which is really quite an honor, especially considering the history of the magazine. the feature was a cover story titled ‘The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady’ written by Emily Nussbaum who interviewed myself and the others a couple times over the past two months.
the intro:
On the day Barack Obama was elected, a strange new feature appeared on the website of the New York Times. Called the Word Train, it asked a simple question: What one word describes your current state of mind? Readers could enter an adjective or select from a menu of options. They could specify whether they supported McCain or Obama. Below, the results appeared in six rows of adjectives, scrolling left to right, coded red or blue, descending in size of font. The larger the word, the more people felt that way.
All day long, the answers flowed by, a river of emotion—anonymous, uncheckable, hypnotic. You could click from Obama to McCain and watch the letters shift gradually from blue to red, the mood changing from giddy, energized, proud, and overwhelmed to horrified, ambivalent, disgusted, and numb.
It was a kind of poll. It was a kind of art piece. It was a kind of journalism, but what kind?
originally she was interested in the Word Train, but quickly, the story grew to involve many more aspects of the times. aspects including multimedia editor andrew devigal, aron pilhofer and the interactive news technologies team, steve duenes and matt ericson of the mad mad grafx team and a few others from throughout the organization. while steve and matt actually don’t end up quoted in the story – and actually neither does andrew – do know they were there the whole time. and i feel emily pretty much nailed the descriptions:
I met with members of the teams that created the Word Train in a glass-walled conference room, appropriate for their fishbowl profession. There was Gabriel Dance, the multimedia producer, a talkative 27-year-old with two earrings and a love of The Big Lebowski. There were Matt Ericson and Steve Duenes from graphics, deadpan veterans who create the site’s interactive visuals—those pretty maps that conceal many file cabinets stuffed with data. And there was Aron Pilhofer, a skeptical career print journalist with “nerd tendencies,” one of the worried men who helped spearhead this mini-renaissance.
overall i was quite flattered with emily’s story. and thank fucking god i didn’t look more like an idiot in the photograph. i had a mad lip quiver going on that day. my only quarrel with it is that you can’t see i actually have long hair still cuz it’s all back. on the flip side, it’s good to know that people still think i look OK with my head shaved. the photo actually ran across two pages in the magazine. big. real big. crazy shit.
anyway, i did want to go through and annotate a couple points:
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