Fixed Questions, Vox Pops, Questionnaires.

The "fixed question"/confession book format.

You will find this type of interview most often as an ongoing fearture in a publication. The set of questions are pre-determined, often attributed to someone or have some sort of history or cotext outside the world of the interieweel.



One example is Vanity Fair magazines's "Proust Questionnaire," for example, is inspired by French writer Marcel Proust. The format, while not requiring a rigorous back-and-forth, nonetheless requires an interviewer's editorial skills often to make work. This kind of interview may recall the several set of fixed-question survey notes that make their way through social media sites like Facebook ("My first times," etc.).

I am a big fan of Metal Sludge's 20 Questions interviews. There's a core of set questions, some in a rather rapid-round fashion.


Vox pops.

(from vox populi, Latin for “voice of the people). This is when a writer or reporter used a comment from the “man on the street.” The published format of a vox pop takes several forms: a round-up-style feature with the question at the top, with pictures of each interviewee and their answer; a feature or hard news story could have a vox pop section, in which someone from the community is asked about a specific issue; an “as told to”-style feature from a person directly affected by a specific issue. This is sometimes given titles that signal the voice-of-the-people element (examples: “My Turn” or “Community Corner” or “Voices”).

The “on the street” format. Head note: Just the facts: name, age, occupation, hometown of interviewee; location of interview [around 20 words]; Interview Q and A. Punchy. Off-beat. Semi-confrontational [400 words].

What are the implications of blogging?

[T]he vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not "the masses" but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.
...
Print publishing acts as a filter, weblogs do not. Whatever you want to offer the world -- a draft of your novel, your thoughts on the war, your shopping list -- you get to do it, and any filtering happens after the fact, through mechanisms like blogdex and Google. Publishing your writing in a weblog creates none of the imprimatur of having it published in print.
--Clay Shirky, "Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing" [link]

***
We need professional journalism. It doesn’t have to be delivered on paper; it need not be produced by omnibus newsrooms with twelve hundred reporters and editors; and it can surely be complemented by amateur efforts. But it must be done by people who have the time for, and commitment to, the kind of painstaking work that Schlosser describes. It is not something one does in his spare time, or when inspiration strikes. It is a job.

A problem with Shirky’s Gutenberg analogy is that, in 1500 the transition was from nothing to something—a rapid expansion of news and information. Today we face the prospect of, at least in terms of serious journalism, going from something to nothing. We can’t afford to lose the engine of our news and information culture before we know how to replace it.
--"The Grave Dancer's Folly," Columbia Journalism Review editorial, July/August 2009 [link]


***
In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.
--Jay Rosen, "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press" [link]


***
There are now closed and open editorial systems: they are different animals.

They don’t work the same way, or produce the same goods. One does not replace the other. They are not enemies, either. Ideas that work perfectly well in one—and describe the world in that setting—may not work in understanding the other: they misdescribe the world in a shifted setting.

Because we have the Web…

There’s the press, but there is also the press sphere, an open system.

Within the press we find the people we know as “professional” journalists.

Within the press sphere we find pro journalists and the people formerly known as the audience, mixed together.

Because we have the Web…

The means of production—editorially speaking—have been distributed to the population at large.
--Jay Rosen, "If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn’t. So Let’s Get a Clue" [link]


***
[N]ewspapers are locked into producing a product that’s of comparable quality (from an advertisers point of view) to the top blogs, but at far greater cost. And yet all their decisions - like the decision to spend a lot on photography - are entirely sensible business decisions. Even if they’re smart and good, they’re caught on the horns of a cruel dilemma.
...
I wonder if Andrew Rosenthal and his colleagues understand that someone equipped with an RSS reader can assemble a set of news feeds that renders the New York Times virtually irrelevant? If a person inside an industry needs to frequently explain why it’s not dead, they’re almost certainly wrong.
--Michael Nielsen, "Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?" [link]


***
Want to work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune? Make sure you can demonstrate mastery of Facebook and Twitter. The daily is hiring a political reporter, and insists that they show up with Web 2.0 bona fides.

From the Strib’s posting on Journalism Jobs (via Minnpost): “Enthusiasm for communicating political news on many different platforms – from print to online to mobile to social networking media – is essential.”

First: Good to know that even bankrupt papers are still hiring. That’s my good news tidbit for the day.

Second: The social networking part may sound like a novelty, but I think in the not-too distant future this is simply going to be a core requirement for any reporting job, like having a driver’s license.
--Peter Kafka, "Want to Work at a Newspaper? Better Brush Up on Your Twitter," All Things Digital's Media Memo, July 8, 2009 [link]


***
Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets--a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

...

In those days, it took about six months to bring to market a new product or a start-up, Ms. Wennmachers recalls. First came East Coast tours with analysts and monthly publications, followed by visits to weeklies, then dailies. But the rise of blogs and social networks--and companies’ ability to post information on their own sites--transformed all this. Gradually, deadlines disappeared, as even monthly magazines offered Web sites that published stories by the minute.
--Claire Cain Miller, "Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley," New York Times, July 4, 2009 [link]

Spring 2010 Advising Information and Appointments.

Hello Daniel Nester Advisee!

As you probably know, Advisement Day will be Tuesday, November 10.

This will explain what you need to do before your advising appointment, as well as outline how to set up an appointment with me. If you are a continuing advisee, you probably know the drill; if you are a new advisee, I urge you read all of these directions, and email me with any questions before we meet.

The goal of this 15- to 20-minute meeting is for me to advise you on which classes you should take, to approve your tentative schedule, and give you a PIN number so you can register for classes.

We have a short time to accomplish this.

This means Student Advisees need to do some work before we meet.

Advisement meetings will take place in my office: Dolan Hall, 442 Western Avenue, 1st floor, Room #2 on the right. My office phone number is 518-454-2812; my email is nesterd at strose dot edu.

How to Prepare for Your Advising Appointment
1. Email me to sign up for a meeting as soon as possible.
The Sign-Up Sheet with appointment times is posted at the end of this post. Check this page and refresh it often. Advisement times are on a first-email, first-served basis. There are more than as many appointment times as there are advisees.

2. Obtain and fill out a Course Registration Form.
This is important. You need to show up to your appointment with a filled-out and complete Course Registration Form.

If you don't, I'll just tell you to set up another time later on Advisement Day or meet during my office hours. 

Where can you get a Course Registration Form?  English Department secretary Barbara Dickson keeps copies in her office in Marcelle Hall, as does the Registrar in Saint Joseph Hall’s Student Solution Center. The College has a PDF version of the form on their website, which you can print out and fill out.  Please do not come to our advisement appointment without filling out the top matter of this form (i.e., your name and address) and courses you need to take. If we change your choices through the course of our meeting, we can simply cross one course out and add another.

Bottom line: Bring the form and fill it out beforehand. If you do not come to our appointment without a filled-out form, I will not meet you and we will have to reschedule our appointment. If you show up without a form at all or with simply a blank form, there’s no point in meeting, since a large part of our meeting will consist of me looking at you writing out your address.

3. Login to Banner (bannerweb.strose.edu) and review your Academic Progress report. Print the report out. Look at it and see if all of your classes are falling into the right places. Identify which areas in your English major requirements as well as your Liberal Education requirements you still need to fulfill.

3a. If you are a transfer student, looking at your Academic Progress Report is doubly important. Make sure that your transfer classes are there, that nothing looks strange or out of place, that your transferred classes are also “counting” for requirements you think they should be. For example, that a class you thought fulfilled a requirement is not languishing in your General Electives on the bottom-right-hand corner of your report. You should also have a copy of your Statement of Transfer Credit report, which tallies up which classes you took at your previous institution, and tells you where it will apply in the College of Saint Rose degree requirement. If there are any questions or problems, please come with these questions at our meeting, and we can figure out the next step.

Those of you who have already met me for an advising appointment know that I take ample notes in your student folder regarding what administrative tasks need to be done to make sure classes are falling in the right places in the Academic Progress Report, there are no clerical errors, etc. If you need to see another person or go to another department about changing where a class falls in your Academic Progress Report, I write this down in your file. If the issue has been resolved, I write this down in our notes; conversely, if steps have not been taken since our last advising meeting, I write this down as well.

4. Review the semester’s English Department Course Offerings as well as the College-wide courses. The course listing with descriptions are online here. Hard copy is available in the English Department office buildings. Look at your Academic Progress report and identify which kind of English courses you need to take.

This is your major; read the courses descriptions and come with questions about particular courses. Figure out your schedule as far as days of the week are concerned. And finally: Have an idea of which English course(s) you would like to take next semester (as well as Summer, if applicable).

Advisement Times for November 10, 2009


10:00 Emma T [advisee]
10:30 Teresa F [advisee]
11:00 Jonathan D [advisee]
11:30
12:00 Kristen O [advisee]
12:30 Internship midterm meetings 2 [Lauren R, Shaakira J, Nicole C, Kyle M + others]

1:00 Tony G [advisee]
1:30 Dana C
2:30
3:00 Katelyn L [advisee]
3:30 Jordan H [advisee]
4:00 Timothy W [advisee]
4:30 Ashley M [advisee]

The "Also About Me" questions.

Great class today. I hope what we talked about and did in class clarified what our goals are for this next interview assignment, The Heavily Edited, It's Also About Me Interview Assignment.

Here's what you need to send me by Tuesday, November 3 by 9:00am.

-- The name of your interview subject, or at least who the person is.

-- 10 Questions you want to ask your subject. We worked on these today. These questions do not include the basic, who-what-when-where-why questions. These are questions you will make up ahead of time--as we discussed in class, these could be personal revelation with a question tacked on, an observation about life or specific topic related/unrelated to interviewee with question tacked on, or just a plain statement. Consult our models for guidance.

Name your file:
FirstNameLastNameAlsoAboutMeQAQuestionsResearch.docx/doc/rtf

For those of you who were not in class.
We worked from prompts in class from a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies, a tarot-like device to help generate writing. Each student wrote 3-5 questions in class using an Oblique Strategy as a starting point. There's a PDF version here. So you have some catching up to do!

The prompts, the interview, the lists: the next week of posts (November 1-8).

I loved our class today.  I hope you had some fun, thought about how and why blog posts are short and topic- and title-driven, where this style and mode of writing falls along the continuum of modes available to us.  That's among the goals of a class and course like this, in any case.

Here the prompts, interviews, and lists we came up in class.  They were so good I posted them on my own site!

The collected prompts--78 of them, at least.
14 collected interviews.
24 leftover blog writing prompts, written and "rejected" by students in blogging class.

Directions.
Starting Sunday, November 1, using the prompts and interview you collected in class, write one post a day on your blog.

It need not be a long post, nor a very involved one.  Use the prompts as a starting-off point.  Unless it is completely germane and necessary, do not refer to the fact you got these prompts in the class, include the language of the prompt, or state that it was not written by you.  Just write a post. For the lists, use the title, and include that the title of the list was written by someone else--again, if you feel necessary. Write the interview post whenever you want in the seven-day period.

And yes, you also have a Links Round-Up due Monday morning at 9am.

For those of you who were not in class: Use Interview 13 and choose six of the the leftover "rejected prompts."

Have a great weekend. 

And remember: use small pieces of paper when writing your prompts in class. It's good to conserve paper.

Photo of our prompts courtesy of

The Complete Stranger Rule: Clarifications, Finding Someone, Possible Lessons.

Preamble.
Here's a pattern I am picking up as we move onto the Heavily Edited, It's Also About Me Interview Assignment: A good percentage of y'all want to do The Oral History of Myself Assignment for your last project. Which is fine—I am excited about teaching it, talking about it, as I am for the Extended Q and A Interview Assignment.

Thing is, when you choose that, the thought occurred to me--and this thought doesn't occur completely from the passive-aggressive part of my brain; it comes from my pedagogical planning part, too:

Many of you have gone out an interviewed a complete stranger.
This, to myself and others, is the reason why we go out and interview people: to get to know other people, to hear others' stories.

Pedagogical backgrounds.
So one thing I am thinking about, from a teaching and logistical standpoint, is how do I enforce this complete stranger rule in an effective way, especially if you are planning do to the Oral History of Myself Assignment, especially if you A Had me russle up an interviewee at Equinox B took an assigned person from me for the Haunted Houses interview and C don't want to interview a complete stranger.

Oddly, one way I can "enforce" this Complete Stranger Rule is to assign, you guessed it, a complete stranger.

So perhaps this is all wasted energy. Perhaps you get just as much out of the interviewing process with someone you know or kind of know. Perhaps that part of the class is not important.

As I was clicking away at the past student interviews, many of which appear at Banalbany.com, I looked at each one and thought--oh, this student was a roommate with this person, this student is cousins with this person, etc. It was fine at the time--this was a one-shot assignment among many in a 300-level class.

But this a class dedicated to the interview, and for many of you, this may be your only Q&A-style interview. So I am flipping the script a bit, or I am enforcing some rules.

In the past, my criteria was that the person must live or work within the city limits of Albany. Not someone currently employed at or attending The College of Saint Rose. Then students went and interviewed their cousins, roommates, friends of roommates.

Here was my first rule: The person you interview should be someone you do not know.

This, as you know, led to a series of clarifying questions. We talked about Facebook friends as perhaps one metric of how well you know.

Here's my clarified rules for some you can and cannot interview for your next assignment, now called

The Complete Stranger Rule.

Not someone you went to school with in the past.
Not a classmate.
Not a roommate.
Not a friend of a roommate.
Not a housemate.
Not a friend of a relative.
Not a friend of the family.
Not someone you knew all your life and you're going to interview the person interview anyway, because how could my professor tell I knew this person. I will know. The interview will give it away.
Not a Facebook friend.
Not a relative or friend of relative, blood or by marriage.
Not a friend of a friend.


Here's how you find someone to interview.
You go somewhere you don't usually go.
You go somewhere you usually go.
You look at someone you've always wanted to talk to.
You find someone you never wanted to talk to.
You find someone who frightens you.
You look at a place that always interested you, or frightened you, or confused you,.
You enter that place.
You try to find a person in that place.
The person in that place might be someone you do not know (see above).
You ask around.
Ask people about someone who might be interesting to talk to—by "interesting," let's say compelling, confusing, frightening, funny, eccentric, inspiring.
Someone with whom you could have a 15-30-minute conversation.
Someone you could research and ask questions about.
Find a random person you don't know. Challenge yourself.
Find what you might think to person most unlike you at an event or gathering you attend—a concert, party, shopping mall, church, keg party.
Go in the middle of a park, twirl around three times, and point. Whoever lines up in your finger, that's the person you interview.
Think of songs you love. Think of ones where there is a name mentioned. Google that name along with "Albany, NY." Contact or Facebook-search that person. My favorite karaoke song is Rick Springfield's 1982 hit "Jessie's Girl." I will go and look up a "Jessie." [Leaves, comes back.] I found a Joseph Jessie in Albany, NY on Facebook.


Possible lessons learned from interviewing a random person.
We are all human beings.
We all have stories to tell.
It's fun to talk to people we don't know.
It's fun to talk to people from other walks of life—class, gender, sex, religion, address, age, dress.
You will have to talk to random people all your life, and you might as well start now.
This will increase and complement your already considerable interpersonal skills.
Your brain will hurt at first, then it will loosen and new knowledge will pour in.
Random life-affirming events might happen.


Other ideas about this assignment.
Do we want the interviews to have a common thread?
Example: Should we all just go down to, say, Lark Street, and find people?
Or should we just randomly call/email people?
Should we all ask the same initial questions

The Link Round-Up Assignment.

Background.
There are many kinds of blog posts, as we have covered here on the Teaching Blog.  The link round-up is a staple of just about every blog.  This is how blogs started, as you have read in Say Everything--the first blogs merely pointed out to cool stuff around the internet.  Posting one's own content came slightly later.  

I am going to assign you all to write a links round-up post every week until we all get it right.  Why?  It's an efficient way to assess whether a student-writer has read blogs and can writing in blog style, and I feel comfortable giving a link round-up a grade.

Here is the assignment, expanded and explained.


Due: Every Monday at 9am: November 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, December 7


Description.

Called the super link, link list, or link round-up, it is a post that brings together links from various online sources, often with an essayistic thread or commentary. It's a "great way to hype something that you really like, an under-appreciated author, artist, or musician, or greay piece of writing" Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus, notes.


Here's specifications of the assignment, and how I assess your link round-ups:

Topicality: How relevant are the links to the blog's mission? (20%)

Breadth: Link to at least five sites. Does it look like the blogger merely Googled a couple topics and put the links up?  Or is the round-up comprehensive, in its own way? (20%)
Efficiency: Did the blogger move easily from setting up a link to offering teases about others?  Does this have anything to do with the content itself--small, pithy links to occasional posts, substantial summary and commentary for meatier ones? (20%)
Fluidity and Use-friendliness: Is the linking awkward? Too coy? Do the links work?  Are the links sloppy or neat?  (20%)
Mechanics: Is the copy clean and professional?  Are there typos? Is the grammar correct? (20%)

Examples of super link, link list or link round-ups:
Ron Silliman's links
The Rumpus Morning Coffee posts
The Morning News Headlines feature
Heeb 
The Art of Manliness

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