So this guy does an AMA on reddit yesterday, makes the front page and major national headlines, says heâs making the UK film censorship board watch paint dry, for 607 minutes, "... in a protest against censorship and mandatory classification.â Turns out he made a film, all crowdfunded, consisting of a single shot of paint on a wall.
Today on the reddit front page, thereâs a link to a BBFC announcement that "PAINT DRYINGâ has received a âUâ rating. And the traffic reddit provided to the page is so heavy, like as of right now as I write this, that the page takes super long to load, or doesnât at all.
Mark Duffy is Copyranter (I think it should be Copywranter). This link leads to his work for Digiday. I really like his Dec. 4 article on toilet paper advertising.
Suits are to women what lingerie are to men. Or so I'm told. This is why it is so important to get it right when you're wearing a suit, and why it is so wrong to break...
I thought this a very good article, with good information, and written with flair.
For all the occasions during which youâll need a suit.
A massive fire in the University District sent several residents fleeing from their home in the middle of the night, and now there are fears the building where it started could collapse after the flames caused extensive damage.
First of all, thank you Lee Stoll and KOMO news staff for your quick reporting on this surprise, middle-of-the-night-story. Great job!
Now Iâm going to complain about itâone aspect only.
Letâs talk newswriting, and burying the lede.
(TL;DRâitâs in the fifth graf)
The lede is a summation of the news, as concise and informative as possible. âThis is what happened.â You lead with your lede by placing it in the first graf (paragraph).
The term nut graf indicates the graf containing a key bit of information the reader needs for full understanding of the newsâusually appearing in the second or third graf. However, we donât say âbury the nut graf.â It just doesn't sound as pretty.
To bury the lede means to put information vital to the storyâvital to both reader comprehension and fulfillment of the civil service of journalismâtoo far down in the piece.
The lede in this U. District fire story, IMO, appears in the fifth graf:
âFortunately, no one was injured.â
Human life is the most important aspect of any news story. The writer must ask, even if it seems obvious: exactly how does this story affect people? If people are hurt, how badly? If helped, how?
Full disclosure: this fire happened 10 blocks south of my domicile, where my family and I live, on the same street. Extra scary for my fellow Roosevelt and U. District neighborhood residents and I.
So imagine me, a newsreader, reading a local piece about something that could have affected my family or someone I know. Itâs about a fire. Fires kill people. Reading further, I grew more and more tense, veering towards real fear.
When I got to the fifth graf, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Immediately after I felt annoyance at having not been told that nobody was killed or injured right off the bat. Saying that residents fled their homes does not tell me whether anyone was harmed. I mean, even the family with a baby is mentioned before I get the âno deathâ alert.
Newswriting with proper flow contains a balance of informative importanceâthe inverted pyramid. Most important at top, descending in importance as you read further.
I understand if one of the writers involved here wanted to tell the story chronologically, because thatâs how it happened for the people involved. But for meânewsreader, dad, potentially personally affected partyâI needed to know if anyone was hurt sooner. What I need before any description can take place is how many people were hurt.
One of my favorite quotes from an early season of Mad Men was Don Draper telling a young staffer, âOptions are weak.â I think about it every time Iâm preparing to give a recommendation to a client. Do I offer them multiple choices to consider, or do I go with my gut and give one [Read More]
New Barokas PR blog post by Morgan Bradley.
Morgan takes a great Mad Men quote and runs with it, taking it to its inevitable conclusionâDon Draper wisdom will never let you down.
Barokas PR is a company that doesn't want to hire me, but does great nonetheless. Here's their latest blog post, detailing their work with Kato.im, a new, cat-loving client.
Great writing, Lizzy!
Back in July we started working with said cat company that was operating in beta mode at the time called Kato.im, which is the first free, full-featured professional chat solution for businesses.
I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I likedâ-even if I hated it.
Itâs so funny that I stumbled upon this article this morning, because I woke up irrationally livid at Facebook anyway. Why? Because for a while now, I feel like FB has been closing me in a box, and unless I play by their rules, I am losing access to the people who want to be reached by me. Â
I have almost a million followers on FB. But I reach a very small percentage of people with every post on average. And this isnât by my fansâ choice. Not a day goes by when I donât see comments like, âHey why am I not getting your updates anymore?â Iâm helpless to explain exactly why, but I have a good inkling.
In order to scale with the number of people we collect on our accounts, FB has had to implement technology to filter our feeds. Because theyâve learned that âsocialâ media is just that, and we canât just dump people when we get bored with them or want to move on in life. So the FB algorithm filters my content based on how many likes people make on the things I share. (Because closing people into interest pockets makes it easier to make money on them, I get it.)
So how do I, as an individual, fight this type of âdowngradingâ of certain types of content I share? Well, I could cater to the algorithm more. I could do this by sharing things I know will be popular!
Easiest way to do that? Share pictures of my face, my body and things based on my appearance.Â
This sucks.
Yes, I guess this is human nature to give feedback on our appearances, thatâs why weâre swimming in a world of selfies. But because our new virtual statuses are built on this type of feedback, it is training us to output things that will be popular, and that, in turn, tells women that achieving high statuses online means sharing things about their looks. To the detriment of anything else. Or else get buried and excised from the people around you. In a sense, weâre hostage to the algorithm.
Who thinks this is a good thing?!
And I think this is more than just about my own online engagement, itâs about FB specifically. I see way less of this on other platforms, this filtering of âeverything but the most reinforcedâ content. FB is training people to feed the algorithmic machine with things that will please the most mainstream. Reinforcing the median taste level. I think this methodology is marginalizing people who think out of the box, closing them in enclaves of people who only like exactly what they like. Trapping us in our own echo chambers of reinforcement, where weâre not influencing or being influenced by opposing thoughts. And in addition, weâre being tricked into believing that our small worlds are much bigger than they really are in the grand scheme of things.
Neither of these things is helping anyoneâs reality.
I donât think itâs healthy. Or good for us as a society. I think the internet is an amazing place, where you can connect with people who are like you, and be accepted when you donât feel accepted in real life, but the drive to make money and clean up the platform to scale properly is not helping us, itâs taking the good things about what the internet can do to the opposite extreme.Â
Donât look for my account to share more selfies than usual, or pictures of me in cute outfits. Thatâs not my style. Look for me to share the exact same stuff I always do.
Unfortunately, you might have to go way out of your way to look at all.Â
Big Little Man offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into the broader and very complicated social and cultural politics of race, masculinity and immigrant identity.
I once had a news writing instructor named Alex Tizon, back in 2008 at Western Washington University. He was a young middle-aged guy, a features writer for the LA Times, living in Seattle (teaching in Bellingham).
In 1997 Tizon had already won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting for the Seattle Times.
Now Tizon's got a new book out called "Little Big Man, In Search of My Asian Self," published this past June by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The link above directs you to a solid review by @hansnf.
Tizon taught me how to tighten up my own writing, and how cool it can be to write features.
One of my sharpest memories of the class is the time I asked him what he was currently working on. His answer was initially dismissive, something like, "Oh, it's boring, you wouldn't be interested." But I pressed him on it, and he told us all about how he was currently in the process of interviewing a guy living in a bomb shelter under some silos, doing something crazy down there. I'd written features before, but none were as exciting as that.
He was a new teacherâmine was the first class he taught. I could tell he was green. However, at the end of it, I could tell he came away having learned something. One of my coolest teachers ever.
He gave me good grades too, keeping my GPA up. Thanks AT!
He wrote some notes on my final paper for the class, among them an invitation to have a beer with him sometime. I'm still trying to nail him down for that. Come on Alex, get me tipsy and lay your secrets on me!
And congratulations on finishing the book, my esteemed colleague.
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