One Story, Three Ways

The Rivers Casino

1. The first way I would choose to tell the story of the Rivers Casino is through live stream video, possibly the only way to truly show the reader the madness and strange characters in this huge establishment. I would use time-lapse video over a period of, say, 24 hours, to show the comings and goings of the employees, performers, and players at the casino. I would then break up my article text into time increments. For example, "2:00 a.m. The fat, bald man orders another Miller Lite and angrily pumps more one dollar bills into the Kitty Glitter machine." The video would show this in action, but the text would give more detailed descriptions for each person and their actions. Examples of this type of time-lapse video journalism is shown here.
2. Another way to tell the story of the Rivers is through an interactive map of the building itself, similar to what David Dobbs did in "My Mother's Lover". Casinos are often full of more than just the slot machines and table games, so a map would allow the reader to explore the other parts that they may not know that the casino has (restaurants, bowling alleys, bars, etc). I would include features that allow the reader to click on each part of the casino to obtain more information about that particular place.
3. One very interesting way to tell the story of the casino is to choose a few main characters to focus on, rather than exploring the various people there. I would choose maybe five or so characters and follow only those few people, telling their stories along the way. I would include photographs and player statistics about these people as supplementary information. This would change the tone of the story, because it would become more about the people as characters rather than the casino as a whole. This type of piece would focus more on why people gamble, what types of people go to the casino, what is their thought process as they're losing or winning money, and other omniscient tactics.

48 Hour Magazine Idea

Topic:
The River’s Casino
Mainly personal stories with facts sprinkled in for solidity/humor
Online Magazine for video snippets

We’d cover our 48-hour magazine during the weekend of one of the Peirogi eating contests

Length:
Use tumblr as our format to keep updating after our 48 hour deadline

Articles:
1. Gambling Problems/Addiction
2. Seafood Buffet/Free Drinks (pop)
3. Entertainers-Journey Cover Bands
4. Winning and Losing stories/Range of Emotions
5. People, NRA convention-Time Lapse of a certain table/machine
-Convention Center events that draw in crowds to the casino
-How the people in Pittsburgh see the casino vs. other cities in US (Vegas and Atlantic City dress up)
6. Slot Machines, different types, penny machines (kitty glitter-a cat themed slot machine)
7. How to get banned from a casino: Using a fake ID
8. Policy on counting cards: could be a how to illustrative guide, how to play the games, count cards, etc
9. Employee’s outfits and funny stories
10. Card members and Player’s Club (bios on people who have these)
11. Dealer School- story about how to become a card dealer
12. Pro Poker players, any famous people from Pittsburgh seen there?
13. Recent Jackpot Winners!
14. How bad of an idea having a casino credit line is

Art wise:
Photography
Illustrations, cartoons, diagrams, labeled parts
Videos (time lapse and short interviews)

Stats: Short blurbs/side bars/cartoons
About money dropped
How much the employee’s make
How many people go there

Two New Facebook Pages

I liked Rolling Stone magazine's Facebook, which posts articles from their latest issues of the magazine as well as performances and interviews from popular artists.

I also liked Slate, because after doing so much research on it for the previous post I found it very interesting and relevant for my major.

Slate and Grantland Social Media

Slate:

Twitter
@Slate
@SlateArticles
@SlateCultFest
@SlateWine
@Slatest
@browbeatslate
@SlateViral
@PBSlate
@SlateTodaysPix

(Holy guacamole! I can barely keep up with one Twitter account.)

Facebook
Slate.com
Slate Culture
Slate Explainer
Slate V
Slate's Culture Gabfest
Slate Political Gabfest

Grantland:

Twitter

@Grantland33

(plus the various journalists on Twitter who are contributers to Grantland)

Facebook

Grantland

lab 2

I found freelance journalist Alissa Walker's Twitter feed (@GelatoBaby). Though I'm not very familiar with her work (she's written articles for magazines like Details), I was instantly drawn to her Twitter because it's much funnier and more realistic than many of the other writers I encountered, who seemed to be self-promoting with every tweet and never really saying much. I think that Alissa uses Twitter in a very effective way, because she allows her followers to get a glimpse of her personality and personal life while still promoting the articles she's written and the events she's taking part in.

I also found Creative Nonfiction magazine's Facebook, which they use mainly to promote their magazine and what's going on in the world of nonfiction. It says, " Its objectives are to provide a venue, the journal Creative Nonfiction, for high quality nonfiction prose (memoir, literary journalism, personal essay)". They also post nonfiction events, new work releases, and other nonfiction news.

In Class Exercise

• Here is the audio of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

• In Pennsylvania on January 1, 1644, the weather was "cloudy and rainy weather, with occasional sunshine and somewhat warm," according to The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 15
• Five Deadliest Hurricanes in the United States:

1.Galveston, Tex. 1900
2.Lake Okeechobee, Fla.1928
3.Katrina (La./Miss.)20053
4.Florida Keys/S. Tex. 1919
5.New England 1938

According to: Deadliest Hurricanes in the United States (U.S. Mainland) — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0778120.html#ixzz1ZwP12W00

• Here are the original blueprints for Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.

• My thoughts on Ernest Hemingway's 1923 passport photo:

1. Ernest Hemingway was kind of a babe (this is factual, right?)
2. Passports at this time had a weird kind of swirly background print with "United States Passport" printed inside
3. He was number 359666
4. The whole document is very off-center
5. There is a raised seal in the left side of the passport

Abandoned Pittsburgh Sources

Here are some sources I've found detailing information on urban decay and abandoned buildings in Pittsburgh:

BootsnAll: This travel website posted an article called "Guerilla Tourism in Pittsburgh", a guide to spots like the Dixmont Insane Asylum, steel mills, and the Church Brew Works, all places which have been long abandoned (and, in some cases, reopened as completely different things).

Historic Pittsburgh: A very extensive list of the most interesting abandoned buildings in Pittsburgh, endangered buildings, and other historic places.

Fiveprime: A really cool photo gallery on the photography search engine with dozens of pictures of abandoned buildings and houses in the Pittsburgh area.

10 New Twitter Accounts

Here are the ten new Twitters I began following, all related to creative nonfiction.

@JournalistsLike - The Twitter account for StuffJournalistsLike.com

@Gawker - A news site / blog based around the media and gossip

@AP - The Associated Press, managed by a team of editors

@SociaLogicMktg - A website that gives advice on social media

@RollingStone - The official Twitter for Rolling Stone magazine

@pourmecoffee - a humorous news blogger

@BorowitzReport - "There is a fine line between social networking and wasting your fucking life." Andy Borowitz is a comedian / satirist who frequently contributes to The New Yorker, has hosted and contributed to many writing events, and created theBorowizReport.com, a news satire site

@kellyoxford - A blogger and television-pilot writer who posts witty tweets about pop culture

@NewYorker - the magazine's official Twitter

@PublishersWkly - publishing information and book reviews