We’re doing TT partnerships with TV stations all over the state and Wednesday is Waco liveshot day. After we’re done, photog Justin and I, plus our friend Reeve, meet for breakfast on the UT campus. It’s always a good time.
The Tiger Takeaway
The Tiger Woods saga-scandal continues this week, and by week’s end it’s safe to say none of us will be surprised to see another mistress – or ten – emerge. I have a day job that keeps me busy, but exploring the kaleidoscope of topics that come with the Tiger Woods story has become pretty much my favorite pastime of late. (Because face it, folks. Running sucks.)
Enter my old Mizzou pal Drew, who I affectionately call Drewbie, because I like to add an “ee” sound at the end of “ee” appropriate names. (This is also Matty’s plight.) Usually I complain to him about my fantasy team. Today we talked Tiger. A lot. Here are Drew’s various takeaways from Tiger’s tale of woe, conveniently in a somewhat chronological form.
1.) Tiger in accident? Yikes.
When the crash first happened it was serious news. The reaction was, oh my gosh, Tiger has been in a major accident. Then it was a minor accident. Then we learn his wife had to punch out windows to free him. This sounds curious on its face. How does that skinny woman pull a large guy out of a large car?
Then you find out he hit a tree and fire hydrant. The second reaction here is, this is not a good story for GM. “GM is always telling me about its ON STAR system, but a it appears a disembodied voice did not talk, assume control of car and call for safety,” Drew says.
2.) Getting to Know Tiger
This guy so closely guarded his private life that he refused to reveal what beverage he chose to drink out of the Ryder Cup upon winning it. But suddenly, because of this rapidly unfolding scandal, we get to know Tiger! After the accident, we learn about call from neighbor.
“Oh snap! Tiger has a black neighbor! I didn’t think this guy would have black person living within twenty miles of him, and he has a black guy living right next to him,” Drew says.
But think about it a little harder. Tiger lives on some sort of estate, right? Whatever happened must have happened in a loud, spectacular way in order for the neighbor to know about it and call 911.
3.) The Discovery of Infidelity and/or Domestic Violence
OK, why did wife Elin need to bash in a window, really? The idea of domestic violence enters the picture. WHAT is it that she is pissed off about? Then we learn the National Enquirer has an infidelity story. (This is around the time I become a regular reader of TMZ.com, which really became the go-to blog for the latest Tiger information.) Now, I know there are some areas in which the National Enquirer cannot be trusted, but for the record I believed them on that John Edwards love child story from the beginning. Here we were again with a powerful guy with mistress story, it was safe for both Drew and myself to follow their reporting. Especially if we were reloading TMZ most of the time, anyhow.
“Then we find out another crucial fact,” Drewbie points out. “That Tiger likes women. Tiger is such a neutral, emotionless, passionless robot most of the time that I had no idea that he had cravings of the flesh! That he was into carnage! You see other athletes and their performance and you get the idea that this or that guy owns his masculinity, has a swagger to him. Tiger had none of that going on.”
4.) Lesson Learned: Scandinavian women are not to be messed with.
“The more this story comes together, the more you realize this is not the heroic act of a wife,” Drew continues.
In fact, I think this is about the time in our conversation when Drew referenced something like 5,000 years of Viking fury that beat Tiger within an inch of his life. She deserves our respect for holding her husband accountable with a big stick.
5.) Women out of the woodwork
This is the part of the story where I can’t really keep up because I’ve been editing video or calling sources or otherwise doing something productive (not that this is not a fascinating and legitimate story in its own right). OK so let’s review. The first mistress woman denies any affairs, but immediately hires LA power attorney Gloria Allred. It seems mistress #1 won’t be saying anything to us.
Enter the second one, Jaimee Grubbs. “She’s my favorite of the ten or eleven women,” Drew says. “If you wanted to brand the kind of woman that Tiger likes, you could say it in one word: Grubbs. That is exactly what he is after. This is the one who’s previous claim to fame was being on the VH1 show, “Tool Academy. I love that. She’s clearly intent on building on the Jamie Grubbs brand. She immediately takes her story public. Not only have a slept with Tiger Woods, I have the electronic paper trail to prove it. And my god, if this voicemail message isn’t the greatest thing ever.” (Listening to it is better.)
Hey, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Can you please take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone and may be calling you. So if you can, please take your name off that. Just have it as a number on the voicemail, just have it as your telephone number. You got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. Bye.
This is Tiger truly speaking from the heart. Not some sort of practiced statement. We’re learning not only of his neighbor, but of his game. Game-game, not golf game. “And the directions that she’s giving this woman. How does that help him out at all? This is clearly the ramblings of a desperate man.” This is the part where Drew felt sympathetic for Tiger, in the same way we all kinda felt sympathetic for Mark Sanford after all those nonsense love letters came out. “No man should have to read his love letters in the newspaper,” Drew says.
I’m not sure this was the part where I felt bad for Tiger. I don’t really feel that bad for him, as I feel all the intrigue right now is partly his own doing by a.)protecting his privacy so fiercely that now EVERYTHING we learn about him is somehow a shocking revelation and b.) He’s the one who hooked up with all those women and betrayed his family. We can debate the need for marriage as an institution and the lack of merits for marriage in modern times, etc etc, but if dude wanted more freedom, he didn’t HAVE TO get married and have babies. Nevermind c.) The guy’s a public figure.
6.) Feeding Frenzy
Grubbs is the first to go public and go for the cash grab. BTW, it’s amazing she kept every voicemail and other communication because it shows she was prepared for this moment since she met Tiger. Clearly, this pisses off mistress #1. Press conference at 2:30pm.
While we’re waiting for all that, something like three or four women come out, “each one getting progressively worse on the hotness scale” (his words, not mine). All of them fit the standard Grubbs archetype: the Vegas cocktail waitress, barmaid, nightclub hostess. Tiger has certainly pegged a certain type of women.
“When he feels down, [NFL quarterback] Vince Young watches 2006 national college football championship to remind himself who he is. Maybe Tiger should have done that. Maybe he should have put in the tape of the 1997 Masters or the 2008 PGA Championship. You have a billion dollar [part of the male anatomy] and you are effing these dollar store [something that rhymes with no’s]. He went very low down on the food chain,” Drew says.
Which bring us to…the woman from Perkins the pie restaurant.
“To be TIGER WOODS and to take your wife to a place where the golf course greenskeeper employees dont take their wives to eat, seems a bit odd to me To take youre swedish supermodel wife to Perkins for breakfast regularly?”
7.) Assorted takeaways
Tiger crashes into a fire hydrant in the middle of the night and now we get to learn all kinds of stuff about the guy within a period of two weeks. These are things we never assumed. Now we know he as a black neighbor. He likes cheap women, easy women. He likes to meet them in Vegas or in Perkin’s. And I also know that Tiger has an allergy to condoms. There’s no excuse for why this guy did not know better. And if your “game” is repeatedly cheating on your wife and subsequently maintaining regular relationships with the mistresses, just to cover his trail he should have covered up. Just to be safe!
“That had me distressing. That had me jumping to conclusions about why mom went to the hospital,” said Drew.
Meanwhile, what do we make of the kind of women Tiger has been cavorting around with? YOU ARE TIGER WOODS. Shouldn’t we expect Woods to be hanging out with Rihanna?
8.) The Rise of Tabloids
So to review, this is a news story, a gossip story, a sports story, and it’s a business story because the guy’s a global brand. He’s the governor of a billion dollar enterprise. It’s everything. That latex allergy thing was when the wheels of this story really came off for me, but who knows what we can believe? We’re all trusting news organizations that PAY for their sources and stories. This is troubling for us as journalists who do not pay for news in a host of ways, which we can probably save for a separate post.
But quickly here – as journalists who don’t pay, we play other cards to get information, like cunning. Or the put-truth-before-your-own-self-interests card. The News of the World and Enquirer and even US Weekly, from what I understand, they play the we’ll-give-you-$150,000 card. This is why the Associated Press only acknowledges the first two mistresses and is holding off on the last seven, cause they can’t independently confirm them. If you can’t source it you have to say, “the Daily News has added these people, etc.” How do you stay in a story without opeining your wallet? All these outlets are paying.
9.) Looking Ahead: Are we in David Duchovny territory?
“Jaimee Grubbs is… I’m sorry. I could get with Jaimee Grubbs,” Drew says. “The fact that Tiger did this… Tiger and I should not be competing for the same pool of women.”
The Marathon. It Sucked.
It’s taken me more than a week to properly process the beat down that was the San Antonio Marathon last Sunday.
Long story short, I actually finished it, but it took me more than five painful hours. I have many excuses.
1.) My running buddy, with whom I’d been training since July, got nauseated around mile 15. This led us to stop for about twenty minutes as he debated inside a porta-potty whether he needed to throw up. I told him, F*CK IT, JUST DO IT LIVE! (as Bill O’Reilly would say), but I think he ended up keeping all those Gu energy gels in his system.
2.) The energy drink of choice at the SA Rock ‘n Roll Marathon? Something called Cytomax, which really smelled and tasted more of Pedialite mixed with Honey Cough, by Robitussin. I was really hurting for Powerade.
3.) Did not plan for upper 80’s and thick humidity in mid-November, but that’s really a lame excuse considering I do live in Texas.
4.) Running buddy Eddie from bullet point number one ended up hitting the proverbial wall at mile 19. This was highly unfortunate, as I was already nearing something like a wall. Decided, ultimately, to leave him behind, but this was probably not the smartest decision as I spent the last 7.2 miles feeling alone and angry that I was still running.
Finally, FINALLY made it through, and a lot of thanks go to the strangers who were out there supporting us with awesome signs. My favorites included:
“KEEP RUNNING, WE’RE ALREADY DRUNK”
“This is hard. That’s what she said!”
Emerging from the Hole
I’m not a parent, but I feel like a team of us at The Texas Tribune just birthed a baby. We launched early Tuesday morning, and to follow the metaphor, we know the hard work is just beginning.
Together, we worked 12 to 18 hour days for something like two and a half weeks straight. The developers were given 90 wireframes of designs and features to code, and only three to four weeks to code it. We didn’t outsource the work to Bangalore, and we are a site run on all custom systems – from our content management system, down to the widget all staffers have on their laptops in order to link stories to “TribWire”.
By the wee small hours of launch, my eyes looked like roadmaps, it was Tuesday but I thought it was Thursday, my emotional bandwith ran so low that I would start crying spontaneously, and all of us survived on food being brought in to us so we wouldn’t have to leave the building in order to eat.
I realized how removed from the world I became when someone told me there was a Michael Jackson documentary coming out, and I’d never heard of it before.
The site is now live, and the incredible response we collectively received from the national press and tech geeks and smarmy lobbyists and people who don’t even like politics has been enough to induce tears — this time, the happy kind. This is the hardest I’ve ever worked, but the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. We mean it when we say this has purpose.
Those of us who graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism know Walter Williams’ creed well. It begins like this:
“I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of this trust.”
Ever since the day I graduated from college and started working in journalism, I’ve observed the slow whittling away of the public service part of what we do in order to meet the high stakes demands of turning a profit. Our founder, John Thornton, who started the Tribune as his personal form of philanthropy, decided that you can’t serve both God and mammon. That journalism plus business equals business, and in starting and being a non-profit-by-choice we can throw every dollar we raise straight back into the product and our mission – journalism that matters.
This whole experience has been nothing short of a series of small miracles. In my personal life, had this not come along, who knows what Stiles and I would have had to sacrifice in order to be in the same city. In my professional life, had the Tribune’s Evan Smith and Ross Ramsey not called, I may have wandered out of this craft that I love. On many, many fronts, I am so grateful. We’re exhausted but exhilarated.
More than 1,000 people crowded an Austin bar last night to celebrate our coming out. I cried (again) when I saw my friends who I’ve missed seeing so much. Thank you a million, gazillion times for supporting this financially, intellectually and in spirit.
Finally, I think y’all know that part of the reason I love my new job so much is because I get to mess around a little and exercise creative freedom as much as there’s time in the day. Our site developers are so awesomely geeky that I used my little pocket Canon to catch some moments in the early morning hours before launch. That’s the video above. Here’s to the boys.
The Hole
Decided to title this post “The Hole” since it is both the multimedia room where I stow myself away and the vortex in the time-space continuum many of us at The Texas Tribune have disappeared into as we make our final push toward next Tuesday’s launch. Whoa. Next Tuesday is November 3rd. Conceptually, it’s tough to wrap my exhausted and excited mind around.
It’s a significant date because it’s launch day… the unveiling of the first iteration of what will be many versions of The Texas Tribune. The goal is a rich, satisfying site full of context – which our founder will explain much, much better on day one.
I’ve never worked on a campaign. But a lot of commenters on our Facebook site have made that comparison. I guess we’re working for a cause (public service, the reason why we wanted to be journos in the first place) and toward a certain drop dead date (the aforementioned November 3rd), but perhaps the most apt similarities are the frenetic pace, sleeplessness of staff and piling up of food containers everywhere. I took a picture of a typical end-of-a-working-weekend trash pile yesterday, but decided it was too gross to put up, even in this personal blog space.
I haven’t seen or talked to many of my closest friends in the past few weeks. So I’m really sorry, and I miss you. Also, a huge thank you to the friends who have already supported or are planning to support The Tribune in one way or another. This is a non-profit organization dependent on support from ‘viewers like you’, so it means a lot. Until we can come up for air, I’ll make better use of this cyberhole to communicate. Much, much more to come.
Confrusted
Converting to Snow Leopard operating system created a mountain of problems for me and all the video/audio programs we rely on. Various device driver downloads solved most of my camera compatibility issues, but now my hub for my podcasting mics is unable to be read as an “aggregate device”, because Snow Leopard won’t make that a choice.
This is a situation our technology grand pubah calls “confrustion”, the unfortunate hybrid of confusion and frustration. You can see it on our faces, below. I’m guessing since we’re a startup trying to build a new public media brand, being confrusted will become the norm for the next few weeks.
Muddled
Outrage! I started a new personal blog only to abandon it for professional pursuits. At least for the last few weeks, that is. Everyone at the new office is working nonstop to be ready for our November 3rd launch, so, you know how it goes.
We are allowed to have weekends, though. Last weekend was one of the bigger ones in Austin, because it was the annual ritual where 90,000 people converge on a lush, green lawn to listen to hundreds of bands play three days worth of live music. A drenching rain on Saturday turned the newly-turfed Zilker Park lawn into a thick, sewage-infused mud sludge, so thick you’d easily lose your shoes to it and be forced to wander the open swamp barefoot. (Note someone’s Crocs casualty, pictured. And let me digress to argue that losing your Crocs is perhaps not a casualty at all.)
Barefoot did me in. Sometime between Raul Malo or Ben Harper and before Michael Franti, something sharp pierced the arch of my foot, then made a three-inch-long lateral cut I didn’t get to see for several hours, because a.)my feet and legs were buried under several layers of mud and b.)I had to stay to see Pearl Jam, because, come on.
One tetanus shot and many bandages later, I’m in pain every time my foot hits the ground. Like the man sings: “Lifetimes are catching up… with me…”
My Office
My first project for my new job, The Texas Tribune, was never assigned. The startup ethos in the newsroom is such that we’re free to go down the roads of interest to us, explore, and even fall on our faces should that happen. In this case — my teammates and bosses were great sports in just ‘going with it’, despite having little idea what I was doing.
Anyway, I thought it would be perfect, conceptually, to ‘introduce’ our team members by putting them in scenes straight out of NBC’s ‘The Office’ opening sequence. Thanks to some outdoor shooting help from my photog friend Justin (who almost got a ticket for riding on my back bumper while shooting an Austin City Limits sign off the side of a tollway), it actually turned out as I imagined it in my head.
The (Texas Tribune) Office from Elise Hu on Vimeo.
Back in the USA
We lost constant internet connectedness for the last week as we traveled Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary by cruising down the Danube River. While we managed to check our emails once a day, not being tethered to the iPhone and other communications devices was a welcome break. I instead relished human connectedness – the kind with my family, the kind all too rare now that my mom, dad and brother are spread out across the globe.
The flights proved exhausting and frustrating as usual (but at least I didn’t have to spend the night in a baggage claim like that one night on the way back from China in 2007). Loved the Hungarians. One of our guides explained that being on the losing side of every war since the 17th century makes the people quite authentic and realistic — something that made us want to go back to Budapest, or as the locals say, Budapescht, quite soon.
Travel log:
Passau, Germany
Wachau Valley, Austria (includes cities of Melk and Dunstein)
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary
Esztergom, Hungary
Sturovo, Slovak Republic (just across the border from Esztergom)
Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Grein, Austria
Linz, Austria
And without further delay… the PHOTOS!!!
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| Europe Sept 09 |
Donau-ing It
This may be the only blogpost I get up this week, since we’re slowing floating down the Danube River in a skinny boat full of German senior citizens. Mom/Dad/brother Roger/Roger’s girlfriend and Mr. Stiles are all here; today we’re in Vienna, yesterday we were in the vinyeards of the Wachau Valley.
Internet access from the boat costs 40 euro an hour so we decided to live without it this week, with the exception of this current sojourn into a Viennese coffee shop to get amped up on caffeine and get a wifi fix.
Vienna’s shockingly beautiful — much like Paris but a totally different feel. Went on a long run along the Danube this morning and things were going well until my brother Roger joined and I suddenly tripped over a metal hook thing jutting out of the concrete. Bit it. Hard. But managed to not-seriously injure myself.
Should mention that the best part of this place, for me. Hot dog stands. Everywhere.