Storify III: Me. Everywhere.

Storify II: Scalia!

Storify: How Cool Is This?

Curate social media from across the web. Any social media: tweets, facebook posts, YouTube videos, blogs, any user generated content. Create a narrative sequence for an event or present a 360 view of a topic. Neat storytelling opportunity or technological kerfuffle? 

Troubling: (Mis)Representation of Female Sexuality in Comic Books

This piece explores how female sexuality is portrayed in modern comic books. Well written and heartbreaking. While I personally don't care to read anything published much past 1986 (unless Joss Whedon wrote it), I love the comic book medium and I'm troubled that with the freedom given by abandoning the Comics Code this is the way women are being portrayed and all the various messages that sends.

On a positive note, I like the way Laura Hudson constructed her article with images that -literally- illustrate her point and a myriad of appropriate hyperlinks. I think she fails to address that the issue isn't new and maybe could have looked into the history of women in comic books a bit more to create a fuller picture.

Hybrid Websites Case Study

Perhaps one of the best examples of a traditional form of media hybridizing to contend with the changing times is Paste Magazine. Formerly a print magazine, Paste made the transition to online as a method of coping with financial difficulties, eventually going fully digital and ceasing to produce a paper product.

Prior to that they'd attempted a non-technical but still modern strategy of inviting subscribers to pay whatever they wanted for a year's subscription, a la Radiohead. While this was fairly successful it ultimately wasn't enough to sustain a print publication especially amid the economic downturn of the late 2000's when revenue from advertising was at an all time low. The move to web-only was a last ditch effort following a fund-rasing campaign.

In May the magazine announced that it would bring back it's weekly subscription service in a digital layout available for iPad and Android tablets- getting on the bandwagon of smart phones and other digital media applications that seem to be spreading like wildfire.

The publication's content and quality appears to have remained much the same (A level of quality attested to by multiple National Magazine Award wins.). Articles (see this one on R.E.M. breaking up) include widgets to enable readers to share content to social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter. Although there may be an argument to be made about the prestige of being a paper publication versus purely digital, for most intents and purposes Paste appears to be thriving in its digital incarnation.

New Twitter Feed Subscriptions (In Progress):

-Margaret Atwood (writer)
-Neil Gaiman (writer)
-The Atlantic (magazine)
-APStylebook (as opposed to FakeAPStylebook, which I was already following and adoring)
-PittTweet (University account)
-Paper_Cuts (Editors of the NYT Book Review)
-KeepCalmandCarryOn (British propaganda is never not relevant)
-fuggirls (Nonfiction writers of a sort)
-HuffingtonPost (newspaper)
-NBC News (...NBC News)

Credible Online Sources

When my group discussed the feasibility of researching drag culture in Pittsburgh we came up with multiple first person sources and leads, but researching online proved a little more difficult. 


Potential Sources of Online Information for Group Research Project: 


Publication: Cue Pittsburgh, LGBTQ publication covering western Pennsylvania, Ohio, D.C. and West Virginia. 
Blog: Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Pittsburgh blog. Not updated terribly frequently but could be a resource for tracking down other relevant sources. 
Expert's Bio: RuPaul's autobiographical timeline, tracing her journey into drag culture. 
Audio/Video: There are numerous YouTube recordings of Pitt's previous drag concerts, a handful of documentaries on cross-dressing culture not relating to Pittsburgh such as Paris is Burning, but I didn't have much luck finding media that fit our topic's criteria. 
Research Resource: Pitt's library system offered a wealth of resources, one of which is the eBook Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. 
Source of My Choice: An acquaintance (former Tae Kwon Do instructor's niece, as it were, not precisely a friend) who is heavily involved in the subculture in question and could direct me to additional first-person sources. 

Credibility or Lack Thereof

Classic example of dubious reliability: Wikipedia. But that isn't to say it's never an appropriate tool. To avoid sifting through excessive amounts of legalese jargon in original documents (I'm narrowing down which Supreme Court case to research for my poli sci Capstone class) I find that Wikipedia is useful to establish basic information. While I can't exactly cite facts directly from it, the links at the bottom of an article are often more legitimate, such as The United States Court of Appeal Federal Circuit. It's a government run site, so while whether you can trust the government or not is a deeper question than I'm seeking to explore I believe the facts found on this page are overwhelmingly likely to be accurate. 


Another somewhat less obvious source lacking credibility?  The social media outreach branches of otherwise reputable sources. In the rush to update in real time on events still unfolding fact checking sometimes falls by the wayside, necessitating later revisions and retractions. And are the same people undertaking the actual journalism and research for these sources doing the tweeting, tumbling, FaceBooking and blogging for these sources themselves, ensuring correct information is disseminated? Probably not. It may well be staffed by unpaid interns, a contingent not exactly known for their diligence.  Even more alarming is the possibility of those accounts being hacked to intentionally disperse false information for various nefarious reasons, such as the recent NBC scandal. 

Public Relations vs. Beauty Journalists

BritishBeautyBlogger Jane brings up another controversial component of beauty journalism. There are probably better ways the PRs could handle the transparency of the tier system, but are there issues at play other that slighted feelings?

Hello Topics in Nonfiction

Like every other course I take I need this to graduate (two majors and two minors = no electives), but of course there were other Topics courses I could have taken. I chose this course because it offers a chance to develop a skill set in social media that I feel will prove valuable to virtually any career path, as well as perhaps personally enriching. That the professor came highly recommended was not an inconsiderable factor. 


I hope to learn more about crafting written work for online consumption and how to utilize social media for less frivolous purposes than surreptitiously catching up on my friends or keeping close tabs on Doctor Who spoilers. 


What kind of writing I'd like to do: The kind I'll get paid for? Hmm. Although I've worked in a few other nonfiction genres I haven't had many opportunities to explore magazine writing, which I think seems to require a sort of blending of skills from journalism and from creative nonfiction. 


Two Favorite Nonfiction Writers:

1. Joan Didion "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Didions prose is powerful through it's sparseness and precision, a good example for someone prone to flowery and circuitous phrasing (...see?) 
2. Tom Wolfe New Journalism is the writing equivalent of coloring outside the lines. If five semicolons and some gratuitous s p a c i n g or tangential exploration will enhance your story, go for it. 

Daily Online Reading Habits:

• British Beauty Blogger. First and foremost. I used to work for Murad UK. 
• Domestic Sluttery. Provocative name for a fashion/cooking/interior design blog. Staves off homesickness for the UK. See here. 
• More often than not my entire Tumblr dashboard
• Texts from Last Night. I can't not. 
• Cracked.com 
• Glance at my FaceBook feed 
• Glance at AOL homepage before checking emails (No, I'm not sure either why I still use AOL).  

Where I Am Online: 

• I Tweet @SarahSimkin
• I Tumble at saneliving 
• I FaceBook at, well, Sarah Simkin. 
• I blog here (well, yes) and at shalompittsburgh.wordpress.com