Learn Stuff!

Over the past few years, I've had the pleasure to teach a variety of students. What veteran journalists and middle schoolers have in common? They like handouts. 

USC Annenberg's Andrew Lih and I firmly believe in the power of checklists and cheat sheets and we've put together a few one-sheeters for folks to take home. I've started putting the few we've developed on my site and will update it as I produce more. 

I'll be developing an online course in data journalism. So look out for more content!

Infographics Graveyard

You can't succeed without failing, they say. Here are a few eye-catching but failed data visualizations.

And a few minimalist econ posters that didn't make the cut:

Bo Xilai: Inside The Scandal

Bo Xilai's story is a juicy and complicated one. I spent a good month's worth of nights and weekends trying to disentangle the story of the ousted Chinese politician with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors. We finally turned it into this 17-minute opus. 

Immigrants Working in America

Immigration has always been a subject of interest to me. You can probably tell if you scroll through my portfolio of work. Here are two graphics I did for Planet Money on U.S. workers who were born outside of the country. 

A Few Observations That Have Made Video A Little Harder

Character casting. Back in 2007, when I was working on my master's project on Burmese refugees for several months, I knew that would have to do this to find a decent character for documentary. We interviewed dozens of people, went through several agencies and organizations. Some granted us interviews only to vanish after. Some wanted to tell us about their agenda rather than about their story. And some really disliked the camera. Finally, a month and a half into the research process, we arrived at three main characters. It was an arduous, but ultimately rewarding experience. 

Then, after graduation, I entered the world of news. 

The Character vs. the Interviewee 

What happened there was that speed on superseded character. The nutgraf overruled the uniqueness of an individual shown on camera. They had to be representative of a greater story. 

Perhaps that was a newspaper approach to a video package. But it did a number on me. 

For many stories, it became about getting the right quote and finding the person with the appropriate background to match a hypothesis, to fit neatly into an idea. That works for a certain kind of video feature, a news-driven feature. 

On some level this has also crept into some first person narratives told by individuals representative of a larger trend or of a certain human experience.  

There is a lot of heart-tugging work out there in the multimedia-sphere. Master pieces in story crafting, beautifully executed pieces. But sometimes they fall flat of lending their characters a third dimension because they are representing an issue, a trend, a sad saga. 

But that runs the hazard of becoming formulaic. 

I did a lot of reporting trips while I was based in Hong Kong. Trips that lasted 5 or 10 days tops. My life in Asia consisted of a lot of news and very often representative interviewees. It became a straight-forward task to produce stories (though it always remained hard work). I knew my stories were solid, but I started feeling that something was lacking. 

And then -- after listening to the experiences of many documentary filmmakers around me -- it all came back to me. I remembered the Burmese refugees in New York, the hours of footage we wasted trying to find the right people, the effort and time put into that search and the difficulty we had trying to put together these stories. Real characters throw you curve balls; they can be cast as both villains and victims, and they will test your ability to weave together a complex set of facts to paint -- at best -- a Jackson-Pollock-like picture. 

Gosh. How I long for this agony!

Radio vs. Video

Working with some amazing radio reporters also reinforced in me one very crucial thing: most media, even radio, can travel into the past. Video can't. 

There's a lot of work out there and work I've done, that describes things that happened in the past. Or things that happen every day ("What do you do on a typical day?" I hear myself asking). 

"TV where nothing unravels in front of the camera is dead TV," a friend said recently. 

There's a lot of broll gathering in today's multimedia work. In other words, there's a lot of beautiful stuff out there. But there is little where things unravel. 

The best footage requires time, serendipity and trust from your character. It requires a bit of luck. It also requires lots of time for things to happen. On some level perhaps years (depending on how deep you want to be entrenched in something and how long it takes the story you're pursuing to come to its natural conclusion). And yes, add to that technical and aesthetic skill. 

(Re)discovering all this just made me so much more skeptical of my own work, which has been largely driven by news gathering. I will keep working in visual media, don't get me wrong. But it's changed my focus. I used to concentrate on what I realize now are mostly stylistic, methodological aspects of storytelling -- pacing a visually and orally told story, shooting for information and aesthetics, interspersing moments of reflections between anecdotes and action shots.

Now I want real people who do things in front of the camera over time. That'll mean fewer videos. But hopefully better ones, too. 

Recent Work: Evan Twyford's Industrial Design for Outer Space

Something I reported back in December. Space is fun. 

Personalized Storytelling: You Can't Do Anything Wrong

My last post for ONA as an MJ Bear Fellow. I had a great time. 

Last fall, I found myself in a blizzard-like storm in New York, fighting my way through a thick wall of snow. I had just left my position at the Wall Street Journal in Asia to be with my husband and to pursue full-time reporting. This weather was a reminder of the fact that I was no longer in the comforting tropical climate of Hong Kong and no longer in a comfortable job at a multinational news organization.

I was on my way to the Pageturner Literary Festival to see Junot Diaz speak. He is an author who bedazzled me with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Coming back to the U.S. had been a bit of an adjustment, and so I was hoping for some advice and counsel — perhaps a shove in the right direction, an uplifting tale of struggle and eventual success from Mr. Diaz.

And he delivered.

OF ENDURANCE AND PATIENCE

“Eleven years is a long time to feel like a loser,” Diaz said at one point in his speech. He was referring to the time it took him to finish his novel about the pudgy Dominican nerd Oscar Wao. Diaz won international acclaim for his book, but it also took him more than a decade to finish it.

He urged the soaking, attentive crowd of aspiring storytellers to be patient with themselves — to give themselves a break.

“When you’re on your sixth year of your novel, and you’ve taught a student how to write a novel in six months, then you start blaming yourself,” he said. “Most of us don’t help ourselves [in those situations]. We tend to double down on the punishment. If the page or the thing [we're] working on is punishing us, we seem to think that that’s somehow a value judgment on ourselves.”

Diaz said we need to give ourselves the same compassion that we do the characters in our stories — in his case they are fictional; in ours they are real.

Ira Glass has a similar plea to young storytellers. Here in this (much-circulated but never old) video, the host and creator of “This American Life” speaks of the need to be patient and continue to produce work — to produce a lot of work and to do so repeatedly, even if the work is not entirely what you want it to be.

It’s not easy to always keep this in mind. We’re young and restless, after all. We want to tell amazing stories. We might go to conflict zones, where we suspect those stories are waiting for us. The falling prices of gadgets and tech gear are on our side, but to be consistently great takes patience with oneself. This is something that I, and perhaps some others in my shoes, lack at times.

OF PERSONAL EXCELLENCE AND AUTHENTICITY

Diaz and Min Jin Lee, the author sharing the stage with Diaz, also talked about artistic integrity. They spoke of editors who wanted them to remove parts of their novels that were integral to their stories and characters, such as Korean words or footnotes. Those elements seemed be too “weird” for their audience, according to those editors.

But instead, Diaz and Lee encouraged the audience to listen to their own understanding of what is, and what isn’t, too experimental for their audience.

“They [your editors] are making economic arguments about aesthetic issues,” Diaz said. “The economic argument should not be made because you aren’t going to make much money doing this.”

Their struggles to sell books is perhaps akin to our need to sell our stories to our editors and to the omnivorous Internet. Sometimes the currency we’re dealing with is not the money people will spend on our books, but the traffic, eyeballs and clicks.

But beyond the short-lived, monetary benefits of traffic and the pats on the back you get from your editor, there’s one quality that’s lasting: What is my own definition of personal excellence in my craft, and how can I reach my selected audience? By that, I don’t mean the voiceless masses that makes up the traffic stream to a website, but the audience I choose to move — the people whom I want to reach.

Who knows whether “traditional media” is a platform for bringing the best you can do to your chosen audience? It could be a documentary about an obscure community you send out to selected screenings. It could be an article such as the hauntingly beautiful and absolutely unconventional account of a man in Japan, floating on his roof for days after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroyed his village.

There’s nothing wrong with striving to find your own voice, both authors urged. For us, this is something that can, and sometimes cannot, be done in the field of journalism.

“There is the idea that there is this right path,” Diaz said. But if you haven’t taken it “you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Didn’t take an MFA? You didn’t do anything wrong.
Took you 11 years to write your book? You didn’t do anything wrong.
Don’t feel like writing about your family? You didn’t do anything wrong.
You do feel like writing about your family? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Well, I’m not sure whether I’m spreading myself too thin by trying to work with every medium. I’m not sure whether I did the right thing by leaving Asia. But I didn’t do anything wrong, either.