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Archive for the 'Twitter' Category
Journalists need to tend to the trauma we experience covering horrible news
Posted in Breaking news, Journalism, tagged Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, Journalism, Storyful, trauma on August 17, 2016| Leave a Comment »
I encourage watching Storyful's video about processing vicarious trauma as we cover horrible news.
In my community of Baton Rouge, journalists this summer have covered fatal shootings by and of police officers as well as a widespread natural disaster. Other journalists cover war, terrorism and mass shootings. Even if you don't witness death and destruction yourself, interviews with survivors can be difficult for journalists. The Storyful video focuses on the impact of dealing with graphic images of traumatic news.
The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma provides helpful resources for journalists, both for effective and sensitive coverage of traumatic news and for dealing with the secondary trauma that journalists may experience.
Digital First Media newsrooms collaborate on trauma coverage, peer-support program
Tips for reporting on traumatic news
How do you 'steel' yourself to ask tough questions
Scott Blanchard's advice on asking tough questions
'Marie Christmas:' Some journalists fell for San Bernardino prank; others backed away
Posted in Accuracy, Breaking news, Ethics, tagged Anderson Cooper, Andy Carvin, Anime, Associated Press, breaking news, CNN, Gamergate, International Business Times, Jay Dow, journalism ethics, Marie Christmas, New York Times, Reported.ly, Scott Kleinberg, Twitter, verification on December 3, 2015| 28 Comments »
These tweets early in the San Bernardino shooting Wednesday attracted a lot of media attention, including a blog post from me last night and the initial version of this post (most of which will be retained here, with updates noted):
As I noted in both posts, this was either an eyewitness who could provide helpful accounts for reporters working on a breaking news story or a prankster playing the media. She answered tonight:
"Marie's" success included a telephone interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper and a bogus "Gamergate" reference in an AP story that was published online by the New York Times.
My own original version of this post raised doubts about her. But I concluded she was probably legit (but I said wouldn't use her tweets in a breaking news story without a phone interview). We never had a phone interview (though I gave her my number), but I thought my analysis of her media interactions fit well in the context of a blog that addresses media issues. Despite some passages that are now embarrassing, I think most of it holds up as valid analysis. I hope it improved after the liar started boasting about the hoax.
Let's be clear about several things here:
You can call it a prank, "Marie," but it's also a lie. That may make you smarter than some journalists, but you're still a liar.
Exploiting a tragedy for fun and laughs is lower on the scale of humanity than whatever you think media do in seeking to interview witnesses to tragedies. Enjoy your end zone dance, but I think you should attend the funerals of each of the San Bernardino victims whose deaths gave you such glee.
"Marie" didn't expose "the media." She exposed a few media outlets (albeit some big ones; more on them later). As far as I can tell, most journalists who contacted "Marie" didn't use her story. Some told me privately that they were skeptical. I will be asking them if I can use their time-stamped expressions of skepticism, all before her victory tweet.
Another important point here is that this may not be a one-woman (if "Marie" is, in fact, a woman) hoax. Shortly before she started her end-zone dance on Twitter, I had a direct-message exchange with a possible co-conspirator (unless this is another lie) who had posed as a CNN reporter early in her exchanges with the media. Some other fakes (detailed below in the original post along with the fake-CNN reporter) might also be co-conspirators.
Here are my DMs to and from "Paul Town," the fake CNN reporter:
For what it's worth, I don't think you fight for ethics in journalism, by lying, so that's just another lie. I did note Marie's tie to Gamergate, a running controversy over sexual harassment and conflict in video game development, in the original post.
Some journalists were skeptical from the first
Andrew Seaman of Reuters first called Marie to my attention by direct message Wednesday night, noting this tweet from Brian Ries of Mashable:
He elaborated in direct messages Wednesday night after my initial post, which focused more on the San Bernardino Sun's breaking-news coverage, but reported his doubts:
Later in the original post, you'll see several journalists who tweeted at Marie, asking for interviews. In most cases, I can't see any indication that the journalists used anything from Marie, so I think skepticism was widespread, though obviously not universal.
Reported.ly, which specializes in real-time reporting from social media, and produced a social-media timeline of the San Bernardino shooting considered and rejected Marie's tweet. Reported.ly chief Andy Carvin explained the decision to me in a Facebook message (I add the last names and Twitter profile links of the journalists he referred to by first name):
I just took a look at our chat log; we discussed the tweet in Slack. Kim Bui found it, then noted she hadn't used it. I suggested we take a close look at the timestamp to see what if anything we could glean from it. Malachy Browne urged caution and noted it was the first time the user had ever mentioned San Bernardino. So we moved on and left her on the cutting room floor.
Monday update: Browne elaborated on Twitter:
Gadi Schwartz of NBC LA reached out to Marie (you'll see his tweet below), but told me later by DM that the timeline "seemed fishy so i quickly moved on."
Scott Schwebke of the Orange County Register asked Marie to contact him, but eventually decided not to use anything from her:
Shortly before Marie began gloating about her lie, Seaman, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, expressed strong skepticism in a Twitter DM:
Who fell for the story?
While lots of journalists backed away, Marie did successfully troll some of the biggest names in the media, using the names "Marie Christmas," "Marie Port" and "Marie A. Parker" in various media reports:
On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the host interviewed "Marie Port" by telephone Wednesday night. I have asked CNN spokeswoman Erica Puntel for an explanation of how Cooper and/or his producers vetted Marie before putting her on the air, and will update if I hear from her.
I can't find a clip of just that segment from Wednesday night on Cooper's show site and don't plan to watch the whole episode to catch that interview on an official CNN video. (I suspect CNN will ask YouTube to take the clip below down, so I'll embed the video, followed by a screengrab):
Marie and her friends commented on Twitter about the interview. I used those tweets in the original post and left them in place if you care to read that far.
When a liar suckers the AP, that means potentially 1,400 newspaper members and thousands of broadcast members might have used the story.
Here's an archived version of the AP story of "Stories of those who survived mass shooting in California," which included this sneaky reference to Gamergate:
The woman said he had a strange emblem on his shirt with the letters GG on it.
Friday morning update: AP Vice President and Director of Media Relations emailed me this bulletin, saying it was sent to members about 8 p.m. Thursday:
The current AP story has a correction at the end:
This story has been corrected to eliminate the testimony from Marie A. Parker. That person has publicly retracted the statements.
I would prefer a stronger description than "retracted." That person (whose name most certainly isn't Marie A. Parker) is gloating about pulling a hoax on the AP. The correction should note that AP fell for a lie and quoted someone fictitious.
And in that spirit, I should note that Marie gloated about me, too:
While most AP members probably didn't use the story (that's true of most AP stories; every member selects a minority from a huge budget of news coverage), the New York Times did, and that prompted gloating from Marie and her friends/followers:
I understand the Times story occurs as an automatic feed from AP with no Times handling. The Times story did not carry the correction when I updated this story late Thursday, but it carries the AP correction Friday morning.
Times Standards Editor Phil Corbett emailed me:
As far as I can tell, that story was part of the automated feed of AP (and Reuters) stories that readers can access through nytimes.com. Those stories are not selected or edited by Times editors. Corrections to them, when needed, are handled by the AP.
The Times did write its own story on a hoax involving a possible suspect's name, but I'm not going into that here.
The International Business Times, quoted "Marie Christmas," saying she lived in "La Puerta, Calif." The story didn't say whether they communicated by phone or Twitter DM. I can't find any tweets between them. Google Maps shows a couple California businesses in the San Diego area named La Puerta, but not a community by that name. La Puente, Calif., is about 50 miles west of San Bernardino. I've asked IB Times contacts for explanation and will update if they respond. At 11:30 p.m. Central time Thursday, the story was not corrected.
Jay Dow
New York TV reporter Jay Dow of WPIX-TV made the best media mea culpa:
What's left of my original post
Pieces of the original post have been moved up and updated. I don't unpublish without a good reason, and embarrassment isn't a good enough one. So here's what's left of what I posted Thursday evening shortly before Marie started boasting about the hoax. I will note some updates and add comments on where I am pleased or disappointed with what I originally wrote. But it's all here, unless I moved it up and updated:
Eyewitnesses who tweet about horrible news events can be important, willing and helpful sources for journalists covering breaking news.
All journalism ethics codes stress accuracy and verification. Coverage of breaking news has always tested journalists' ability to verify information in a hurry. The 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia, well into the digital age, but at the birth of the social media age we're experiencing now, resulted in inaccurate front-page banner headlines and late-night broadcasts trumpeting the "miracle rescue" of 12 trapped coal miners. It later turned out that only one miner had survived. The mistaken source in that story was then-West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.
Unfolding breaking stories today often call on journalists to vet lesser-known sources, such as "Marie Christmas," whose tweets above offered journalists a chance to connect with an actual eyewitness, while awaiting those official reports (which, as the Manchin case reminds us, can be mistaken).
Breaking news stories have always required journalists to try to connect with eyewitnesses, some of whom want to talk to us and some of whom don't. Asking them for interviews can be difficult, and sometimes a single witness will attract a media horde. Crude bunch that we can be, journalists (and our sources, too, I suppose) sometimes call this horde a clusterfuck. Which might be a good time to warn you that I'm not cleaning up language for this post. The rest of the F-bombs won't be coming from me, but mostly references to journalists in the media horde.
When journalists try to verify that people actually witnessed events they have tweeted about, we can be annoying, even insulting. Verification — and media inquiries in general — can be an uncomfortable. Even when we're doing good journalism we can be intrusive and we have to be skeptical.
Before I was able to ask "Marie Christmas" about what she saw and experienced Wednesday, I mentioned her (though not by @JewyMarie username or the obviously fictitious name on her Twitter account) in a post yesterday about breaking news coverage. (If you don't want to read or reread the full post, just search "eyewitness" at the link above and you'll find the section where I mentioned her tweets and why Brian Ries of Mashable raised questions about whether she was an actual witness.) I believe Ries' concerns were valid and thoughtful, but I won't elaborate on them again here.
Update: Yeah, this paragraph is embarrassing: After closer examination, I believe "Marie" (she used the last name Port in a CNN interview) actually was an eyewitness, even though I'm not sure we know her true name. I saw the red flags that prompted Ries' concerns. But I saw many reasons to believe she was a true eyewitness. She had interactions before, during and after the incident that convince me strongly of her legitimacy. This will be a long post, with about 50 screenshots of tweets among Marie and friends, strangers and journalists. Some of the tweets will repeat ground I covered yesterday, but with screenshots this time, rather than just quotes.
I didn't use screenshots last night because Marie had taken her Twitter account private. I asked to follow her (you can't read tweets from a private account unless the user accepts you as a follower). She accepted my request and after our discussion by direct message, I have decided to use screenshots of tweets from, to and about her. She has decided to speak publicly about her experience yesterday, and I think her direct messages and Twitter exchanges illustrate some points about breaking news coverage and verification, as well as about the toll journalism can take on sources and how some of the public views our work.
Interspersed with the screenshots will be my comments. I won't use screenshots that address some personal matters Marie tweeted about before her moment of fame, but those tweets contributed to my belief that she's legitimate. We'll start with my direct-message exchange with her:
I normally wouldn't ask someone that bluntly about verification and whether she was actually there. A phone call would have allowed more gradual and polite vetting, some basic questions about who she was, etc. But since we were communicating by Twitter, I got to the point more directly. I also had already given her a link in which I discussed reasons for skepticism about her specifically. So I got to the point. I think you can detect irritation in the messages below, and I understand and respect that response. If we have more exchanges, I will add them to this post.
She has not DM'd me since, which I understand, but since she had answered questions and had done an earlier interview, I decided to grab screenshots and use her Twitter exchanges.
Clearly, she was right about her birthday. Before her birthday lunch, she got lots of greetings from Twitter friends:
The birthday greetings don't verify that Marie witnessed the shooting. But they do identify that the person who tweeted about the shooting is a real person with real friends who knew it was her birthday and acted friendly toward her. All of that could describe a prankster. But I'd be more suspicious of someone with a fairly inactive previous Twitter history. Marie is active and lively on Twitter. This looks like someone who would tweet if she saw something terrifying unfold on her birthday.
Plus, the tweets identify lots of friends you could contact for verification. Some might connect you with Marie directly. Some might have been at the birthday gathering and shot their own photos of it. I didn't try to contact the friends, but would have if I were covering a breaking story. I did check their timelines and didn't find anyone who had been at the birthday gathering, but also didn't see anything suspicious. They appeared to share interests and personality traits. One tweeted about hearing Marie on CNN that evening. Update: Trying to contact the friends directly would have certainly raised suspicions.
Of course, that could be amazement about a friend being on CNN to discuss what she witnessed. Or it could be amazement that a friend pulled off a con. More on the CNN interview later.
As I noted yesterday, Ries saw concerns in Marie's timeline: (Update: I used this screengrab up higher, but decided to leave it in its original place, too.)
Sarcasm is a frequent tone in Marie's timeline, and nothing I could see before Wednesday indicated any connection to San Bernardino (as Ries noted in a direct message). And I saw tweets about pranks, though they seemed to be appreciation for pranks by others, not a pattern of playing pranks herself. I saw valid reasons to wonder about the authenticity of Wednesday's claim. But I have no doubt this is an authentic person's oft-used Twitter account, even if the name is fictional. Frequent interests of Marie are Anime, video games and the Gamergate sexual-cyberharasssment controversy (in which Roguestar is a figure):
Marie Christmas, media star
I have taught thousands of journalists in recent years to use Twitter to connect with eyewitnesses to breaking news events. My first blog post on the topic was six years ago this month, noting how slow media organizations were in catching up with a survivor who tweeted immediately and extensively about a Denver plane crash. I have used that example in dozens of workshops, seminars and classes.
Back then, watching carefully on Twitter was a certain path to a scoop. Update: In teaching verification techniques, I noted that the survivor's username, @2drinksbehind, should be a red flag, as Marie's obviously bogus name was. But his timeline provided more help in verifying his authenticity.
Well, today someone who tweets from the scene of a breaking story gets plenty of media attention, more than I noted in yesterday's post. Marie received multiple inquiries from some news organizations (it's not uncommon to have lots of journalists working a story this big and duplication is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent).
I am messaging the journalists cited here in a variety of ways, before and after I post, and will update if they respond.
New York's Gray Lady and tabloid Daily News both wanted to talk to Marie:
More shortly on John Fairfield and others who objected to journalists seeking interviews with Marie.
This next inquiry came from the Chicago Tribune. Of course journalists should emphasize safety over media contact, as Scott Kleinberg did here:
Update (after initial publication but before the hoax-boasting started): Kleinberg, social media editor for the Chicago Tribune, send this detailed explanation of his Twitter approach to possible eyewitnesses (before the hoax was revealed):
First and foremost, I'm a stickler for accuracy. My tweets about this situation were careful … using official accounts, etc.
Maybe you noticed that I sent an angry tweet with all caps to the general world telling them not to tweet verbatim from the scanner. Ever since Boston it's been a thing and it drives me mad.
With @JewyMarie, I had a few thoughts at the time. Remember … I've been live tweeting in one form or another since 2008-2009 so I've learned a thing or 100 along the way. First thing: Never tweet and provide email addresses or phone numbers. That makes you look desperate and I bet it's what attracted those naysayers.
They say be careful and launch into the contact thing so it seems disingenuous. I was careful to put safety first and let her know that we'd love to talk to her but I didn't want to put any specifics out there yet.
Right or wrong or helpful, those other journalists don't realize how much perception matters. So for me I immediately thought of telling her to stay safe … I do that when I ask people to tweet weather photos so I'm all about safety.
I figured that if she responded, then I'd go into the deep verifying and ask her a whole bunch of questions. In the meantime I was looking at her feed and trying to get a sense for who she was. I instantly thought she was young and in high school based on the subject matter, the lack of capital letters and next to zero punctuation. I'd guess a senior in high school as some of the friends wishing her happy birthday had 15 in their Twitter handles, which I believe is their graduating year.
At that moment I just wanted to make the connection. And I wasn't looking per se to talk to an eyewitness, but I just happened to catch hers and the tone resonated where I wanted to reach out. The people who put in phone numbers and act desperate often send the same tweet to multiple people and that adds to the desperation even more.
Kleinberg did not get a response from Marie, but I like his thoughtful approach. I'm not opposed to tweeting a phone number, but I think he makes a valid point. I know many journalists who've gotten great interviews (and been able to vet sources effectively) that way. But perhaps that was more effective before today's Twitter media horde.
Update: After being informed of the hoax, Kleinberg added:
MSNBC invited a phone call. You can vet a source better and more politely over the phones. Phone numbers may be a your-mileage-might-vary situation:
This next inquiry is from the Daily Beast. (I recommend that journalists reaching out to news eyewitnesses identify themselves in the tweets, rather than counting on the person to check your profile to learn who you are.)
Even a Russian media outlet wanted to talk to Marie:
Multiple responses here. I'm not sure why I haven't been able to see ABC producer Ali Ehrlich's tweet to Marie. More shortly on some of the others, but this string shows the horde Marie was attracting.
As this next tweet indicates, Marie was not going to be easy to interview (clearly a red flag in retrospect, though some journalists, as noted above, backed away in part because of the lack of a phone). The "Buzzfeed Afghanistan" inquiry is clearly a fake, but the media inquiry at the end of this string was legitimate.
Backlash to media inquiries
John Fairfield, mentioned above, was the most consistent scold of journalists seeking interviews with Marie. But he had plenty of company:
Update: Jenna Susko of NBC LA says:
I messaged with her but did not use it.
Fake fake fake
Merry Fyrsmas, included above in a string of legitimate media inquiries, does not appear to be an actual journalist, nor is Fyrasec News, which she cited, an actual news organization (or one you can find on Google, at least). I suspect this is a friend, mocking journalists' inquiries of Marie.
Update: @Fyrasec confirmed my conclusion:
The inquiry below appears to be a fake, too. Merry Coyote's link in the Twitter bio is not to a political blog and I could not find such a blog. Might be a friend of Marie's mocking all the media attention. Or just a stranger joining the clamor.
The question below appears like something an actual journalist might ask, but the inquirer doesn't identify himself and discloses in his Twitter bio that the "Counterspin Central" blog he once authored is no longer active. Hesiod Thogony, whether a fake or real name for this Twitter user, has its roots in antiquity that I don't care to read about.
A fake CNN reporter
Though Marie did eventually appear on CNN, this inquiry is a fake. CNN reporters and producers are pretty easy to Google and I can't find any indication of a CNN employee by that name. Here's the top of his Twitter page:
And the tweet pinned at the top of his timeline:
And the home page for paultown.com, the link from his Twitter bio:
Nothing there looks like a journalist. Erica Puntel from CNN PR confirmed by email my conclusion that he's a fake. Will update if I hear from him. (If he follows me back, I'll DM him questions. If not, I'll tweet at him when I post this, inviting comment. The blog has no contact information that I can find.)
Update: "Town" followed me back and I've added our DM exchange up high. He's the guy (if he's male) claiming a "secret cabal" of media trolls.
Actual interviews
Marie later exchanged tweets from an actual CNN reporter:
Update: Hanks would not discuss his interactions with Marie. In fairness it should be noted that he is a CNN digital writer/producer, and I could not find any references to "Marie" on CNN.com. Hanks does not produce for Anderson Cooper 360, the CNN show where Cooper interviewed "Marie Port" by telephone Wednesday night, as I noted earlier in the updated post.
The reaction to the Cooper interview seems to indicate friends regarded it as legit. In retrospect, some, if not all, were clearly in on the hoax:
Marie and her friends wound down the evening with light banter.
She summed the day up:
I think if she would have gotten in touch with me on deadline, I could have verified pretty quickly that Marie was a valid eyewitness and tried to use and verify her real given name. I wouldn't have used her tweets in a breaking story without talking to her, though. Update: I'm glad I originally said that I wouldn't use the tweets without talking to her. And, given the fact that she was lying, I'm certain I would have been able to determine that if we had ever talked on the phone.
I feel comfortable using them here because of our Twitter exchange and the context I am providing. The work I spent on this blog post was way more than you can spend on one source in most breaking news stories.
Here were my last DMs to her (I have not heard back, but will try again and update if I do).
I'll update with responses, if any, from Marie and journalists I have messaged (and will continue messaging; sometimes sending the link to a published post brings a response).
Post script
As I've noted in earlier posts about identifying mass killers, I don't like indulging attention-seekers, and these trolls clearly relish attention, even if for their fake names. So it sickens me to feed that disgusting behavior with this much attention. But journalists covering breaking news should learn from our mistakes. I made mistakes in my initial analysis of this episode, and other journalists made bigger mistakes. So I wrote this long, long updated analysis in hopes of making it harder for trolls to exploit tragedy, and journalists' challenges in covering unfolding breaking news.
I suggest reading my social media verification tips (I may need to reread them myself, and update). I also suggest reading the Verification Handbook. In my chapter of that book, I used (and explained the history of) one of journalism's favorite clichés: If your mother tells you she loves you check it out. And if someone with a phony-sounding name tells you anything, double-check and triple-check it out. Or move on to a more credible source.
One final point: This hoax was clearly rooted in Twitter, and social media have given liars and pranksters new tools. But media hoaxes way predate social media. Journalists have been interviewing teen-age boys named "Heywood Jablome" (say it out loud; the kids always spell it for the gullible reporters) for decades.
Friday evening postscript
If you've made it this far, you might find the comments from trolls below interesting. Fascinating patterns: Moral indignation about failings (some of them valid, obviously) by the media but completely clueless about how cowardly they appear hiding behind bogus names and how completely lacking they are in integrity, as they trumpet lying as a perverted tool of digital vigilantism. I responded to a few, because I respond to almost all commenters here, but I'm going to stop. I generally delete comments from trolls, because they are so clearly seeking attention and I don't like to indulge attention-seekers. But they seem appropriate here, showing the psychology of the lying troll better than I could describe it.
Update: Of course, I spoke too soon. Right after I posted the paragraph above, a troll lied in a comment, so I deleted it. You can defend lying here, but I won't tolerate new lies. Find somewhere else to troll. And another update: No sooner did I post that last update than the same troll posted another long diatribe with more lies. I've deleted his/her entire thread, including my responses. This was the most active troll in the comments, but I think enough others remain to illustrate the points I've made above.
San Bernardino mass shooting provides strong examples of breaking news coverage
Posted in Breaking news, tagged breaking news, San Bernardino, San Bernardino Sun, Twitter on December 2, 2015| 4 Comments »
Southern California media has done an excellent job, from what I've seen, of reporting the mass shooting in San Bernardino using liveblogs and social media.
This post is my early and admittedly incomplete assessment of coverage that is still unfolding, and I fell behind in following the story as I worked on the post, so it might reflect early developments better than later ones. I admit a bias on this topic: I visited the San Bernardino Sun and taught liveblogging, use of social media and other digital skills to my former colleagues at Digital First Media there and throughout the Los Angeles News Group, where journalists pitched in on today's coverage. I'm proud of what I've seen of their performance. I watched their work more closely than anyone else's and will unapologetically focus on it more.
What I'm going to do here is identify and show examples of best practices (and some not as good practices) in covering a breaking news story on Twitter and a liveblog. In a separate post tomorrow, I'll curate a debate I joined with some other journalists about covering these unfolding stories. Update: Twitter embed codes don't seem to be working in this post right now, but if you click on the date in the block quotes for tweets, that should take you to the tweet.
This blog post will continue to unfold, as the coverage does, after I initially post. I won't mark any updates unless the correct the original post.
Report what you know
You can and should report important facts, with attribution, as you confirm them. Early in a story, the facts may be vague and impartial, the attribution no more than "reports." But be as specific as possible within each tweet and in the flow of your coverage. (more…)
Even in long writing, make your central point tweetworthy
Posted in Wisdom in tweets, tagged Anne Frank, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Rachel Carson, Ronald Reagan, Twitter on November 9, 2015| 1 Comment »
"What is the tweet you want people to remember out of a long piece?" #manship2010 @stevebuttry
— Abbey ⚓ (@AbbeyH113) November 4, 2015
In a series of posts nearly five years ago, I made the point that some of the great wisdom of the ages fit easily into tweets. I made the same point in some classes last week, noting that even in long writing forms, such as books or speeches, you should make key points briefly in memorable lines.
In my slides for the class, I imagined how some historic speeches or books might have been summarized in tweets:
Suggest some other imagined tweets from historical writing such as books and speeches, and I'd be happy to add them here (and possibly use them, with credit, in future classes and workshops).
The rest of the class
As noted above, these tweets come toward the end of a class about writing for social media. I review the full class in an accompanying post. Here are the slides for the full class:
Creative use can turn a bad practice into a smart one
Posted in #twutorial series, Digital First Media, tagged #twutorial, Christoph Trappe, hashtags, livetweeting, Twitter on January 5, 2015| 7 Comments »
I don't post a lot of lists of don'ts on my blog. I don't think I've ever posted a list just of what not to do (please correct me if you remember one), though suppose I've probably tempered some tips posts with advice on what not to do.
Christoph Trappe, linked from Twitter avatar
I certainly could compile a list of journalism or social-media practices I don't recommend, but I often think that someone smarter than me — or perhaps someone with different goals — could use those practices successfully. They may use the practice in a way that I couldn't foresee or in a unique situation that turns the potential annoyance some people feel from that practice around, giving it appeal (or using the annoyance in a creative, positive way).
Christoph Trappe, a friend from Iowa, probably falls into both of the categories above — someone smarter than me, with different goals. I highly recommend his Authentic Storytelling Project and think it could benefit people in various fields of communication.
In a tweet last night, Christoph referenced a post from October about his Twitter pet peeves.*
My Twitter pet peeves http://t.co/5cjba5cJhZ
— Christoph Trappe (@CTrappe) January 5, 2015
I couldn't exactly see what prompted his calling attention to an old blog post, but I've done it before (today, in fact), so I read with interest a post that slipped past me the first time.
I commend the post to your attention without endorsing all his peeves. I share Christoph's annoyance at most of the practices he listed. For instance, I, too, am peeved when people send automated direct messages thanking me for following them (I welcome personal messages, though) or post only teasers and links. (more…)
A NY Times editor: 'Having the top editor active on Twitter is important'
Posted in Twitter, tagged Dean Baquet, Lexi Mainland, New York Times, Twitter on October 18, 2014| 2 Comments »
I thought I was done blogging about whether top editors should be active on Twitter. Then last night, Lexi Mainland tweeted this:
.@PostBaron and @arusbridger have made me come around in my thinking: having the top editor active on Twitter is important.
— Lexi Mainland (@lexinyt) October 17, 2014
As her Twitter profile says, she's an editor on the Times' interactive news desk. Not exactly agreeing with me (as you'll see in some subsequent tweets), but sort of agreeing with me. So, given the interest in my criticism of her boss, Dean Baquet, and other top editors who aren't active on Twitter, and Baquet's response to me, and the response to Baquet, I thought I'd give the topic at least one more ride and curate last night's Twitter exchange among several of us:
@lexinyt @PostBaron @arusbridger: You mean me and @stevebuttry telling you didn't work? I am shocked 🙂
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) October 18, 2014
@lexinyt why's that?
Joseph Lichterman (@ylichterman) October 17, 2014
@ylichterman They're such good editors. They pick great stuff to share and are great at pointing out why it's worth paying attention.
Lexi Mainland (@lexinyt) October 17, 2014
@ylichterman It's a pleasure for anyone to follow the top editor of a publication they love, when they're good at Twitter.
@lexinyt They do it well: listening, responding, adding value, and driving attention to great journalism on their sites and beyond.
— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) October 17, 2014
@jcstearns Totally. They do it just as well as any of us and are right in there. It's cool. I undervalued it previously.
@ylichterman I've been fairly dismissive of this in the past, but when someone who runs a media org. is on here and is good, it's great.
@lexinyt The whole debate over it has been fascinating. I agree though. When they do it well it's really a great bonus and good for everyone
@ylichterman The debate is annoying and I don't agree with a lot of the pontificating around it. But the point is that it's great content.
"Pontificating." OK, that could be me.
@lexinyt Right. I don't think the NYT, or its ability to innovate digitally, is suffering bc Dean Baquet doesn't tweet.
What I'd say here is that Baquet and his predecessors, who have been similarly dismissive of Twitter in terms of personal use, have led a lot of great innovation at the Times. So "suffering" isn't exactly the right word, and I don't think I ever said innovation at the Times was suffering. In many respects, it's been an innovation leader.
But a Times committee studied innovation and said the newsroom needed to do better. That's true in any newsroom, but no other has identified the need (to my knowledge) as clearly or in as much detail as the Times. Baquet has embraced the report and said he plans to implement its recommendations.
My point is that you lead innovation more effectively by example than by exhortation. But back to the tweets (where I think I made that point):
@ylichterman Yes.
@mathewi Also, one thing you don't usually point out: @andyrNYT, Dean's Editorial side counterpart. Great on Twitter/FB (currently away).
@lexinyt @andyrNYT: you are quite right — my bad
Valid point: I believe Twitter is a valuable tool for every newsroom leader and editorial-page editor.
@lexinyt @stevebuttry @ylichterman but when someone very senior isn't good at it – ie tone deaf or thud – ouch.
— Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) October 18, 2014
@sdkstl I agree. If you don't take to it and get good at it, it's not really worth it -- for anyone.
@sdkstl @stevebuttry @lexinyt @ylichterman Ah, the classic senior-executives-must-know-everything trap. The best will ask for help.
Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) October 18, 2014
@lexinyt @sdkstl @stevebuttry So is effective and engaging tweeting a mandatory talent for a top editor?
Mark Loundy (@MarkLoundy) October 18, 2014
@MarkLoundy It's a nice to have, not mandatory. Everyone's different.
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl I might stop a notch or two below mandatory. Valuable, important.
Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) October 18, 2014
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl It's more mandatory and important if you're trying to change your culture & emphasize digital success.
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl Actually, I meant more valuable & important.
@stevebuttry I stop before yoking an org's digital success w/one person's Twitter activity. But I agree it's valuable if it can happen.
@lexinyt I wouldn't yoke the two, just making the point that leadership by example works best.
@stevebuttry If a top editor isn't Twitter-comfortable, they need to bring something else to the table to make up for it. @lexinyt @sdkstl
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl Definitely. I think every top editor, including @deanbaquet brings lots to the table.
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl In leading a digital transformation, comfort w/ data or multimedia would somewhat offset not using Twitter.
@MarkLoundy @lexinyt @sdkstl Or some experience in different social tools (Instagram, YouTube, etc.). Or live coverage. Etc.
If you can't effectively use Twitter and Facebook - particularly Twitter - you're done as a journalist nowadays. @MarkLoundy
Matt Maggio (@MaggioMatt) October 18, 2014
@stevebuttry @MarkLoundy @lexinyt by the time someone becomes a top editor now s/he should be comfortable interacting via social media.
Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) October 18, 2014
Which is bigger? 19 percent or 40 million? Twitter use is huge
Posted in #twutorial series, Twitter, tagged Ann Friedman, Dean Baquet, Twitter on October 15, 2014| 1 Comment »
Numbers always demand context.
Twitter is used by "only" 19 percent of Internet-using adults. That was the word Ann Friedman used in a Columbia Journalism Review piece, following up on the discussion of New York Times Twitter use started by Buzzfeed and continued by me, Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and others.
Friedman's piece gave reasons why a journalist might want to use Twitter as well as some why you wouldn't. She's enthusiastic about Twitter and I applaud her contribution to this discussion. But I'm going to pick at that one word, because others have used that 19 percent figure as a reason to dismiss Twitter. On Twitter and in a comment on Friedman's post, people zeroed in on that number as a supposed sign that Twitter isn't important (Ivan is channeling others here, not expressing disdain):
Q2. But but but … why Twitter and not other tools if only 19% are on it? What is it that makes it better, if at all? #dfmchat
— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) October 15, 2014
But 19 percent of adult Internet users is a lot. Let's do the math:
The most recent estimate of U.S. population is 316,128,839. The adult population is 76.7 percent of that, so we're at 242,470,819.
87 percent of adults use the Internet, according to Pew research. That's 210,949,614.
So 19 percent of that is 40 million Americans.
How much differently would Friedman's piece have read if she had written "a whopping 40 million Americans" instead of "only 19 percent"?
My opening point was that numbers demand context. So here's some context for you: 19 percent of adult Internet users or 40 million Americans is more than:
The people who buy the 541 daily newspapers who reported figures to the Association for Audited Media.
The population of California.
The votes George H.W. Bush received in 1992.
iPhone sales last quarter.
The people who watched the last episode of "Breaking Bad."
The point is: Internet use is huge and 19 percent of its users are a lot of people. Google, Amazon and Facebook have bigger audiences, I presume, maybe a few more. But there aren't many bigger digital audiences than Twitter's.
And, as I've said many times before, Twitter is an excellent tool for finding sources on breaking news, liveblogging and many other journalism uses that have nothing to do with the potential size of your audience.
Don't use 19 percent as a measure of how small Twitter is. It's a measure of how big Twitter is.
Update: I remembered this after initially posting. I made a similar argument here a couple years ago, when the numbers were smaller.


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The Tudors (season 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
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The series, a banquet for the eyes, flaunts excellent efficiencies as well as a traditionally genuine mood yet just periodic flashes of the type of activity as well as thriller you may get out of such a duration item. Tudors for a writing on the socioeconomic stress that improved England throughout Henry's power. Still, the program does a great work of revealing the interaction of enthusiasms as well as national politics that formed many of his choices. Although "The Tudors" includes an additional gem to the crown Outset has actually been building of late, this certain gem isn't really all that amazing.
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TTRP Corner – Making a Character with Depth
By Christopher Rondeau on	 April 17, 2020 0 Comments
Have you ever had trouble creating a character for your Tabletop Game? Do you want to have some depth to your protagonist? Come check out "TTRP Corner" and see ideas to incorporate in your next game.
One of the constant questions I am asked is how to create deep well-rounded characters. Here is a simple four points list to get your gears grinding. If you can create a great character, you are going to bring a level of enjoyment for yourself and everyone at the table. Today, I will be building Blitz, the Goblin barbarian, to provide an example and clarity of what I mean. But first… let us talk about
PART 1: MECHANICS
Photo by Clint Bustrillos on Unsplash
I believe that you need to be able to play a character that you will enjoy short and long term. Your great character isn't going to be fun if you don't enjoy the system you are playing the character in. Read your rulebook and make sure you can play this type of character within the mechanics of the game and that you will enjoy playing it. The worst part is playing a wizard when you don't like the idea of spell slots.
For myself, I enjoy playing shorter characters because they are naturally viewed as the underdog. Halflings, goblins, kobolds, and dwarves naturally have a height disadvantage that they must creatively overcome. I also enjoy martial characters over spellcasters. If I happen to play a spellcaster, it is almost always to augment my melee abilities or to support my party. Creating Blitz, the Goblin barbarian, fits my exact playstyle and I should enjoy the mechanics of the melee character.
PART 2: BACKGROUND
Understanding where the character came from is very important. Your character was not always adventuring and must have done something. I have found that players normally think of social class when thinking of their background but in reality, I think you need to figure out the defining moment your character left his/her life to adventure. My favorite mental image is the kid who sees a war hero enter his small town and at that moment he decided that he also wanted to be a hero. Perhaps even, your defining moment comes from the first session but talk with your Game master first about that.
Blitz was a miner in a desert community. He mined precious stones for an ungrateful employer. However, he was fired due to not making his weekly quota. After being evicted from his home, he walked the streets of this desert trying to find new meaning and a place to lay his head. Suddenly, he witnessed a stand-off between guards and a gang. Unable to react, he found himself with a scimitar to his throat and a gang-member using him as a hostage. When the guards didn't seem to care for his life, he had his defining moment. He bit the hand of the criminal as hard as he could, took the scimitar and swung at his assailant. From there, he made a commitment to only work for himself. This defining moment sets the tone for the rest of his story.
PART 3: RELATIONSHIPS
Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash
I often think that players forget they would have had friends or family prior to adventuring. They may not be positive relationships but they must have met someone. My golden rule is to have at least three figures that helped define the character and at least one location. I am defined by my friends and family, and thus my character must be as well.
Blitz's location is the Ladenswallow Mine in the desert community, he worked there and that is all he ever knew as an adult. He doesn't think fondly of this place, as it was mostly dark and dusty but it shaped him to be the goblin he was. His three relationships are his boss named Duncan who fired him and acts as the antagonist prior to adventuring. The Captain of the Guard who would gift him equipment after defeating the criminal. And lastly his parents who helped raise him before he moved out. All of these things help round out the character and help define his weaknesses and strengths.
PART 4: GOALS
Many people stop thinking about the character as soon as they enter the game. But a character's development does not stop at that first session. Therefore I suggest three things that you can give a game master to help grow your character. First, give them some personal obstacle that they must overcome. Perhaps a personality trait or a debt that is following them. Then give them a concrete and abstract goal. A goal of something they want that they can work towards and an abstract goal that they want to obtain. Perhaps a cleric wants to go on his divine quest but abstractly he just wants to feel loved.
Blitz at his defining moment made the decision to not depend on anything. His own obstacle is going to be asking for help but everyone needs a helping hand. As a GM, I would focus on putting Blitz in situations where the skills he has isn't good enough for the situation. Blitz concretely wants a house with someone in his employ so that he can be a better boss. His abstract goal is that he wants to be respected by people around him and not put down because of his statue.
I believe in collaborative storytelling. As a Game Master, I ask my players to think deeply about their character. Often, I build the plot off the character goals. Blitz wants a house and a butler, how can I put natural obstacles in front of him that make it hard to achieve his goal? Perhaps no one wants to sell him a home and he has to earn the respect of the city to get his villa. If a player can see their character overcome an obstacle to reach a goal, when they accomplish it they will feel proud of their character. Happy gaming friends!
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Christopher Rondeau
Christopher Rondeau is a storyteller based in southern California. Finding himself with little work, he ended up creating a job as a Game Master full time on the internet. Chris spends most of his days reading everything he can, writing bad fiction, and watching old Digimon cartoons with his daughter. Sometimes you can find him Dungeon Mastering a podcast or streaming on twitch. Most likely though, he is panicking about his creative thesis for his master's degree. Find out more at https://rondeaucreator.com
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New York Asian Film Festival 2017.03: Village of No Return, Japanese Girls Never Die, Mon Mon Mon Monsters, and Blood of Youth
Four films the day before, a relatively early walk back to the AirBNB, sleeping on something pretty couch-like, ad then back at it again. I started the day with Bong Joon-ho's Okja, and if I'm lucky and nobody chases me away from this AC outlet, the next post down (or up) will be what I thought of that weird little movie and Netflix funding and releasing them almost imperceptibly in theaters. If not, hey, it's Fantasia time!
For better or for worse, Okja didn't quite line up with what was going on across the street in the Walter Reade, so I had some time to kill afterward, mostly hanging around the little park in the middle of Lincoln Center, then it was back across the street to the Reade for another four-movie marathon.
It was a pretty good day - the sort of fun genre festival day where, even though the films are going for something pretty visceral, there at least a little to unpack as one ruminates upon the movies later. I was kind of let down that I didn't get any Hong Kong over the weekend, but sometimes that's how it goes.
[< ------ INSERT PHOTO HERE ------ >]
So, with my phone telling me I had 2% storage left and a trip coming up, I offloaded everything to my Windows laptop, which I left in Boston, forgetting that I would be trying to post this from my Chromebook in Montreal. So, come back in August to see Yang Shu-peng introducing his film Blood of Youth
I may not have been able to get through his movie because it was the end of the day and I was sleepy, but the guy's got an interesting story; he never went up through the usual film-school channels, instead working as a firefighter before making his first two films, both period pieces, with Blood of Youth being his first contemporary picture. To me, this sounds like the hard way to go about it, but he pointed out that censorship is more of a problem in present-day stuff. It is one thing to show corrupt officials in the Imperial Court 500 years ago, quite another to imply a police officer is anything but completely dedicated in today's People's Republic of China, even though human nature hasn't really changed.
Anyway, the movie ended I was spit out onto the streets of New York, exceptionally pleased to find a 24-hour-diner not terribly far from the length of sidewalk where Megabus departs from Boston (not particularly close, admittedly, being in the opposite direction from the subway station, but when it's 12:15am and your bus doesn't leave until 3am, you've got some wiggle room). Can't really say I got a decent night's sleep on the way home, but the employer gave us Monday 3 July off without either calling it a paid holiday or making us use time-off, so I had time to atch up later in the day.
And now, I am in Montreal, getting ready to start the next festival! I'll be at The VIllainess and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (amusingly, The Villainess will close NYAFF a few days after opening Fantasia, so even though one festival is "before" the other, the movie goes the opposite direction), so come say hi!
Jian wang cun (The Village of No Return)
Seen 2 July 2017 in The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
If The Village of No Return is meant as satire - an idea I am more amenable to now than I was walking out of it - then it's either the sort that plays much better to its home audience or which attempts to bury its true intentions under enough other material that they can easily be lost or distorted. After a few days considering it off and on, I'm coming around to liking Chen Yu-hsun's ambition and some of what he seems to be trying to say, although he often makes a cluttered mess of it.
Though the film opens away from the village of the title, it gets there soon enough, as merchant "Big Pie" Chu (Ban Zan) arrives home with a secret mission from a nearby lord and rumors that there may be a railroad coming through. His beautiful wife Autumn (Shu Qi) is waiting, although it's not like she has a choice - she was a gift to him and has a shackle around her ankle after her previous attempts to escape and find her true love Dean Wang, who was supposed to return after a year making his fortune in the capital but has been gone three. Even more notable, though, is lay monk "Rainbow" Fortune Tien (Wang Qianyuan), who carries with him a mysterious artifact - the "Worry Ridder" helmet, which can extract troublesome memories from one's head, expelling them as tiny cocoons. Which sounds nice, but before long he's used it to erase the memories of everyone in the village, telling them that he is chief, Autumn is his wife "First Flower", and their goal is to help him dig for a long-buried treasure. Autumn is not just a pretty face, though, and has an inkling that something isn't right even before Dean (Tony Yang Yo-ning) finally comes home.
Even before Rainbow shows up, there's a fair amount of misdirection going on - Big Pie is meant to provoke the dangerous Cloud Clan of assassins into an attack, giving the lord cover to intervene and be seen as a savior rather than an aggressor - although the film seems to forget about it for much of the running time in much the way that the brainwashed characters do. Throw in the fact that the assassins maintain their cover by effectively being the country's postal service, and the film is actually built on a very solid theme of how knowledge is power in a very real sense, and tyrants will re-write the actual facts of the situation to serve their own purposes (and, as a key scene or two implies, even a relatively benevolent leader may find it hard to resist that temptation). Chen and the production design team are also cute with how they use the Worry Ridder - it's a whimsical design that doesn't seem out of place in this sort of period comedy at all, but it has a user interface, and that doesn't seem like it's just an amusing anachronism but commentary on the present.
Azumi Haruko wa Yukuefumei (Japanese Girls Never Die aka Azumi Haruko Is Missing)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Japanese Girls Never Die looks like it should be trickier to get a handle on than it is, cross-cutting as it does between two or three related stories and putting what looks like a mystery at the center. But for as much fun as puzzle-boxes are, director Daigo Matsui never lets this aspect of it overwhelm the story. We spend more time watching Haruka and Aina and how they individually feel diminished for being different types of young women in modern Japan, less trying to puzzle out how their stories will connect, and as a result, both the bits tie in and those that don't feel like a bonus.
We're introduced to two or three threads right away, as Haruko Azumi (Yu Aoi) seemingly vanishes outside a convenience store in the time that it takes a camera to pan back and forth, a group of three young people spray paint a stencil on a wall, and a classroom or two's worth of schoolgirls rowdily fills a movie theater. Soon enough, we're flashing back to get to know folks better - Haruko still lives at home at the age of 27, working in the office of a small business where senior office lady Hiroko Yoshizawa (Maho Yamada) does all the work and the two men in charge don't even pretend to treat the women equally; her friend Hitomi (Serina) is marrying a wealthy older man, but she's looking at Yuji Soga (Huwie Ishizaki), a slacker from her high-school class still working at a local convenience store. Speaking of high-school classmates, 20-year-old Yukio Toagashi (Taiga) just loaned his friend Manabu Mitsuhashi (Shono Hayama) a documentary on a graffiti artist, and though they don't turn out to be particularly talented taggers, Haruko's missing-person poster catches their eye, as does Aina Kinami (Mitsuki Takahata), another classmate studying to be a nail stylist whom they make part of the gang in part because she seems like she'd be easy even if she is clingy. There are also news reports about a gang of teenage girls attacking single men out alone, but it's initially hard to register whether these scenes are happening in the background of the other stories or on their own.
For all that Matsui and screenwriter Misaki Setoyama (adapting a novel by Mariko Yamaguchi) seem to be jumping around, their focus is surprisingly tight: Haruko and Aina are both young women pulled back into the orbits of the men they went to high school with, maybe looking to reconnect with a time when more seemed possible even though these guys don't seem to be particularly invested in anything right now or interested in treating them well. Haruko and Aina may not have the exact same story, but there are certainly enough similarities that there's a certain tension to the idea that Aina could wind up on a poster of her own, chewed up by the same world that seems to have no place for a woman other than marriage to some deeply flawed man (or if not flawed, then from so far afield that a woman must be exceptionally lucky to find him).
Bao gao Lao Shi! Guai Guai Guai Guai Wu! (Mon Mon Mon Monsters)
* * * (out of four)
The jokey stammer in the title of "Mon Mon Mon Monsters" implies a playful irony that is not there at all; the latest from Giddens Ko doesn't quite take pleasure in its cruelty, but it is unflinching in how it uses school bullying as its backdrop for a supernatural horror story. A lot of viewers might hit the point of enough being enough or outright disbelief even before the dismemberment starts in earnest, although they probably shouldn't.
Even before the story proper starts, it's clear that Ko is looking at empathy for the marginalized, as the first thing the audience sees is a convenience store operated by an old woman who probably should have been able to retire years ago trying to get her developmentally-disabled grandson to learn how to make change, while chasing away a homeless man. From there, we go even further around to see a pair of ghouls - humanoid creatures somewhere on the continuum between vampires and zombies. The sun coming up, they retreat even further, into boxes that seem too small to contain their spindly bodies. That the first image of the undead is that they are vulnerable is important, as is the fact that this sort of cruelty exists outside of high school.
High school, on the other hand, is where Lin Shu-wei (Teng Yu-kai) is currently having things thrown at him at the head of the class as teacher Ms. Li (Deng Yu-kai practically smirks; he's been accused of stealing the money for the class trip. When he brings proof that bully Duan Ren-hao (Kent Tsai) and his friends Guo-feng (Lai Jung-cheng) and Wei-zhu (Tao Bo-meng) did it and accused Lin for laughs, her response is that it's no good to throw accusations around and assigns them to do some community service together. This leads to coming back to try and steal from a practically-catatonic old veteran at night, when this neighborhood of forgotten souls is the ghouls' hunting grounds. They barely escape, capturing the smaller ghoul (Lin Pei-hsin), taking it back to the school's abandoned pool house and starting to torture it in the way little psychopaths who find someone who can't talk and seems to regenerate from injury will do. Lin doesn't like it, but goes along both because he's now more afraid of his bullies and because being part of a secret makes him feel special. He does try and research the beast, eventually finding a story of people who went missing from a voodoo cult decades ago. One looks like their captive, and the other is her sister (Eugenie Liu) - and in addition for a hunger for human flesh, she seems to have the instincts necessary to track her kid sister.
Shao Nian (Blood of Youth)
N/A (out of four)
I'll be honest here - this was movie #5 on the day counting Okja, and I was wiped-out enough to drift in and out a lot. Which would normally be a recipe for disaster with a movie involving unreliable narrators, long recurrent flashbacks, computer hacking, and more on top of that. The thing is, I never really felt lost, no matter how many micro-naps seemed to invade my viewing. I was distinctly aware that I lacked details, but I could pretty much follow along.
Unfortunately, as much as I could follow what was going on, I didn't much care. Maybe a few more of those details would have helped, but, the trouble is, it's got an ending that basically says that a bunch of those details weren't real, and while I kind of suspected that from what we saw of the big flashback scene, that seems like it might make things worse; there's enough to grab onto the fact that the movie is lying to you, but not enough to make the alternatives interesting.
Blood of Youth didn't do much for me one way or another, but I didn't exactly give it a fair shot. Given that director Yang Shu-peng is apparently a favorite of the NYAFF guys, I'll certainly be on the lookout for this when it shows up under more manageable circumstances.
Labels: action, China, comedy, drama, fantasy, horrible photography, horror, independent, Japan, New York Asian Film Festival, Taiwan
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Establishing a coalition and advocacy for the introduction of the quota policy in Algeria
This practice addressed the need to improve the representation of women in the political life. In 2005, CIDDEF conducted a...
This platform is part of the Axis 1 "Strengthening the capacities of equality actors" of the Priority Solidarity Fund "Women for the future in the Mediterranean" funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and led by the European Institute of the Mediterranean, in the framework of the project "Developing Women's Empowerment" labelled by the Union for the Mediterranean.
Secretariat at:
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Muncie shelter sees big increase in animals
kroysdon@gannett.com
MUNCIE – Due in part to two raids that saw hundreds of small animals seized, the Muncie Animal Shelter saw a big increase in activity last year.
The number of animals taken in by the shelter reached 4,717 in 2014, according to an annual report, released this week by shelter director Phil Peckinpaugh. That number is up from 3,906 in 2013 and 3,821 in 2012.
Peckinpaugh distributed copies of the shelter's annual report to members of Delaware County Council in a meeting Monday. Peckinpaugh was giving county council a report on the city shelter's activities because the county pays the shelter $120,000 in an annual contract for animal control.
Although county council appropriates funds for the shelter contract, Peckinpaugh didn't advocate an increase in the contract amount. And in a subsequent interview with The Star Press, Mayor Dennis Tyler said he didn't think a request for an increase was in the works.
The numbers in the shelter's report reflect the depth of the city's problems with stray animals as well as efforts to place animals in homes through adoption.
The shelter has handled between 1,600 and 1,800 dogs a year in recent years and a similar number of cats. The "other" category in the annual report jumped from about 300 in 2012 and 2013 to 1,223 in 2014 in part because of the raids.
Peckinpaugh conducted raids of two properties along Granville Avenue — one a storage facility, the other a pet store — since August, although only one of those occurred in the 2014 calendar year. Those raids produced hundreds of mice as well as guinea pigs, hamsters, birds, lizards and other creatures.
Peckinpaugh didn't emphasize those raids in his discussion with county council, however. The shelter's dealings with animals in the unincorporated areas of Delaware County outside the city limits was the focus.
The shelter picked up 1,182 animals from county areas in 2014, an increase of more than 200 over the previous year. Shelter workers responded to 942 calls in the county.
Peckinpaugh did cite instances of when the shelter responded to rural reports of multiple animals, including horses in the Daleville area, in need of shelter services.
"You guys are definitely getting what you pay for," Peckinpaugh told council members.
After years of using other animal care and control providers, including some from neighboring counties, the county contracted with the city in 2012 after Tyler took office and a majority of officials for the city and county were Democrats.
During the meeting, council members expressed satisfaction with the shelter's efforts.
In an interview, Tyler praised Peckinpaugh, his appointed shelter director, and his staff.
"I think they're doing a fantastic in the city and the county under extremely difficult and hazardous circumstances," the mayor said, adding he'd like to see a decontamination area added to the city's Gharkey Street shelter so workers could clean themselves up, particularly after entering homes and businesses with dozens or hundreds of animals.
Asked if he expected the city to ask the county for an increase in the $120,000 annual contract amount, Tyler said, "I think it's close to where it ought to be." Tyler also indicated he didn't believe there would be an immediate need for a new animal shelter, although he said the building was "small for what they're trying to get done."
Although a new shelter is not being proposed now, Tyler said, "That doesn't mean the day won't come to sit down and talk about it."
In the details of the annual report, the shelter cited 995 adoptions in 2014 and 478 instances when an owner reclaimed an animal.
Peckinpaugh reported the shelter euthanized 729 animals in 2014. Another 500-plus were dead when the shelter received them or died in their kennel. Another 1,375 animals were placed with rescue groups.
Contact Keith Roysdon at 765-213-5828 and follow him on Twitter: @keithroysdon


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Lacuna FAQ
Impression v. Lexmark, Rocketry News, and LIGO's Latest | Vol. 4 / No. 32
June 4, 2017 RFB
Seeing as how we all know at this point that Donald Trump has announced he's going to try to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement, I'm not going to talk about that today. Suffice it to say that we're all disappointed, and that it'll take years to do, so keep fighting (and VOTE).
So let's talk about something else for a change.
Photo: Andy Melton, CC BY-SA 2.0
Impression v. Lexmark
This week the news came out that a seven-year court battle, ostensibly about refillable ink cartridges, had been won. Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc. went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the cartridge refillers, Impression Products, won. This is a pretty huge story, not just because it means that you can refill printer cartridges (because, I mean, I guess people still print things sometimes) but because of what it means for other products, especially pharmaceuticals. The long and short of it is that US patent rights can now be considered to expire at the moment of sale, meaning resale of products sold abroad is protected. As Adam Clark Estes writes over at Gizmodo, "Giants like Pfizer and Eli Lilly and Co. PhRMA wanted the court to protect US patents abroad because that would help them prevent Americans from buying their drugs for much cheaper prices in countries like Canada and Mexico and then bringing them back to the States." It's a pretty big deal and it didn't get a ton of press coverage, so if you have a few minutes, go read the piece at Gizmodo.
The Rocket Lab Electron lifting off from New Zealand | Photo: Rocket Lab
We've got two big pieces of rocket news this week. First, Rocket Lab, a US/New Zealand rocket startup targeting the small satellite launch market, had a very successful test flight of its Electron rocket on Thursday. While it didn't go perfectly—they're still exploring why the second stage didn't quite get to orbit—there were significant successes: liftoff, passing through Max-Q, stage separation, even the fairing separation went off without a hitch, which is great at this stage in the game. The Electron will cost only $4.9 million to launch, and will be able to carry 330 lbs (a big stack of cube sats, for instance) into a polar orbit favoured by many for taking photos of the Earth's surface. Their CEO says they're on track time-wise for commercial launches late this year, and you can read more about it at Spaceflight Now.
The second bit of rocketry news is a look forward to tomorrow morning when, at 7:58am ET, India will be launching its GSLV-III rocket for the first time. The three-stage launcher will be able to carry 22,000lbs to low earth orbit, about half of the payload capacity of the SpaceX Falcon 9, but it's still a huge step forward for India. Bear in mind that there aren't many countries in the world capable of doing what they're about to. Here's hoping it goes off without a hitch and that we get to see some great science going forward. You can read more about it at the Planetary Society.
"LIGO on Hanford Reservation" by Umptanum – Self-photographed. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
Three Times at LIGO
You remember back in February of last year when the team behind the LIGO observatory announced that they'd confirmed the existence of gravitational waves? Well, this is just a little catch-up on that story. This week marks the third detection of the phenomenon so far, with the second back in June of last year. The waves, which are actual ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself, were in these cases caused by the collision and merger of black holes. And just to be clear, these are black holes of sizes we couldn't actually be sure existed before. We now know that there are black holes with masses of 21, 49, and 62 times that of the sun. If they weren't out there running into each other (billions of years ago) we wouldn't be able to tell. This is also the furthest detection yet, taking place 3 billion lightyears away (and 3 billion years ago), telling us more about just when black holes of these sizes existed. The previous detections were at 1.3 and 1.4 billion lightyears away. And these are still the early days. New observatories are coming online soon that should help better pinpoint the locations of signals, and teach us all sort of new things about the universe. You can read more about the discovery over at Phys.org.
And because there's always so much more to cover than I have time for, here it is, your weekly linkspam:
Nintendo's making a Netflix for NES games service for the Switch
Intel's releasing some very powerful new chips
There's a kickstarter for solar blinds that'll generate electricity from all that sun you don't want in your house
The next generation of vanomycin (3.0) is a very powerful antibiotic
There could be roughly doughnut-shaped planets out there, but they'd only last about 100 years, and
Goldwind wants to pay to train Wyoming's former coal workers to service wind turbines
That's all for today, have a great week.
Thanks again for reading. Except for the very *very* occasional tip, we only get paid in my own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!
If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we've written. If there's something you think we've missed or a story you'd like to see covered, drop us a line! Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.
Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as Deputy Managing Editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.
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Hera Give Me Strength (and Excellent Weekend Numbers) | Vol. 4 / No. 31.1
Your Pride Month Book Club List | Vol. 4 / No. 32.1
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Debunking Denialism


A Millennial Interviews Her Mother About Having Kids – MotherShould?
From the editors: MotherShould? is interested in how millennials weigh the decision whether or not to have children and/or when to have children. This interview by a 21-year-old college junior reveals how one millennial's mother has shaped her thinking on having children. The interview also highlights the challenges of being part of the sandwich generation and the silence that shrouded miscarriage twenty years ago and tends to persist today. The interviewee and the interviewer have decided to use pseudonyms here to protect their privacy.
From the interviewer: I'm a 21 year old college student and I chose to interview my mother, Tiffany, 59 year old mom of two. She worked as a dietitian for over 25 years and chose to leave her job. I chose to interview my mother because I feel as though she was different from other moms. Instead of pushing me to find a boyfriend and raising me to be a wife and mother, she taught my sister and I that we have to figure out who we are first as individuals. My mom is one of the many people who inspired me to go after my dreams and never settle for anything less. She is a strong woman with a big heart who worked hard to get to where she is today, and to have my sister and I be the people we are now.
Hannah: You had Erica (my sister) at age 32 and me at age 37. Were the pregnancies different in any way?
Tiffany: I would say being pregnant at 32 was probably a little easier because I could sleep eight hours a night uninterrupted. I was working full time, but I could still sleep; you need extra sleep when you are pregnant. But, that was probably the only difference. See, with you I had a four-year old, I was working full time, and I was pregnant. I was five years older and sleep deprived.
Hannah: Did the doctors say you were "high risk" at age 37 to have a child?
Tiffany: Every time I went to the doctor, they made a determination whether I was high risk or not depending on my blood pressure and my blood value. Fortunately I was never considered "high risk." But at my age, being after 35, I had a harder chance of getting pregnant. So when I was 35 years old, I went back to my doctor who delivered Erica, and I said that I wanted to have another child, but I am not sure if I want one right now. He said, "You have to get pregnant right away because you are 35. If you wait any longer your fertility rate goes down rapidly." That was something I did not know. I think women should know that when they are planning on having a family after they're 35 your fertility rate drops every year and markedly after age 40. So we started to get pregnant right away. Then it took a couple of years because I had a miscarriage.
Hannah: Let's talk about that. I know you had a miscarriage before I was born. What was the experience like for you? How did you decide to have another child after that experience?
Tiffany: Well, I was 36 when I had the miscarriage. I was 35 when we started to try for another child and then 6 months later, I was pregnant. During the pregnancy, I felt like my body wasn't reacting well to the pregnancy from the very beginning. I was only 2 months pregnant, first of all. So it wasn't a long pregnancy. The whole time I was pregnant I didn't feel good. I felt like there was something wrong.
What they don't tell you is you can't see your doctor until your 2.5 to 3 months pregnant. You don't even see your doctor until you are almost into your second trimester. So I hadn't even seen my doctor. But I knew I was pregnant because I took those blood tests at the hospital, I got what felt like a heavy period two months later. But it was almost like a relief for me because sometimes you just know to listen to your body; like what's right and what's wrong. That pregnancy felt really really wrong.
After the miscarriage, I went to work and took care of my four year old like normal. I don't know if that is a normal response that other women have. I mean I never really talked about it with other women. So my reaction to the miscarriage was kind of like a relief I felt so much better physically. I kind of mentally prepared for it. I would say things like "I'll be fine." There was a lot of denial. I would be so busy that I never really sat down and thought about it. I just said "Oh I'm pregnant. I'll be seeing the doctor in another four weeks. So I'll just save all my questions for then." So I just went about it like it was a normal pregnancy.
When I had my miscarriage, at 8 weeks, it felt like having a really heavy period. I remember the cramps. It was not as painful as going through a birth, but they were really painful. I remember talking to my doctor on the phone and he said, "You're fine.You don't need to come in." So my primary concern was: Is everything okay? My doctor said to wait to get pregnant for 30 days and then try again. That's what we did, and I got pregnant right away.
Hannah: Where were my dad and Erica when all this happened?
Tiffany: Your father and your sister were not at home. It was interesting because it was February, and it was after we got this huge snowstorm and your father went off to California and took Erica with him because he was visiting his family. I was alone in the house.
Hannah: What do you think caused the miscarriage?
Tiffany: It wasn't my fault. When I look back at it I realized that there was something wrong with the pregnancy from the FIRST DAY I was pregnant. It felt like it wasn't going to work. I don't know if other women have that kind of "internal wisdom" but I tried to push those feelings away. Of course because you don't want to think that. So for 8 weeks, I tried not to think about it. I tried to tell myself, "Oh it's just a different pregnancy. You could be having a boy." Like I said I hadn't even been to the doctors, so I didn't really talk about it much to anybody.
I feel like since it was my first experience having a miscarriage, and I already had a child, my feelings are different from the vast majority of women who have this experience. It would be very different for a woman to go through this if they had been trying to get pregnant for so long or they found out they were having troubles with their fertility. It would have made the miscarriage so much worse.
When I got pregnant with you the difference between the pregnancies were that with you I felt queasy, and my sense of smell was heightened. This pregnancy felt similar to when I was pregnant with Erica. But with the miscarriage pregnancy, it didn't feel this way.
Hannah: What was it like to work and take care of an infant?
Tiffany: I had three-month maternity leave. I had to use my vacation time and sick time. So I had to save them. Most of the time I got a paycheck, which really helped. We really needed two paychecks to get by. Erica was in daycare since she was 3 months old. Same as I did with you. Going back to work was difficult because I was really tired. Erica wasn't sleeping through the night, and I was breastfeeding. I tried to breastfeed and work but I couldn't do both. I don't know if other women can, but I could not. Breastfeeding took a lot of energy out of me. The fact that I wasn't sleeping all the way through the night, and I was working full time, I came to the decision that something had to give. So what I did was I gave up the breastfeeding, and I wish I didn't have to do that.
When I had you it was really different. Erica was now a toddler. I had to keep her life as predictable and stable as possible. So she went to the same daycare, went for the exact same hours; her life had to stay the same. We kept my husband's schedule the same. Then I had you at home with me for three months. It was just the two of us. I breastfed you then for three months and just remember it being a very happy time. I was very very happy being at home with you. That was the first time I thought that I didn't want to go back to work. But I had to go back to work because we needed one and a half incomes to pay the mortgage.
Hannah: You finally decided to leave your career when Erica was 17 and I was 12. Why did you decide to leave your career?
Tiffany: Well my mom got sick, and she didn't want to go into a nursing home. She didn't want to go into an assisted living. She also was a widower and lived on her own. I started helping her. I am in what is called "the sandwich generation." That is when you have kids to take care of and then you are taking care of your sick parent as well. But the thing is, you can't do everything. I had a senior in high school, I had a 7th grader, I had a sick mom. Derek's mom had just passed. He was, you know, grieving. It was all just too much. I don't know how other women deal with that kind of stress, but for me, personally, it was my point where I just needed to take a step back.
So I started to drop back hours. I was doing a consulting job and working a full time job so I was working more than full time. So I cut the consulting job back, and then I cut some of the days back. So I did it gradually. I felt as though I had responsibility for taking care of my mother because she took care of me. So my mom was one of the reasons I left my career.
Another reason was because of you. Erica was going off to college. So I knew the stress I was feeling about Erica was going to be temporary because senior year is a very stressful time. She was applying to colleges, and we had to visit all the colleges she was applying to. So she was going to leave for school soon. That was also my regret because I knew I wasn't home for Jenna much after school. With you growing out of the YMCA after school program in middle school, I knew it wasn't working for you anymore [I was bullied by the mean girls a lot.] I wanted to give you more attention. I wanted to be home for you because my mom always worked when I was growing up. There are two roads you can take: One being the happy road to college and being taught your full potential. The other road you can take is not achieving your dreams. I needed to keep you on the right path. I started to feel like this when you were in elementary school. But I couldn't figure out how to do it because we still needed the money. Whether you are male or female, we still have the financial responsibility to our children. I felt that financial responsibility 100%. My husband and I are the same when it comes to that sort of thing. We both contribute to the family financially as equals. I wanted to do the right thing by you, and I wanted to do the right thing for my mom.
Hannah: When you were at home, did you ever have a moment where you regretted your decision to leave your career?
Tiffany: Now, I know I complain about having a black hole in my resume, however I do not regret leaving my career. It was the best decision I ever made. I know it was the right thing to do.
Hannah: You always told Erica and me to never marry your highschool sweetheart and to wait until we were in our 30s to have children; to follow our career goals and make a name for ourselves first. Why did you teach us that?
Tiffany: That was the wisdom my mom taught me. So I pass it down because it was very helpful to me. I think that when you are 18 you don't know who you really want to be with. You don't really know who a good partner would be because you don't really know yourself. In your 30s, if you worked in your career and are earning good money, you have the confidence to pick the right partner. You also change so much from 20 to 30. What you want and need are different. Marrying the right person is one of the most important choices in your life.You really have to marry the right person for you. It takes maturity to know what that looks like, what that feels like. In your 20s is a great time to date other people and build a career for yourself that you actually love/like.
Hannah: What are you doing now that your children are all grownup and out of the house?
Tiffany: Well I am working on my business and I'm doing a lot of things art related.
Hannah: If Erica and I eventually do get married and have children, what advice would you give us about balancing our careers and spending time with our children?
Tiffany: Everybody is different. You have to have an "internal dialogue" with yourself every day. Make sure you're happy. Don't sacrifice your own happiness because there is always a way to figure it out. You can change things. It's like having two full time jobs. You have a full time job at work and the stresses of getting up early everyday to go to work everyday working 8 hours everyday. Another full time job is taking care of the baby. So it is basically like working two full time jobs. So it's tough. You are going to have many sleepless nights. But just try to be as happy as you can doing that. Know that every stage that you go through with the children changes. It's never the same. First they are teething and crying and then it changes. They start walking and talking. It always changes. If you also are with the right person you'll always be 100%. Your kid will have two 100% parents being there for them. You can't be 50/50 with your partner parenting. You both have to be 100%. So if one of you gets sick, your child still has a parent that is there for them. Derek is such a great partner because he was taught from his mom to view his partner as his equal. I am his equal, and he can pass that onto you guys as well.
At the end of the day when you are trying to balance your career and raising children, there should be no regrets. Usually people don't regret working more, but they regret not spending enough time with the people they love.


Abstract : [en] A multitude of devices and technological tools now exist to make, share, and store memories and moments with family, friends, and even strangers. Memory practices such as home movies, which originated as the privilege of a few, well-to-do families, have now emerged as ubiquitous and immediate cultures of sharing. Departing from the history of home movies, this volume offers a sophisticated understanding of technologically mediated, mostly ritualized memory practices, from early beginnings in the fin-de-siècle to today.


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PCGS Founders Roundtable shows value of grading firms
By Bob Bair
Published: Oct 31, 2016, 11 AM
Counterfeits like this fake 1873 Coronet gold quarter eagle continue to plague the country, but grading services help identify these fakes, among other contributions to the coin collecting community.
Original image courtesy of ANACS.
Having viewed millions of genuine coins is one secret weapon grading services employ to help identify fakes like this counterfeit 1873 Coronet gold quarter eagle.
Images courtesy of ANACS.
Guest Commentary from Nov. 14, 2016 issue of Coin World:
Thank you for the recent video interview that Coin World's Steve Roach conducted with David Hall, Gordon Wrubel, John Dannreuther, and Van Simmons, where they responded to Coin World reader questions that you posed to them regarding the founding of Professional Coin Grading Service and the development of widespread acceptance of its "slabbed" coins; the constant war against counterfeiters waged by the three major third-party authentication/grading services; thoughts about the future of the hobby, computer grading of coins and a 100-point coin grading scale; and more.
PCGS Founders Roundtable: Analyzing the Past, Present and Future of Numismatics: The founders of Professional Coin Grading Service discuss their company and the hobby as a whole with Steve Roach.
It is important, in my opinion, that this interview emphasized that having viewed millions of genuine coins is the major weapon against counterfeits that the experts at PCGS, Numismatic Guaranty Corp., and ANACS employ, since the counterfeiters are constantly evolving in the increasingly sophisticated creation of their products.
As well, the point that David Hall made that anyone at a major coin show featuring an auction can view as many coins as he or she would like in the lot viewing area, and that this is a free and important way to sharpen one's coin grading skills, is also an important point that can help any purchaser of coins.
About all that I could wish had occurred in this interview would have been a discussion of coin "gradeflation" over the years, which I understand led directly to John Albanese's Certified Acceptance Corp. entering the coin market nine years ago, endorsing less than 50 percent of the PCGS and NGC coins submitted to it, but being willing to buy coins it has endorsed sight-unseen at high wholesale prices through CoinPlex.
PCGS and NGC "Plus" grading, which David Hall mentioned as being offered by PCGS (and NGC, I understand. on the same day) in April 2010, possibly came about as a response to CAC endorsing such a low percentage of PCGS and NGC coins submitted to it.
By the way, I see that John Feigenbaum of Coin Dealer Newsletter will be offering separate generic gold "bids" for CAC and non-CAC gold type coins in Coin Dealer Newsletter, perhaps not the last effort by CDN to track the two-tiered coin market that has developed for CAC-endorsed and non-CAC-endorsed coins.
All in all, a fine and fascinating interview involving some of PCGS's major luminaries! Thank you for presenting it to Coin World subscribers!
Bob Bair got hooked on collecting as a young boy in Wisconsin while serving as a newsboy. He was in the education field for five decades and has been published in several numismatic publications.
Sep 16, 2016, 7 AM
Bowers: How gradeflation encourages resubmissions
Sep 11, 2015, 10 AM
New leadership for Coin Dealer Newsletter publications
PCGS founder ignores advice, starts firm