So, you want to be a journalist?
http://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/jwplayer.swf
They forgot to mention having to cover those Saturday job fairs in Spartanburg, SC.
Phone Book FAIL
Are you kidding me? Don’t tell me to calm down about this. These phone books/epic waste of trees have been obsolete for at least the last half decade and yet I still get NEW ONES dropped off of my porch every few months or so. This is a classic OUTRAGE, people.
Moonlighting at Old Navy
“What are you doing at Old Navy?” -my friend Ryan, who sent me this photo…
Do even all Asian mannequins look alike?
A Message from My Brother
This was too long to tweet for him, on his @rhuinchina account. A random message I received from Roger this morning:
You know what I hate about China? Everytime you ask someone something, regardless of what you ask – the conversation goes something like this…
Me: “Do you know where to get laundry detergent?”
Them: “Over there or walk straight”
Me: “Do you know how much it would cost?”
Them: “Not much or pretty expensive”
Me: “Do you know approximately how far it is?”
Them: “Not far or very far”
Me: “Do you know what the temperature is?”
Them: “Not cold or very hot”
(I will put this in my “OUTRAGE” category for Roger.)
Reddy on the Spot
My friend Sudeep is unwittingly in a public feud with Sarah Palin. In a Wall Street Journal blogpost, Sudeep wrote that her claim about grocery prices rising “significantly in the last year or so” was not supported by the facts. Palin used her Facebook page to fight back, rebuking Sudeep by citing another Wall Street Journal article to support her original inflation argument. Only, she selectively quoted the piece. She took out the part that said prices have been “tame” and clearly supported what Sudeep (and the facts) said. Doh.
We here at Hey Elise are Sudeep’s #1 fans, and as such, decided to aggregate today’s coverage in case the “prestigious” (Palin’s words, not mine) WSJ reporter ever comes out of his undisclosed location and wants to read about his day in the lamestream media spotlight.
So, Palin is hammering the Journal and Reddy for pointing out that she’s flat wrong about grocery prices going up significantly in the past year. What does she do? She quotes a separate Journal story that confirms what Reddy is saying—and cuts out that part with three dots. Nice! Palin has a journalism degree, so I’m guessing she knows what an ethical no-no it is to misquote somebody like that.
Of course she didn’t really read the article she cited to support her rebuke, because that article actually supported what the WSJ guy said in the first place. In conclusion, Sarah Palin, an illiterate person, is very entertaining.
Slate (in which John Dickerson attempts to post a defense of Sudeep on Palin’s FB page but it gets deleted)
At least she called you prestigious, Mr. Reddy! Palin seemed to have his number. But then I read Reddy’s critique and the story Palin says undermines it. The story Palin cites to support her claim doesn’t do that. In her speech, Palin said that “prices have risen significantly over the past year or so.” The Journal article says prices are only “beginning” to rise. The time period of “significant” increase Palin is talking about is referred to in the first sentence of the exculpatory article as “the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.”
And I love this one, NY Magazine’s “Sarah Palin is in a fight with a Wall Street Journal Economics Reporter about Economics:”
Ouch. Reddy, dude, you don’t even read your own paper? Are you literate at all? Even a “former [half-term] governor and current housewife” knows more about economics than you, an alleged economics reporter. How pathetic for you. Maybe you should be the housewife and Palin should be the economics reporter.
Wait a second, though. As Reddy and the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Ryan Chittum notice, Palin used some ellipses to skip over a section of the Wall Street Journal passage she quotes. We wonder what she left out …
An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.
But that directly contradicts what Palin was arguing, and validates Reddy! When Palin realizes that she omitted this vital information, she is going to be so embarrassed for the first time ever.
Can’t wait to see what cable news will do with all this. A Mama Grizzly versus Lamestream Media fight could feed the cable newsies for weeks. (More at Huffington Post, The Raw Story, and too many other places to track.)
Slightly More Than 48 Hours in DC
Big thanks to my BFF Sandeep for hosting us for a couple of nights in his new Capitol Hill home. It was lovely. He even provided eyeshades to help us sleep better and slipped the Washington Post under the guest room door in the morning. And (he’s just learning this now, but) he loaned me his Barcelona travel guide which I will put to good use during the Hu-Stiles Spain trip next month. As we did for NYC, a few highlights:
-Reunions with so many people I love. Alexis, our traveling writer friend who is now community managing/blogging for US News and World Report, the two Daves who worked with Stiles at the DMN, the Mizzou folk who also attended the wedding for which we made the trip east.
-Crab puppies. Seriously, why don’t these things proliferate in Texas? What’s more delicious than crab and fried dough?
-Our brief time at the Online News Association annual conference, where Stiles was way more popular than me. (Coders are super cool at these conventions.) And then we found out we won an ONA the next night, which was super cool.
-Witnessing an adorable couple wed on the banks of a beautiful Virginia lake, as the sun slowly disappeared for the day.
-Queen Noble, the woman on the DC ballot running for the district’s non-voting seat in Congress.
-The Newseum. Worth the $20 entry fee. Saw a riveting 9/11 exhibit, the Tim Russert office, an interactive on news ethics, a look at world press freedoms, part of the Berlin Wall, but most importantly, was reminded why we and others do what we do. To write the first draft of history, to shine a light on injustice, to call the powerful to account, to give voice to the voiceless, to whine ceaselessly about our working situations… 🙂
What I Love About ATX
Walking out of the office to a random alley concert. You know, right there behind the dumpster.
48 Hours in New York
Whirlwind doesn’t describe it. Highlights:
-Excellent Pork Chop House (no, it’s really called that), on a street off a street off a street in Chinatown. Just walking around that neighborhood sent me back to Asia for a dizzying hour. The smells, the spitting, the meat hanging in the windows… ahhhhh, delicious.
-Taking a journey through the last decade of my life, vis a vis the various friends who were able to meet despite my seriously brief windows of availability. First it was ColeH and SummerH (friends from my Twitter life in Austin); then Walton (a genius writer friend of a writer friend in Dallas); Drew (from journalism at Mizzou); Dr. Jerry (my opthamologist friend from my time in Taipei); Stacey (my old professor); Joe (from my early days at Mizzou); Chelsea (from Austin); Andrew (from the summer internship after high school). That said, I basically did nothing in New York except eat, drink coffee, drink vodka and rush to the next place to meet someone.
-The twenty minutes we sat at the Ace Hotel bar within five feet of superproducer Danger Mouse and kept talking about him loudly, only to not actually go talk to him.
-Talking to strangers, since NYC is clearly not a talking-to-strangers kind of place. Ended up chatting it up with a guy named Tom at PJ Clarkes, a bar that’s been the same since the late 1800’s and featured quite often in Mad Men. Turns out Tom used to be general manager of a soccer team called the New York Cosmos. On the other side of me at said bar was a New Yorker who appreciated Tito’s vodka, the Austin-distilled favorite. I told him I’d send him a bottle (we have no shortage of Tito’s back home), he seemed both shocked and appreciative.
-But what am I talking about? We were there to accept my first and only national Edward R. Murrow award. The Texas Tribune won two, actually – one for me and my friend Todd’s project, Stump Interrupted, the other for the Texas Tribune as a site. Evan couldn’t make it to accept for the site so I ended up having to pick up both awards and well, what an honor. Brian Williams, Soledad O’Brien, the NBC News President – they all showed to individually accept their prizes – it was an honor to be among them. Also great to see old friends from BELO, as two BELO stations accepted overall excellence prizes.
-Keith Olbermann won a national Murrow for writing and couldn’t have been nicer as random newsies went up to get photos with him. I later found out he did Countdown in a tux last night, so I guess he was able to make it from the studio to the awards dinner pretty fast.
Lowlight:
-Roger Hu, my little brother who lives in Beijing and who I don’t see but once a year, was in New York at the SAME TIME. Not only that, his hotel was TWO BLOCKS AWAY from mine in Midtown. But we didn’t get to see each other. He had to leave for another work call in Boston the same day we discovered we were both there.
ME: Why don’t you just take the train to Boston?
ROGER: Cause I rented a jet.
(Groan)
The Texas Tribune Is
Sneak peek! Here’s my promo vid for the Texas Tribune, inspired by the latest iPad commercials on TV:
Congrats, Roger Hu!
Looks like the Chinese company my little brother joined last week is movin’ on up. The Dow Jones Newswire reports:
Chinese K-12 tutoring company Tal Education registered to sell $100 million of American depositary shares in an initial public offering in the U.S.
It’s the second Chinese education firm this month to register for a U.S. debut, following test-prep company Global Education & Technology Group. Ambow Education Holding Ltd. (AMBO) launched its IPO last month.
With proceeds from its offering, Tal wants to expand its number of centers and build a national training center, as well as improve existing facilities. It will also pay a declared cash dividend and strengthen its curriculum and course material development.
Tal said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is China’s largest after-school tutoring company for kindergarten through 12th grade, according a report it commissioned. It tutors students on core subjects like math, English and chemistry, either through small classes, one-on-one work or online courses. By the end of February, it had about 383,000 student enrollments, up from roughly 67,000 two years prior.
Its two founders offered the group’s first math-tutoring class while they were still grad students at Peking University began tutoring math in 2003. Last year, its profit doubled as revenue rose 86%.
This means little Rog will be coming back to the US soon for their bell ringing deal. I hope it’s not on one of those bad days when the Dow drops a million points and he has to stand there all smiley…