I’m With Her

Agenda

WordPress Team
6 p.m.: Bobby Ampezzan
Best Overview Essay
Fix stories, build page

WordPress Team

Nicole Plumlee

Jared

–Mock Up Designs

We’re working with this idea of three sliders:

https://wordpressua.uark.edu/datareporting/test-layout/

We would like to modify the slider to make the images larger — there is too much border.

–Mobile device – editing in Divi

–New single page site. Editor role

workingandpoor.uark.edu,

–Build!

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

Aubry Tucker

-Update Sherrod Bryan story with his restaurant closing.

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

Andrew Epperson

Esmeralda Jaimes – fix edits, photo. rewrite

Esmeralda Jaimes, Office Cleaner. By Andrew Epperson

Philip Sais audio.
–Question for Epperson on the Sais graphic – bar musicians. where did you find that data?
–re-edit the photo and crop it tighter

Quintero
(brief introduction needed for second clip)

Mishell Quintero, JC Penneys, By Andrew Epperson

Tonney Gazaway
: https://wordpressua.uark.edu/datareporting/tonney-gazaway-andrew-epperson/ ‎
(profanity at 18, 42. edit)

Ann Johnson

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

2) Renee Smith.

(AUDIO NEEDS EDITING– CHECK SOURCE FILE. HARSH SOUND)

–Fix graphic. Just display average annual wage

3) Davis.
–Who is Quinn Childress?

Alvin Davis, Engineer. By Katie Serrano

4) Lara
Clean up edits in red.
Audio needs an introduction

Bertha Lara, Poultry Worker, By Katie Serrano

Elisabeth Butler

Jobst

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?

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.

Peer Review Essays

Read these essays and comment. Vote for the best.

Homework

Format and Post Your Stories in a Slider on the New Web Page

2. Fix any items on your punch list. That will include photo editing (Crop and Adjust Brightness) and audio.

3. Develop the following graphics for the various occupations:

–Fast food manager — Aubry

(edit this: source of data, year. (https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.uark.edu/dist/0/367/files/2018/03/FinalCooksSupervisors-276uelm.jpg)
–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

Due 11:59 pm Wednesday April 25

Graduate School Orientation

by Camilla Shumaker | Jan 7, 2019

Class 13, April 19