barry’s hilarious Holiday Gift Guide, featuring such wonderful holiday fare as the motorized ice cream cones and nosehair clippers disguised as a finger.

    But pay attention to each item’s credit lines. Aside from Barry’s enormous talent as a humorist, an important part of his success stems from the hordes of readers who contribute items to his columns. The gift guide is a great example of this. By giving credit to his readers and involving them in the process, (also known in buzzspeak as crowdsourcing), he has built a solid reputation as being the master of locating all things funny.

    It doesn’t always take a fancy Web 2.0, database-backed, AJAX-powered, time-sucking online contraption to build a loyal readership that takes ownership of content. The most important ingredient is the initiative.

    And if that doesn’t help, you might try luring them in with a free copy of the Great Big World of Nematodes coloring book.

    Sigh. I’m a cut-and-paste ‘expert.’

    More interesting comments have come in regarding my previous student advice post. But pay particular attention to the remarks of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune‘s Lucas Grindley.

    Take note, future interns and recent hires, as Grindley writes:

    “When folks send me their resumes, I often feel bad for those who think they have two years experience working at a major news Web site. But really they have two years experience pasting photos into a gallery and writing cutlines.

    If that’s your job, learn on your own how to do something more complicated. Learn a programming language. Teach yourself something. Try Flash. Anything.

    But don’t tout yourself as an “expert” at cutting and pasting photos or stories into a content management system.”

    Too true. It’s extremely easy to get stuck doing the daily copy-paste grind of photo galleries and updating databases all the time. Staff members love to have the interns do that stuff so they can work on fabulous interactive Flash graphics and win SNDies. If you’re an intern, don’t be afraid to ask about working on more challenging projects if you you’re getting handed too much copy-paste work. But don’t be a diva either; every person must pull his weight with the boring stuff.

    As a primer, doing the copy-paste is great to become familiar with content-management systems (I cut my teeth online doing the Sun-Sentinel‘s Day in Pictures photo gallery). But make sure you are being challenged in your work and that you’re constantly learning more.

    Don’t think just because you’re working on a news Web site means you’re hot stuff. Challenge yourself to produce compelling Flash graphics, slideshows, videos and audio stories for your portfolio. If you don’t, you’re going to be the Cutline Master for years to come.

    Advice for young journalists

    The constant, nagging question in our industry today is what to do about the future of news. Students are that future, and it’s imperative that those of us out in the trenches give them the best guidance possible.

    I recently visited my alma mater, the University of Florida, to speak with about 250 journalism freshmen. Before that, I asked your advice on what to tell them. Below, I’ve compiled some excellent responses. Some came from seasoned veterans working in the industry. Others came from academics. Other responses were from young’uns like myself who are recent hires.

    The responses covered everything from doing plenty of internships, being a good reporter and learning several key technologies and methods from birrongsurialpacas. Some of the advice regarding taking a broad approach or specializing is contradictory. I’d argue there’s room, and a need, for both kinds in growing online staffs.

    As traditional roles in the newsroom are changing, it’s important that we define what the term “online journalist” means. Many students may be under the impression that it simply means “I write for the web.” In truth, the term is so broad it’s almost useless today.
    Instead, I defined “online journalism” in terms of content journalists are expected to produce for the Web:

    1. Text (stories, blogs, breaking news snippets)
    2. Photos (still images)
    3. Video (moving images)
    4. Audio
    5. Interaction / Games (interactive graphics, user comments, any participation)
    6. Data (as in raw databases used to create journalism)

    The changing media landscape means we have a whole array of new tools to tell a story. Sometimes a narrative is best. Other times, it’s a database-backed Flash graphic. You, the journalist, must have the wisdom to choose which is the best tool for a particular story.

    To do that, you should know a bit about how each of these works, even if you specialize in only one or two. Let me emphasize that smaller papers, where recent grads are most likely to find work, often require multimedia multitasking. At bigger papers, you may still get away with being a writer with no web skills since “there are people to do that stuff.” But that’s not likely to last long.

    Do you need to know HTML? Heck, yes.

    How much? It depends on what you want to do in journalism. Some gigs require mad coding skills; others don’t. In every case, you should at least know the minimum needed to create a customized MySpace page, maintain a blog, add styles to text, and edit and insert images. So write a blog. Make a web site. Do a web project. Experiment with Flash if you can.

    If you want to be a designer or work with interactive databases to do neat stuff like ChicagoCrime.org, you’re going to have to learn things like HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, Ajax, MySql/Excel, some Flash and perhaps one or more server-side tools like ASP, PHP, Python or Ruby. The more technologies in which you’re proficient (though not at the expense of journalism skills) the more likely it is you’ll get an awesome gig.

    But journalism isn’t changing just because we have more tools. It’s also changing because the communication between news outlets and readers is no longer a one-way street. Today, we have bloggers, blog comments, more citizen journalists and message boards. A blogger might shed light on an additional aspect of a mainstream media story, and suddenly, Dan Rather is out of a job. But perhaps the public has better information as a result.

    Journalism has become more of a conversation and less like a lecture. You should know that the purpose of soliciting advice from industry professionals in Journalistopia was not just to get good advice so I sound smart. It was also to demonstrate the power of collaborating with an audience.

    Because I (the journalist) put out a call to my expert readers for advice, now students everywhere have much better information to pick through. It’s a bit how Wikipedia works.

    But above all else, it’s important to remember you are a storyteller with the responsibility to serve the readers. You might tell the story of crime in a city using a Google Map. You may tell it through a Soundslide, plain text, a graphic or in some other form. But in the end, you still need to have solid news judgment, a strong sense of ethics and the dedication to serve the public interest.

    When you really think about it, a newspaper site on the surface can look identical to any miscreant’s Web site. Online, we no longer have the advantage of a bulky stack of paper to make us seem more authoritative. Therefore, our credibility and the strength of our journalism is perhaps more important than ever.

    Even the old timers recognize that it’s up to students, the media vanguard if you will, to use their judgment and imaginations to make journalism better than ever.

    ***

    Now on to that fabulous advice I’ve been hoarding:

    From:
    Paul Conley, media consultant / PaulConley.com

    1. Become a great reporter — know how to work a phone, work a room, flirt with a secretary, cozy up to a crook, convince an untrustworthy politician to trust you, get regular people to feel comfortable with you, learn to feel comfortable around powerful people, always carry a mechanical pencil and double-check the spelling of people’s names.

    2. Become great with the computer — know the ins and outs of every content-management system you can find, understand at least the basics of html, be able to work in Flash and Photoshop as easily as you can work in Word, build something online using open-source software such as WordPress or Joomla, learn to work a spreadsheet like an investment banker and an audio file like a sound technician, always carry a digital camera and double-check the spelling of people’s names.

    3. Become a great person — be fair in your reporting and kind to strangers, keep your complaints to a minimum, work harder than the people around you, learn to understand yourself before trying to get others to understand you, don’t dress like a bum, call your Mom, always carry spare change for the winos and double-check the spelling of people’s names.
    From:
    Ryan Sholin, Invisible Inkling, recently graduated and hired

    1. Start blogging. Write about whatever you want, but become as knowledgeable as you can about one or two topics you’re passionate about, and read and write about them constantly. Learn to design your own blog, and use a feed reader to do your online reading.

    2. Treat everything you produce as a piece of professional public work, whether it’s text or photos or a video you post on YouTube. Your Web presence is an important part of your portfolio. You will be Googled.

    3. Choose one online skill and become great at it. Edit video, podcast, create Flash infographics, design blogs, be a Soundslides ace — have a specialty.

    From:
    Matt Waite, St. Petersburg Times/MattWaite.com

    Forget about platform. More and more every day, you won’t just write for print, or just write for a blog, or just do video for TV. You’ll be doing ALL of those things. You won’t work for a newspaper or a radio station. You’ll work for a media company, and the more things you can do, the more valuable you’ll be. So taking just print or just broadcast classes is shortsighted and dumb.

    From:
    Derek Willis, Washington Post/Thescoop.org

    Don’t just learn computer programs; learn about how the computer actually works, how the Internet actually works. I’m not talking TCP\IP engineering, just the basic concepts of operating systems and Internet protocols. Don’t be a prisoner of your software.

    From:
    Lex Alexander, News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. / Blog on the Run

    If you don’t know how to think logically and critically, if you don’t know how to ask the right questions (and, sometimes, keep asking them), all the technical expertise in the world won’t matter.

    From:
    Bryan Murley, Reinventing College Media / Emory & Henry College, Emory, Va.

    I think it comes down to three attitudes:

    1. Excitement about change

    2. Desire to learn new things

    3. Embrace the “other” – i.e., the community

    If you have these three attitudes, the skills and knowledge will naturally flow.

    I think the editor of the News-Record gives some good advice: http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/archives/2006/09/jan_schaefer_of.html

    also, Howard Owens:
    http://www.howardowens.com/index.cfm?action=full_text&ARTICLE_ID=2277

    From:
    Matt, recently hired at a 90,000 daily somewhere

    From someone that was hired one year ago at a 90,000 daily as a phone clerk and has moved up quite a bit in one year, students must know in three years that a degree doesn’t mean they can walk into a newsroom and become a columnist and/or the No. 1 reporter. You must start somewhere, and that somewhere is traditionally a very low place (low as in on the totem pole and in the pay scale)

    Also, read a newspaper. Every day. I can’t tell you, as a former EIC of one of the top JC papers in SoCal for a year, people come in not reading one inch of a newspaper (sure, plenty of blogs and web sites) but rarely did I find someone who actually read a newspaper. To me, it shows when reading their copy.

    From:
    Kristen Novak, UNC grad

    As a newbie in the field of multimedia journalism (just started my first “real” job last January), here is what I have found the most useful:

    1. Understand what the different types of media are – text, audio, video, photos, infographics – and how they work. You don’t have to be the best at each of them, but understand them and their purpose.

    2. Learn how to tell a story. Forget the platform and focus on the story and how to best tell it. (Each media can be used to best convey something…why are you choosing video to tell a certain story over photographs with audio? Maybe because there is a lot of action you would otherwise miss out on, etc…)

    3. Get experience NOW! INTERN! WORK! Don’t restrict yourself to anything in particular. Think about the big picture and use internships/jobs to get skills. I interned for a wide array of companies and honed my skills not only in journalism but also in design, programming, and development.

    4. Make use of the technology available to you! Biggest question in interviews: Do you have a blog and what is it about? Everyone has a passion – write about yours on a blog to get experience and practice! And if you are a visual person, don’t feel left out – make your blog using photo stories or videos.

    From:
    Cory Armstrong, University of Florida / News Reporting and Public Records

    Learn to use Excel and manipulate data. I’ve been told by reporters/editors that learning to feel comfortable with numbers will be a huge plus. So much information is online now that the more you know about what to do with it, the better you’ll be.

    From:
    Anthony Moor, Orlando Sentinel, edited from one of my favorite articles in Online Journalism Review (and not just because he’s my boss either…)

    A Northwestern University study finds that online managers are primarily looking for detail-oriented collaborators capable of editing and copyediting, not technical producers.

    When I examine resumes of recent graduates, I’m looking for the journalism skills first, specifically news judgment. Have you worked as an editor at your college newspaper? Do you have clips that demonstrate a clear hard-news focus, in the classic, inverted-pyramid writing style? I want journalists who want to be editors.

    Next, are you Internet literate? No newspaper editor would hire an applicant who didn’t know the function of the A-section. While we don’t need code monkeys, we do need people who understand the unique attributes of the Web as it pertains to journalism.

    So, have you built a Web page as part of a student project or on your own? Do you know basic HTML? Do you work on the student newspaper website? Do you frequent Internet news sites? Do you use an RSS reader? Do you podcast? Did you ask to shadow the Web producers for a few days at your last internship? An affinity for our medium is essential.

    I also need people who think in multimedia. So if you’re a broadcast major, take print courses, or visa versa. Do a Web project. Do you keep a blog? Why not? There has never been an easier way to publish your journalism for an audience. So become a journalist online. Blog your hobby or your summer in Europe — like a reporter, not an opinion columnist.

    ***

    Anything else to share?

    The crowded media landscape

    To help explain how journalism has changed in the last ten years, I tried to give my University of Florida brethren a picture of how the media landscape has been altered by so many choices.

    While this is not complete nor proportional, here’s the snapshot I created for Monday’s lecture:

    medialandscape.jpg

    Thanks to Maude’s coffee shop, home of the delicious B.B. King brownie, for letting me hog a table while I snipped all the little Web site logos. Also, thanks to everyone who responded to the call for advice to the students!

    Here’s a version of the image in PowerPoint if you’d like to use it for a presentation.