My group for Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab trekked up and down Frankford Avenue on Saturday to document the bi-annual clean-up. After Philadelphia Brewing Company shared a few of their kegs with us and volunteers, we put together this multimedia package to show what they accomplished. Click on for the goods.
On Saturday, I visited Pop’s Playground on East Huntington Avenue in Kensington for the unveiling of a skate park in the once-abandoned park. Paula Sen and I put together this multimedia package to capture the event. This audio-slideshow was completed for Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab.
I spent a considerable amount of my time this summer researching and shadowing William Brawner—an HIV positive HIV/AIDS activist who runs a youth center for kids affected and infected by HIV—and the fruits of my labor were materialized today; as the cover story for this week’s Philadelphia Weekly. I hope you’ll read the piece and let me know your thoughts.
A preview:
Already 90 minutes late, William Brawner pumps the gas pedal of the rental van, jumps the curb and pulls up next to the 10 teenagers waiting in front of a half-abandoned warehouse on East Allegheny Ave., home to HAVEN, the drop-in center for HIV-positive kids.
The kids cram into the white van and let him have it.
“Will, we love you and all but it’s 9 o’clock,” one says as the others groan in agreement. Brawner, who opened HAVEN last January, laughs then turns up the radio and pulls away in the direction of I-95 and Washington, D.C., where in a few hours he’ll introduce Magic Johnson at an event aimed to spark talk about the plague so many have forgotten.
Boomp3.com Photo by Ashley Myers
I spent the last three days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, taking a break from the long, dwindling summer. I have some big things publishing soon, so it felt well-deserved. Coming up on this site:
Stay tuned.
In preparing my Writing Portfolio, I wondered how far back in my career I would pull material. When sharing your work with potential employers, it seems smart to share your best work. But that approach comes from a time when you’d have to stuff photocopied clips into an envelope or worry about your’s and your recipient’s e-mail attachment limit (as you attach two or three heavy .PDF files to it). When you’re hosting your own files and can point an employer to them at their own disposal (like this site), why not share everything?
1) It shows the growth you’ve made as a writer. This is important for employers to see and it helps you realize the progress that you’ve made.
2) A clip that you aren’t fond of might stand out to an employer. What if the person perusing your portfolio happened to have written about the same subject and was impressed by your work? Just hope they’re not jealous.
3) You can still make your favorites stand out. No matter what, you’re still in control of the content you share. People are naturally driven to items that you highlight, so chose carefully.
With this in mind, I’d like to go ahead and do just that—highlight selections from my archive, provide a little background for each selection and give the content fresh appeal. As these selections build, I’ll cross-link From the Archive selections with my portfolio, helping to create a “living” portfolio that has detailed explanations and behind-the-scenes stories that drives traffic to my portfolio. Score. Look out for From the Archive every Monday.
And uhm, why not peruse the Writing Portfolio now, if you just can’t wait?
There’s been a lot of talk in my circle (see end of article for links) about the importance of owning your name in Google. Right now, the top hit in a search for “Brian James Kirk” is my MySpace page. Just looking at that page above my professional web page causes brain hemorrhaging. No, that pulsing against my skull isn’t because this site hasn’t really taken off, yet. What really makes my brain want to explode is the anxiety created by the competition between public image and professional career as a result of online social networks.
Every article that you’ll read about this phenomenon says the same thing: Be very, very afraid, green foot. Maybe it’s a guilty conscience that makes me want to re-write the rulebook on hiring. I think employers are smart for searching out their employees to recognize whether or not their lifestyle will fit in at the office. But, I think that this social-network fear-mongering stifles creativity. Especially considering the field that we’re in; Do hiring journalists really care about seeing that someone has personality outside the office?
After the jump, let’s get inebriated.
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I met with a few friends for one of the city’s Fourth of July celebrations: the showing of Shawshank Redemption at the Eastern State Penitentiary. It was a great idea, but limited seating excluded the hundreds of people that were lined up outside (wrapped around the entire Southwest wall and nearly half of the West wall). People seemed generally friendly that it was at capacity; after all, it was free (Play the audio above for a sample). Reports from the inside said that the screen was small and the seating crowded. Quite frankly, the box of Cracker Jacks that I bought for the show was still tasty.
So, you just shelled out the big bucks to buy a DS2 audio recorder. Suddenly, you’re no longer misquoting sources and you’re coming up with follow-up questions you never thought possible. You’ve even started liking the sound of your own voice (you’ve been secretly recording conversations just to listen to yourself). No doubt, you spent that extra dough so you could copy files right onto your computer and life is good.
But when you’ve got an hour long conversation to transcribe (for ahem, posterity), having the digital audio files means nothing. You load up your favorite text editor, Quicktime, and start cranking away at those choppy interview sentences. You already know the score: listening to someone else explain what you know nothing about makes it nearly impossible to keep up with. You spend the next 5 hours(days?) of your life trying to type out a 46-minute interview. It’s gotta be easier.
If you’ve ever used a pedal controlled transcribing machine, its easy to fall in a ‘lil bit in love. Sure, its clunky, weighs in at about 17lbs, and looks like it should be combing nuclear waste sites for left over radiation, but those pedals are a life saver. In a traditional three peddle system, one pedal rewinds( a variable, but most conveniently by a few seconds), one plays, and one pauses. Your hands stay on the keyboard, and your transcribing dreams can come true. But, those are used for tapes. You’ve got yourself a fancy digital recorder and you’re not afraid to use it.
You can buy USB pedal systems for your computer, but c’mon. We both know that’s not going to happen. So, whatcha gonna do? After some hunting, I came across Express Scribe for Macs. It imports your audio file, has assignable hotkeys for rewinding, playing, slowing down, and pausing audio. And when you’re in the heat of the moment, you can transcribe like a court typist. Oh, and it’s free— hells. yes.
Might as well give it a try, because by the time voice recognition software catches up to those quick fingers, you’ll have run out of interview tape. If, uhm, cassettes are your thing.
Hello! With some help from my roommate Neal Santos and the many, many resources available online for Wordpress, I’ve started this blog. The site will be a resource for things of interest to my career and my life in Philadelphia, along with an up-to-date portfolio and resume. I’ll write a more compelling introduction soon (I dare you to try hacking together a Wordpress blog in a day and still attempt wit). Thanks for reading, everyone!
