Joe Martin Stage Race – Finish on Mount Sequoyah

Literature of Journalism course for the Fall 2018.

Hi all – see the details about the Literature of Journalism course for the Fall 2018.

This is a great class taught by Prof. Bret Schulte. The graduate section is Literature of Journalism, JOUR 5313 and the undergrad section is JOUR 405V-006. There’s also an Honors Colloquium section, JOUR 3932H.

The course operates something like a book club, one devoted to works of long-form journalism. We read a book over the course of two weeks, discussing themes/structure/tone/voice/character development/reportage along the way. After each book, the student writes a response blog and then a paper at the end of the semester. Grad students also do a mid-term.

Here’s the course description:

A survey of book-length narrative nonfiction from mid-20th Century to today. Authors may include pioneering literary journalists, such as Hersey and Capote; New Journalists, such as Didion and Wolfe; and their successors, such as Frazier and Orlean.

The class meets M/W from 2 to 315.

Questions: bjschult@uark.edu

Agenda:

5 pm: Selection Final Graphics. Design. Writing the wrap-up. Homework

5:30 pm: Bobby Ampezzan

6:15 pm: R Studio, join race and income data

Design:

WordPress Developers Here Next Week

Copy this code and send it to your cellphone. View page. Comment.

(https://wordpressua.uark.edu/datareporting/working-and-poor-in-arkansas/)

All right. I think I’ve looked at all of the profiles and listened to the audio bars available.

Do you have access to, or inclination, to go back and spend time with any of these people? I actually think for a 4 min. radio story the best thing to do is profile one person in three acts. Here’s roughly how the full 4 minutes would break down in scenes or acts. Let’s take Phillip Sais as an example (I like the piano playing a lot, even though I think a fast food worker is the better porster child for working poor).

1. Meet a person. Phillip plays piano, talks about loving it, when he picked it up. Then says piano doesn’t cut it. Explains his situation.

2. Basic premise of story: In the last 20 years, it’s been hard to get ahead in America (data set/proof) and Arkansas particularly (proof).

3. 20 seconds of Barbara Ehrenreich (for ex) by phone, or UA prof in person.

4. Back with Philip, who’s now at a grocery store. After he gets done buying store brand pasta and sauce, he has $8.43 in his acct.

5. Not only are poor people not making more, but life is more expensive …

6. Philip at home, at night, on the computer, lookign at want ads. Philip’s not the only one, back at the grocery store, the person who checked him out is [name]. She makes [what]. She also is working poor. (Or something like this.)

Obviously, that’s contrived, but that’s how I imagine this. Alternatives? Sure, you could arrange for three to meet up. Maybe Phillip and Karen Roquemore agree to have lunch at Lisa Terry’s Waffle House. They sit and talk about this life. Meanwhile, get sound of coffee brewing, plates clinking, an old man lights a cigarette …

Another alternative, if you only use the existing sound, is you flip the structure. You begin with facts and then introduce characters to reflect or provide color for those facts. So the people become kind of the in-between parts and the story itself is built around the numbers and the data. The reason this isn’t so great? One, facts make for bad stories. Two, there’s a greater cacophony of sound when each new person has new ambient noise background.

Let me know about Thursday, and thanks for making me a part of this. I’m happy to Skype in and explain to the class my ideas and talk through some things with them. I think maybe Andrew has the best natural sense of both sound gathering and then voicing the story. This is my suspicion but i may be wrong.

ps. and if you want me to take the lead on this I will. I would pick Andrew to do the story and pick another reporter to help and get shared credit. I would talk with them about picking a good subject. Then I would work with you and them to flesh out a script with facts and at least one other “expert” voice.

Bobby Ampezzan

Managing Editor | Arkansas Public Media

5820 Asher Ave. Ste. 400

(501) 569-8489

ArkansasPublicMedia.org

Natural State News with Context

More Tips from Ampezzan

Here are my broadstrokes on all of this (is broad strokes two words? Yeah, probably.)

1. I love this topic. I was reminded of it yesterday when news broke of Walmart taking their tax package windfall and giving hourly workers a newsworthy but ultimately pretty modest raise.

2. No radio story, even a two-parter, can approach the depth of the package your team produced in the fall, for instance. So no one up there should think that EVERYTHING needs to be done with an eye toward producing a radio broadcast news feature.

3. That said, I’d like to be in on the story map for this project along the way. That way I can say, “Record this interview,” or “This data can be squeezed down to a few lines of the script.” It’s really important that we target a good subject (working poor) early and follow him or her around with a microphone for a bit. (Far better than, for instance, doing 20 minute “formal” recorded interviews with all subjects that, really, don’t paint a picture in sound.)This formula — I. Open on sound, then voice of someone affected, usually in-scene, then maybe their voice in a quieter environment; II. Ask why this is?; III. Talk to experts, authorities; IV. Finish with voice/sound of someone effected. — is pretty standard.

4. It’s important to think of sound reporting like parts of a movie production and not like something you can do by waving a microphone around. The example I say is, how do we SHOW that we’re in a Starbucks? We gather blocks of sound — a cash register, an espresso machine steaming milk, the perk of a coffee maker, the sound of the drive-thru cashier repeating an order. In editing, we weave the sound elements to create a picture. What we don’t do is wave a microphone around and hope people get that we’re in a Starbucks.

5. I’m happy to talk about that over Skype, and talk about what equipment they’ll have, and how they should treat gathering sound. Attached, for instance, is proper form for getting a “tape sync,” that’s a phone conversation recorded in such a way as to sound like the person is being interviewed in person.

6. There can only be one or at most two voices narrating the story. Are more than one or two students going to want to do that? (They can voice the scripts at KUAF.) We won’t have to pick until the end, and maybe none want to and all would prefer I voice the report. I’m fine either way, but I will say my hope, if I’m involved, is that whoever voices the story does so with appeal and an ear for dramatizing the script. This was and is for me harder than I ever thought. (I don’t mean dramatizing like in an audiobook, but, for instance, when David Folkenflick reports for NPR, he’s got urgency and clarity in his voice. He’s pacing the long sentences and giving the short ones punch. I consider that part as important to the broadcast as anything, though admittedly it’s less important for the journalism, strictly speaking.

Fact Check

Attached is a spreadsheet for the fact checking process. Please put the name, email and phone number of the people you spoke to on this list. I will be contacting them and sending a few quotes to make sure everything is ok. I do this on major projects and rarely have any issues – the people we interview really appreciate the follow-up.

Editing Punch List

Photo editing: Crop and Adjust Brightness….

Need graphics for the various occupations:
–Fast food manager — Aubry
–Waitress – Serrano
–Retail sales — Mary Kerr
–Manager Fast Food — Serrano
–Retail Store clerk — Ann Johnson
–Child care — Elisabeth
–Bar Musician — Andrew
–Barber – Aubry
–Custodian – Andrew
–Personal care assistant – Ann Johnson

Mary Kerr Winters
Modify this to make it just an interactive Tableau map that we will use in the gallery.
–bring in the audio files, fix audio for Cathy Lee

My Tableau Workbook – Mary Kerr Winters

Andrew Epperson and Philip Sais audio.
–Question for Epperson on the Sais graphic – bar musicians
–re-edit the photo and crop it tighter

Ann Johnson, Chris Paff
–edit graphic, eliminate legend – measure names.
–update data for 2017.

Katie Serrano
1) Dana Ralpho
–Wage she earns at Wendy’s
–Audio clip
–More detail about her situation. This story is very brief and incomplete

2) Renee Smith
–increase in pay reference – what was that? explain
–Audio still doesn’t work.
–Photo needs cropping
–Fix graphic. Just display average annual wage

Elisabeth Butler

Poverty by Race in Arkansas: Elisabeth Butler
Redo this to focus just on Arkansas
(https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.uark.edu/dist/0/367/files/2018/02/Demographics-and-Poverty-1ebo4l8.jpg)
–Abigail Jobst: Not sure where she is working (Grubs?), how much she making and if they remain in poverty status if Zeballos is back to work making $50,000?

TASKS TO DO

Definition of Working Poor

See “Table Notes” to far right on factfinder website after you’ve generated a table.

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2016_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf

Read: “Poverty Status in the Past 12 Months”
“Poverty Status of Households”

Definitions. working Poor

–Poverty thresholds:
The actual poverty thresholds vary with the makeup of the family. In 2015, the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four was $24,257; for a family of nine or more people, the threshold was $49,177; and for one person (see Unrelated individuals), it was $12,082. Poverty thresholds are updated each year to reflect changes in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). Thresholds do not vary geographically. (For more information, see “Income and poverty in the United States: 2015.”)

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2015/home.htm#unrelatedindividual

Weighted Average Poverty
Thresholds in 2015 by Size of
Family
(Dollars)
One person 12,082
Two people 15,391
Three people 18,871
Four people 24,257
Five people 28,741
Six people 32,542
Seven people 36,998
Eight people 41,029
Nine people or more 49,177
Source: U.S. Census Bureau.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.pdf

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html

Graphics Comments from Jon Schleuss

These are a really great start!

I went through and made a bunch of ridiculous notes about each aspect of each student’s work. A bit overkill. I see a lot curiosity in the data. Why are so many Asian people in Madison county living in poverty? What is up with the single mother’s in poverty?

I think my big takeaways are that most of these charts should be flipped on their sides. That’s because when we sort data largest to smallest (nearly everyone did) we then think of it as time passing if it’s a column chart (bars situated left to right). And that there’s a downward marching trend. Best to flip a lot of these on their side.

And the colors. What does “red” mean when it’s used? And what about using too many colors. At the Times we really only have two or three colors: basic default, a highlight color and a negative color. We break from convention, but keeping it simple helps. I figure now I’ll show them how I approach chart building from start to finish.

Also, I see a desire to combine different data into the same chart. So there’s a left, bottom and right axis. But that’s a bit confusing to the reader, especially when things have the same values (percentages vs. percentages instead of percentages vs. hard counts).

Are you guys doing choropleth maps? I’m guessing you’re just focusing Northwest Arkansas counties, but I wonder how they compare as a region to the rest of the state? And also, how have things changed over time? Several students seem to hint around the edges of this, or want to know. Is NWA improving its median household income?

This is great stuff though. Are you finding them interested and curious about the data? I think that’s a real trick: being a journalist with your data too and asking it tough questions.

Anyway, these have inspired a bunch of the issues I’ll address in class. And we can keep it very casual, so folks can ask questions when they have them or we can switch to mapping data, or exploring the data, or whatever.

Return of R Studio

Exercise: Join Race and Income Data

April 12 race-income exercise-2k0qnde

Data

US Ark Counties Poverty ACS_16_5YR_DP03-Jan 24-y46vv7

Race Poverty Set

ACS_16_5YR_S1701_april12-22nnfd5

File Header Definitions

ACS_16_5YR_S1701_metadata-1on99rr

Homework, due 11:59 pm Wednesday April 17:

-Revisions to Assignment #4

-Editing punch list.

-Overview essay: 400-500 words
Last week we discussed the major themes that emerged from our reporting. Write an overview story that would stitch together the material we have and incorporate these themes.Draw from the class readings. Feel free to use material from your colleagues’ work – just give them a reporting credit in your essay. The final overview essay will take from a number of the profiles.

Here is some guidance for the essay. You don’t have to hit all of these themes but this may help you organize your thoughts.

In our initial interviews, many participants reflected these sentiments:
–Never complaining
–Pride
–Acceptance
–Contentment
–Positive

One other theme: We found many of these people had money available for cable tv, entertainment, video games.

We also talked to a number of women, some of whom were supporting their families with low-wage jobs.

Are these people working poor? Describe the working poor definition and how these people do or do not fit in.

Your essays will be distributed next week for peer evaluating and grading. The best one becomes the lead byline for the overview story.

DRAFT PROFILES

Graduate School Orientation

by Camilla Shumaker | Jan 7, 2019

Class 12, April 12