Archive for September, 2010

  • 30 Sep

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    Digital Imaging – Gestalt Logo

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    One of my goals for this school year was to improve my (nonexistent) design skills. To make this a reality, I enrolled in Digital Imaging, a Visual Arts class taught by Pinar Yoldas, a visiting artist at Duke, that uses Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for digital design.

    Our first assignment was to create a logo for an NGO that would exist in the year 2020 using Gestalt principles of design. Below is my creation, inspired by the novel Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (note: this is a fictional idea and does not represent what I think will happen in 2020).

    I used the magnetic wand tool in Photoshop to isolate the hammer and sickle from an image of the Soviet Flag I found on Google Images. From there, I pasted my selection in a new document, desaturated the color and converted it into a path object that could be imported into Illustrator. I traced the outline of a United States Flag and placed the path on top.

    Color: Pantone DS 90-1 C

    The People’s Union of the United States of America

    In 2020, the U.S. is facing its greatest inflation rate in the country’s storied history. The dollar’s value is at an all-time low, and the People’s Union of the United States of America will form. The group will advocate for the dollar to have its value pegged to the Chinese Yuan, the new world currency standard.

  • 26 Sep

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    The Story Behind the Story: Duke vs. Alabama

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    Now that the dust has officially settled on the Duke vs. Alabama football matchup of more than one week ago (this past weekend Alabama continued to exert its dominance over the rest of the college football world while Duke dropped its third straight game), I wanted to look back over my work leading up to and immediately following the most hyped game in Duke’s recent football history.

    I had eagerly been awaiting my opportunity to cover the defending national champions and scheduled a sit down interview with Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe the week before the the Crimson Tide rolled into town in order to write a feature detailing his Alabama football days under legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. After the interview, I had enough material to turn my feature idea into a miniseries previewing the matchup, and spoke with Mal Moore,  Alabama’s director of athletics, for the second part to add a more balanced perspective. Here’s the tangible results of my reporting:

    Overkill for a game that was essentially over within the first 10 minutes of the opening quarter? Perhaps some would argue that. An example of the beat reporter I hope to be after graduation? Most definitely.  Dutifully completing my senior at Duke and being a professional-level beat reporter for the paper has been a balancing act—feel free to watch as I can keep juggling both gigs.

  • 05 Sep

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    The State of the News Media 2010

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    For the past seven years, the Pew Research Center‘s Project for Excellence in Journalism has put out an annual report on the state of American Journalism.

    And every year, the picture gets bleaker.

    I read through the overview for my Policy Journalism and Media class. Here are some notable points (the word “highlights” doesn’t feel right):

    • Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenues fall 26 percent during 2009, which brings the total loss over the previous three years to 43 percent. Total U.S. ad spending suffered its sharpest drop since the Great Depression.  Of all online news consumers, 79 percent say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.
    • Of those online ads, display ads fuel revenue for news sites. Of that revenue, aggregators and Internet service providers take in 28 percent.  Television websites, which include both news and entertainment material, get six percent. Newspaper websites get 5 percent and current-event sites less than 3 percent.
    • Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year.
    • Print revenue still provides 90 percent of the revenue for the industry.
    • Roughly $141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.
    • After analyzing a million blogs and social media sites, the report found that 80 percent of the links are to U.S. legacy media.
    • The most often linked-to news stories among bloggers matched the top story in the mainstream press just 13 out of 47 weeks studied. On Twitter, the top story was the same just four of the 27 weeks studied.
    • A handful of sites collect most of the eyeballs, with 80 percent of the traffic to news and information sites concentrated at the top 7 percent of sites. Two-thirds of the top news sites (67 percent) are still tied to legacy media financed largely by their shrinking end of the business.
    • Moreover, of the news sites with a half million visitors a month (the top 199 news sites), 67 percent of from legacy media and 48 percent of them newspapers.
    • As media organizations get more niche, audiences aren’t splintering their attention further and further—while only one-third of online news consumers say they have a favorite news website, most people (57 percent) use between two and five websites, and only 12 percent use more than six.
    • People spend about half as much time per month on niche news sites as they do no those focused on general interest news.

    And finally….

    • While the notion that newspapers in large numbers were going out of business was not true (just a half dozen went out of business last year, most the few remaining second papers in their markets), roughly a third of the newsroom jobs in American newspapers in 2001 are now gone.

    That’s all.

    All that depressing news is enough to make one yearn for the simpler pleasures in life—like fishing off the coast of Lisbon, Portugal, with an October sunset in the background.