I wrote a short article for the Pink Line Project on the DCist Exposed Photography Show. It’s a really neat event. DC photogs submit their photos and then the best are selected for a show at Long View Gallery. I had a photo in the first year of the show. It was awesome seeing one of my pics hanging on a gallery wall and I got to meet some great photographers who I’m still friends with.
It’s so popular that this year there are two opening nights, March 15 and 16. Get your tickets now – it will sell out.
SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.
The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.
I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls. Continue reading “Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year”
Greg and Ben will be sharing best practices and how you can take the next step with WordPress as a platform. Pulling from their wide-ranging experiences in journalism, publishing, government, and development, they’ll be discussing how you can use WordPress to craft your personal brand, and what lessons that can be learned from how journalists use WordPress.
We’ve invited the DC Hacks/Hackers group, a meetup for journalists and developers, to join us this month. You can learn more about them at http://meetupdc.hackshackers.com.
Here’s their cheeky bios:
Since 2007, Greg Linch hasn’t had a journalistic job or project in which he hasn’t thought about using or — in most cases — used WordPress. His current job at The Washington Post is the only exception, but it’s only been a few months, so give him time. Most notably, Greg led The Miami Hurricane’s migration to WordPress in 2008 and co-founded CoPress to help other student news organizations do the same. (Twitter: @greglinch.)
An aspiring attorney, a coder, and an all around geek, Ben Balter is a J.D./M.B.A. candidate at the George Washington University and a member of the FCC’s New Media team. When not working or in class, he enjoys tackling otherwise-impossible challenges to sharing information using nothing more than WordPress, duct tape, and occasionally a pack of bubblegum. (Twitter: @BenBalter.)
NOTES
Andy Nacin introduces and thanks sponsors for the beer and space.
April 12 next meetup. Format: lightning round. Looking for speakers.
Greg Linch
Used WP on multiple projects, including Miami Hurricane. NYT using it for blogs. Davis Enterprise using WP for content, then imported into InDesign for print. It’s web to print. (I am skeptical of all-in-one solutions, having seen balky print-to-web systems pushed by journalists who hated the web back in the 90s.)
EditFlow: assign stories, set status for newsrooms. It’s a WP plugin.
AssignmentDesk: interact with community, an open assignment desk.
NPR’s Argo Network uses child themes for local blogs.
WordPress goes well with a delicious IPA.
WP Courier is an email newsletter plugin. (I need that.)
LivingStories is an interesting experiment in online storytelling.
Good question: how to get reporters to use? Show em how simple it is.
Washington Post is getting a new commenting system. (Yea!)
Ben Balter
Using WP to craft personal brand, take back Google results. Dynamic speaker but then goes into brandspeak, i.e, “what is a brand?”
You’re the Chief Marketing Officer of your brand. Search engine management needed for professional reasons. They show pics of modems.”This is how people used to connect online.” Everyone laughs. I feel old.
No longer defined by a company, you need an online brand (like joeflood.com!). Your content online is your brand, including the embarassing pics. It’s like your college transcript.
73% of recruiters Google you.
WP makes it simple to tell your story.
Grab a domain (key in google searches), describe yourself on your site, setup a basic WP site, start a blog for credibility and engage others, use Google Reader to find things to blog about. It’s like an online brochure about you.
Use Google Analytics to discover your most popular posts.
Be social. Use Facebook, Twitter, etc to promote your posts.
Every journalist should have a web site. Every potential journalist should have a site. Every job-seeker should have a site, if only so that your embarrassing Facebook photos don’t show up in a Google search.
I’ve met writers and editors before who don’t have web sites. They don’t want to learn HTML and still look at the web as a lesser medium. That’s short-sighted. WordPress is not difficult. If you can use Word, then you can create a site in WordPress.
WordPress DC meets monthly. It’s a nice mix of developers, writers, bloggers and other creative and technical folk.
DCist Exposed is back! This fascinating photography show returns to the Long View Gallery from March 15 to 27, 2011. Out of over 1,000 individual entries, 43 winning images were selected by a panel of judges to be included in this year’s DCist Exposed exhibit. DCist.com prides itself on engaging and promoting emerging local photographers through its daily use of images from the popular, reader-generated DCist Flickr photo pool. Each day, DCist.com selects photos from the pool for use in its daily coverage of local news, arts and entertainment, food and sports.
The opening reception, held March 15 and 16, will be epic. In fact, it was so popular that last year I couldn’t even get in. DCist is attempting to remedy that by selling tickets in advance. Get yours now!
I had a photo in a previous year’s show. To see my pic hanging on the wall was inspiring, and I got to meet some amazing photographers who have broadened my concept of photography. The DCist community is awesome. They’re nice people who like a good drink and they all have their own unmistakable style. Just glancing at my Flickr contacts, I can pretty much tell who shot what – Samer Farha (beer), Erin McCann (coffee), Jim Darling (iPhoneography), Matt Dunn (portraits) and Chris Chen (street life).
To accompany the DCist Exposed show, there’s also a special edition magazine featuring the winning photographs from all five years of the show. The issue can be purchased online at MagCloud for $27.50, which comes with a digital version, or at Long View Gallery during the receptions for $25.
DCist is also bringing back the popular special event for emerging collectors, Emerge Exposed, on Monday, March 21, 7 to 9 p.m.Co-hosted by DCist and the Pink Line Project, a panel of experts will share tips and ideas on how to begin collecting art.
What I like best about DCist Exposed is that it demystifies the art of photography. You don’t need to have expensive lenses or your own studio to be a photographer. You just have to take a decent photo.
Perhaps because I’m an avid reader of Chris Guillebeau’s blog, I didn’t get as much out of this book as I thought I would. It’s still a good book, however, for people who want to live differently and pursue non-traditional goals. However, a lot of it is very familiar to regular readers of his blog.
I was sitting at home when it happened. There, in the audience of the Kodak Theater was someone I recognized. Luke Matheny, director of God of Love. And he had just won the won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short.
Tall, with a mess of wild hair, he’s easy to pick out of a crowd. I recognized him from the filmmaker party at the DC Shorts Film Festival. I’m an executive judge with the festival and have been sort of an uber-volunteer for DC Shorts. I’ve judged films, taken photos, checked-in filmmakers, supervised volunteers, distributed catalogs and managed the screenplay competition (which I like best of all).
God of Love won the Audience Choice Award at DC Shorts. It was a breakout hit, according to The Washington Post.
I didn’t actually get to talk to Matheny at the party in September of last year. I met other filmmakers, including the director of Touch (a poignant short film I really liked) and the hilarious brains behind Enter the Beard. After a couple drinks, I’m not a bad mingler. I’m not one to flit about a room, a social butterfly, but I enjoy meeting creative people. As a writer, it’s really inspiring to me.
And that’s the way I felt seeing Matheny bound up from his seat in the audience. Inspired. I’ve written screenplays before, and even won a local screenwriting contest, but Hollywood seemed like an impossible and futile dream. (And perhaps not a very desirable one, as I learned after a visit to the set of The West Wing.)
I also felt confused. I like DC Shorts because it’s the anti-thesis of Hollywood. The short films we show are singular works, not the product of committees filled with MBAs. They’re made on small budgets and are works of passion. And DC Shorts is programmed by Washington-area filmgoers. Anyone can be a judge and help decide what gets included in the festival. (Regular people are such good judges, in fact, that Ryan Kearney of TBD thought that there were better films in DC Shorts than the Oscars.)
To go from the democratic world of our festival to bright lights of the Kodak Ballroom – that’s something I never thought I’d see. I didn’t think there were any connection points between the two worlds. We were separated by thousands of miles and completely different sensibilities.
Moviemaking in Hollywood is about millions of dollars, bloated egos and budgets, teams of writers and executives tearing apart good stories. It’s about loud explosions, hackneyed catchphrases and plots that make no sense.
DC Shorts is about the filmmaker. Singular. It’s a festival for filmmakers, programmed by movie lovers.
The Oscar win is great for Luke Methany and, by extension, great for DC Shorts.
But people shouldn’t wait to be discovered by the entertainment industry. Instead, they should write that book, paint that painting, film that movie. Don’t ask for permission, don’t look for validation, just tell your story.
You could have the greatest idea for a movie in the history of the world. But Hollywood will still reject you. It’s better to be an angry filmmaker. Better to make your art on your own terms.
Want to see your short film included in a festival like DC Shorts, DCIFF or Rosebud? Then check out my article for the Pink Line Project on how to get your movie in local festivals.
It could even lead to the Oscars! God of Love won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short. But before that, it won the Audience Choice Award at DC Shorts.
ABNA is a competition sponsored by Amazon for self-published and unpublished novels. This year’s competition will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance. (I’m entered in General Fiction.)
Quarter-finalists will be announced on March 22 while we don’t find out the first place winner until June 13.
The competition is also a great way for Amazon to highlight their self-publishing tools, CreateSpace (for print books) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for e-books). They’re both easy and free to use.
Murder in Ocean Hall is a mystery set in Washington, DC. The world’s most famous oceanographer is killed at the Smithsonian. Set during the summer before the 2008 presidential election, we follow Detective Thomas across the city as he encounters the powerful and the powerless in his quest to solve this high-profile case. Thomas has grown bitter from decades of investigating bloody mayhem on city streets. Despite the new condos and gentrification, has the city really changed?
Murder in Ocean Hall is available exclusively at Amazon. The paperback is $9.99 while the Kindle e-book edition is just $2.99.
Check out the trailer for the short film “Catching Up”. It’s a film by an American University film student, Mary Ratliff.
I first encountered this script during a live reading at Arlington Independent Media. At the time, I thought part of it seemed unrealistic – a little girl in a prison? But it’s based on a real story. Truth is stranger than fiction.
The script for this film was a finalist in the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition, where I got to read it as a judge for the competition. Mary is just one of our talented finalists who have gone on to make movies and do other great things.
She’s also part of what I like to call the “AU mafia” of filmmakers, including Colin Foster, who just filmed Man with a Bolex Movie Camera. As an AU grad myself, I think this is awesome.
In the run-up to the mayoral election, I was told by many well-meaning folks that Vincent Gray shared the reformer credentials of Adrian Fenty but without the hard edges. He would be a fairer Mayor, one more attuned to the needs of citizens.
The people who tried to convince me of this notion hadn’t lived in DC as long as I had. They assumed that the city had always been this way. They didn’t remember the days of DC as the murder capital of the country, of when city government was synonymous with corruption. They thought of Marion Barry as an entertaining relic, not the coke-addicted “Mayor for Life” who drove the city into bankruptcy. Continue reading “Undoing Reform: Cronyism in the DC Government”
