It wasn’t easy and for a moment it appeared that UPS was going to tag them as undeliverable– long story but basically my NYC apartment building has a broken doorbell to my apartment, so I had to stand outside between 10am and 6pm to catch the delivery guy– but that all does not matter now, because they’re finally here!

And I humbly hope I don’t say so myself, but they’re gorgeous!

In the words of Bob Hope, “Rooowrrrr.”

In the coming weeks these babies will be flying all across the world to our educational partners, schools, colleagues, prospective students and my mom.

It’s a mini-milestone (milepebble?) that started late last year when I signed on with Tortuga to teach photojournalism and multimedia. Immediately I dove in by putting together a website and designing these posts cards. We think they’re pretty spiffy and I tried to put a lot of thought into the design, going back and forth for weeks as we redesigned them not once, not twice but four times.

The decision was made early on to go with a postcard: they’re eye catching, invite viewers to post them to a wall or fridge, can be viewed quickly and invoke the feeling of travel, which is perfect for a week-long workshop in another country.

I love minimalist design and I knew I wanted to take advantage of lots of negative space and keep everything very clean and simple. I approached it with one goal, to create a postcard you would want to pin up at work.

For the front I fell in love with an image created by my fellow Tortuga instructor Roberto Rosales, of a boy handling a hammerhead shark during a previous workshop on the Island of Meanguera, El Salvador. The image not only gives a taste of the stories to be found at the workshop, it’s tack sharp, perfectly exposed and has this very rare unusual and arresting juxtaposition of the calm boy against the serrated teeth of a shark in his hands.

The caption, which I wanted to include because as a photojournalist I think it’s crucial that we add to the story once viewers are hooked in by a beautifully shot image, is on the back side of the card.

But before we could get to the back, we next had to make selections of text, fonts and colors. In the past Tortuga Photo Workshops had kept it monochromatic with black on white, but we wanted to introduce a splash of color and hit on a shade of yellow that was bright with just enough depth as not to look flat. Marrying the Tortuga logo to the yellow was an instant smile inducer.

For the copy we kept it simple and brief. The point of our postcard after all was to draw you in and give you a well designed product you’d enjoy looking at, even pinning to your wall if we’ve done our job right, not to sell you the kitchen sink. With that in mind we quickly narrowed the message to a short summery, removed Twitter and Facebook information from the front– a taboo in some circles, but our website was on the front and could provide that information easily — and added a simple black border to give weight to the package.

On the reserve  side I carried the postcard motif and kept lots of white space and areas to write a message, address and place a stamp.

Whereas the front featured the yellow logo hit, on the back we have the classic Tortuga Photo Workshops logo, creating a base structure and column grid for the layout. The goal again was it create a natural flow that was pleasing to the eye.

The Twitter, Facebook and website URLs also appear, accented by a simple splash of color and again are part of a very clean design. I also moved them up from the border’s edge to make allotments for postal bar codes which are printed along the bottom edge by the USPS. We won’t know for sure if anyone at the post office will smile or even notice, but we do know that our contact information won’t be printed over and become illegible.

The caption below the logo reads: “A boy no older than twelve handles a hammerhead shark caught in the bay of Jiquilisco, El Salvador, with his father. Despite the danger posed by the prey, his small community relies solely on fishing sharks for economic gain and stability. This is just one of the many stories to be found on a Tortuga Photo Workshop.”

I’m most proud that I was able to include the caption; it also sets up the premise for our message of “Discover Your Story,” which we dropped the opacity on and printed using a light font in a greyscale that would allow it to be legible but still be written over when used as a postcard.

Over all I’m thrilled with the final result and we hope you will be too.

And it doesn’t stop there, we’re also happy to add that earlier this week we opened up the window for applications to the August 2012 photo workshop on the Island of Meanguera, El Salvador. Please help us get the word out, but space is very limited so apply first!

Let me preface this post by saying that Louis CK inspired today’s musings. Why is that pertinent, it’s not really, but I’m not so secretly hoping he’ll google himself and end up here and then we’ll go down to the Comedy Cellar together and form a two man tribute band which only plays The Seeds Mr. Farmer and PUSA’s Peaches, or least co-write it as a story line for season three of Louie.

I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of fail, or to put it more crudely, the ability to suck out loud.

Sports fans, or anyone one born after 1980, know to well about Michael Jordan being cut from the high school basketball team and then roaring back on grit and determination to become arguably (Wilt? Magic? Oscar?) the greatest player and root beer aficionado ever in the NBA.

We’ve all seen the widely circulated Ira Glass videos, where he admits he sucked when he started, but the lesson he and we learned is that fearing failure will keep up from pushing forward.

Sucking isn’t a modern construct, Abraham Lincoln was sucking it up from way back when, losing elections and failing to get nominations to the ticket in various elections (although not as many as some would have you believe) before becoming one of our most admired presidents.

Failure or sucking is something we fear or look down upon, but in reality it’s only by stumbling and falling and looking stupid do we learn to walk and succeed.

That’s the odd bit about sucking, we always forget that it’s a step toward success. You can’t just skip over the lot, you have to struggle and learn and fail a lot (a whole f’n lot if you do it right) and try to fail, because trying to fail means you’re taking chances and growing. Remaining in your safety zone is when you stop swimming and start wading or worse sinking.

It’s not a revolutionary epiphany, we all know this, it’s rather intuitive despite how many times it’s packaged by the next self-help guru, motivational speaker, Oprah or a Chicken Soup for the Albino book.

Still, doesn’t hurt to be reminded and I was reminded of this recently while getting my lol on with some YouTube.

How this:

Became this:

Just watching this these two videos reminds me that sometimes you can suck real bad, like horrible-what-the-hell-it-hurts-to-watch-I-can’t-believe-this-guy-became-that-guy… but that’s the point, Louis the awkward, lame voices and painful to watch jokes about peaches and dolphin noises guy kept at it and became evolved into the witty, painfully honest, observant mirror and hilarious man we churned out a million dollars in profit for.

Inspiring. I mean, Louis really sucked!

Once again, welcome to my latest post for #JCarn.

The Carnival of Journalism is a loose collection of journalism thinkers (and people like me) who get together to post on their blogs with their reflections on a given prompt.

This month guest ringmaster Michael Rosenblum asks “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?” Journalists never like talking about money, mostly because we don’t have it, so it’s a weighty topic. I’m looking forward to seeing what my fellow carnies come up with.

If you’d like to participate next time head on over and sign up for the next prompt.

I actually find the question posed a little peculiar.

I suppose the notion here is that journalism and capitalism are mutually exclusive, at least that’s what we like to believe, but journalism has always been an enterprise designed to turn a profit. From the Hartford Courant (which proclaims itself America’s oldest continuously published newspaper) to the Huffington Post, every circulation began with a business man and an owner making an investment.

This is truth, you can argue it, but all I have to do is point to years of layoffs to prove it. The facts are that newspapers started off as a license to print money and were sold at vastly subsidized price that still allowed growth each quarter.

What we like to pretend it is– the hard living, back breaking, gritty profession we take on in service of the greater good and maintain as a responsibility to society– it was never intended to be.

As illustrated by this educational film from 1940, it was a straightforward capitalist idea:

Ignoring the sexism of the video for a moment, the ideal of journalism has only in recent decades become known as that noble truth-seeking 4th branch of government. In the wake of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and photojournalist from the Vietnam era who demanded more than fluff, generations to come after have looked to the profession as a calling in the interest of the social good.

Anyone who has spent anytime in a newsroom knows the familiar triad, “I make no money, but I didn’t get into this for the money.” It’s so cliche in its naiveté that we began to think it was real.

What irks me is that we already know this, but refuse to admit it. As journalist, we’re an educated bunch with tried and tested abilities to research, interview, present, mine for information, simplify complex subjects and have a fairly solid understanding on what makes the world work.

When there’s a scandal or investigative story the first place we start is looking at the stakeholders and following the money, because we know it’s human nature for people to do things to your own self interest and incentives.

So then why do we pretend that journalism should be or is any different? Newspapers have become publicly traded companies with CEOs who draw large bonus and have just as much to do with spreadsheets and profit margins as any monolithic Fortune 500 company.

Going from clunkity-clunk to cha-ching

Journalism is a business, your noble intentions aside, you’re part of the great American capitalism machine.

There aren’t many journalist in the trenches today that like this reality, I myself hated it and tried to conduct myself as if it didn’t exist in the newsroom, so I have to wonder why does this attitude afflict so many of us?

Perhaps we have to ask the right question and resolve a few things, chiefly:

• Poverty isn’t something to romanticized.
• Why is it wrong to make money as a journalist?

Think of the image that you have of a journalist. Hollywood’s sold us the image of a sloppy dresser with a unkept hair, no family or social life, empty fridges in past-due draft dark apartments, sporting tussled blazers and a lose knot tie next to bottles of whiskey kept in the desk.

This person sacrifices in pursuit of the truth and only stops long enough to shave or warm up a microwave pizza, and the poverty is worn like a badge of honor. As if owning a car from the same decade, living in a place with natural light, shopping for fresh produce or asking for a raise were some how selling out on your principals.

And my friends, we’ve all drank the Kool-Aid. I’m just as guilty as you. My first job I lost money (no gas reimbursement), my second job I used my own equipment and paid for my own repairs, at another job I spent months eating $0.08 Ramen noodles on my entry level salery with unpaid overtime– and I did it all with pride.

I’m not in it for the money, I’m in it to inform and help people have a voice. And I was proud of the work I was doing, I still am, but I romanticized the ideal of the broke journalist falsely.

What’s wrong with money? The bloke above seems to be having a good time with it. I rather be that guy then the guy above him right? I’m tired of not being able to afford a new laptop or knowing if I’ll make rent next month. (anyone know a cheap place in NYC?)

Journalist have this idea that if we make any money, we’re selling out. That’s just silly and stupid on our part. There is nothing wrong with a fair wage for work done, just because you happen to be doing something you enjoy isn’t a substitute for greenbacks, it’s a perk. It means you did something right in life and ended up in a place you don’t hate going to it. Best of all, it means no “Mondays” posters of cats in the office.

Quack like a duck

Journalism is capitalism, we just don’t like the word.

And a journalist can be good capitalist, but we have to get over those deeply engrained hurdles first.

Think about it, we have a set of skills that make us perfect at running our own enterprise.

1. We’re organized, smart and understand how to get to the information we need and what to do with it.
2. We’re goal and deadline oriented, and used to getting $#!t done day in and day out.
3. We know how to take rejection and criticism, in fact we relish it!
4. We know how to interact with others and harvest relationships or get across a complex idea.
5. If we don’t know something we don’t let our ego get in the way of admitting it and we aren’t afraid to ask for help in formulating or completing a game plan.
6. No one knows how to follow the money, access the interests, customize the message and package and pitch an idea better than a journalist, well except a photojournalist ;).
7. Who else understands media or branding or storytelling and how to connect with an audience better than us? Certainly not a “guru”.
8. We embrace change and new things. SoundSlides, Video, interactive, mobile and social media? Pu-leaze, we’re already on to creating our own things like Storify and trying to incorporate uses for Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest. We invented pivot before it was a buzz word.
9. When it comes to following the money and making sense of complex ideas, no one does it better, so we have all the knowledge and leads on where to look to put together a business plan of our own.
10. We’re ethical. Google’s motto is “Don’t be Evil,” for a journalist to use it would be redundant. And plagiarism.

These are all skills that will help any of us become titans of industry, but first we have to get over those two giant hurdles.

• Poverty isn’t something to romanticized.
• Why is it wrong to make money as a journalist?

You could say that the president’s State of the Union address each year is like the Super Bowl of web journalism. If you won’t say it, I will. It’s a single manageable time of immense importance and scrutiny and every news org is experimenting to take advantage of the web and jostling to become the top shared news provider for the event.

Think about it. When else does our industry have this many captive eyeballs for a topic that is in our civil good to cover and can be planned for? Aside from election night (which has sadly become more sporting event than chronicle of history, but that’s a rant for another post), they’re non-existent.

With that in mind I woke up today with glee and took to the internet tubes to scour out the best of the best, like a child on Christmas morning I couldn’t wait to see what innovative treats interactive producers and multimedia journalist at my favorite publications had come up with. Follow along with me and stick around to the end if you want to see my choice for Noble Lord of #SOTU Coverage Majesty, ESQ. (sorry I’ve been watching Dowton Abby.)

The Guardian

The Guardian always comes through when it comes to interactives! Everyone had the same idea this year (and every year from now on?) to annotate the SOTU video with transcripts and make it easy to follow along and reference the words, but The Guardian (am I wrong or wasn’t it The UK Guardian before?) took it one step further then say The New York Times, and broke it down into sensible topics, allows users to quickly get to the information they want via the transcript, and most importantly it’s all presented it in a slick, very well designed, intuitive and thought out interface that didn’t look like information vomit, like say The New York Times.

That said it would have been nice to be able to search the transcript without reading it so I can click to the parts that talk about the EPA and milk spill or Buffet rule.

PBS NewsHour

After last year’s innovative HTML5 enabled real time analysis of the SOTU, I couldn’t wait to see what PBS NewsHour had up their sleeve for 2012. This time around, it’s much less sexy but much more important. Using the Mozilla backed Universal Subtitles tool, PBS invites the public to help translate the address into every language in the world. As of now it appears to be complete in 9 languages with about 8 more in the pipeline. Not bad for 100% volunteer efforts over 24 hours and a couple pleas via Twitter. In addition to the SOTU, PBS is also hoping to translate the republican response as well.

PolitiFact

From the the if it ain’t isn’t broke, don’t fix it department, PolitiFact keeps doing what they do and doing it well. There’s not much I can say about them that’s new. I almost didn’t include them in this post as I try to stick to the spirt of innovation and one shots, but after spending 20 mins. on the site, it just wouldn’t be fair not to acknowledge that grandpa still has legs.

The New York Times

This New York Times graphic didn’t jive with me at first glance — the information isn’t easy to read right away and it feels it should be interactive and it’s not — but after a little analysis it starts to reveal an important narrative of what’s on everyone’s mind and how the next couple of months may play out as the rhetoric heats up. As a journalist I might look at this and see that perhaps I should dig deeper into research on topics like jobs and taxes as they may become the talking points later. It’s also interesting to see how the trends have come and gone, such as the deficit  being a hot topic earlier in 2011 before it started to teeter off for some.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post decided to take a similar route to the NYTs but rather than look at the President’s words as compared to other candidates, they compared them to his past three addresses. The data heavy picture that emerges is President Obama’s time in office has been consumed by the economy and talk of jobs for the most part. The piece is packed full of transcripts, charts and graphs and has some useful bells and whistles like the standing ovation tracker which reveals that Republicans agree with drafting a bill to ban insider trading by congressmen but aren’t too keen on raising taxes on the wealthy. Overall a very well packaged interactive with tons of data to pour over.

And finally, our Top Dog: The White House

Once again Whitehouse.gov live-streamed the address — as they have done since 2002 when George W. Bush look to the digital airwaves — but as has become indicative of the Obama presidency, they didn’t hesitate to put some pepper on it.

The centerpiece was an interactive video with captions, embedded links to more information, a call to submit questions or feedback via Twitter #hastags (#bashtag?) #WHchat or #SOTU, and links to full transcripts, share buttons, the history of why we have a State of the Union and even some fun facts for some light triviality.

Beyond the video of the address, the site lists events to take place over the coming days in which various Q&As hosted on YouTube, Google+, Yahoo and Facebook and is encouraging users to engage by providing some of the questions.

They even anticipated the tangental ‘who is sitting next to the first lady’ angle and created a nifty little interactive with pictures and bios of each person (hmm, there’s San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, I covered him so much when I worked there). Very impressive and I must say it’s the best interactive I’ve seen on the topic even when compared to efforts from established media.

The one drawback is the lacking design of the video with its patched together PowerPoint-esque slides fading in and out and the fugly blue border and background, but that’s a minor nitpick.

So what’s that leave for journalist? Well come on!

Now it’s time for journalism to really shine where it works best, in the analysis, fact-checking and hitting the streets to hear what your community is saying. As news sources start going directly to the people (think of how many stories cited a Twitter post as the first source for breaking news in the past year), the journalism switches to that of making sense of the information and analyzing what it means rather than regurgitating a press-release with some quotes for color. I don’t know about you, but that excites me.

What’s your take?

Did the Whitehouse.gov take the top prize? What interactive did I miss? Most importantly, as news sources start to cut out journalist and take the message direct, what’s this mean for journalist and how we cover such events in the future? Leave a comment or head over to my Facebook group (link in the header and footer) to share your thoughts with others.

Ralph Miller doesn’t complain about the back aches or the mice chewing up crops or the lack of hands around the farm.

The 77-year-old retired minister knows what he singed up for and he wears it all with a smile.

We are always building on the past, yet unified in our signaler endeavor of eking out a living. Generations come and go, but this simple fact never changes.

For seven generations, the Miller’s have cultivated a small patch of land in Rockport, Maine, raising everything from cattle to berries to children and pumpkins.

October is harvest time for Ralph.

I met him during a VII Master Documentary workshop with Ron Haviv this past fall. This is Ralph Miller’s story and his hope of preserving a family tradition by passing it down to his grandson.

It’s the end of the year and that usually means two things, left overs and best of lists. This year saw a lot of newsworthy events from the Arab Spring to OWS, Obama got Osama to Rick Perry trying to remember three things, it was a year packed with news events and continued debate about what journalism’s of the future will look like (that’s a circle jerk that will never end btw).

This isn’t a post about all those events, this is about the thing that never changes year to year – story. More precisely multimedia stories over the year that I watched again and again trying to take apart, ran over to my journal to brainstorm or immediately shared with my closest cohorts.

Here’s what inspired me in 2011.

Capitalism meets Communism

Dai Sugano revisiting the audio side he first explored in 2005 and showing everyone how to combine original reporting with style and impact. I’m biased – he’s a pal- but there’s no denying the talent. Just watch it and thank me in the comments below.

Take this Lollipop

Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now

Sprawl 2 – Arcade Fire

A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan

Coal: A Love Story

The true cost of gas

An American Cleric

What is Graypants?

Today

Everything is a Remix

If you think everything has been done before, you’re right. But let me share with you something I learned a long time ago; everything’s been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you. Put your stamp on it and tell the story from you eyes. If everyone had looked at Robert Frank’s The Americans and said someone’s already taken pictures of our community, why do that, well it would be a sad place today. Not to mention no more pictures of farmers from OU or WKU grads.

Bonus: