Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

John McWhorter sums up my position succinctly: “Calling attention to the fact that black nerds are often teased by black peers for “acting white” elicits predictable reactions, such as claims that the problem doesn’t exist.”

Yeah, the problem doesn’t exist.  Just by virtue of the fact that black people are inherently cool.  If there are nerds among us, they are anomalies, probably infected at birth by the same gene that makes white people smart, yet incredibly uncool.

Tongue in cheek, people.  Stay with me.

I’ve been listening to the unelected Black Nerd spokesman, McWhorter (and sometimes, Stanley Crouch), bitch about this “black nerds slammed for actin white” problem for what seems like a decade.  I didn’t even know that group needed representation.  I picture a whiny coven of old men plotting revenge over the ass whoopin’s and ego bruising they received as children.  Yeah.  Children are cruel (ever read Lord of the Flies?).  Get over it.  Stop turning your humiliation into a book, just because you have the nerd cred, i.e. degrees and media access, with which to do so.

Now that Barack Obama’s on the scene, McWhorter says black nerdiness is “in”–as if it were ever “out.”  If you grew up in a black neighborhood, “black” and “nerd” go together like no-name kicks, high water pants and coke bottle glasses. Like the cute girl with the pigtails who stayed behind after class to talk to the teacher.  Like the kid who the principal always singled out for good behavior.  Like every freshman class at Morehouse.  Like the kids who lived in fear of the 3pm bell.  And yes, like the kid who got jawned on for “actin’ white.”

Point is: this was a problem for a very specific group of black nerds.  So it is intriguing that McWhorter can push the angle that because black nerds were smart, they got jawned on for actin’ white and then get media play like it somehow indicates a problem for black America.  I mean, really?

I have another angle on McWhorter’s thesis. I came up in the prep school system and I distinctly remember thinking, about some of my peers, “I know we attend white schools but do you have to sound white, too?”

I never thought this about the few black kids who grew up on the UES or in the Village; I thought this about the kids who, like me, took trains, planes and automobiles home to working or middle class black neighborhoods but still managed to sound like the subculture who summered in East Hampton. I mean, really?

And sometimes, they pulled rank.  I remember one private school senior speaking down about her Bronx family members in front of a small assembly of tony Manhattanites and me. Her facial expression, tone of voice–both implied, with some show of shocked disgust, that her cousins treated her different because she valued education and they did not, she valued “proper English”, but they did not. I cringed in my seat.  “Ever think,” I wanted to say, “that you stand out among your family because y’all live in the South Bronx but you sound and act like a stereotypical Upper East Side JAP?”

I remember this incident though, because of the girl’s mother.  She’d sought me out after the panel, perhaps because I was the only other black person there and was a few years older than her daughter.  She was West Indian, like me, and spoke with a 24/7 Caribbean accent like my mum.  So I code-switched and inflected my speech with a little Caribbean dialect, too.  The woman’s eyes lit up and she said,  “Come meet my daughter!”

Her daughter was less than thrilled.  She didn’t need a mentor, which is what her mother was trying to force upon both of us in the parking lot of the school’s campus.  The meeting ended awkwardly.  I tried to get the mother to smile.  Her daughter’s first-class education–the thing for which she had undoubtedly sacrificed–formed the chasm that now separated them.  I understood that from my own life.  But how difficult it must have been for the mother to at once, feel pride to watch her daughter speaking on a panel but then, listen to her child denigrate their family in front of strangers.  Talk about an Imitation of Life moment.

McWhorter’s bully and my private school example represent two sides of the same coin.  They speak from the same bleak landscape of low self worth in that they both equate “being educated” with the race to which they do not belong*.  Now, why doesn’t McWhorter make that point?

* I write this, recognizing that race is socially, not biologically, real.

Your grandma’s eggnog, it ain’t.

Coquito, the Puerto Rican version whose ‘kick’ depends on the cojones of its maker, drew hundreds of party-goers this Saturday to el Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.  The seventh annual coquito-tasting contest featured more than 30 entries from as nearby as 110th and Third Avenue, to as far away as the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.  What everyone shared though was a love of Boricua heritage and an undeniable desire to keep a family Christmas tradition alive.

“Coquito is about a cultural connection,” said Debbie Quiñones, who flitted here and there all evening, trying to make sure her ‘extended family’ was all right.  She hosted the first tasting party in her apartment.  When the gatherings became too large, three years ago, she chatted up a welcoming neighbor: el Museo.

But, “It’s growing bigger than what we can handle!” el Museo’s director of public programs, Gonzalo Casals said onstage, sharing a laugh with the overflow crowd.

Well before the pouring, yelling, jostling and tasting began, it was clear that coquito (literally, small coconut, in Spanish) was so much more than the yummiest drink, ever.

“I’m the only one in my family who makes coquito,” said Enid Rodriquez, who was participating in the contest for the first time.  “Throughout the years, the tradition has gotten lost in the family and I was the one who picked it up.”

Iris Mendez, bottle #10 and also a first-timer, debuted her mother’s recipe.  “I hope I get lucky tonight,” she said, “because there’s lots of competition here.”

Martha Laureano-Perez, bottle #21, entered the recipe of her late husband, Richie Perez, a well-known human rights activist who died in 2004. “We were married for 23 years and every Christmas we made coquito together.”

This year’s winner, a husband and wife team who concocted bottle #15, accepted with a nod to their New York roots: Hunts Point, the Lower East Side and of course, Harlem.

After the tasting, everyone rocked their hips to the transplanted African rhythms of Segunda Quimbamba and head-nodded as poet, Emanuel Xavier, essentialized what it was and is, to be Nuyorican. (In his “Nueva York” poem, below, listen carefully for, “papitos vendiendo coquitos mientras brown-skinned project mothers crossed themselves every morning before heading off to the factories or going off to do the compras…”)

The museum event ended around 8:30pm with little to no coquito left.  No doubt, the after-party duró toda la noche.

Check Columbia Journalism Review’s open thread on Twittering.  Though not closed to its benefits, I’m not a Twitter fan, primarily for the bolded reason below.  Thread highlights:

“I’ve found out the following from twitter: that my neighborhood in West Hollywood was in lockdown, being searched for an armed gunman; that the earthquake I felt was powerful but doing little damage, and that the NoOnProp8 protests in my neighborhood were peaceful but growing exponentially. I got this info minutes – and in some other cases, hours – before it was available from other news sources online.”

“What does get lost with this tool is it is missing a specific socioeconomic class of people that journalists should not ignore. It just requires them to go out and talk to them face to face – and that isn’t as instant as the group of people on Twitter.”

I’d go further than UMiz new media prof, Jen Reeves, above, and say that Twitter excludes most of the world’s people and what’s happening to them in their neighborhoods.  I care less about the platform, more about whom I’m talking to.  So far, Twitter is breaking news/running commentary from the college-educated, technofiles and the upper middle class.  Our media is already an echo chamber for the privileged so I’m cautious of any technology making it easier to remain that way.  It’d be very cool though, if people in Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Upper Harlem, the South Bronx and Jamaica, Queens could Twitter with each other and the privileged.  Who wants to help me invent that platform?

“I don’t know, John. Should journalists use the telephone? The fact that you cannot see the other person is only the most obvious of that platform’s limitations. What do others think? Join the conversation: is “telephone” just a stupid audio trick?”

“Twitter takes nothing, it’s only a fragment of the whole that makes a news story.
In a 24/7 news cycle it is probably one of the greatest (and cheapest) ways to gather and distribute information. That is, if journalists are open to learn how to use Twitter, and listen. Without ever forgetting the basics of the trade.”

“Maybe one of the Tweet Revolutionaries can explain how Twitter helps with the much more crucial tasks of connecting dots, situating events in their proper context, explaining and analyzing complex issues, etc. If our information culture did a better job at the latter, I suppose I would be a lot less concerned about all the hype devoted to the former.”

“And these “Tweet Revolutionaries” you refer to, who are supposed to unfold the awesomeness of Twitter for explanation, background, context, as well as breaking news, of course… who are they? Or are these simply the people you really, really, really want to argue with, whether or not they exist?”

“I think journalists should follow people relevant to their beat in order to get some sense of the what people are talking about and to cultivate sources. Twitter may not connect the dots, but it does an awesome job of letting you subscribe to lots and lots of important ones.”

Read more (and comment!) on CJR’s page.

Walk the streets of Bed-Stuy and you’re liable to pass an around the way girl, a hipster, a rasta, an Ivy League educated attorney and an ex-offender all on the same block.  On election day, Bed-Stuy hummed at the prospect of Change-with-a-capital C personified by Barack Obama. Some volunteered and phonebanked for him. Many others watched the election fever from the sidelines. All soared a little bit higher later that night, when word came down that Barack Obama had become the President of the United of States.

I got up from my table at a Harlem lounge on Saturday night to thank an unknown guy who stepped out of the shadows to pay my tab. In return, he smacked the side of my right thigh and said, “No problem, sweetheart,” or some such. How did I react?

I didn’t say anything. I was too busy looking at the burn mark that landed an inch below my boyfriend zone. High school dances popped into my head, where the guy wants to cop a feel but doesn’t want trouble so he rests his hand just above your rump but below the small of your back. High thigh was this guy’s compromise.

“Oh, that don’t mean nothing,” Unknown Tab Payer said. I was still looking at my thigh as though it belonged to another chick–specifically, the pole-humping one in the music videos. Did this dude just smack me on my thigh? Really, really close to my a$$?

I mumbled something about him having overpaid (he put $40 on a $13 tab) and while he was telling me to get another drink, I walked back to my table with my head still in 40 seconds ago, replaying the smack. It was a rare moment where I was too shocked to catch an attitude. And, here’s the other unexpected part: I’m actually grateful.

Twenty years of riding New York City subways and stomping these concrete streets as a young, black female is enough to dry husk the Pollyanna out of any woman-child. It feels good to be surprised by boorish behavior. Like, maybe, even after all of this:

I was 12 when I started riding the train to school alone and when random men began to press against me on the overcrowded 6 train in the mornings. Strangers have shown me their free willy’s on subway platforms. Grown men have hissed at me while, as a young girl, I walked with my mother. One young man wished AIDS upon me after I rebuffed him for pulling at me. Others have cussed me out. “I hate black women!” a few have yelled. Cars have trailed me at a snail’s pace both in broad daylight and at night. And of course, there are the near misses and “what if” situations that I owe to luck and the guardian angels…

the city still can’t beat me down. So long as I can still be shocked–a sign that my standards are intact–I’m happy.

This post is more personal than any I’ve written in this space. Sexual harassment feels normal because it’s what I grew up around, but–and I have to remind myself of this–it isn’t. Speaking up counters the most dominant message that this city taught me about what it means to be a young, black girl/woman: “You are prey.”

I took a picture of this sign on the C train earlier in the semester. I’d planned to do a story but class deadlines took priority.

They didn’t have these signs when I was a kid. Got me wondering, What if the city undertook a massive (and clever) public service campaign to deter street harassment? What would be its impact on men and women in this city? What kind of conversation would such a campaign provoke?

*All darlings have been sarcastically struck from this post

Yup, here I go being cynical again.

Maybe you’ve already heard me rant on the subject. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t care.

This is in response to the style of writing I feel is being taught to us here at the J School thus far. The basic, obvious, boring, tape recorder style writing.

I get it. Building blocks, fundamentals, work your way up, walk before you run.

That’s all great, unless you intend to fly.

I’m not necessarily criticizing my professors. Possibly it’s the way that they were taught. Possibly it’s the way they think is best to teach us. Possibly it’s the unwritten, unspoken, uncompromisable rule in journalism.

Or possibly it’s the reason they have had jobs in journalism and I probably never will.

But sometimes I feel suffocated by the rigid structure.

(more…)

Can black journalists cover the Obama White House without bias?  Many asked that question–perhaps, not out loud–after watching ABC reporter, Steve Osunsami’s reaction on election night, to Obama becoming the 44th POTUS.

Media watchdogs, like fellow classmate Rima Abdelkader, sniffed out Osunsami’s election night throat-spasm and Osunsami, likely reacting to criticism as well as praise, explained why he showed emotion on his ABC News blog:

For me, it wasn’t the political event that was moving, it was the human event: on Tuesday night, the whole world watched as Americans of all colors came together in such an historic way.

Was Obama’s victory–the country’s victory–an acceptable reason for journalists to break professional composure though? I tended to think it was not.  I mean, it’s not like journalists covering election night were being thrown a curve ball.

Listen to Michel Martin’s NPR discussion with other prominent journalists about their emotions on election night.  All, except Soledad O’Brien, reported that they struggled to “hold it in.”  Point being: they at least thought it important not to show emotion on-air. And I wondered whether Osunsami had the same struggle or whether he regretted his show of emotion and if so, why?  I didn’t expect Osunsami to publicly reveal himself again by answering those questions, however. (I was one of the folks who Facebook’d him after the near-cry… no response… read on for why I didn’t follow up)

On election night, I inwardly burned during every second of Osunsami’s near-cry. (you must understand, in general, I’m the passionate sort)  I saw “the moment,” not as a beautiful display of the story’s human side; that role should’ve been played by the jubilant Morehouse students in the background.  Rather, I interpreted the moment, then, as a journalist compromising his professional integrity–and as a television network lowering its standards for “the black guy.”

Osunsami, with ABC’s help, had opened the door for his credibility to be questioned as a journalist.  The hidden “benefit” of being a black journalist though, is that your purported lack of bias will be attributed to your race as well.  Lucky us.

Which brings me back to the ignorant question that kicked off this post: can black journalists cover the Obama White House without bias?  By his own admission, journalist Jeff Winbush can’t–but later asks to be judged by his reporting first.  I find that odd, as well as his justification of black groupie behavior because, erm, white journos are groupies, too.

I’m not going to answer the question that I posed.  Ignorance deserves a challenge, not an answer–and I realized after some thought, that I too was guilty of needing the challenge.

For others, question your assumption that black people think however it is that you believe black people think.  You’ll squeeze more truth from a situation if you think of the offending black journalist as a journalist, first.

For me, don’t justify ignorance by fearing its repercussions.  Part of what infuriated me about Osunsami’s show of emotion was the belief that, “he’s ruining it for the rest of us”–us, being the significant minority of black journalists who struggle mightily to enter and remain in this profession.  It would drive me insane if I hounded myself with the belief that others doubted the quality of my reporting because of my race.  Really, that’s their problem.  I shouldn’t make it mine.

That realization is why I didn’t pursue Osunsami beyond that Facebook ouverture.  On election night, I too was guilty of looking at him as a black journalist, not as Steve Osunsami.  But if I were viewing him primarily as a man, I’d have said, there’s nothing wrong with showing emotion at an extraordinary time.  Journalists are human, too.

Letter to the Editor, The New York Times November 5th print edition, from Rev. Connell J. Maguire, Riviera Beach, FL: That day has dawned, the day dreamed of by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when a man is judged by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin. …”

Of which man does Rev. Maguire speak?

I’m not being cheeky.  In fact, the question exhibits a lack of assumption that I wish more of the media had deployed both last night and throughout the election cycle.  Hopefully, they’ll master those assumptions over the next four years of practice.

Here’s my beef with reporters and editors: If you’re going to cover race, you can… nope, you should also speak to the roughly 85 percent of the country who isn’t black.

On November 4, in addition to camping out in Harlem and at Morehouse, the historically black college, the major networks could’ve planted reporters in predominantly white neighborhoods too.

John McCain, in his eloquent concession speech missed an opportunity to get it right.  The “special significance” and “special pride that must be theirs tonight” belongs not just to black Americans.  It is America’s and also belongs to white Americans.

What about the white Freedom Riders who’ve lived to see this election?  There’s also the little white boy or girl in the 1950s, forced to give up a black friend and conform or risk being ostracized?  Fast forward a bit: what about the whites who hunkered down in white flight neighborhoods like those in Long Island or the Detroit suburbs between the 1960s-1980s?  Or the infamous “white working class” voters in Appalachia territory?

If the coverage is tainted with what I’ll call, “Baby Boomer assumptions,” about race and racism then two main but truth-obscuring ideas flourish: 1) blacks support Obama simply because he’s black, rather than because he’s charismatic and qualified and 2) whites are miraculously, race-less, or worse, when they are race-full, it’s only because they’re racist.

The cost of skewed coverage is that Americans really are taken aback by each other November 4th–which means that we (blacks, whites, Asians, etc.) really don’t know each other.  And that the media hasn’t helped us in that regard.  It typically hasn’t covered stories, like this Christian Science Monitor piece, that show us how the country and our relations with each other have changed.

Back to Rev. Maguire’s Letter to the Editor: Suppose Martin Luther King, Jr. in this statement plucked from his 1963 March on Washington speech, also included white men and women?  Suppose he realized that whites also judged each other by the color of their skins rather than the content of their characters?

Perhaps voters, including those who abstained from the process on election day, were finally judging McCain by his character?

Just a thought.  But in the final analysis, it’s the questioning of long-held assumptions that matters more.

Every Wednesday is karaoke night at the Brooklyn Jerk Center.  The blue awning’d bar on the corner of Brooklyn and Church Avenues sits in the heart of New York’s Caribbean population. On October 8th, the date of the vice presidential debate, while Brook Benton and Shania Twain rotated on the karaoke machine, I talked to first-generation immigrants about their candidates, the election and their issues.

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I have a split personality when it comes to reporting.  Sometimes I’m wearing a pair, other times–especially when I play photographer–I’m feckless and wondering why I’m a journalist in the first place.  I have a difficult time taking pictures of people who haven’t consented to having their pictures taken.  Am I not invading their privacy?  Clearly, NYC street photographer Bruce Gilden doesn’t think so.

A photographer friend, aware of my hang-up, sent the following video for inspiration.

My first reaction? This is all kinds o’ wrong.

My second reaction? Gilden’s boldness can teach me something about how I see myself in interaction with others.  Maybe we’re not all islands.  Maybe people won’t automatically assume that I’m cutting and pasting their heads to porn sites.  Maybe I can be a bit bolder than I have been.

See some of Gilden’s work here.