I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were all so cavalier to introduce our grievances about topic X as soon as we learn about someone’s allegiance to said topic. Or how inappropriate it would be if we talked about a stranger’s recently deceased relatives the way we talk about their recently laid-off colleagues.
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RELATED:
After talking with family and friends about the destructive tornadoes in Joplin, we were struck by a feeling of helplessness. We had seen the pictures. We had seen the front pages. Now, we just wanted to see some hope, and something we could do to help.
Luckily, there’s the Internet.
I’m impressed by how people used the web for good to spread the messages of how to help. There are multiple ways, but here are some ways people are doing what they humbly can to help the people of Joplin.
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“ONE STATE. ONE SPIRIT. ONE MIZZOU.”
The University of Missouri is partnering with the Heart of Missouri United Way to sell tornado relief T-Shirts for $14.95 apiece. All proceeds will go to support the United Way’s United for Joplin campaign, the press release says.
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DONATING VIA TEXT
Texting the word JOPLIN to 864833 will assist the United Way’s recovery efforts with a $10 donation, which will be added to your cell phone bill.
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DONATING ONLINE
This is a no-brainer, right? But there are so many options, including:
Of course, these are just some of the organizations taking donations.
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HELP THE JOPLIN GLOBE
A former professor of mine from the University of Missouri posted this on Facebook:
“If you can spare a couple of days (or more) the Joplin Globe could use your help – reporters, editors, photogs — to relieve exhausted staffers. This would be a volunteer thing.”
The post included a Gmail address, but I won’t post it, lest the phishers, spammers and perverts get to it. But if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll connect you. If you’re a journalist near the area and can spare the time, it would be invaluable for you to donate your time and skills in this way.
UPDATE: I’ve heard from Laura Kelly, the contact for people wishing to volunteer for the Joplin Globe. She writes:
Please let folks know that we are covered for now, but are keeping names/contacts on file just in case. Response has been outstanding.
The Missouri Press Association has set up a special fund to help Joplin Globe journalists, to which you can donate here.
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We’ll be warned that there are people trying to scam us, and there will be. There will be people commodifying someone else’s pain and taking advantage of people’s good intentions. But I don’t think those are reasons to not give or not help. They’re just reasons to be cautious.
Whether you’re earnestly trying to help in the spirit of stewardship, or out of a feeling of guilt, or to feel something other than helpless, there are ways to help.
Yesterday, President Obama and his wife Michelle visited Ireland. Last week, Queen Elizabeth II was in Ireland. All in all, a pretty big week for the country.
Obama was there pay tribute to his lineage in Moneygall, which Mark Landler of The New York Times described as “a postage-stamp Irish hamlet of 300.” Obama hugged people, shook hands and — most importantly — had a Guinness.
The Queen’s visit was more somber, as she addressed — but came short of apologizing for — the history of violence between England and Ireland. There were several protestors, and the pictures of them are more striking than the photos of the Queen’s visit. To see photos from The Big Picture, click here.
The way the two visits were played in the press highlight the differences of the trips. The usually playful Irish Examiner had a clean, serious front for Elizabeth’s visit, but returned to its normal relaxed form with a scrapbook-y collage of Obama’s visit.
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THE QUEEN’S VISIT TO IRELAND
The Irish Times focused on the conciliatory nature of the Queen’s visit, showing her with Irish president Mary McAleese laying wreaths in honor of the dead Irish at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin.
Miriam Lord writes:
This was the moment many thought they would never see.
The Queen of England, standing in the Garden of Remembrance, head bowed in a mark of respect for the men and women who fought and died for Irish freedom.
Here, in this revered shrine to republicanism, the strains of God Save the Queen swelled in the quiet of a Dublin afternoon, played with the full blessing of the President of Ireland and the political establishment.
These electrifying minutes signalled the end of a long and very difficult journey, when two neighbouring heads of state finally stood together as equals in a display of friendship and reconciliation.
To read the rest of Lord’s story, go here.
The Irish Examiner showed several photos of the Queen’s visit, but the largest play went to the photo of Queen Elizabeth II signing the guestbook at Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the president of Ireland.
The importance of this was summed up in the main copy block under the photos:
At precisely 12:47 yesterday afternoon the course of Anglo-Irish relations changed forever when Queen Elizabeth II signed the visitors’ book at Aras an Uachtarain. It was a deeply psychological and symbolic moment, an acknowledgement by the British head of state that she was in Ireland as a visitor, a guest of the Irish head of state, President Mary McAleese. It was a meeting of equals, a coming together of the representatives of two neighboring nations in mutual respect, a moment of which the people of Ireland can rightly be proud.
To read Shaun Connolly’s story, go here.
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OBAMA’S VISIT TO IRELAND
The Irish Times played the story the way it plays many of its centerpiece stories: with one main photo, one headline and one deckhead. The photos fascinated me, because I was trying to wrap my mind around the glass-looking partition thing from which Obama delivered his speech.
What the Irish Times front didn’t show, though, but did show on its website:
That photo was uncredited on the site. To see that photo (and to read the story by Stephen Collins and Mark Hennessy), go here.
That Guinness moment did make it on the Irish Examiner front, though:
Similarly to the front featuring Queen Elizabeth II, the importance of this event was summed up in the main copy block under the photos:
The visits of US presidents emphasise the importance of what is one of this country’s major resources — Irish descendants in the United States and, indeed, Irish descendants scattered throughout the world. We need to cultivate those resources wherever possible.
To read Paul O’Brien’s story, go here.
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UPDATE
The Queen did NOT have a Guinness. Read about it here.
This past week, the people of Jacksonville, Fla., elected its first black mayor in the history of the city. Democrat Alvin Brown beat Republican Mike Hogan in a runoff on May 17. The runoff followed the March election in which the two garnered the most votes.
Many of my former colleagues at The Florida Times-Union did great work this week. Here’s some — but not all — of that work.
By the time Wednesday’s paper went to bed, the two were 603 votes apart. Brown photo shot by Bruce Lipsky, Hogan shot by Bob Self. But by Wednesday afternoon…
…Alvin Brown was declared the victor. The victory shot from Thursday’s paper by Don Burk.
Reporter Matt Galnor explained the historic win’s statistics and graphic artist Annie Liao made this graphic showing the precinct-by-precinct results. Click for a larger view.
And Sunday, Tim Gibbons wrote a piece analyzing Alvin Brown’s campaign and how he won.
Jacksonville was my home for four and a half years, and because of the time I spent there with such great friends and colleagues, I will always think of Jacksonville as one of my homes. Thus, even though I no longer live there, this mayoral race was pretty interesting to me. And it reminded me of a few graphics I did that can now be updated.
In January 2009, I researched and put together this graphic in time for Obama’s inauguration. This timeline-chart hybrid shows which party was in control of the presidency, U.S. Senate and House, Florida Governorship, Senate and House, and the Jacksonville mayor’s office and city council from 1960 to 2009.
A month later, I researched and put together this graphic showing how long it took for black men and women to be elected into various political offices, from the White House down to Jacksonville positions. Jacksonville’s first black city council members post-Reconstruction were Sallye Mathis, Mary Singleton and Earl Johnson. Nat Glover became the first black sheriff in 1995. He ran for mayor in 2003, but lost to John Peyton. Jackie Brown, a black woman, ran for mayor in 2007, but also lost to Peyton. She died shortly after the election.
I’m looking forward to the possible graphics that can come from this election. Between Brown’s victory, Peyton’s administration coming to an end and the shift of influence in the city, there will be no shortage of graphics.
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UPDATE
Denise M. Reagan, AME for Visuals at The Florida Times-Union, writes:
The blogs on election night and all the next day during the count of provisional and absentee ballots were well done and featured a lot of participation from the community.
Additionally, on Monday, #AlvinBrownVictorySongs was a hashtag on Twitter for — you guessed it — potential victory songs for Alvin Brown.
“If we are saying, ‘Come out and be filled with pride, then it’s our responsibility to make sure that continues right through their last day.'”
Last night, I saw a screening of “Gen Silent” at The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. The documentary, made by Missouri School of Journalism alumnus Stu Maddux, focuses on the challenges facing LGBT adults as they age. He followed six Boston-area adults as they navigated the care system and asked themselves, “Who’s going to take care of me when I can no longer take care of myself?”
For many of their straight counterparts, the answer has been easy: their children will care for them. It’s trickier for LGBT adults. Some of them don’t have kids and grandchildren to care for them. For others, their LGBT identity has alienated them from their families. The prospect of nursing homes can scare anyone, especially people from a generation when homosexuality was considered a mental illness worthy of shock therapy. I don’t enjoy going to doctors, but I can only imagine what it would be like if I had the experiences with doctors that these people had.
This documentary opened my eyes to many issues I had not yet considered. Some of the people interviewed mentioned cases where caregivers came into gay adults’ homes and tried to convert them. For many LGBT people, going back into the closet seemed like the best way to survive being in a nursing home.
This would be heart-breaking for anyone to hear, but especially when you consider what these people have done for us. After the screening, “Gen Silent” director Stu Maddux stood up and addressed the crowd, mainly filled with LGBT adults who were peers to the people featured in the film. “As a gay man who has stood on your shoulders, you are in my eyes ‘the greatest generation.’ I made this film as a tribute to you.”
“We have a whole generation of people who don’t know who we are. That’s really sad, because you’re missing out on a lot. We know a lot. We did a lot for you. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.”
I had never used the term “the greatest generation” when referring to that generation of LGBT individuals, but Stu was right. These are the people who put their lives at risk and marched when there were few others with whom to march. These are the people who came out when it was still acceptable to send gay people to mental institutions. These are people who had to refer to their partners and lovers by code names of the opposite sex so as to not be found out. These are people who knew too many people who committed suicide because they’d rather be dead than go through what gays had to go through back then.
In the last six months, there have been a spate of “It Gets Better” videos. Well, it was because of these people that it ever got better in the first place. What the documentary painstakingly (and painfully) shows is that these people now need our help. If we don’t help them, who will? One of the caregivers featured in the film recalls how back in the 1980s, many gays banded together to help gays with AIDS. There were buddy networks and other programs designed to provide care for people who otherwise had no one to care for them. What this woman suggested in the film and again when talking with her after the film is that we now need that banding together again. We need people to reach out and ask what they can do to help these people who put their lives at risk for us.
Of course, as my friend Kye pointed out when we left the theatre, these people are not the only ones who need our help. Anyone who is navigating the care system — gay, straight, black, white, Cylon — could benefit from someone volunteering his or her time.
For more info on the LGBT Aging Project, go here.
So, in the last few weeks, 13-year-old Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” has gone viral. It’s a song about an eighth-grader getting ready for school on a Friday and getting excited for the weekend.
Did I mention it’s by a 13-year-old?
In case you missed it:
For what it is, it’s catchy. But it’s catching lots of nasty comments for Black. Last week, she appeared on “Good Morning America” for a segment in which the reporter read some of the comments people have anonymously posted online about this video. Watch the interview, and you’ll totally feel for this kid. But for all the hate, she’s doing alright for herself. She’s passed Justin Bieber for iTunes downloads, or so say the talking heads on that ABC clip.
The last pop song about Friday I remember getting any attention was The Cure’s “Friday, I’m In Love” from the band’s 1992 album, “Wish.”
The Cure video’s embed feature has been disabled, or else I would have linked to it. But check it out, and then take a look at how each of these songs compare as odes to the last day of the work week:
So, from my estimations, here’s a breakdown of each song and its video:
Total mentions of “Friday”
Rebecca Black, “Friday”: 27
The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”: 9
Total mentions of any other day of the week
Rebecca Black, “Friday”: 4
The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”: 28
Verses sung by a rapper
Rebecca Black, “Friday”: 1
The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”: 0
Tween girl wearing braces
Rebecca Black, “Friday”: 1+
The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”: 0
Pasty white man wearing a wedding veil
Rebecca Black, “Friday”: 0
The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”: 2
So, Rebecca Black gets down on Friday, whereas Robert Smith gets down MOST on Friday. Of course, he also has been known to get down at “10:15 On A Saturday Night.” Rebecca Black, though, would not be getting down at that time, as she’d be in bed. Or at a sleepover, playing MASH.
In the last week, all hands have been on deck in the Boston Globe infographics department for our coverage of the nuclear crisis in Japan and what it means for nuclear plants in the U.S., particularly in New England. We’ve had great work from David Schutz, Javier Zarracina, David Butler, James Abundis, Daigo Fujiwara and Monica Ulmanu.
Below is just some of the stuff we had from March 14 to March 18. We used a variety of approaches for the variety of stories and angles, and I think we’ve been doing a great job. Needless to say, I love working with these people.
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MONDAY, MARCH 14, 2011
On the Sunday after the earthquake, the focus of the story had shifted to the Japanese reactor and the crisis at the nuclear plant there.
David Butler and I worked on the graphics for that Monday’s paper, including this one here. Butler found an earlier Associated Press graphic, but then simplified some of the steps and colors. Additionally, he added some details not in the original graphic, using information we got from reporter Carolyn Johnson and David Schutz, Deputy Design Director/News & Graphics.
Here’s a look at that graphic. Click on it for a larger view:
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TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2011
The next day focused more on the plant at Fukushima. Here’s a front page graphic. Click for a larger view.
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2011
James Abundis put this graphic together explaining radiation levels. The questions many people had were, “How much radiation has been released by the Fukushima plant?” and “How does that compare to other radiation levels?” This infographic answers those questions simply but thoroughly. Click for a larger view.
Inside the A section, we had this infographic explaining the risks of nuclear meltdown and the potential worst-case scenarios.
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FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2011
The problems with the boiling water reactor in Japan shed light on the BWRs and PWRs here in the states, particularly three in New England: Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power in Vernon, Vermont; Seabrook Station in Seabrook, New Hampshire and Pilgrim Station in Plymouth, Mass. David Schutz had put together a map of historic earthquakes last year, so I updated that to show these three reactors. Click for a larger view.
Inside, we had a graphic by Monica Ulmanu and Javier Zarracina explaining the safety measures in place at those New England nuclear plants, with an assist by Boston Globe reporter Beth Daley. Click for a larger view.
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These are just some of the graphics we did this past week. It’s been a team effort, with work by everyone in the department.
RELATED
How The Boston Globe covered the tsunami on Saturday, March 12, 2011
How other newspapers covered the tsunami on Saturday, March 12, 2011
Former St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion, who played on three World Series championship teams (1942, ’44 and ’46), died Tuesday night of an apparent heart attack. Read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story here.
Marty Marion (No. 4) joined the celebration after the St. Louis Cardinals won the 1946 World Series. Others who turned around their jerseys to mark the occasion were Whitey Kurowski (1), Enos Slaughter (9) and Stan Musial (6). (Post-Dispatch photo)
I grew up in St. Louis, but most people my age wouldn’t have known his name. I’m fortunate that I got to know him as a person, as he was my neighbor. It wasn’t until I got older and started researching that I realized how legendary he was.
He had been known as the Cardinals’ greatest shortstop until Ozzie Smith played for the team in the 1980s. He was one of the best players on the team from the ’40s, an era when the Cardinals won the National League pennant four times and the World Series three times. He was a teammate and friend of Stan Musial, considered the greatest Cardinal to ever play and a larger-than-life hero in St. Louis.
According to the Post-Dispatch story, Marion indirectly influenced another great shortstop: Cal Ripken. According to Tony LaRussa:
“I heard that [former Baltimore Orioles manager] Earl Weaver said the reason he thought about moving Cal Ripken to shortstop is that [Weaver] grew up in St. Louis watching Marty Marion. That’s a helluva compliment.”
Marion’s Baseball-Reference.com statistics are interesting, specifically during the World War II years when some of the players were, ya know, fighting in the war. Marion’s stats look odd with modern stats in mind, but the game was different then. (For starters, no andro.)
To see a Post-Dispatch/STLtoday.com gallery of Marty Marion photos, go here. Here’s how the Post-Dispatch played the story on A1 on Thursday:
And how it played on the front of sports:
This week, the Missouri School of Journalism launched Project 573, a multi-disciplined, multimedia reporting project put together by 12 seniors representing the School of Journalism’s six sequences: broadcast, convergence, magazine, photojournalism, print and strategic communication.
They decided to report on the recession of the last few years and how it’s affected American life. The result is “The American Response,” which will be updated throughout the next few months. When it launched Monday, it already had photo galleries, videos, narratives and infographics. There’s even an interactive game.
Project 573 (so named for the area code) was put together by 12 seniors, overseen by two faculty advisers, Reuben Stern and Jacqui Banaszynski. I had both Reuben and Jacqui when I attended Mizzou’s J-school. It’s because of Reuben that I took my first infographics class and chose this path.
The project was conceived by Evan Bush and Adam Falk. I was impressed by the project, especially when you realize that the Kirk and Spock of the project were seniors who had all sorts of other things going on. I remember my capstone semester in college, and I barely could function well enough to remember to eat or get gas in the car, let alone run a project like this one. So, I wanted to get their perspectives. Evan took some time to answer my questions, the answers to which are below.
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How did you guys come up with Project 573?
The project was kind of a weird moment of serendipity. Adam [Falk] and I are roommates and we spend a lot of time on “shop talk” around the house. But the project was actually fleshed out in an excited text message/ Gchat conversation. Adam was at a journalism conference, and I texted him something like, “We need to make a documentary.” Just an off-the-cuff idea I’d had. Adam quickly reminded me that the J-school probably wouldn’t let us take a year off to shoot a documentary and that a collaboration with students of other interest areas would be much more interesting.
In New York, the conference Adam attended was about the future of journalism education. I think the wheels started turning for him there; he came back jazzed on journalism and couldn’t shut up about the conference.
So we took a step back, and the day he came back, hashed out the guts of our plan in a G-Chat conversation while Adam was at work and I was in class.
I had a lunch date with a couple of other students and Dean Mills. I just jumped in and said I’d been kicking around a crazy idea–that we could bring all the sequences at the J-school together for a big happy journalism mess. Dean had been at the New York conference with Adam, so they were sort of familiar with each other.
I told him we would like to meet with him. He agreed for the next week, and then the planning began.
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How did you pitch this? How was it received?
Adam and I went to Dean’s office just bubbling with excitement and energy. We took about an hour to get ready for school that day–like we were going to a senior prom or something. We practiced a basic elevator speech at home and tried not to get too excited.
When we walked in, we made small talk for a few minutes and we didn’t get halfway through the pitch before he jumped in with basic questions. We’d expected this thing to be a fight and we’d have to have a lot of ammo.
After a couple of easy questions, he said something to the effect of, “Sounds great, let’s take the next step.”
We kind of looked at each other like, “Uh…is that a yes…and if so…let’s figure out a couple of next steps.”
It kind of felt like he’d already made up his mind before we’d even stepped foot in his office.
We’ve had a lot of feelings like that in Dean’s office. We’ll get geared up for a big pitch to him and then walk into his office and he’s already excited and ready to support us however he can.
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How did the other 10 seniors get involved with Project 573?
The hardest pitches we’ve made were to students, although pretty much everyone we talked to was interested right away. We contacted students individually based on our experiences with them in classes and seeing people’s work out there. We asked professors for recommendations. We came up a one-sheet pitch to give people.
Adam and I met with them individually, gave them a basic elevator speech, answered questions and let them take a few days to decide. Pretty much everyone we contacted was interested right away and it usually became a logistics question–how the heck are we going to get everybody Capstone credit in an established system.
It took a lot of work to make sure everyone could fit into a schedule and graduate on time.
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How did you divvy up the workload among the group?
It was a process. We didn’t know what we were doing as managers right away and weren’t comfortable taking complete ownership over a group project. We thought it was going to be really important to get everyone on board with the idea and then go from there. For the first few weeks, we had really vague discussions about what we as a group wanted the project to be.
Everyone was really interested in a truly collaborative process, but it became clear that at some level they needed someone to drive the boat. Adam and I decided to be co-editors with the group’s support and take that role so people would feel comfortable with a structure.
After that, things became more collaborative and everyone started to feel more comfortable. We all brainstormed an organizational structure where we divvied out administrative workload. We decided that everyone would be reporting, editing and either designing or helping conceptualize design.
I’d read a bit about Google’s 20% model. Basically, Googlers get to use 20% of their time however they choose as long as it fits within the mission of Google. We put that in place right before winter break and people have taken ownership of some supplementary things we call “pet projects.” For example, all of our bio videos were produced by Alex Rozier, who chose working on them as his pet project.
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How long had you been working on this before you went live?
We spent one semester in a one-hour class conceptualizing, planning, pre-reporting and designing a website. But any true reporting and web development began the last week of January when we put our noses to the grindstone and began going out into the community and working on stories.
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What kind of hurdles did you experience when working on this?
Woof. What a question.
First off, Adam and I had little to no experience in management. But we were confident (read: stupid) enough to give it a shot. Learning on the fly when 10 people are expecting results from you has its ups and downs. We have learned more about group dynamics, how to get people excited, how to lead meetings, and how to execute an idea more than any Business 4000 class could ever teach you. We were fortunate enough to recruit patient and forgiving people that liked us (or pretended to at least) enough to stick it out when we didn’t know what the heck we were doing.
Kind of along those lines, getting people on board with this thing was tough. Our class in the Fall met for one hour each week at 8 a.m. No amount of coffee was going to get everybody pumped about Project 573 consistently each class session at that time. We worked really hard at making sure everyone was involved in all the big decisions and that they began to feel ownership of this project. We had to transfer ownership from the two of us, to everyone else. By the end of the Fall semester, we’d begun to feel really confident about the way the group was starting to gel and take initiative. At the end of the semester, we had a 4-hour meeting outside of class on a Saturday. Best decision we made. Everything kind of culminated and we came together as a group. That was the moment we knew everyone was on board and ready to get out there and report.
Settling on a topic took about 8 weeks. To get everyone on board, we needed something universal, and something every reporter could get behind. So we spent a lot of time talking about what we valued in journalism. In the end, our group decided that we wanted to focus our reporting on people and universal themes.
We wanted to report on something that we would have an advantage covering in Missouri, but that would resonate on a national level. So we settled on telling the story of the economy in the heartland.
Equipment was a challenge. We wanted to shoot video on DSLRs–Nikon D7000s–because we felt like we could get more camera for the J-school’s buck. And we definitely did, but we didn’t know the equipment.
Adam, myself, Andrew Feiler and Dan Brenner came up with an equipment list that basically amounted to endless Googling of photography and videography blogs. The equipment we’re using took a lot of time to put together and is unlike anything the J-school currently has. It’s amazing stuff, but it has quirks no one at Mizzou really knows how to fix.
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What was easier than you expected?
Convincing the dean. Finding a developer. We found a guy to develop our site for free because he needed a portfolio piece. He is an absolute animal and stayed up for about 3 days finishing our site recently. He gets the web, understands journalism, and has been a pleasure to work with. All for free. Could we have stumbled into a better deal? Public Service Announcement: Josh Smith. Hire him yesterday.
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What surprises came up that you weren’t expecting?
We asked Jacqui Banaszynski to guest lecture for our class. She’s a Pullitzer-prize winning journalist who coaches writing at Mizzou. She came into Project 573 and gave a quick chat that had everyone’s jaws touching their desks. A month and a half later, she agreed to help with story coaching. Basically, she helps our reporters conceptualize stories and brainstorm how to tell them. And she suggests ways to improve stories as they come along.
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You blogged and Tweeted with this project way before Project 573’s March 14 launch date. How did this help you lay the groundwork and get interest in the community?
Community engagement is something we thought was incredibly important to start with. It’s something we didn’t know enough about and kind of did a lot of trial and error to get figured out. We have an amazing strategic communications student, Campbell Massie, working on the project. The three of us have talked a lot about improving engagement. It’s a new area for all of us, and we’ve been experimenting with it. Having an online presence was very important to us, but it was hard to justify that without content. We started a blog and started pushing that out as a way to engage with people, find an audience and get connected with social media.
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When putting this project together, from whom, where or what did you draw inspiration?
First, we looked at top student multimedia projects that we thought had similar ideas to us. We wanted a mark set that we could shoot for. Not to pigeonhole us as student journalists, but with full class schedules and the limitations of a college life, we wanted to set expectations that were attainable, yet of the highest quality. We drew inspiration from University of North Carolina’s Powering a Nation and the Soul of Athens project at the University of Ohio. We sought out some of the students who had worked on those projects and had gone onto professional careers in multimedia and chatted with them about what to expect.
After that, it’s a mixed bag of things we thought were awesome journalism. NPR’s Planet Money helped us understand broad economic concepts. The New York Times has some fantastic multimedia work in One in 8 Million and a variety of other projects. Little video blogs like Californiaisaplace were great examples of storytelling and compelling shooting.
Inspiration came from anywhere and everywhere. It just had to have a core that focused on dynamic, well-reported storytelling.
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What plans are there for this project to continue after you all graduate and move on with your careers?
We don’t have anything hard and fast lined up, but a big part of this project has been trying to find juniors to take the mantle over. One of our group member’s pet projects is to recruit new, talented students to take ownership of Project 573 and take it from here. We have a handful of people that have shown interest and expect to have more interested following the launch.
A lot of the professors in the J-school think this project is important and some have expressed interest in helping that continue. Entrepreneurship and innovation are becoming hot words at Mizzou right now, and we hope this will open the floodgates for plenty more projects with bold goals and students at the helm.
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If you’re hiring this spring, consider these students. Seriously. Be sure to check out the “Meet The Team” bios on each person. Their candid videos about the future of journalism shows their excitement for trial and error. These students have some interesting ideas and don’t seem to be afraid of the possibilities. That’s pretty refreshing, and inspiring.
March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, a religious holiday in Ireland and a secular holiday everywhere else. For a guy named Patrick, it’s like a second birthday. But anyone can enjoy this holiday, whether you’re an Irishman, a descendant of one or a “little Chinese boy in the suburbs pretending to be Irish in the middle of March.”
I now present 10 things you might not have known about St. Patrick or his Feast Day. Don’t feel bad; I didn’t know a lot of these myself, and I’m named after the guy.
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1. St. Patrick was not Irish.
He was from Britain, back when Britain was still a Roman colony. In the late 300s when the Irish began raiding Britain, he was abducted and brought back to Ireland, where he was a slave for the better part of a decade.
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2. St. Patrick was not originally named Patrick.
He chose the name Patrick for himself when he was ordained as a Catholic priest. He was originally named Maewyn Succat. After his years as a slave, he returned to England, where he had a vision that the Irish needed him. When he became a priest, he took Patrick as his Christian name.
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3. The original color associated with St. Patrick and his feast day was blue.
There was even a shade called St. Patrick blue. But the Emerald Isle is overwhelmingly lush, making green a more natural color with which the Irish could identify. Political groups later adopted the shamrock (and thus the color green), solidifying green as a part of Irish nationalism.
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4. He did not literally “drive the snakes out of Ireland.”
Ireland never even had any snakes. The “banishing of the snakes” was a metaphor for the banishing of evil and St. Patrick’s hand in Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. Within 200 years of Patrick’s arrival, Ireland was completely Christianized.
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5. The association between St. Patrick and the shamrock may be overstated.
It’s been said that the shamrock is associated with St. Patrick’s Day because St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Christian concept of the trinity: the Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit, each separate but the same. He might have used this metaphor, but it appears nowhere in any of his writings, which detail so much of his philosophies and teachings. If St. Patrick kept such fastidious notes about his work, how come he never mentioned this? So, according to the History Channel, this could be a myth, but we have no way of verifying.
The shamrock ended up being used by political groups in the last 300 years, though, in part because of the association with St. Patrick. But the national symbol of Ireland is not the shamrock; it’s the harp.
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6. Corned beef and cabbage is not associated with the holiday in Ireland.
The traditional meal for St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland is bacon and potatoes. Bacon and pork in general have historically been a big part of the Irish diet. Corned beef was eaten in Ireland, too, but it’s been more emphasized by Irish Americans. When many Irish immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s, they found that their reputation for loving pork preceded them. Anti-Irish cartoons featured stereotypical Irishmen with pigs, saying, “Here comes Paddy with his pig!” Beyond the anti-pork Irish slurs, there’s a much simpler reason the Irish Americans turned to corned beef and cabbage: it was much more affordable than bacon and potatoes.
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7. St. Paddy, not St. Patty
Patrick comes from the Irish name “Padraig.” The shortened form of that is Paddy. The name Patty is short for Patricia, the feminine form of the name. So, if you say St. Patty’s Day, you’re actually referring to the Feast Day of St. Patricia of Naples, which is August 25.
It’s easy to see how “Patty” and “Paddy” became confused in America. Americans enunciate the two words the same, whereas the Irish would pronounce a harder “T” sound, thus making the names distinguishable. An American would hear the Irish name Paddy and think it was Patty. It wouldn’t occur to people unfamiliar with the name Padraig that it should be Paddy. After all, Bobby works for the name Bob, so why wouldn’t Patty work for Pat?
But now you know. After years of mistakenly being called Patty, I’m reclaiming my masculinity. You can call me Patrick, Pat or Paddy, but not Patty.
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8. Leprechauns were only recently associated with the holiday, by Americans.
The drunk, impish troublemakers who trick you and lead you to pots of gold are really a fabrication of Walt Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and The Little People” and the marketing geniuses behind Lucky Charms. Before those brands recast the leprechaun as benevolent tricksters, leprechauns weren’t associated with St. Patrick’s Day, because leprechauns were scary bastards. They were part of pagan tradition that predated St. Patrick’s arrival in Ireland by centuries. Leprechauns were a type of fairies who guarded areas and tried to scare you away. The modern version of leprechauns are based on anti-Irish cartoons that were based on derogatory stereotypes.
I remember middle school, when the “Leprechaun” movies first came out. These three kids in my English class would tell “yo mama” jokes, trying to outdo the other. Whenever someone busted out “Yo mama look like the ‘Leprechaun!,'” it was OVER. You can’t come back from that.
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9. March 17 is believed to be the day St. Patrick died.
Many Feast Days for Catholic saints tend to be on the saint’s death date, or day associated with his or her death. St. Patrick is believed to have died on March 17, 461. For Catholics in Ireland, the day is a Holy Day of Obligation. In other words, a day on which attending Mass is mandatory.
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1o. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in America is believed to have been in Boston in 1737.
It’s not universally accepted, though, as there are those who say the first St. Patrick’s Day parade was in New York in 1762. Others say it was in Philadelphia in 1780.
March 17 is used to be a city holiday in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville and thus used to be a day off for school kids and anyone employed by the city. It’s technically not for St. Patrick’s Day, though, but Evacuation Day, the day the last of the British left the city. It’s convenient that it falls on St. Patrick’s Day, though.
UPDATE: Governor Deval Padraig Patrick signed a law requiring government offices in Suffolk County to open on Evacuation Day and Bunker Hill Day. Read more here.
UPDATE, AGAIN: To test your knowledge of the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade, take this Boston.com Your Town quiz.
