Oh, and?

:)

UPDATE: Um, I was afraid this was going to happen. Note to Newseum: It would be super duper awesome if you'd create permalinks for the daily front page analysis. That way, when bloggers link to, say, the analysis of all the Obama nomination front pages, they don't come back the next day and see that their link now goes to some malarky about hockey. So, anyway, my smiley was a brief and lazy way of saying YAY OBAMA.

While you were sweating

Holy hell, it got humid fast. I don't care if "quickly" is preferred standard English grammar there or not. When you're talking about humidity, you spit the words out and get it over with and then go back inside and take a bath in iced tea.

Mmmm, iced tea.

Anyway, I would like to sit and write and write about lots of different things, but my eyes are still dilated from the eye doctor this morning and I can't focus on the damn screen. The good news is that my vision hasn't gotten worse in a year and a half. That's unheard of for me. So I may finally be stable enough to consider Lasik. Which means that if I am in a plane crash and get stranded on an island, I won't be the weakest link because I lost a fucking contact lens during the crash. (I know I'm only on the second season of Lost, so maybe that plot device is yet to come, but seriously — where are all my vision-impaired brothers and sisters who would be up the proverbial shit creek were they to land on an island with a pair of broken glasses or no spare contacts? Yes, these are the things I think about when I watch that show.*)

More good news: Yesterday I came in to work only to find out that I'd won a Scripps quarterly design award. Yee haw! I got a certificate and everything. I'm pretty proud. I've had a lot of help this year and been given a lot of freedom to create some pretty cool designs, so I'm really thankful for that. Here are the pages that clinched the win:



Apparently the judges really liked the tornado A1. We were sure to include the backstory with the description of the page. (That was the night we had to hoof it to the basement twice and lost at least an hour of production time and they still expected us to meet our regular deadlines. Oh, and it was Super effing Tuesday, too.)

*UPDATE: Oh, duh. As someone who does not exist on the internet reminded me, Sawyer has shitty vision. Although, they kind of abandoned that storyline real quicklike.

We have got to get this internet thing down some day

I'm about to pick a nit with the daily paper. I think I even beat Mediaverse to it!

This is the big story on the M cover today, though it's fairly buried in the online edition. It's a Washington Post piece about online citizen journalists. It is curiously devoid of any reference to any Memphis citizen journalists. There are no breakout boxes with any links to local blogs that would qualify as being run by citizen journalists (a dumb term, if I may say so, because it just sounds so cartoony). There is no sidebar talking about the vibrant community of local bloggers who cover local and state politics and business.

So is the reader to assume that citizen journalism is something that happens only in D.C., where the Post is, or in New York City, where the story is datelined? I think unless the CA gives some context, there's some danger of that. At the very least, it makes the CA seem out of touch to ignore this obvious bit of helpful context.

Just off the top of my head, I can name several local blogs that, in my view, provide citizen journalism just as much as Faye Anderson's does. Gates of Memphis, Smart City Memphis, Paul Ryburn (on the downtown entertainment/scene beat), Thaddeus Matthews (link NSFW today — gory pics of dead people and a bare ass are on the index page), Field Guide to Urban Memphis, and At Home She Feels Like a Tourist all do excellent original reporting and commentary. Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered writes more often at the aforementioned Mediaverse — primarily a media criticism/observation blog — now, but I'd still list him and his blogs along with these others. And those are just off the top of my head. I am absolutely positive that there are others I'm missing. My point stands, though.

Citizen journalists exist here. Hell, Memphis seems to be the kind of place where they could thrive (so many stories to cover and relatively few professional reporters covering them). I think the paper missed a good chance to talk about what local citizen journalists do, how they do it, and why.

Sometimes I really like my job

Like when I get to put Stephen Colbert's face on the front page. I mean, I always like my job, but everyone who works any type of job knows that sometimes there are little nuggets of nothingness that might seem meaningless to everyone else but, with careful attention, can be polished and kept and treasured.

And putting Stephen Colbert on the front page is something I can treasure. Cuz I'm a freak.

So, yeah. Not sure when Steve Cohen's interview will air. But it should be a hoot. Full story here.