On Journalism: Anonymous Commenting

NYT: News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments
April 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/technology/12comments.html?ref=technology

"The debate over anonymity is entwined with the question of giving more weight to comments from some readers than others, based in part on how highly other readers regard them. Some sites already use a version of this approach; Wikipedia users can earn increasing editing rights by gaining the trust of other editors, and when reviews are posted on Amazon.com, those displayed most prominently are those that readers have voted “most helpful” — and they are often written under real names."

The handmade revolution: is it just the recession?

Written for Feature Article Writing course, Spring 2010. Never Published. 


Assignment: Write an open feature. Your choice: Home, fashion, food, consumer, health, science, how-to, entertainment. Think of a content area within the world of features that you particularly like to read. 

The handmade revolution: is it just the recession?
By Natalie Kirkpatrick

     Kimberly Dorn makes plush headbands. Erin Protheroe designs tutus for little girls, like her daughter. The Crafty Bastards Fair, one of many events featuring only handmade items like Dorn’s and Portheroe’s, is hosted at the Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams Morgan, and is seven years running this October. The event features 150 vendors with handmade items to sell and over 25,000 people in attendance.
     The whole idea began with the Washington City Paper, which was thinking of doing a yard sale to promote its classifieds section.
     “This was about the same time that the Renegade Craft Fair had just started up,” said Kimberly Dorn, one of two festival directors of the Crafty Bastards Fair. The Renegade Craft Fair is featured in cities across the United States including Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles.
     Dorn said, “This whole crafting thing just seems really cool so we decided to start a craft fair.”
     The fair got her into knitting, she said, and she also is the director of Hello Craft, a nonprofit that works for the “advancement of independent crafters and the handmade movement,” and supporting small business owners while introducing people to “the benefits of buying handmade” according to their Web site.
     The Sugarloaf Craft Festival, like the Renegade Craft Fair, is a local option for buying handmade items. In the D.C. metro area Sugarloaf hosts events in Chantilly, Va., and Gaithersburg, Md., where “more than 250 of the nation’s most accomplished craftspeople, as well as renowned artisans” can feature their works according to their Web site.
     Dorn said that by buying handmade you’re supporting the local economy.
     “Usually people who make handmade goods are going to buy handmade goods so that money is circulated in the community,” Dorn said.
     She noted the District specifically as a trouble spot for independent business owners.
     “It’s really hard for independent, creative stores to exist in D.C. because it’s so expensive,” Dorn said.     “This is one day where people can go and buy tons of cool stuff that comes from independent crafters and artists.”
     So what’s the difference?
     “There’s a lot more care that goes into it for the most part. It’s more unique because it’s not mass produced,” said Erin Protheroe, who has her own business, SweetSassy. “You can change things if you want to.”
     “You’re buying a story about a piece. At Target you’re just buying a piece,” Dorn said.
     “People are buying for the uniqueness and the fact that it’s not some mass produced thing,” Protheroe said.
     Some have claimed that the handmade revolution is recession-based. In an article by Clive Thompson featured in Wired Magazine, Thompson he wrote that with the “Web-fueled boom in DIY culture, there are more one-of-a-kind products being made.”
     “What we’ve seen if you look at the stats from Etsy, even though this is a recession, their profits seem to be through the roofs,” Dorn said. Etsy is an e-commerce site that allows users to buy and sell their handmade goods. Etsy, created in 2005, by Rob Kalin, describes itself as an alternative to mass-produced products.
And Dorn hit the nail on the head with the Esty statistics. According to their web site, in 2009 the site sold $180.6 million in gross merchandise sales. Through January of 2010 the site had already sold $20.1 million in gross merchandise sales. If the site continues at that rate they will have added $60.6 million to their gross merchandise sales since last year.
     “With people losing their full time jobs, people look to crafting to make some extra cash flow because there are so many outlets where you can sell your goods,” Dorn said mentioning ArtFire along with Etsy as outlets for selling handmade goods.
     Through February of 2010 the unemployment rate held at 9.7% according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Specifically, all 22 counties in the D.C. metropolitan area “had unemployment rates that were higher in December 2009 than a year earlier” according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
     It could also be that selling your handmade products online is now becoming popular, according to Protheroe.
     “The stuff like Etsy has been around for a long time,” Protheroe said. “More people are noticing it now.” Protheroe thinks that since people are learning how to fix things and remodel their homes themselves, they’ll continue to do it, but maybe for different reasons.
     When asked whether or not the handmade movement will ever slip away Dorn said that they had their doubts about stability at Crafty Bastards. “I think about maybe three years ago when we were doing Crafty Bastards, we thought that it was at its height, […] that it was going to go down from there, but surprisingly it just hasn’t,” Dorn said.
     Dorn said that could be due to the increasing number of craft fairs like the Sugraloaf Craft Festival, the Renegade Craft Fair and Crafty Bastards.
     “The more outlets it just creates this creative vibe and people want to be a part of it, and you get people into the community that way,” Dorn said.
     Many of these outlets, aside from the craft fairs, operate online. Hello Craft, Dorn’s other endeavor, “shares information concerning small business how-to’s and general knowledge of the handmade movement through a variety of media.”
     Dorn said that blogging is a way to keep connected to customers. “When you blog, you’re creating personalities and you’re showing off your individual personality,” Dorn said. “If you can show off who you are, people are more enticed to buy form you because they feel like they know you.”
     The “strict jury,” as Dorn describes it, finds vendors who they know are going to make money and be successful “because they have quality goods and unique goods.”
     “There’s always new things being made and being sold and bought, and it just inspires people to make and buy handmade. I think its creating more of a community for itself all the time,” Dorn said.
Dorn’s hoping that handmade goods will move into the male sphere as well.
     “The hand made community, it is full of women,” Dorn said. “The community can use a lot of stuff for dudes.”
     Dorn said that a lot of men go into business with their partners, wives and girlfriends. She said that a lot of men are graphic designers who realized that they can turn what they do for work into art and sell it. “We haven’t really seen a lot of that but it could be the next thing that’s coming up,” Dorn said.

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9/11 defines 2000s for even the young

Written for Feature Article Writing course, Spring 2010. Never Published. 

9/11 defines 2000s for even the young
By Natalie Kirkpatrick

     For Caitlin Miller the image of the destroyed lobby of the World Trade Centers was a shocking image. For Gillian Avery the smell of burning buildings loomed in the air. Andrew MacCracken remembers huddling around a radio in class and Ellie Rutledge could only watch a few minutes of the news coverage before attempting a normal day at school. It seems that many people can remember Sept. 11, 2001 which makes it understandable why the Pew Research Center found it to be the biggest event of the decade.
     All four of them recall exactly where they were when they found out that a plane had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
     “At the moment that the plane crashed into the towers I was at my locker. We were changing classes,” said Miller, a senior in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC from Noblesville, Indiana. Miller was in eighth grade at the time.
     Avery, a senior in the School of International Service at American University was in public school in Queens when her math teacher was replaced by her English teacher who also left the room multiple times.
     “It’s a New York City Public School, you don’t leave children unmanned!” Avery joked. After her teacher broke the news Avery said even the students close to the incident didn’t understand the implications.
     “We didn’t get it,” Avery said. “And he left again and we were all sitting around kind of talking about it. We didn’t get that it was really serious.”
     MacCracken, a junior in the School of Public Affairs at American University, was at his bus stop in Aspen, Colo.
     “One of my friends said, ‘The twin towers got knocked over’ and I had this really weird image in my head of this domino like thing,” MacCracken said.
     Rutledge, a sophomore at American University was in sixth grade in Indiana and had never been to New York before.
     “I found out in homeroom and I remember one of my best guy friends was telling everyone the World Trade Center has come down,” Rutledge said. “I was like, ‘What’s the World Trade Center?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know but it fell down.’”
     For all four students watching the news coverage helped unfold the seemingly confusing events.
     “I like turned on the radio and then we started to get it,” Avery said. “Not only had they hit the World Trade Center but by that time it had collapsed and they had hit the Pentagon,” Avery said.
     The radio was the means for gathering news for MacCracken as well.
     “Our TVs and everything at school weren’t hooked up to cable at the time because they had just been set up so I remember being huddled around a radio in one of my classes,” MacCracken said.
     For others it wasn’t the words that stuck but the images.
     “I think one of the most powerful ones was that shot from the street where the first tower was already in flames and then the camera caught the second plane coming in very low,” MacCracken said. “I’m getting chills thinking about it again right now.”
     Miller described her trip to New York City the summer before 9/11. She remembered pausing with her parents to pose for a photo in the lobby of the World Trade Center, standing by the grand staircase, waiting for the elevator to bring them to the observation deck. Miller remembered a photo she had seen on the news of the lobby after the attack showing the grand stairs still in place.
     “That’s where our picture was. It was all pretty and everything and after the attacks the stairs but there’s all this debris around it,” Miller said. “We were standing there one year ago and now it’s a big crumbled mess.”
     For Avery the images weren’t immediate.
     “I never saw the footage of the planes hitting the building until six months after because my mom wouldn’t turn the television on,” Avery said. “She was like ‘No, you don’t have to watch it […] you can visualize it yourself, you don’t need to see it.’”
     The study titled “Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years” put out by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put out in December of 2009 noted the decade as a negative one.
     “As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it,” the study said. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years,”
     Participants were offered a list of six major events of the decade and 53% said that the “Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were the single most important event of the decade.” Other events were Barack Obama’s election as president, the 2008 financial crisis, George W. Bush’s election as president, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.
     “That was the beginning of the decade so it kind of defined what the decade was about and it was so devastating that it kind of set this trend for the rest of the decade,” Rutledge said. “I definitely think that this decade has been depressing.”
     Miller said that among other terrorist attacks on American soil nothing compared with 9/11.
     “You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing it,” Miller said. “It’s something that has been burned into the minds of every person in America and touched people all across the county.”
     To Miller the trauma aided making it a key event of the decade.
     “I would definitely say it was something that defined this decade more than anything else, even more than having the first African American President,” Miller said. “It was the kind of event that was so traumatizing that you remember everything.”
     The study contradicted Miller’s thoughts and noted that younger Americans aren’t as likely to name Sept. 11, 2001 as the most important event of the decade.
     Miller, Avery, MacCracken and Rutledge were not even out of middle school on Sept. 11, 2001.
     “If it happened again today I know that I would be bawling if something like that happened because I understand more what it means and I understand more that thousands of people were killed whereas at the time I had absolutely no idea and I couldn’t really grasp that concept,” said Rutledge. “I wasn’t really old enough to grasp that.”
     MacCracken even described himself as a kid.
     “They had police on campus,” MacCracken said describing his school on the day of the attacks. “It made me nervous as a kid. I was smart enough to realize that Aspen, Colorado isn’t going to be a target but it is still bizarre to see that kind of police on an active school grounds.”
     Avery found herself separated from the attacks because of her age.
     “I had a part in it but I was also 13 at the time so it’s not like I lost my job because of it or I had to worry about financial security because of it or any other event really because I was still just growing up,” Avery said.

     All school schedules ran normally except for Avery’s. With the day off after the attacks, students returned to her school in Queens on Thursday, two days after the attacks.
     “It was weird because by that point you could smell from the buildings, you could smell the burning in the air,” Avery said. “I live pretty far, 15 miles away but you could smell it.”
     To Avery that was when the gravity of the situation sank in.
     “Then it was really obvious like the reason he got called to the office is because his mom works there and the reason why my friend’s mom called to say she was okay is because she was late to work that day,” Avery said. “My math teacher got called because her husband works there and all these other people I knew. Then it started to get depressing.”
     Despite their youth, all four students remember Sept. 11, 2001. Whether it’s an image of a grand staircase surrounded by debris, huddling with classmates to hear the news, watching the coverage on television or breathing in the smell of burning buildings on the way to school their childhood experience defined the decade.

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Google conflict strains US, China relations

Written for Feature Article Writing class, Spring 2010. Never published. 

Assignment: Write a news feature. These are stories written "off the news." For example, a news feature after the attempted Christmas Day bombing on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit would have involved talking to travelers at airports around the country to gauge their reacting to additional screenings. News features can be the local angle on a national story, but you still need timeliness. 

By Natalie Kirkpatrick

     You won’t find a Falun Gong entry on Wikipedia when surfing the Internet in China. The Tibet and Tiananmen Square entries are missing as well. You won’t find information about them on Baidu, a government controlled search engine. You will find all of them on Google.cn.
     “You know our government can control our search engine but cannot control Google, so they have conflict,” said Wang Qian, 26, a Chinese teacher from Beijing and visiting scholar in Portland, Ore. “I don’t know if they can solve this conflict or not.”
     When Google.cn launched in January 2006, the company said they believed that the benefit of allowing freedom of information compensated for censoring some of the search results, according to David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer for Google, who detailed their decision to consider closing Google.cn on the Official Google Blog.
     Now Google is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn,” Drummond wrote. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”     

     “What’s in the Chinese press right now is they’re framing this as Google quitting the market because they couldn’t hack it in China,” said Natalie Matthews, a student at the School of International Studies at American University in Washington, DC who was in China from June 2008 through May 2009. 

     With Google’s decision of whether to close Google.cn looming, Americans and Chinese alike are weighing the consequences.
     Susie Vulpas, a student at American University who studied abroad in China from August 2008 to May 2009, said that when attempting to get onto a blocked site in China, users are greeted with a page claiming “connection failure.”
     “It’s like when you have a bad connection, the page that pops up, it’ll pop up for Facebook but it won’t pop up for Baidu or China Daily,” Vulpas said. She uses the Internet to translate English to Chinese, to watch movies and to do research.
     Baidu is the Chinese search engine. According to a site called “The Baidu Story,” the word Baidu literally translates to “hundreds of times.” The search engine allows users to search in Chinese and download movies and music. It is monitored by the Chinese government. And Baidu is anything but unpopular.
     “I just know that they have the majority of the market in China,” said Matthews. “You can search Baidu if you’re trying to watch movies illegally online, or get music, you can download music, so I would use Baidu for that,” Matthews said.
     “In general, Chinese use Baidu,” Vulpas said. “That is Google.”
     Baidu is an easy replacement for Google in China.
     “It’s set up for the Chinese culture, the Chinese society. It’s more reflective of their society, I think,” Vulpas said.
     “It’s interesting, though, because the Chinese teachers from the program in China who teach here at AU and when I go over to their apartment I see them using Baidu here even though naturally we would think, you’re in America you can have free Internet. But that’s what they’re used to, and it’s all in Chinese,” Matthews said. “It’s definitely more popular.”
     That’s not the case for Wang.
     “I think it would be very sad for Chinese people,” said Wang of Google’s possible departure. “That means that Baidu is going to be the only big search engine in China and any other Chinese search engine in China would also be controlled by Chinese government.”
     Wang said that this would decrease the amount of information they could get from other countries.
     “International politics in China are really restrict,” said Wang.
     Matthews explained that the social networking site Twitter wasn’t as popular when she was abroad, but she knew that it was blocked toward the end of her stay, along with Wikipedia, the New York Times web site due to “unflattering” articles, BBC News and YouTube sporadically.
     “Most Chinese citizens aren’t trying to get on Facebook,” Matthews said, noting that there are more popular Chinese social networking sites. “Only Chinese people who are friends with Westerners use Facebook, or Westerners who are in China.”
     The censorship isn’t doesn’t stop the portal to the content according to Matthews. If someone wanted to download movies, articles or porn they could leap over the wall.
     “People like use software proxies to get ‘over the wall’ as they say,” Matthews said. “It’s called the ‘great firewall of China,’ and so in Chinese, when people are searching to get around it, it translates to ‘leaping over the wall,’ and so that’s the catchphrase, how people find software to get out.”
     While social networking and technology have reached new levels, diplomats are emphasizing the Internet’s importance. In her speech on Internet freedom at the Newseum in Washington, DC in January, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the Internet is a “source of tremendous progress in China.”
     “Now, in many respects, information has never been so free,” Clinton said. “There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any moment in history.”
     There are 300 million Web users in China, to which Matthews said, “It’s the Chinese market share so even a small market share could be worth a lot.”
     Matthews admitted it’s a hard market to walk away from.
     As the struggle to reach a happy medium of censored search results continues, international relations between China and the United States are hardening.
     “I think that the Chinese government is very offended by the whole situation, and Google is being seen as the U.S. government,” Matthews said.
     Vulpas thought that the simple action of Google ceasing to do business in China would speak volumes. She thought it would show how they value morals about searching the Internet and how citizens get information.
     “I almost want to say that they should to protect their corporate image,” Vulpas said.
     To Vulpas, Google’s decision might border on commendable.
     “They’re acting on something more than just money,” Vulpas said. “I think that’s very admirable in today’s economy, too. Because people are so focused on financial independence and freedom and here’s a company that doesn’t have to worry about that so much, and they can start acting on a higher level. More power to them.” 

     Clinton isn’t the only one calling for increased Internet freedom. During her speech, she noted President Barack Obama’s town hall meeting in China in November 2009. The meeting had an online component “to highlight the importance of the Internet,” Clinton said.
     Clinton said that President Obama discussed free access to information on the Internet and said that it strengthened societies.
     “He spoke about how access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable, generates new ideas, encourages creativity and entrepreneurship,” Clinton said. “The United States’ belief in that ground truth is what brings me here today.”
     Wang remembered Obama’s speech as well and noted how it is possibly troubling calm waters.
     “I think actually its already affected something,” Wang said. “I heard Obama already said something to Chinese government about Internet freedom, but Chinese government didn’t admit that so we do have conflict between our two countries… I think it’s not very easy of a question to be solved very soon.”
     Wang thought that the Internet censorship issue was not the only one between the two countries and that the worse conflict is going to come later.
     “I think there are going to be more conflicts that are going to occur. It’s just a matter of time,” Wang said.
     “But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century,” Clinton said. “Now, the United States and China have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently in the context of our positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship.”
     Matthews said that there’s no way Google can back down now.
     “Once Google puts it out there that you stop censoring or we’re leaving, they’re not going to stop censoring, that’s just not going to happen,” Matthews said.
     Shock value also matters. Matthews noted that the Google conflict and Hillary Clinton’s speech aren’t exiting the media cycle.
     “I guess they’re going to have to get rid of their search engine, but I think they’re going to try to find a way to stay in China and say that they want to keep employing all of those people and still try to sell all of their phones there as a way to do it,” Matthews said.

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