The rest of my NAM pieces and other tidbits

Finally, I have time to post again. My last few weeks at NAM were busy, though lots of fun.

Here are the rest of my NAM stories from this summer. I definitely feel like I know more about how various organizations work. Yay!

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b88471def91d2e8e23483276e5abca29

A few other papers and senior-focused orgs have picked this one up.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e962932d4d63900c3af60fb3a6142983

Since for some reason my photos didn’t get used with my HSF story on the NAM site, here are two:

Someone from CNN booking emailed me after reading my HSF story, asking for a pre-interview on skype. We skyped last Thursday, and she’s forwarding my contact info to the editorial and broadcasting teams (no guarantees that they’ll contact me, but they now have my info), and she told me to email her if I’m interesting in contributing writing/reporting for them!! (She thought I had an interesting perspective on health care as a college student..)

I wish I liked taking photos more. It always feels so much more intrusive than reporting to me, or less respectful, even though I ask permission.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e91ffed0c73d55bce8709338dae45caf

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=06e2f6b0dc04931447885cb20d905df4

This story of mine broke before the Chronicle’s story about the Nichi Bei Times, first in the Nichi Bei Times itself and then on the NAM site, and a few other Asian American news sources picked it up. In fact, looking at the way the Chronicle structured their story and the information they included, I wonder whether they used my story for guidance.

I also got an email from the Asian American Journalists Association, for whose listserv I’m registered because I got a grant from them for my NAM internship, called “Save the Nichi Bei Times.” AAJA asked for members to support the new Nichi Bei Foundation and referenced my article. In other words, I got a general, anonymous blast that referenced my work! It was great seeing that someone was actually using my reporting to promote a cause. If my job is to be simply shifting information around, and maybe also digging up something from time to time if I’m lucky, it’s good to see that the shifting might matter.

Other NAM news:

Shane Bauer, one of the three hikers detained in Iran after accidentally crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, is a freelance journalist who contributes to NAM. So the day the story of their detention broke, CNN and two or three other mainstream news organizations burst into NAM’s little, very-non-mainstream office to interview our director and others about the detention, and other media kept the phones ringing all week about the story. Iran has released little information about the status of the three since detaining them.

Random: someone recently found my blog by searching “What do dolphins eat.” Alas, poor searcher, my blog has given you only more questions, and no answers. Though I might suggest “fish” as an answer. This blog has also been the destination of the searches “what do ladybugs eat and drink” AND “what do deer eat.”

On another note, how did I manage to see 40 or so meteors the Wednesday before last and forget to wish on a single one?

NAM 7 week update

I think I missed a great editorial meeting last week. As I tried to get off the phone with Dell tech support, I wandered in and out of the meeting and heard something about an upsurge in leg extensions and other cosmetic surgery among Asians – someone asked how they did it, and someone else explained that she thought they broke the leg, and then added titanium piping. Then Dell told me I had to install something I didn’t need on my computer. (It turned out that one of our writers is working on a story about a dramatic increase in middle-aged Chinese-American men getting plastic surgery to compete better in a difficult job market. Their wives used to encourage them to come in – now they’re doing it on their own!)

When I got back to the meeting, I heard someone saying, “It’s a little late. I mean the movie came out two weeks ago,” and someone else saying, “Yeah, but he has a pretty unique perspective as a bank robber himself.” I correctly concluded NAM has connections with a bank robber who reviewed Public Enemies:

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=919ce62e8dfd7bacffeb666a487d15af

I recently had to do a lot of outreach for these roundtable discussions on women immigrants that New America Media was hosting in Washington, D.C., Chicago, LA, New York, and Miami. As an offshoot of the discussion, NAM decided to post blog entries by various contributors about their women immigrant relatives. Since I’d written about my grandma leaving China after World War II in my Writing About War journalism class last semester, I modified that piece and they posted it:

http://blogwire.newamericamedia.org/2009/07/justine-drennan-on-pei-fen-koo.php

I mentioned looking for a family to interview about long-term care of a family member. I arranged to go meet the Waltons in Berkeley - Carol takes care of her husband Ortiz - and went to interview them last Friday with Paul on the video team. We got there 30 minutes early, and as we were waiting outside the house, a firetruck and ambulance came speeding down the street. Paul said, “They better not be coming here,” but sure enough, they stopped right next to us and five or six officers and medics went into the house.

They came out a few minutes later – it turned out the husband had had a fall, and then the wife had passed out as she was trying to help him. They were ok now, but we told Carol we’d come back and interview them another day, after they’d got some rest. That this had all happened just when we came to interview them about the difficulties of being old and ailing without support.

We came back on Monday, and in our interview, we learned that Ortiz Walton is a fairly famous jazz bassist – the youngest person and first African American to play in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, who has since then written about called Music: Black, White, and Blue in America, and held benefit concerts to raise money to support voting rights, and started a foundation for vulnerable students with his wife, and received a doctorate in Sociology from Berkeley, and been mentioned by Duke Ellington in his book, and been called by Max Roach “the greatest jazz bassist of all time.” And so on. My feature on them will be going up soon, but it was an all-around surreal experience.

Ortiz Walton back in his Boston Symphony days

Second NAM story

Here’s my second full story. They had a lot fewer edits for this one, and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, except for an extra, unnecessary “Perez said” – which has now been fixed. Here’s to having the intern-guts to point out even small problems!

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=625cb9e7f8b1d707b866faabbf1e887a

Now I’m working on two health-related stories. For one, I’m interviewing  a family involved in long-term care of an elderly family member. My interview will be part of a policy piece on the place (or lack thereof ) of long term care in state and national health care plans. Apparently, 27% of national Medicaid spending on long term care services goes to home and community-based  services (HCBS), while 73% goes to nursing homes. 89% of Americans of 50 year and older want to stay in their homes as long as possible, and the unpaid contributions of the US’s ~34 million family caregivers are valued at over 375 billion.

I’m also working on a story that assesses the success of Healthy San Francisco so far and looks at how its principles might apply to national health care in light of the current national discussion.

And next Thursday, I’ll be reporting (maybe on camera ) at a rally organized by the Ella Baker Center in Oakland calling for more California budget cuts in incarceration for minor offenses (they say these cuts could save 12 billion dollars over the next five years) so that cuts won’t be made in social services, education, health care, etc. (yay!).

My first real NAM story and excuses

The story is about Richard Valle and Tri-CED, his recycling business in Union City that employs at-risk youth. (See the link below.)

The excuses are for the quality of the story. It was fun going to report on and writing up the story, and it’s probably good for me to experience the official newsroom editing process. The main editor that I have been working with had great suggestions, but when the story went to the other editors, I felt like many issues I had struggled to eliminate were, as I know better than to say, rearing their cliched ugly heads again.

Many of the editors’ suggestions involved replacing my words with phrases I’d intentionally avoided because I was afraid they would sound cliched or cheesy. I had to work to find a way of arguing that we use the active voice, rather than that the passive voice be used, while not seeming too uppity as an intern. In general, I lacked both the authority and the time to argue for all the changes I would have liked.

Of course, some of my differences with these editors probably come from my being relatively unfamiliar with NAM’s style of journalistic writing. In my journalism class last semester, we were allowed to use the first person – at NAM, absolutely not. Also, since it is my piece, I probably care more about each word than an editor.

So although most of these words are mine, I am not responsible for a few oddities in tense – they wanted to put the first half of the  anecdote about Denzel in present tense until I pointed out that it was confusing to change tense in the middle of the same incident, so we put it all in present tense, only for them to change it all back into past…or almost all or it. I am not responsible for the title, or for the phrase “It was 1974, and”. I am not responsible for putting so many conjunctions at the starts of sentences. And so on (<– intentional irony).

news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e6130a3ef2eee097a0674f309136ab7e

This photo of Richard Valle is just a thumbnail on the NAM website, so here he is in his full, awesome, glory.

Still, there is something fun about putting a story through the editing. It was definitely useful learning which parts of my story weren’t as clear as I thought they were. Also, I’ve always liked the idea of a substance becoming refined through a variety of processes – the steel for swords slowly growing harder in the fire, etc. – and I’m telling myself it works the same for news stories, even if they get a little charred in the process.

Maybe I seem arrogant about this, but with the grammatical things, if not the matters of tone, I was objectively right. Maybe now, in this post, I’m rebounding from the restrictions of an official news feature by going voice-and-opinion-crazy. Also, maybe melodrama is contagious, because here I go, comparing my story to a steely sword.

Weijie Mu, a Tri-CED employee that I mention in the story

The Xinjiang riots

The riots, which have killed over 150 people and injured over 1,000, Uighur and Han, came up at our NAM editorial meeting yesterday. Our director made the point that the Uighurs get a bad deal twice over  – firstly, because they have become increasingly dispossessed of their resources, rights , and culture by the Han Chinese, which is a major reason for the current unrest and Uighur resentment toward the Han; secondly, because for some reason or other, they are a group that few outsiders care to advocate for – unlike, say, the Tibetans. (Although the Guantanamo Bay resettlement story gave them some recent exposure.)

It seems likely to me that the general lack of passion about Uighur rights is at least in part because they are Muslim. Maybe it is hard for many, say, in the US, who want to fight for greater freedom, etc., to champion a Muslim cause in the same way they can champion the Tibetan Buddhist cause (which of course also has its own issues of class and religion that do not match the liberal values of many of its champions  as well as they might like to think). I believe this bias exists even though the Uighur’s brand of Islam is, from my understanding, a good deal less rigid than Islam in much of  the Middle East, for example. I don’t know if many people know that much about Uighur culture.

Call to prayer in Kashgar, from my 2006 trip. I feel a little weirdly anthropological and condescending in the dumb Westerner way, adding these photos, since they’re not related to the riots in particular. But I want to give a sense of the normal scene in one of the currently affected cities.

The Uighurs also don’t have a figure quite like the Dalai Lama to rally outsiders. They do have Rebiya Kadeer  – who currently lives in the US, and who the Chinese government accuses of instigating the recent riots, maybe taking a US-blaming cue from the Iranian government.

Also like Iran, however, the Uighurs now have things like Twitter and text messages to help unify them.

A few people in Munich, Washington, etc. have been showing their support by protesting, trashing the Chinese embassy, etc. But these protesters are generally Uighurs in exile themselves, not multi-ethnic supporters like those Tibet attracts.

I am certainly not saying that the Uighurs do not share blame for the riots. But it seems unfair (as it often is) to classify them as the sole aggressors or terrorists, and unfortunately, it may be easier – for China or observers – to do so because the Uighurs are Muslim. Then again, may also be too easy for many Western observers to classify the Han Chinese as solely at fault because of the way many in the West delight in pointing out the continuing repressive nature of the Chinese government and somehow using that to incriminate the Chinese people themselves.

If anything, these riots demonstrate that people’s tendency to be violent idiots is in no way limited to one group of people.

Kashgar's Sunday livestock market

Selfishly, but probably in a way many people might be, I probably feel especially sympathetic to the Uighurs because I was in these places – Urumqi, Kashgar, etc. – three years ago, when I went on a trip along the Silk Road from Beijing through Xinjiang with my mom’s side of the family. Worse, I might also feel an especial interest because the Uighurs there thought I was one of them – I have that Eurasian look. It was the first time I’d felt like I fit in, appearance wise, with most people around me.

But I guess silly things like that are how many people come to care about specific causes, rather than just having a general desire to do something about something, which often bothers me, especially when I detect it in myself. Not that a simple desire to do good is a bad thing.

Uighur kids in Kashgar from my 2006 trip. Again, I feel dumb putting their photo here. My point is just that the little girl is adorable, chador (I think?) and all. And that the kids look Eurasian like me.

Unrelatedly, except in that it comes from my Silk Road trip, I wouldn’t like to have a cavity in Kashgar. This was not the only shop in Kashgar’s Old Town with a sign like this at its front:

Dentiset

My apologies that my photos are only of Kashgar, and not Urumqi, the epicenter of the recent riots. Kashgar was a much more interesting city for us as tourists, and my mom, who took all these photos, didn’t get any of Urumqi. Maybe it is a little suspicious that, at least according  to several Chinese news sources, Rebiya Kadeer, who lived in Urumqi for over 20 years, couldn’t tell that the photo she used to demonstrate government brutality was actually from Shishou, in Hubei Province, not Urumqi. But as far as I remember, Urumqi really doesn’t have many visible distinguishing characteristics as a city. (By the way, it is, however, of all the cities in the world, the farthest from any ocean.)

More stats, a link, and a poem

Well, as intended, a post called “My sex statistics,” coupled with a very tempting first few lines to appear under the results for the tag “sex,” has attracted to my blog a few more wayfarin’ strangers searching the  tag “sex”. Only 4, this time, which, given the post’s tantalizing beginning, I can only attribute to the fact that the “sex” searchers are generally a small, regular group of people who have begun to learn that I cannot offer them what they seek.

Still, it seems now that something more complex than simple search results is drawing people to “My Sex Statistics.” 35 page views, my largest number so far, happened on the day I posted “My sex statistics,” with most views of that page in particular. Also for the first time people visited my “About” page. The increase in number of visitors was much larger than either chance or the four “sex”-searchers could account for. I guess it could just be a few visitors looking at many pages.

Apparently, one person also found my post by searching for “sex dreams.”

On an unrelated note, you can now read my first published NAM reporting piece (Note: I just collected the parents’ info and quotes. Someone else wrote it up, and therefore, I should not be held responsible for the grammatical and formatting errors.):

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=0bbde7e4e2698d568c4c43582670211d

Also, a silly poem I wrote a few months ago, but which no one has seen and I just re-discovered on my computer:

The hem of my skirt touched the ground

and I winked at you just so, hoping that by quaintness

I could enchant your heart that beat to the rhythm of

hip hip, and I never thought to wonder why

rhythm has no vowels when

doom da dum dum dum

where would we be without vowels?

I shouldn’t have been wearing a long skirt in that club

anyway, and the way I was thinking chant came from enchant

I knew I had it all wrong.

But I can always hope.

My sex statistics

There are some things I’ve always wanted to try: outdoor rock-climbing – as opposed to the kind on the plastic walls above the mats, hang-gliding, skinny-dipping, chocolate covered crickets…

Aaaaannd…

An internet search experiment. But I set up the beginning of this post – the part that would be quoted on the WordPress page where it displays all entries for a given tag – to fool the people who get to my page by searching for the tag “sex.”

As promised, the results of my WordPress search experiment:

Total page views of “Dirt makes everything more interesting” by people who searched the tag “sex”: 7

Total page views of “SF gay pride parade” by people who searched the tag “sex”: 5

Total page views of anything from by people who searched any other tag (still): 0. This includes tags like “news,” “writing,” and “books” – not exactly obscure topics with limited appeal.

However, all views of “Dirt makes everything more interesting” came from people who found it on the first page of the posts WordPress listed under the tag “sex” (the newest posts). “SF gay pride parade” had a more persisting appeal, with 3 views coming from page 1 of “sex” search results and 2 views coming from page 5. This gap (no views from “sex” pages 2-4) suggests to me that the time of day I published each post might have made a difference – this could also help explain the already probably insignificant differences in number of views between the two posts.

The real conclusion is that certain WordPress users are sex-obsessed. For those of you who yet again came to this blog because I tagged this post with “sex” – gotcha again, suckersss! Your views will become stats in my next post

A separate intriguing stat: 2 people have come to my blog from a Google search. For 1 of these, the term searched was “why dirt is so interesting.” Either this was someone who had already visited my blog and was trying to find it again – maybe an arrogant guess – or this is very interesting.

This is enjoyable in a way similar to looking at the searches Google suggests when you start to type in something. Just now, for example, I typed in “what do ” (with a space after do – no space yields different results) and got:

What do dreams mean? (A very good question!)

What do contractions feel like? (Important to know – or so I realized once I read it from a non-grammatical point of view.)

What do names mean? (Well, different things….)

What do my dreams mean? (I don’t know, Google, but I’m sure they’re interesting. Unless they’re bleak and technological.)

What do turtles eat?

What do ladybugs eat?

What do dolphins eat?

What do your dreams mean? (Mine?)

What do deer eat?

What do frogs eat? (Really??)

Another time I did “what do,” I got “What do Mormons believe?” among other things.