I was struck by the beginning chapters of the novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Though its a science-fiction novel (albeit a classic), I think this has some interesting implications toward the way journalists tell stories. I thought I’d share it here:

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like the singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

“The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

You may have noticed the new buttons I’ve added over to the right in order to highlight the events I will be attending later this year. I decided they needed a revamp and that the old ones, with their dotted line borders, reminded me too much of cut-out coupons.

I’m a huge fan of Adobe Illustrator for CS4, which I use for almost all my infographic work, so I decided to experiment with vector images. There are a lot of tutorials for making glossy or glassy looking buttons in Illustrator (I blame the Web 2.0 trend), but I thought they were all disproportionately difficult to do compared to the result. So today, let me share with you my simple 7 step glossy button tutorial:

Step one: Make a rounded rectangle using the shape tool. Color it with the accent color of your choice.

Step two: Apply a gradient inside the shape. Use your accent color plus light gray. I used basic colors from the swatch panel.

Step three: Overlay a thinner, rounded rectangle onto your shape. Remove the outline and set the fill color to white.

Step four: Open the Stroke window on the right side toolbar and click the Transparency tab. With the white rectangle selected, lower the opacity to 60 percent.

Step five: With the entire shape selected, go to the Effect tab at the top of the screen and scroll down to Stylize. Select Drop Shadow and create a shadow with 75 percent opacity, a 5 pixel blur, and the x and y offsets at 7 pixels.

Step six: In the font of your choice (I used Futura Condensed Bold size 48), write your text. I filled mine in dark gray.

Step seven: With the text selected, go to the Effect tab and go once again to Stylize. This time, select Inner Glow. Set Opacity to 40 percent (or less but not more), Blur to 3 pixels, and make sure the button is selected on Edge, not Center.

Voila! Enjoy your new buttons. Note how easy it is to customize the colors! Same goes for shape and size.

EDIT: I am not fishing for compliments. I have no issues with my self esteem or appearance. This entry is simply about how the double standard irks me. Also, check out this fantastic image.

A few days ago, I wrote about why I don’t think many women play Magic: The Gathering. In return, I have received (along with many words of support), an overwhelming tirade about my appearance.

Call me cynical, but I believe that if I were a man, people who disagree with my opinion would discuss parts of my argument that they think are incorrect. However, since I am a woman, just the fact that I don’t fit into the media’s standard of beauty is enough to make my argument invalid.

And as a slim, white woman, I probably have it easy. A close friend of mine, also a journalist, says that her minority status often comes up as a reason for why people shouldn’t take her reporting seriously.

While we’re both aware that by our choice of occupation, we put ourselves in the public eye every day and leave ourselves open to attacks by that same public, I know that men don’t have to deal with this sort of thing. At Kotaku, my supervisors’ articles also lead to the occasional ad hominem attack, but they’re supported with phrases like “You’re wrong because this video game is better and I can prove it.” For me, it’s “You’re wrong because you’re ugly.”

I scheduled a photo shoot next week with a friend who is also a photographer. This doesn’t mean that I believe the hateful comments about me online, but that I’m going to control how I appear on the Internet from now on. Haters gonna hate. If they want to judge, I’ll put my best face forward.

Amazing cupcakes and photo by Lemon_Solo. CC attributed.

Since my post about Magic playing women was picked up by the Starkington Post the other day, I’ve received a lot of Magic interested visitors to this blog. In view of that, I’ve decided to republish a scene exercise I completed in January for my Community Reporting class, about my Magic: The Gathering group in Bethesda. Enjoy!

***

If a visitor were to enter the Ri Ra Pub on Elm street and ask for the card players, the hostess would know exactly what he meant. With a slight smirk, she’d wordlessly point to the far end of the room, where eight or ten men can be seen beginning their game.

They’re as much of a part of the pub as the carved wooden wall they’ve crowded against and, with their weekly meetings, almost as frequently present. In the dim amber glow of the hanging lamps and flickering tea candles on the table, they resemble the paintings of dogs playing poker. Chatting quietly, they lean over foamy glasses of beer to roll their dice and deal cards. As if surrounded by an aura, visitors approach quietly, reverently.

The group is not even approached by the staff. Waiters don’t come over to take orders, having learned long ago not to disrupt the game. When members want something to eat or drink, they go to order directly from the bar.

A woman with a short, fluffy haircut, a Nintendo and an eight-year-old, comes over to ask what the men are doing. (more…)

This is easily the busiest summer of my life. Between two classes, an internship, a job, a non-profit position at Anime USA, plus interviewing for potential jobs, each day is filled to the brim! Luckily, that means I have plenty of new portfolio work to show off on my blog. Here’s a few of my new visualizations that have gone live:

1) Investigative Reporting Workshop

Two projects I’ve been working on for my job here have finally made it up on the site! The first one, on telecommunications, launched in March, but busy me just found out about that recently. The second one, about German firms’ lobbying, got a lot of input from my amazing boss, Professor Lynne Perri. Click on the thumbs to view the full infographics and reporting.

2) Kotaku

Nothing as fancy as my timeline has gone up lately ( but expect a new infographic soon), so let me share my pull-quotes with you. Every week after Kotaku Talk Radio, one of the editors chooses a quote for us to highlight in an image to promote discussion. Here’s the three I’ve designed in the past two weeks. Click on the image to go to the original post.

This weekend, I attended the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix at Dulles Expo Center in Virginia. And I wasn’t alone: a record-breaking 1,900 people showed up to play. It looks like Magic is popular again. However, out of that unprecedentedly large crowd, I was one of only about 30 women attending. What’s up with that?

For the uninitiated, Magic is a collectible card game established back in the 90′s where players follow a continually more complex set of rules, using land cards to pay for creature and enchantment spells. And artifacts and equipment and instant spells and oh God, so many things that you need to study the rulebook for years to be a judge of this kind of thing.

To some people, this is common sense. Magic is simply not a girl thing. The card themes and illustrations, involving dragons and monsters and scantily clad women, push would-be female players away. However, I don’t think this is true: women are not adverse to anime with supposedly male themes. It’s generally accepted that today, shounen anime has as many female fans as the male fans for which the shows were intended. Plus, I know plenty of women who love action movies.

Another barrier to entry might be the extremely complex rules. If I hadn’t started playing the game when I was 11, I doubt I’d be much into learning it today. That doesn’t mean everyone feels this way; the leader of my local Magic group learned to play in his 20′s abroad in China. But if the learning curve isn’t a problem for male players, it doesn’t make sense for it to be one for women, either.

Alternately, I believe the difference lies in the execution, not the theme. Magic is a competition where players battle each other in order to win. I don’t think women are into that aspect of the game.

I’m not saying that only men are competitive. However, women ARE more adept at problem solving and collaboration than men. When we are competitive, in the workforce for example, we’re more likely to be viewed as aggressive in a bad way. Even if we’re naturally competitive, we’re socialized to suppress it from a very young age.

This also explains why fewer women play “hardcore” video games than men. The Halo bloc of games is all about fighting and competition. However, you’ll find many more women playing puzzle and problem solving games like Farmville, BeJeweled, even the sometimes considered “hardcore” RPGs.

As a female Magic player, I admit competition is my least favorite part. I like teaming up in a group game, or when my opponent and I both try for entertaining plays and applaud each others’ moves. This is why I play in a group that meets at a bar: it’s casual and nobody snaps at me if I forget one of the thousand rules. This is also why I did not compete in the Grand Prix. When the stakes are that high, everybody is too focused on winning for me to enjoy the game.

On the plus side, there was ZERO line for the women’s bathroom.

Magic playing readers, why do you play? What are your favorite and least favorite parts of the game?

Just wanted to share how things are going with my pet project at Anime USA. I decided on WordPress’ Arras theme since it’s so easily customizable, and I wanted to get the blog up and running without a lot of tweaking. It’s not a coincidence that this is the same blog theme that Anime Boston used for their blog when I worked that convention — why fix it if it isn’t broken, I think. Click on the photo to take a look around.

It’s only May, but my goal is to get people accustomed to checking the blog for news by updating it throughout the year. I also set up a twitter account to drum up traffic. We’re getting maybe 20 hits a day, but since it’s only May I’m feeling good.

I just posted an entry about my search for bloggers to help me cover the convention this year. I think this could be a great experience for aspiring journalists to get used to the fast paced news cycle of blogging journalism. So journalism students, please apply! Even if you don’t like anime, it’s a great introduction to exploring different cultures in your reporting, something every journalist should learn.

I have a lot of goals for this project, so don’t expect this to be my last post on the topic!

Now that I’m just about finished with my masters degree (I’m just two more classes, five more weeks, and one internship away!) I decided to update my resume for the inevitable job hunt ahead of me. I’ve held so many new positions this year (four!) that I’ve removed all my previous listed experiences except my Free Lance-Star internship.

It’s been a varied experience. From interning at a museum to my new position at a non-profit, I’ve explored a lot of work environments and I know I’m ready to enter the workforce. If you know a company that’s looking for someone like me, let me know!

I didn’t want to take my Race/Community reporting class. I couldn’t see why this was a required class and the class I wanted to take instead, on website building, was just an elective. While my future job might depend on my programming abilities, who wants a white woman to write their race beat?

Well, Race/Community was about so much more than that. It taught me to look beyond labels and provided me with tools to tell peoples’ stories in genuine ways, minus the judgment that sometimes seeps in to this kind of reporting. Overall, it’s the most valuable course I took this semester.

I focused most of my work in the class on local young people with Muscular Dystrophy. You can find two excerpts from my final on American Observer here and here. My total piece was over 3500 words! So when it came time to create the multimedia part of my piece, I focused on why this project was important to me. And some of you who know me already know why: my amazing boyfriend John lost his brother to the disease.

This April, a park was opened in John’s hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia, in memory of his brother. I covered the event from a personal angle in the video below. It’s a very different approach from my usually removed, journalistic angle. Do you like it better than my usual work? Check it out below:

Here’s a post from the archives. I wrote this piece back when I was in college for one of my early blogging experiments. I remembered it today when a friend of mine asked what I do to get rid of writer’s block. Looking back, I feel that this could use some adjustments in style and tone, but I’ve left it unaltered in order to observe how my writing style has changed since.

Sometimes I’ll ask a friend why they’ve halted on their creative fiction piece, or why they put off their paper to the last minute, and they’ll tell me they have writer’s block. I can relate to them; I used to get writer’s block too. I would tell myself I was going to write, and then just stare at the screen for awhile before surfing the net instead. Of course, this was before I started interning at The Free Lance-Star. As a journalist, every story I’m assigned has a very real and present deadline. I can’t wait for creativity to strike or for my muse to enlighten me- I have to start working right now. And so far, I’ve written more than 50 stories and never missed a deadline. Here’s some of the ways I do it:

1) Make a bullet list – When I start to write a story, all the research I’ve done seems to pop up equally in my head. When it’s all floating around, I can’t seem to write it down fast enough, and the story seems huge and overwhelming. So I sometimes make a bullet list of all the facts at the front of my mind. Once they’re on paper, I don’t have to worry about forgetting part of the assignment or a particularly important fact. Once I have it laid out in a list of points that I want to cover, I simply turn the bullet points into sentences and flesh them out.

2) Write the fun part first – This tip comes from my Magazine Writing professor, Professor Mike McCarthy. “What’s the part of the story you’re most looking forward to writing? Write that scene first. The rest will follow,” he said in class. I once was writing a story about a wildlife center that took care of sick or injured animals. My interviewee told me about Buzz Lightyear, a Great Horned Owl who had been hit by a car and now has eye damage. Buzz can’t return to the wild, so he accompanies a wildlife center employee to assemblies about how people can prevent harming animals. It really stuck with me, but I knew the story was going to be full of boring information about the hospital facilities at the site. So I wrote about Buzz first thing, and ended up making his story my opener.

3) Drag and drop your notes – This works best if you have quotes from a book or an interview. You probably have way more than you need, but type it all up. Once all the clips are on the screen, start cutting and pasting them until they’re in an order that makes sense to you. Keep rearranging them until they’re aligned in order by where they will appear in your writing. Anything that doesn’t make sense in this alignment, you can finally delete. You’ll be left with the quotes you need in the order you need them. All you have to do after that is start writing your own input to tie them together.

4) Start it in advance – Sure you’re having an off day where you don’t feel like writing, but not every time you sit down to write ends up like this. Keep that in mind next time you’re feeling especially productive. So you’ve just hammered out one piece and you still feel energized? Why not open a blank document and start writing bullet points, research notes, maybe an introduction to the next thing you have to write? This especially helps me get back to work after lunch, when I feel sluggish- if I already started working on the story before lunch, it’s easy to just pick it up again.

5) Responsible procrastination – Still staring at the blank screen? Here’s your last resort. If I really feel like I just can’t stand to start a project, I set my cell phone alarm for fifteen minutes later. Then I daydream, check twitter, play Solitare, etc. and do my best not to think about the story at all. The idea here is that after fifteen minutes, I’ll be forced to get back to it. What usually happens though, is that I feel so guilty letting myself putting it off that I close Solitare and feel reenergized to work.