so i was in new york magazine

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:

It was a particularly gratifying moment for Dance, who had joined the New York Times at 24, convinced—with the radical innocence of the cocky Kerouac fan he was—that he was entering a golden age of journalism, not overseeing its death throes.

all quite true, but then

Dance was uninterested, even when he graduated from college, in 2004, in the whole “work in Podunk for a small paper and earn some chops” model.

when i was speaking of the ‘podunk’ option, i was speaking about the two options that were presented to me when i graduated from colorado state university: working at a small time newspaper or going to graduate school and honing my craft. at the time, i was strictly interested in writing for a newspaper. i had not even heard of multimedia journalism. as is true with just about any other graduate coming out of college who wants to write for newspapers, step one is going to a small paper and writing. so in no way was i trying to say that this was a bad thing. it’s just a reality. believe me, a huge portion of the people at the Times started off this way, and i’d be crazy to snub it. so anyway… it was a lil out of context, and instead of going to a podunk newspaper, i went to graduate school. so… let’s call it a push.

Certain facts about journalism online struck him as obvious and inevitable: the legitimacy of the first-person, the immediate, and the anonymous, as well as the notion that sources should be shared and transparent.

and then we’re back to true.

But when Dance was hired by the Times, in 2006, shortly after completing an experimental-journalism program at the University of North Carolina, that glimmering Utopia seemed far away.

when the fact-checker called, i told him that it wasn’t an experimental-journalism program. it was grad school. it was maybe a pioneering program. but not really experimental. alas.

“I took the job because they had agreed to embrace integration,” Dance recalls. “But at first it was difficult, very difficult—we’d make sure we were in on a meeting, but if we didn’t go up, that meeting was going on regardless. Nobody was coming over to the dot-com.”

i’m not trying to complain. i was saying it was difficult to get in on the action. i certainly did not expect the action to come to me.

In contrast, when Dance was in high school, he was running a Dave Matthews music-sharing site and playing Doom with global opponents.

definitely the most awesome quote in the story. however, a little inaccurate. while i did rock doom in high school, it was quake 2 where i first started dominating the global opponents.

the dave matthews music-sharing bit. true.

—

i think emily wrote a very nice piece. she has cool style and some interesting insights. i’m excited with the feedback i’ve been receiving, and i’m very grateful to have the opportunities i do. cheers to my buddies for the high fives. and right back at you. cuz they’re high fives.

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