Recently published (11-08)

From Columbus Alive:

Current needs and future plans of the Mid-Ohio Foodbank.

Interview with local musician Happy Chichester.

Mr. Etch-a-Sketch talks about his presidential portraits.

Radical free space at Sporeprint Infoshop.

From my blogs:

Space books that we love (for children… mostly) at Tiny Mantras.

Sad Last Days: Contents of Evel Knievel’s motorhome for sale at Auction Chronicles.

School Funding Awareness Week

Back when Ohio’s system of funding education was ruled unconstitutional in the mid-1990s, I wrote about it for a local alternative weekly. There were astonishing stories about what poverty meant to education statewide — like the one about a rural school building that sat on a hillside, its foundation slowly slipping over a gas main. Many other country schools were dangerous, some with less dramatic-sounding health risks like peeling paint and bad plumbing. Resources like libraries were woefully out of date, often housed in bookmobiles or on-site trailers with little or no new material.

In our cities, structures were falling apart and creating potential health problems for their students. It was going to take billions of dollars just to bring the buildings in our poorest districts up to code, let alone begin to improve the quality of education to help students in those areas succeed.

In the time since, the ruling was upheld through appeals and lawmakers have wrangled with new funding structures, but the system remains broken. Our Governor Ted Strickland, who has made education reform one of his signature issues, is preparing to unveil his own plan early next year. I’m anxious to find out what he’s set to overhaul, especially when it comes to this long-standing, fundamental problem.

This is school funding awareness week, so School Funding Matters is promoting a letter-writing campaign to the media and state representatives. They have lots of good background information about school funding’s history and current conditions on the web site, so check them out.

(This initiative comes from KnowledgeWorks Foundation, which recently published a lengthy piece I wrote about education reform at Brookhaven High School that you can download here – more to come on that later.)

Recently published

Here are a few of the pieces I published this summer that are available online:

• Light House: An Interview with artist James Turrell, about his architectural lighting installation at Franklin Park Conservatory.

• Go With the Flow, about the “Ways of Knowing Water” exhibit at Ohio State University’s Urban Arts Space.

• Q & A with Animator Tom Richner, founder of Cap City Studios.

Later this fall, KnowledgeWorks Foundation will publish a long piece that I wrote about urban school reform in Columbus, part of its storytelling project.

Group therapy for journalists

Journalists’ feelings are a hot topic in the blogosphere this year.

In February, Kioshi Martinez, a journalist who crossed to the communications side of the tracks, opened AngryJournalist.com. It’s basically a commenting outpost for people in the trade to rant about how much the field has changed, how little their print publications have adapted to change, why a letter from a reader got under their skin, how an editor took out her divorce frustrations on their copy or any other gripe they might have. The number of war stories shared is rapidly approaching 5,000, making it a great place to send anyone that you’d like to discourage from a career in journalism.

Having surfed the media waves (and knowing what it’s like to have the tides turn in a hurry) I laughed out loud when I saw the t-shirt there for sale that reads “Journalists Get Laid (Off).”

Here’s a Word Cloud for the site, which will give you a democratic view of the most used words in the 5K of posts.

Next came happyjournalist.com, where reporters have expressed their gratitude for good editors, page one bylines and most of all, the joy of working in a field where the potential to change people’s lives always dangles in front of us. And after more than three months, the site has exceeded a whopping 100 posts.

MildlyEnthusiasticJournalist.com has little more than a brief discussion about whether or not someone should open a drunkjournalist.com site. (No one has, but someone should. Let me know if it happens.)

Now the Online Journalism blog has opened JollyJournalist.com, where, if you can shake the image of Santa Claus with a press pass that the name invokes, they have started collecting reasons why things are better than they used to be.

I agree with some of the reasons that have been presented there, others I don’t (and I’m not a big fan of the name or the graphic), but it can’t hurt to join the conversation.

Useful resources

I’ve updated my web links over the past couple of weeks.

Among my favorite additions is The Renegade Writer, which is a solid blog about freelance writing that also has a markets wiki where writers can go and share some of the experiences they’ve have had querying or writing for various publications. It’s great to see freelancers do some grassroots information sharing.

Another site that might be particularly handy to some colleagues that I know is The Writer’s Technology Companion, which has some easy-to-use tutorials in new media skills like podcasting and using various blogging platforms.

Have a writing site that you’ve tried, tested and found useful? Leave your link here in the comments, or shoot me an email: tzt(at)writearm(dot)com.

The word economy

Every time a newspaper or magazine is redesigned, the call for additional white space and images shrink the spaces available for articles. New media publications demand that writing be as concise and interactive as possible. Writers’ roles have shifted. We have to think more like television and radio producers and learn to better use pictures, audio, links and video to deepen our stories.

I have found that writing short, thorough pieces can be every bit as time consuming as writing those with a more luxurious word count. You become an editor and writer simultaneously to keep your word count close to the bone without losing the soul of your story.

If you are lucky enough to write for one of the few places that still publish long, voluptuous pieces, trying your hand a short one now and then can be a benefit as well. If you learn to convey something meaningful within a 200-word space, it can help you write a leaner, more compelling 2,000-word piece.

Here are some articles with tips on writing short:

Write Tight by Chip Scanlan at Poynter.

Literary fat reduction by Scott Lindsay at Ezine @rticles.

20 tips for tighter writing by Bill Leuning of the Kansas City Star.

Generating random ideas

For as long as I can remember life on the web, there has been the Surrealist Compliment Generator – a simple bit of programming that allows you to reload the page over and over, telling you that your eyes are like “milky pools of pantyhose” that you have “the intrepid appeal of a carnivorous apple on its way to a pile of cadaverous stones” and that “sound barricades itself into rolls of peanut butter when you speak.”

The same morsel of technology is used in abundance throughout the web,  especially when it comes to helping creative writers and bloggers find quick ideas and prompts to kick-start their writing when blocked. Sometimes the exercises that seem the silliest yield the best results.

Here are a few of the random generators out there:

• Seventh Sanctum’s writing challenge generator. (There are several other generators on the site, as well as technical resources to help you create your own random generator.)

• Prompts contain a technical parameter, a character parameter and a word or phrase for inspiration at the almost totally random writing exercise generator.

•  For personal journals or blogs, there are blog and essay prompts here or here.

• If you’ve been dying to write a B-movie screenplay, try the random logline generator.

• A random writing prompt generator for kids.

Your input wanted: Favorite writing sites

As I continue to go through my bookmarks to pull the blogroll of this site together, I would love to find out which sites about writing that you find most useful, fun or illuminating. I will also be doing some site reviews on this blog. Please post links to sites you feel are worth a look in the comments.

Note to readers in my region: I plan to include Ohio writing resources here as well, so please, submit away!

“Link journalism”: Sharp or shiftless?

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been working to circulate a new term that he coined: “link journalism.” It’s the process of aggregating stories from on-line publications and blogs that has made outlets like Drudge and the Huffington Post lucrative with minimal overhead, and could be better applied by existing news publications, or used effectively in all kinds of independent niche markets.

For a journalist like me, who often loves the act of research as much of the writing, it’s an appealing concept. It’s also appealing to me as a reader because of the vast amount of news and information that exists out here in the digital wilds. I could use a few more trusted  sources drawing up signposts to help me find my way around.

While many news sites link to discussions out in the blogosphere through bot-discovered links and keywords, it’s often clear that no human hands were involved in the process. For example – a post I wrote about Barack Obama’s speech about race on my personal blog a couple of days ago appeared on CNN.com as though it were related story about Brook White, a contestant on American Idol, I’m guessing because I talked a lot about being white. No matter how many filters are applied before that link is generated, it ultimately takes a sentient being with the ability to read, interpret and analyze to truly keep those kinds of mistakes from occurring.

What do you think? Is the ability to lasso and present a group of stories that are interesting to a particular readership enough of a skill to be called journalism?

The beginning…

Over the years, I’ve received multiple emails from wanna-be freelancers asking for help or advice as they tried to launch their writing careers — many more emails than I’ve been able to answer. I’ve always kept a link page available for these visitors, directing them to a few online resources that I thought might be instructive, but no more than a handful.

Meanwhile, I’ve remained a constant web surfer, gathering innumerable links that I have found helpful about the craft of writing, news and trends in journalism and communications, as well as producing and designing web content. I intend to only include things that I find genuinely useful to writers (be they journalists, creative writers, bloggers, communications professionals or any combination therein) to make this an authentic and well-tended resource.

I hope that this blog will help me , as well as its readers, to feel better armed with information in the face of the wildly evolving world of word-smithery