Jen Gerson

"All his life has he looked away, to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was! Hm? What he was doing! Huh. Adventure. Eh! Excitement. Eh! A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless!"

Yoda

• A lesson for the Liberals from my (B.C.) grandmother, who voted Conservative for the second time since Mulroney.
• *****
• Me: "Who do you normally vote for, Nanny?"
• Nanny: "Liberal, oh I've long voted Liberal. I'll probably vote again for the Liberals next year."
• Me: "Why did you vote Conservative?"
• Nanny: "Well, the Liberals confused me. They had that tall man, he came out of the blue and then he went away. What a phony that one was. And the NDP is No, No, No. They give everything away. They'll be in hoc and they'll still give things away to people."
• Then we spoke about the Royal Wedding. She's still anti-Camilla.

thedailywhat:

RIP: 41-year-old British-born filmmaker and photojournalist Tim Hetherington, co-director of the Oscar-nominated Afghanistan war documentary Restrepo, was killed today when an RPG struck a group of journalists in the Libyan city of Misrata.

Three others were also injured in the attack: Pulitzer Prize-nominated Getty photographer Chris Hondros, Panos Agency photographer Guy Martin — both of whom are said to be in serious condition — and freelancer Michael Brown, who was slightly wounded.

In his final tweet, posted just hours before the attack, Hetherington wrote: “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”

(Above: Tim Hetherington (right), alongside fellow Restrepo director Sebastian Junger.)

[vanityfair.]

This is Tony Seskus, making an embarrassment of himself.

“…this level of jingoism betrays a society ill at ease with its own diversity, where an attack on internationalism and ambition — after all, that is what Ignatieff is being accused of — has traction with culturally isolated voters.”

What do thousands of unused sand bags look like? Tiny bit forlorn, actually.

It’s difficult to believe the two things I am most obsessed with have combined to form a hybrid-uber obsession, but here it is. 

Screw reading the news. Let’s all learn how to play the news. Play the news? Yes. Play it. Like a video game. What a freaking neat way to present big-picture data. As an example, I’ll present something tweeted during a recent #newsgames conference: http://playspent.org (with nods to @ThePixelHunt.) Play that for a few minutes and you’ll see what I mean. 

As a writer with a pro-wordy bias, I believe there are things non-fiction can do very well. Narrative, for example. I would argue that even movies rarely have more power to engross than well-written prose. But when an editor comes up to me and says: “Jen, I need you to write a 2,000-word big-picture look at poverty based on this latest data from Statistics Canada,” well, I start to feel a little ball of anxiety-fuelled acid rise from my small intestine. That’s hard. Making readers care about institutional data, frak, that’s really, incredibly difficult. 

Journos do have a few methods we can use to trick readers into feeling an emotion. We find human interest angles and weave them into the data, teasing the numbers into a narrative string. We’ll sex up the writing. We’ll pair the package with great photography and big, sensational headlines. Sometimes it works. Other times it doesn’t. Because, let’s face it, facts and figures are boring, even if the implications of that data are stunningly relevant. 

Which is why  http://playspent.org, created by the Urban Ministries of Durham, was just so neat. No purple prose. No schmaltz. Hell, not even good graphics. The game just presented the data in a way that forced the reader, or player, or whatever, to care. As I played, I felt a creeping claustrophobia akin to my early uni days when I worked as a temp, had $60 in the bank and  a loaf of bread in the fridge. No matter how rich you are, or how much you attribute your personal success to your own innate awesomeness, most people with a soul would find it difficult to play this and not feel empathy. 

Newspapers, why aren’t we doing this? Never mind, let’s just do this. 

(PS - For an excellent write-up of Play Spent from someone much smarter than me, check out Ian Bogost’s blog here.)

Watch as two passions collide into one awesome interactive infographic! Been keeping an eye on #newsgames on Twitter today. (via @sjcobrien)

It’s not inside baseball. If the journos on the hill can’t do their job, these elections will continue to devolve into issue-less showmanship. (Via @AndrewMcIntyre)