the reality tunnel

I use a lot of technology and end up having a lot of unused or broken electronics and I have to figure out what to do with them.  The 44th Ward is having a electronics recycling pickup day on September 11, 2010.  This is what the alderman had to say about it in an e-mail [...]

Me this week Last week, I talked with Rhonda Jones-Gillespie, news editor at the Chicago Defender and I feel like I need to follow up with her.  It wasn’t until after our conversation that I realized why there seemed to be a disconnect around some of my questions.  While the Defender does report about African-American [...]

In the first of a two-part report about Chicago Public Radio’s Pritzker Fellowship, President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia describes the limitations of niche broadcasting, the journalism challenges that motivated the fellowships and his hopes for how the fellows will change WBEZ’s newsroom. In the second part, I plan to explore the perspectives of [...]

I’ve always wanted to know how to project “stencils” on walls or sidewalks, as a lot of clubs or businesses have started to do.  After a lot of knowledge from the Chicago New Media list, I found out that these projectors are called gobo projectors.  I also found out that IKEA sold an inexpensive version [...]

The last two weeks haven’t been very productive for my independent study as I’ve had stories or projects due for other classes.  Though I was too late to shadow youth reporters covering teen depression as part of a Community TV Network summer program, I was able to watch the youth film their introduction sequences, get [...]

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken to a number of reporters about reporting outside of their neighborhoods or experience.  One common theme that I’ve heard is the importance of using people’s own language to describe places and institutions in their communities.  Patrick Barry, a senior scribe working with LISC/Chicago, said journalists documenting community development [...]

I finally realized that I needed business cards for my reporting at Medill, but I didn’t want to shell out dozens of dollars for hundreds of cards that I probably wouldn’t use.  I wanted to pay a few dollars for a few dozen cards and have the option of printing more. So, I created my [...]

This is a jQuery bookmarklet to extract an attribution string and link from a Flickr photo page. To use the bookmarklet bookmark this link or drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar: Flickr Attribution The code is available at github. At the time that I wrote this bookmarklet, I was using the the Monochrome Author [...]

Data can give important insight into what’s happening in the world, but charts and numbers alone aren’t always resonant.  One way that reporters ground the numbers in a story is by finding people whose experience matches the trend.  This was the case with “A Daily Fight To Find Food: One Family’s Story,” a report that [...]

This has been a busy and productive week for my independent study. On Tuesday, I interviewed Gordan Walek and Patrick Barry, who are involved with the Chicago Neighborhood News Bureau, a project of  Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC)/Chicago’s New Communities Program.  The program promotes development in 14 low-to-moderate-income communities in Chicago andnews bureau website aggregates [...]