congratulations to my wonderful friend laura, whose article on walt disney's fingerprinting collection was published recently as part of the news 21 initiative on the future of journalism (read more about the program here). boing boing even picked it up, and you know that's when you've made it! anyway, i encourage you all to read it.

it's been decided - i will be covering congress and all affairs political for both the Yo/rk Da/ily Re/cord and the Han/over Eveni/ng S/un come this september. those ARE in pennsylvania, right? anyway, don't doubt it - i'm going to be coming to all my savvy media friends for insider political quotes. you know who you are. also, do i have any savvy pennsylvani in-the-know friends? cause, uh, i could use your help.

time to research! and try to convince both papers to redo their web sites! because, oi.

It appears that Exxon is astroturfing YouTube, producing content designed to look like an authentic, amateur piece belittling Al Gore's efforts to bring attention to the climate change crisis.

It's been a while since I got really upset by an advertising campaign. I sort of thought I'd grown out of it, to tell you the truth. Guess not. Kriston thinks I'm crazy, but I still believe there should be some sort of disclosure requirement that makes this kind of sleaziness nonviable.

More realistically, YouTube might want to think about introducing such a requirement into its license terms, if it wants to maintain the cachet it's currently enjoying. Eventually the copyright owners will yank their content. If all that's left is a collection of cutting-edge marketing efforts, interest in the site will evaporate pretty quickly.

fishbowl's annual hot media hotties hot hot list is up - and in the male off-air selection alone, we have three competitors of whom i know. 1) joe heim: wonderful man. sweet as pie. i interned for him at washingtonpost.com. 2) nick gillespie: he must be hot, because i am a bag-eyed ho unworthy of his love. 3) a mysterious man who i hear likes chia pets.

who to vote for?!

hey y'all, besides asking your opinions on my quite-possibly-hideous-taste-in-shoes, i have another favor to ask. i'm writing an article for you-know-who on the decline of the indie store - you know, big chains taking over and fun, quirky, small stores closing, etc. why it's happening, where it's happening, will independent stores cease to exist at all one day, etc etc. so i'm asking you for any thoughts, fresh angles, or sources who might be willing to be interviewed (store owners and employees, patrons, um, indie store pontificators and experts?). if you've got some tips, shoot me an email, or leave a comment.

things i like about working here: cutie canadian metrosexual and space/tech reporter da/ni/el sieb/erg was behind me this morning in line for starbucks. you may have seen him recently on cnn's coverage of the shuttle launch. the cashiers greeted him enthusiastically (apparently they are all good friends) and said they hadn't seen him in a while. he responded, "well, i've been on the road. that's the life of a correspondent, you know."

indeed. also, he smelled good.

rob got linked on romenesko. cool!

actual words emitting from anchor lady's mouth: "next up: more on kim jong-il. some say he's just crazy; some say he's crazy like a fox. stay tuned."

in other news, tommy and the weather gods must be in touch, because after driving home last night from having drinks with the ex who's in town for business, my little dodge neon and i were nearly EFFING WASHED AWAY. seriously, there was a poorly-drained intersection where i swear to god, i actually started to feel my car float. it was scary. so i hereby, from my 10 days' worth of living experience, deem atlanta the goddamn rainiest city in the world. its slogan should be: "atlanta! you don't think of it as a rainy city, but you should. also, you'll drown."

for those of you who have been reading for a while, you may recall my invective against the evils of powerpoint. it's something i still sort of vaguely stand by, but mostly because i really suck at powerpoint, not because of any particular reason. however, in our media management class, we've been forced to create powerpoint presentations no less than four or five times already, and the application will be a major part of our final presentation to the star tribune. so, you know, you suck it up.

i've also already become a more skilled powerpointer in part thanks to my friend andrew, whose partner cliff is a powerpoint guru. he literally wrote the book on powerpoint. apparently, since this quarter started, cliff was getting a bit miffed at andrew all of the sudden asking millions of powerpoint questions when he had never showed a real interest in his work before. so andrew did what any loving boyfriend would do: he called up all his media contacts on a friday afternoon, and voila: yesterday, the la times wrote a major business section article on cliff and his skills (which have of late been shown off in the vioxx trial). pretty sweet, no? it's actually a pretty interesting read, no matter what you think of powerpoint. the article was also the most emailed one on the site yesterday, and get this as an additional bonus: cliff's book shot up to #4 on amazon. not too shabby!

our class spent today at the chicago tribune building, talking to the folks of Red Eye (the chicagoan version of express, for you d.c. folks), chicagotribune.com, and tribune interactive. everyone there was lovely and smart, of course, but what was really great was seeing the inside of this gorgeous building. even better was the office space for tribune interactive, which was in the basement, where the printing presses used to be!!1!! i found that really cool, for some reason. it's very sleek and modern and loft-like down there - not your typical basement office. certainly a space where i wouldn't mind working. apparently it's won all sorts of awards. check it out.

i should also mention that we got to check out the printing plant of the daily herald last week, and for all i think of print papers, that is one impressive piece of machinery. check out some images of the press (not the DH's; a german company, i believe) here. though the daily herald is the third largest paper in illinois, it's still what many consider a suburban paper, but its printing presses are some of the newest and most sophisticated in the country. they also have scary machine forklift type robots that load the enormous 20-ton rolls of paper and i almost got run over by one. or, like, it came within 20 feet of me.

printing presses. i know! exciting! alright, more voyeurism - you can check out the pretty faces of some of my classmates here.

i'm an idiot. i think, on the way down from observing the amazing view from the hancock tower this morning, my family and i rode in the elevator with eric zorn. who is eric zorn, you may ask? only my FAVORITE JOURNALIST BLOGGER EVER. he's a columnist/blogger for the chicago tribune, and he's excellent. he covered the ryan trial and recent local elections like no one else's business, but he also uses his blog for silly, fun, bloggy stuff.

i didn't recognize him - he was outfiitted in cubs gear, with a similarly-styled young daughter, and he was very talkative, but pleasantly so, on the 96-story ride down. at one point on the elevator, the sign, for whatever reason, reads "EZ," and his daughter said, "look, dad! your initials!" a small lightbulb went off at that point, but i really didn't think too much of it. but a google image search seems to confirm my suspicions, i believe. ah well. two ships passing in the night, or the elevator, or something along those lines.

remember when i joked that i wanted to be a journalism futurist? well, looks like the new york times is hiring...a futurist. i didn't think positions with ridiculous names like that actually existed, but there you go!

if you click through to when i wrote about the futurist thing, you can also get an account of my first weekend ever in chicago, with susan, which was about one year ago when we were checking out grad schools, and includes references to the now-infamous tequila bender from hell. tommy and (crossing fingers!) kriston might be coming out here soon, so i'll have to make sure to take them to that bar. and try not to puke in a cab in the process. that's right, i set high standards for myself.

this is probably way old news to everyone else, but i only found out a few weeks ago that NPR has a blog, mixed signals...and it is faboo. the normal blogger is jj sutherland, but he's currently off in iraq for a few weeks, so there's a guest blogger who's doing a fine job. but the real gems are jj's occasional posts from baghdad. check it out. it's pretty much my new favorite blog.

Alright, so they're both already well on their way to conquering the art and online worlds, but there's still something cool about seeing your friends show up in dead-tree format on every streetcorner in a city. So go check out the item by Kriston and the piece about Molly in this week's CityPaper.

I'm sure I'm irrationally drawing attention to what they consider to be a minor blip in their respective campaigns for multimedia domination — but this is the first time the struggle has made its way to a publication lowbrow enough for me to read.

the post's city guide just added a somewhat cool feature to their establishments' info - you can now send the name, location and phone number of a bar, restaurant, etc to your cellphone. that's neat, but it would be better if they would do a couple of things: actually publicize this in a venue beyond their post.blog, which is a neat blog but not widely-read by the kind of people who would actually be using the cellphone feature (maybe a post on the GOGblog as well? or a note on the front page of the city guide). second, and maybe this is in the works as far as i know, it would be cool if they had a google-ish text message feature, where you could SMS a particular number with a zip code and a description of what you're looking for - beer, chinese, whatever - and the city guide would send you back what's available in that area along with a brief descriptive blurb from the city guide's review. i'd hit it.

this has to be one of the stupidest opinion pieces i've ever read: this woman claims that the reason we traipsed so happily into the iraq war was that not enough people were reading newspapers. i'm sorry, was she even reading newspaper articles and columns around that time?

Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.

yes. the iraq war is the fault of bloggers and their dastardly plan to have readers read them. shite newspaper reporting had nothing to do with it.

that's the first ridiculous point. the second ridiculous point is basically that the reason for circulation declines is the readers' fault (with a healthy dose of blogs, of course). god forbid anyone ever think that maybe people don't read newspapers as much anymore because maybe newspapers aren't delivering what they need. the condescending view that only newspapers can properly educate people and the reason they're failing nowadays is the fault of the idiotic american public is one of the things that is sure to rile me up into a frenzy.

"My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives."

huh. if only we could do something about this...something like not allowing people to pick and choose what they want to read...perhaps a government-licensed newspaper that everybody is forced to read? that sounds like just the ticket!

shouldn't the new york times at least be a) more accurate than and b) more ahead of the curve than yglesias?

(channeling atrios) time for a blogger ethics panel!

my dear friend claire agre, who i met while working in milan and who is now a graduate landscape architecture student at harvard, is in the new york times today! woohoo! it's an article about the environmentally responsible redevelopment of a historic piece of former mining land in colorado. check it:

Academics and experts on mine reclamation---one of the biggest environmental problems of the West, where there are perhaps 500,000 abandoned mines---say that Breckenridge's groundbreaking path could change how mine reclamation works. With ownership of the pollution and control of the land, they say, comes the power to shape the post-mining landscape in a way that goes far beyond just cleaning it up.

"Breckenridge can lead the way," said Alan Berger, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard and founder of the Project for Reclamation Excellence, a group at the design school that works on reclaiming land damaged by resource extraction. "The opportunities of what the town and county can do here are completely open-ended."

And so are the burdens. The property is hatch-marked by miles of unmarked and unmapped trails carved by generations of backcountry users at a time when no owner was around to say boo. The new owners are bracing for what they expect will be contentious public meetings beginning this spring as managers decide which trails to keep open and who may use them. The town favors things like hiking and biking, while the county wants to make sure that motorized users have their say as well.

Mining's legacy on the forest is another headache. In gold's heyday, lumber was needed for mills and tunnels, and by the late 1800's the Horseshoe was stripped. The result today is a narrow monoculture in which the oldest trees are about 120 years old---mostly lodgepole pines.

Pine beetles, which have ravaged vast parts of the West, are just hitting this part of Colorado. Local officials warn that the bugs, which love mature lodgepoles, could kill 80 percent of Horseshoe's trees.

But Breckenridge, which has carved a tourist niche around its mining history and historic buildings also wants to incorporate the story of the Horseshoe into the fabric of the local economy. That means thinking about mines and miners, and how they gave rise to Breckenridge.

That is where Claire Agre, a Harvard graduate student in landscape architecture, enters the picture.

you'll have to read the rest to find out what superhero claire agre is doing to save the world!

you can see my world-renowned series of "claire, pensive" photos here, here and here.

for those of you vaguely interested in the media management project i'll be doing this spring at medill, (not many of you i imagine, so i'll put the details behind the cut) we've received the info:

...for d.c. as the saying goes.

there's a quick piece in the reliable source column this sunday where tommy and i are interviewed about the Legend of the Butterstick. though tommy isn't given really proper credit (he came up with the name, but the article doesn't mention that), AND our blog URL is not mentioned (le sigh) it is still a nice article, and, hoorah! and it mentions dcist a lot, which is awesome. anyway, there we are: our names in the washington post. maybe one day i'll actually get mine in there for something non-zoo critter related.

me: omigod
jodi wilgoren who changed her name from the nytimes is in the newsroom
and she was just introduced as wilgoren
and she's all like, "actually, now it's RUDoren"

y'all, one of the things you are lucky about is the fact that you get to read this here blog, and you get to see the intimate workings of a Real Live Journalist. not THAT intimate, sicko. but you know, thought process, research, super interview tips (hint: super interview tips do not include dropping contents of purse on interviewee's floor including, ahem, lady things, and inadvertently yelling, "shit!", not that i do that kind of stuff).

i thought as, you know, an extra special treat for you all, i would document my inner monologue as i attempt to complete a 1200-word article that is due, uh, tomorrow.

start: sit down to computer, full of two homemade cappucinos, buzzed, elated, ready to CHANGE THE WORLD with my story because i am a Journalist and we can change the world and shit.

write lede.

word count: 42 words. shit.

think: hmm. most heinous lede ever? well, what am i going to do about it? it's already there. jeez.

add quote. wow. adding a quote adds, like, a lot of words. hmm.

cut and paste about 17 unrelated quotes from pages of typed-up interviews. word count: a lot more! jeez, i'm practically done! now all i have to do is construct some sort of coherent narrative, with flow and wisdom and insight. easy peasy. totally rocking the espresso. you can totally do this, Reporter Catherine!

hmm.

i really hope george didn't sleep with meredith. lordy. that would be bordering on, like, nasty incestuous, also, i would have to kill meredith. with a pointy stick. that had been rubbed with chili powder.

espresso really, really...starts to kick in. in a bad way. goddamn. write two or three paragraphs very quickly with laser-like intensity. no matter they barely make sense and, uh, could potentially be incorrect. libel schmibel! the editing comes later! hey, i think the computer screen is starting to shake for some reason.

beer would be good way to counter espresso buzz, no? yes, yes i think it would.

word count. has not change since the 37th time i've word counted. microsoft should really do something about that. i should also really do something about only having miller lite in my midget fridge.

write a couple of seriously lame sentences.

fuck.

fuckity fuck fuck.

give up to chat on IM and rewatch some veronica mars. story isn't due till 5pm tomorrow; only 800 words to go. totally doable, no?

see, y'all don't need to be worried about the future of journalism! you have bright young things like me to carry the torch forward!

Today's Post has a an interesting profile of a botnet operator — one of those jerks who remotely infects computers, amassing swarms of enslaved machines that are then used to send spam, extort websites, steal information and generally do nasty things. The subject remains anonymous, only identifying himself as a high school dropout living in a small midwestern town. The three businesses closest to his house are also mentioned, but not named.

Except — whoops! It looks like the Post failed to scrub its photos very carefully. Within thirty minutes of the story being picked up by Slashdot, a user had noticed that the Post's photos contained metadata saying "Location: Roland, OK". Which, as you may have deduced, is a small midwestern town (pop. 3000). Another slashdot commenter googled for the businesses mentioned and was able to take a guess at the intersection where the guy lives.

Pride goeth before the fall and all that, I suppose. Have fun in jail, asshole.

i'm going to go out on a limb here and say, in response to this paragraph:

It's O.K. to fall deeply for one loser after another. It's O.K. to show up at a guy's house with a dozen roses and declare your undying affection. It's O.K. to have too much to drink and call your ex 20 times and then to be mortally embarrassed when you realize your number must have shown up on his caller ID. It's O.K. to stand at a phone booth in Times Square on New Year's Eve, drenched like a sewer cat in the pouring rain, crying your eyes out because the man you are infatuated with has decided that he needs some space.

that it's actually probably not O.K.

a compelling account from a journalist reporting from iraq for three years.

just a note to mark the launching of beepcentral, a web site aimed at young chicago surburbanites published by the daily herald, a newspaper serving the areas northwest of chicago. beepcentral grew out of a recent medill media management project, one of the reasons i applied to medill in the first place.

every year, a group of students who select to do the project basically spend a full quarter working as a consulting group to a local newspaper or publishing company. essentially, the company says "we want _____"; the students design, build and market a product from the ground up to suit the company's needs. generally the companies want a) something designed to bring in younger readers and b) an online component.

i'll be doing the project this spring quarter. i've heard rumblings that the partner this time around will be the minneapolis star tribune. i'm really excited about it, even though i have no clue as to what the project could be this time around, but i'll keep you informed!

don't know if anyone else subscribes to email tipster service daily candy - i do for both chicago and d.c., and while i often find their tips to be a) more geared to people earning $80,000/yr and up b) too cutesy, every once in a while they know what they're talking about.

well, i guess those folks knew what they were doing - they could soon be sold for more than $100 million, says the WSJ:

Mr. Pittman bought a controlling stake in the site for about $3.5 million in 2003. With traditional and electronic publishers keen to get their hands on Internet-advertising properties, Daily Candy could fetch more than $100 million, people familiar with the matter say.

While a relatively small transaction, a Daily Candy auction will be an important barometer for the pace and valuation of Web deal making. During the past 18 months, Internet media transactions have attracted top valuations, as publishers worry that advertising dollars are migrating online and away from newspapers, magazines and television. Big media players such as News Corp.; Dow Jones & Co. Inc., which publishes The Wall Street Journal; and E.W. Scripps Co. all have made Internet-related acquisitions.

Daily Candy's business is a simple one: It produces urbane email newsletters that make daily recommendations on shopping, entertainment, food and media. Originally written for a clutch of trend-obsessed New York City women, the site produces 11 electronic newsletters, including editions for Chicago, San Francisco and London. Advertisers pay for access to the newsletter subscribers.

Without costs for printing or the need for much editorial product, Daily Candy boasts margins of nearly 60%, say people familiar with the matter. The hope for 2006 is that the business will produce revenue somewhere less than $20 million, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the low-teen millions, these people say.

anyone interested can read an old but good interview with founder dany levy here.

i'm doing an article on the lawyers for the creative arts, an organization where lawyers donate their time and services to artists and creative entities in chicago to help them with contracts, intellectual property, tax exemptions, etc. i have an interview today with the head of the organization, but i'm also looking for people who might have used their services and i'm having a bit of a hard time. i'm sure the head of the org. will point me towards the right folks, but i was hoping someone out there might know somebody, too! so if you do, shoot me an email.

i don't mean to be cynical (she said, smirking evilly, because she almost always does). the chi-town daily news seems like a good organization, intent on focusing on citizen journalism, which i, as a new media person, should totally be behind (though i must say that sites that think they can exist solely on the efforts of citizens' articles, without any work or input or guidance or pieces by editors, are doomed to fail - though it doesn't appear as if this site isn't trying to do that).

but i just find it funny that, without fail, almost every news story published on the site every day is written by somebody from the medill news service. (we're a free wire service that sends out stories to several local newspaper clients.) that doesn't seem very citizen-journalism-y to me...

definitely worst part so far of reporting: going to a press conference about a big federal indictment, finding one of the defendant's phone number through some random internet research, calling him up and discovering he didn't even know he was being indicted by patrick effing fitzgerald. then having to tell him he was being indicted by patrick effing fitzgerald.

surprisingly, the response was "no comment."

that really sucked.

UPDATE: the case had to do with online piracy. you can read the tribune's account (they are speedy motherfuckers) here. if i'm lucky and they want it, my story will be appearing in the glorious nw indiana times tomorrow.

hey folks. you are all brilliant, lovely, interestingly-employed people who know a thing or two about getting a job, right? well, maybe you could help me out. i seriously need to update my resume but i've always been terrible at doing so. there's a couple of jobs i'm putting feelers out for, and i want to pass around the shiniest, awesomest resume i possibly can. so in the interest of taking advantage of your vast knowledge, i created a resume writeboard. if anyone who is any good at these sort of things could take a look and perhaps make some edits, content or grammatical (wolfson, i'm looking at you), i would very much appreciate it.

also, it's too long. cut it down!

the writeboard is here. password is catherine.

one reason i love my very local chicago news station that i watch in the mornings: as i was getting out of the shower around 7:15, this is what i hear coming from the television:

"stacey, can you run the clip of the monkeys riding horseback?"

so, this facebook.com thing. i'm doing it. sort of. i became aware of facebook's existence a couple of years ago when my brother, then still an undergraduate at UVa, talked about it. i basically got out of it that it was a friendster for college kids, which sounded fun, but SO BELOW wise old me.

well, now that i am a graduate student, and many of the people in my class happen to be fresh-outta-college kids who are facebook connoisseurs, i have been forced to create a facebook profile in order to appear hip and not-ancient and to maintain my new media internets cred. it is hard, but i am doing it. but generally, i don't understand why facebook is so popular, except that you can stalk people...which you can do with any social networking site. why do college kids prefer it over friendster? maybe because friendster sucks balls and is clunky and cluttered and difficult to use? hmm. maybe. facebook's design and features are pretty slick, i'll give it that - i especially like the photo album/upload features (though flickr is still superior to any photo features any site has going on). i guess its main appeal lies in the school affiliation. undergrad loyalty is a super-strong theme, and facebook takes advantage of that. beyond that, i don't really see a huge difference between it and friendster or myspace. but please, god, don't make me have to create a myspace profile, too.

for those who have a college email, you can access my facebook profile here.

that's right, folks: the two articles i wrote last week for my legal affairs reporting class? the two genius pieces on samuel alito? they were sent out over the wire to our client papers and i received the honor of being published in the...(wait for it)

NORTHWEST INDIANA TIMES!

literally dozens of people have now read my name in print! HOORAH.

just thought i'd put a warning out there: i now have a Real Press Pass. also, as of 11:30 this morning, i am BFF with patrick fitzgerald's spokesman.

watch out, world!

long shot, but if anybody out there has an invite to newsvine.com, i would love, love, love to have one.

UPDATE: yay! thanks to mike, both tommy and now have accounts, so presumably i can invite other people. let me know if you want one. you can read cyberjournalist's take on newsvine here.

one of my favorite pasttimes while eating shrimp, ham, drinking wine at 5 p.m. and sitting in my pajamas all day in front of the internets is obsessively searching job listings. it's too early for me to apply to any of them (i won't graduate till august or september), but i still like keeping tabs on what's out there. and i'm glad i did today, because i found a listing that any fun, hip, young journalist would die for: pop culture reporter at the washington times. witness:

Did we mention this is a dream beat? It encompasses movie, television, CD and concert reviews; essays and think pieces; artist profiles, trenders and other features; even investigative reporting. Pretty much anything on the pop culture horizon, as long as you can report aggressively and write with intelligence and style. Dream applicants desire stimulation of the imagination and intellect, unusual room to roam across subject boundaries, and wide exposure. They also are ready and able to write a ton and improve rapidly. And to have fun, an indecent amount of fun.

it is difficult not to imagine that addendum, "...an indecent amount of fun," being whispered maniacally with much cackling and rubbing together of evil conservative hands. of course, an "indecent amount of fun" at the washington times is likely the equivalent to the amount of fun that katie holmes is having being the indoctrinated zombie child bride-to-be of tom cruise, but still. different strokes, etc.

if there's one thing the folks here at northwestern are very good at, it is instilling the ever-loving fear of god into you. mostly fear that you, despite attending a top-notch journalism school, will never obtain a job outside of licking the boots of some magazine editor or, barring that, serving up the delicious will-be-the-death-of-me pumpkin spice lattes at starbucks. i still have two weeks left in my very first quarter and i. am. already. terrified. so i do what i usually do when i am scurred: turn to the internets. internets, will you help me get a job or, at the very least, a prestigious summer internship? i feel like an idiot asking for a summer internship, since that is so very junior year of college circa 2001, but my advisor recommends it if possible and if i feel like taking a quarter off of school.

ideally, internets, i would like a job/internship at an online news site. if i'm going to get all specific, i would like a job at washingtonpost.com or chicagotribune.com. a job that is queen of everything. or, whatever. i'm flexible. i'm also open to consulting positions for new media companies. my full resume is on my dead-monitor computer, but i will post some suckily-formatted basic qualifications behind the cut, and if my dead-monitor computer is ever fixed, i'll upload a real resume. if you have any contacts, or friends, or ideas, or alcohol, send me an email. thanks!

zunta.org: asking for your job help since november 2005.