Planet Money T-shirt: Making the news (very) personal

As an avid listener of NPR's Planet Money podcast, I was fascinated from the first mention of its ambitious T-shirt project, which would ask listeners to pre-order a new T-shirt, with the show tracking the process from seed to shirt. Having not purchased a cotton T-shirt of any sort in years (is that weird?), I figured it was time to update my weekend wardrobe.

The result? Wow. Besides the amazing storytelling and personal connection I now have to an item in my closet, who knew that a radio show could do visual journalism so well?

The well-designed website gives a simple, curated experience that takes you through the story in logical steps with clear connections and transitions among them. This was a priority for the design and development team at Planet Money, and they hit the nail on the head. There is just enough video, just enough text and just enough content to keep you engaged for every moment.

THE VISUALS

Every chapter begins with a full-width video player, and content with stunning visuals and engaging characters. The Machines video (chapter two) that shows the raw cotton turned into fabric, is particularly well-done, with an audio track that reminds you, in a good way, that this is coming from a radio program.

The heart of the project is the People chapter, with a video that tells the story of two garment workers, one in Bangladesh and one in Colombia. The choice of characters is excellent, both good-natured young women who live parallel lives in many ways. One of them, Jasmine, just happens to be living it in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. There is some arresting footage from the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,000 people while this project was going on.

But there is lightness and honesty in their stories too, and we see them both smile more than once. The Columbian woman, Doris, laughingly notes how the shirts they make are "immense" so she imagines a bunch of obese gringos wearing them.

One of the first lessons I learned about video storytelling was that audio matters, and the narration in the videos showcases the radio origins of this project, in the best way. The thoughtful, conversational (I caught a "pain in the ass" in the Boxes chapter) and easy voiceover is more successful than you usually see in video journalism.

And while there isn't that much of it, the photography is beautiful. See the close-ups of yarn samples in the Machines chapter (left).

THE WRITING

The writing in this project is pure Planet Money: Conversational, and with a concerted effort to simplify the concepts at work in the narratives. At times it gets close to dumbed down, but implicit in that critique is praise for the accessibility of this material. You don't need to have ever heard of Planet Money or economic concepts to get sucked into this project.

"The newest John Deere picker needs just one guy to do what it took five guys to do a couple years ago."

"(Yarn, by the way, is what ordinary people call thread. In the garment business, it’s called yarn.)"

In a way, they are writing for radio, and I can see that because my journalist radar pays attention to things like that. But it may also be my coming into this project knowing it would be a rare piece of visual journalism produced by a radio show rather than someone who just came upon it from seeing a link (planetmoney.com/tshirt) somewhere.

So how does it end? Well, I have a pretty sharp grey t-shirt with a squirrel drinking a martini on it and a website that will tell its story, with no advertising whatsoever, forever.

On the radio, the story ended with a wonderful episode about the afterlife of an American T-shirt, tracking it from a clothing donation to markets in Kenya. [More text at this link] That still counts as one of my favorite Planet Money episodes ever, if not just for this project.

"You", the fifth and final chapter in the full multimedia project, is where the listener/viewer/audience gets to participate in the story, with an Instagram collage page featuring people's Planet Money T-shirt selfies. It's nice to see all of those fans/audience members on the site, smiling back out. It speaks to the personal connection that people have to the show and the shirt, one that I feel every time I see the thing in my closet. I've never had such a personal connection to a piece of journalism, and it is more meaningful than I expected.

And my Instagram selfie? I haven't added it yet. My living room seems an unworthy backdrop for something with such a back story.

My Media Diet: Aggregators vs. News orgs

I have catalogued my media diet a handful of times in the past few years (here's the last one from Feb 2013), and I must say it surprises me every time. Tastes change, available sources of news evolve, and I have seen my consumption habits evolve right along with them.

Here is where I get my news, new for 2014.

My primary source of news these days is Twitter. It has always been a big one for me, but the frequency with which I check my Twitter feeds and the frequency with which I click on the links I find there has made it by far my most reliable place for news.

Specifically I find myself drawn to social content shared by the Huffington Post, @AP, occasional Buzzfeed links and Politico.

More generally, I have spent a lot of time curating my Twitter experience, an important step in separating signal from noise on the increasingly noisy social network. I have lists for breaking news, buzzworthy/social news and science news that I keep organized on Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, and find myself checking all of them multiple times a day.

Facebook is another place where I find news - it does a great job of surfacing content that I will like, vetted by the people in my network, and Facebook learns the organizations whose links I click on. But I am simply not on Facebook as much as I am on Twitter, so I rely on it a bit less. For whatever reason Facebook takes me to a lot of Gawker, Daily Mail, Gizmodo and Deadspin articles.

Because social media - Twitter in particular - tends to have a short attention span (with the number of people I follow, my Twitter feeds only show me posts going back 5-10 minutes), I subscribe to a couple of email newsletters to check the top headlines, curated by the organizations sending them.

Every day, I read Mike Allen’s Playbook newsletter, from Politico, and use the New York Times’s daily newsletter as well as The Slatest from Slate to make sure I’ve read any big headlines that interest me. Mediabistro puts out a great daily newsletter about goings on in the media business, which I read every day, and Muckrack’s daily newsletter is a great place to make sure I didn’t miss anything buzzing on social networks the previous 24 hours.

Finally, I rely on mobile apps from trusted sources to check their top stories, several times a day. The New York Times and BBC apps are the ones I check most, but I use Flipboard and the BlinkFeed on my HTC One phone to scan a number of sources aggregated there.

An honorable mention goes to Circa, which I am not yet a power user of, but which I enjoy more and more every time I use it. Circa aggregates bite-size updates about big stories, and allows you to follow any you are specifically interested in, with Circa sending you a notice every time the story gets an update.

Overall, my media diet is pretty straightforward. In terms of platforms, I get 50% of my news on my phone (social media as well as news apps) and 50% on my computer (email newsletters and social media). Another way to break it down is 50% individual Twitter feeds, 25% email newsletters, 15% straight to a news organization’s app or website and 10% other aggregators.

But perhaps the most interesting metric I look at in my media diet is how much news I am getting directly from the organization that produced the content and how much I am getting filtered through my social network or news aggregators.

Because my Twitter feeds center on journalists and aggregators, with only a handful of original sources, the overall breakdown is around half and half. Email newsletters and official social accounts give me half of my news, straight from the organizations, and aggregators and news apps give me half of my news, curated by others.

What’s changed most for me since the last time I evaluated my media diet is my drastically reduced radio and podcast consumption. I used to listen to a lot of NPR and podcasts, and besides the occasional Brian Lehrer show, I now use my car stereo and my headphones to listen to music and audiobooks.

I must mention that, because I work in the news business, professional demands skew the picture if I include them. I watch a lot of CNN and News12 while I am in the office on Long Island, and check the Newsday site and app many times every hour, so at the end of the day those are technically my heaviest news sources.

Review: Distant Witness by Andy Carvin

"Distant Witness" by Andy Carvin (2013)
[cover image courtesy of CUNY Journalism Press]

Distant Witness: A book about Twitter, revolutions, and the Twitter revolution

I never thought reading tweets, retweets and hashtags could be so compelling.

Andy Carvin has done a wonderful job looking at Twitter as a new platform of information and interaction, and told that story using both his own narrative and the voice of the medium itself.

The result is a document both of an amazingly important time in international geopolitics (the Arab Spring that saw citizen-led rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain) and a tool that allows the voices of the people involved to resonate around the world.

During the time of the uprisings, Carvin was a masterful curator, filtering the noise and bringing credible first-hand voices into the conversation around the news.

He has proven equally skilled at looking back and recognizing the unprecedented nature of a revolution lived by those on the ground but witnessed by the rest of the world in a way that had never been done before.

"Distant Witness" chronicles news - the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square, the Libyan rebellion through to the eventual capture and killing of Moammar Ghadafi, and also the unique ways that news lived and evolved on Twitter. The extended sections about the "Gay Girl in Damascus" hoax, the effort to identify supposed Israeli weapons in Libya and the story of the high schooler who advised rebels with field manuals collected and translated into Arabic.

You won't find these stories anywhere else.

I am sure Andy Carvin would admit that his book is just the beginning of a larger conversation, but it's an amazingly useful one with lessons that journalists should be aware of as non-traditional voices continue to find new ways to be heard in documenting history. "Distant Witness" is most of all about those voices, and Carvin does a great job at letting them speak.

Read this book. It will make you a better journalist and a better citizen of the world.

Review: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

"The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg (2012)
[cover image courtesy of Random House]

The Power of Habit: Self-help journalism

Self-improvement disguised as journalism is a very hit-or-miss genre, but with a reporter like Charles Duhigg (2013 Pulitzer at the NYT) writing it, you're in good hands.

'The Power of Habit' is all about understanding how the brain works, and what the latest research says about how patterns of behavior are formed.

But you also get a look into the latest psychology and practice of behavior modification to learn that it is indeed possible to reprogram your brain to break bad habits and develop good ones to achieve whatever it is you want to change about how you live your life, if anything.

It's very well-written, with substantive case studies and plenty of interviews, context and background to attack the issue from a number of angles, which is very satisfying.

The discussion about how responsible a person is for the subconscious habits at work in their brains (murderer vs. gambler) is particularly interesting and an issue that we are already seeing come up in the news as crafty lawyers try to argue that their clients didn't have control over the things they may have done.

You will learn a lot from this book, and you may even be able to improve your life as a direct result. That's a pretty strong takeway from this one.

Oh and speaking of takeaways, here is the book's 4-step formula for changing a bad habit:

1. Identify the habit loop - trigger, behavior, reward - that you see at work in your life.

2. Identify the specific cue - Pay attention to when you get the craving and you will probably find that what triggers this sequence of events is one of five common cues: a specific time, a specific place, an emotional state, the presence/behavior of certain other people, or what you were doing immediately before you had the craving.

3. Experiment with rewards - For a week, test different rewards and gather some data. You may think that donut is what you crave, but it may turn out that it's the getting-up-from-your-desk-to-take-a-walk that you crave. So just try going for a walk instead of getting the donut next time. Some of the other rewards will satisfy the craving, some will not. The one that does is the one you want to preserve in your new behavior.

4. Have a plan - When you are undertaking the difficult task of rewiring a bad habit in your brain, have a plan for how you are going to deal with the trigger, and some obstacles you are likely to encounter. If you have a plan, you're less likely to fall off the wagon and give in to the craving.


There is a ton more insight in the book, such as the factors that influence the success of a new habit and the theory of small victories, but the main takeaway - that habits can be changed if one goes about it the right way - is a meaningful lesson that can apply to all sorts of situations we encounter in our own behavior.

Opinion: Hipsters may have ruined Paris for you, but Paris doesn't care

I see two types of stories about modern Paris life: Stories about how French people love Brooklyn hipster culture, and stories about how Brooklyn hipster culture is ruining Paris.

The latest is of an American in Paris lamenting the gentrification of the Pigalle's loss of its dirty whorehouses, a Sunday Opinion piece in the New York Times by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

I for one find it terribly pretentious for an American to complain about the fact that his naive, romantic desire that charmingly gritty shitholes in Paris remain charmingly gritty shitholes forever may be under threat by the arrival of cool bars and restaurants serving interesting and healthy foods.

He mentions that the bars are packed, so Parisians are obviously happy for a neighborhood full of bordellos to get a bit of a facelift.

I think a lot of tourists and expats fail to realize one thing: The world is not there for you to escape to.

Yes, the homogenization of global culture is something that is happening and is ultimately not that interesting, but Paris doesn't give a damn if it's becoming similar to the neighborhood you left behind in Brooklyn. Paris isn't trying to lure you away from your home with promises of exotic and charmingly gritty shitholes. Paris is just trying to be Paris and to evolve as Parisians want it to evolve.

So sure, hipsters may have ruined Paris FOR YOU because you had hipsters back home, but it doesn't seem like hipsters have ruined Paris for Parisians. And they only ruined it for you because you were applying your own set of ideals that you wanted the city to live up to.

Let Paris be whatever Paris wants to be.

**Full disclosure: I have a French passport, I have lived in Paris, and I don't like Paris. But it's not at all because of the hipsters.