shelbinator.com

Next month I’m presenting some of my research with NASA and Pratt & Whitney at the Propulsion Safety and Affordable Reliability conference. This isn’t like the other conferences I’ve attended or presented at, which have been largely organized and attended by professional societies and academics; this is a big tri-service meeting for the military to hear from industry and academia how we can keep their planes in the air longer, cheaper. And when I went to look at the agenda to see when in particular I was speaking and decide whether I wanted to go out for the whole blessed thing, I noticed something weird about this particular kind of research get-together.

On each of the three days, all of the sessions wrap up neatly at 2:30 in the afternoon.

In Myrtle Beach, there are over 70 golf courses, to say nothing of the ridiculous amount of putt-putt.

There are also close to twenty strip clubs.

Aim High, Air Force.

Just some vignettes from the first part of last week’s New York City trip, including the luscious “intimacy kit” in the hotel minibar. A look at what training to be a Citizen Journalist is like may follow.

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I’m back from my wintry travels, trying to re-acclimate to my graduate studies, and trying to figure out once again this whole work-life balance going forward.

And I’m still hacking up small bits of lung that withered and died in the single-digit Iowa air.

I’ve even gotten all my new cables, connectors, and tiny gizmos sorted and stored in individually marked plastic zip-top bags, which I think will be a key element of carrying around the one-person television production studio in my new backpack and not leaving anything behind when the story is done.

Last Monday night, I met my 50 other Street Team ‘08 cohorts and got quite a bit of pep talk from the president of MTV, the VP of MTV News, and our new producers. After loading us up with wine and snacks, they loaded us up with enough gear to make a U.S. Marine remember boot camp and sent us back to the hotel. There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.

Day one of orientation started off with more legal jargon than you could shake a stick at, and right off the bat I believe we covered what will in retrospect be discussed with great scrutiny when the evolution-of-media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Leonard Witt start the autopsy on MTV and the Knight Foundation’s grand journalistic experiment of 2008. While the press release sang proudly that 51 “citizen journalists” had been hired to cover the election from the local level on up, we have now become something else. Like that catch-22 of quantum mechanics which prevents you from measuring a system without irrevocably altering it, so does hiring a citizen journalist make them not-so-much-a-citizen journalist. Whether that makes us “real” journalists is also a dubious suggestion: if you see me trying to elbow my way through the mainstream press at the John Edwards rally at the IBEW this weekend, take note of just how many of the people with cameras go chasing after every interviewee with a release form to sign. That would be me.

Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.

So we’ll just see how this goes. I’m sure I’ll become quite deft, before long, at effortlessly obtaining all the signatures and knowing how to shoot the story to avoid too many hurdles in the first place. But it is hard for me, as someone whose role in politics has been, most of the time, to jump up and down and yell “You’re doing it wrong!” about this new media thingamajig in the hope of improving people’s methods, to just ignore that aspect of it. The evolution of media seems to be about relinquishing great degrees of control, which is naturally very scary to the old guard, and the extent to which each organization decides to loosen up on the grip is a big element of how their new forays online pan out. Thus any concern I have about importing old world constraints into new media ventures only arises out of my desire for this whole project to kick ass and take names. I really will be curious to see what the Rosen-Jarvis-Witt types say about this whole model. Hell, I’m curious to see what you think of the operation so far, so why don’t you go poke around and opine about it?

We actually got to hear from Jay Rosen, a co-organizer of my old Off the Bus beat at Huffington Post, on day two. He got us all fired up about thinking about our national versus local beats, and thankfully fired off the occasional chastisement at our new employers to make sure they gave us all the tools we need for this to truly be a new media operation. RSS feeds? Yes plzkthx! (Our blogs and media channels currently lack them…but it’s planned, don’t worry.) Surprise, surprise, my “national beat” — or the overarching theme that will hopefully tie into, and at times stand in for, local Georgia reporting — will be science and technology. We’ll see what kind of prayer I have of making sense out of that.

Legal protocols of videography aside, the overarching message of the whole trip was what an awesome platform we’re setting out to create and how excited our backers (oh, and we the Street Team, too) are about our prospects. Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation told us about pitching the idea of giving a Knight News Challenge Grant to MTV of all networks, and his enthusiasm for the project was infectious, even through some of our hangovers. Just hearing about the hope some very serious backers have for us was a wake-up call for how we’re not in YouTube anymore, Toto.

We also got a great send-off from Keven Roach, executive producer of AP’s online video network, Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for the AP and now their online political editor. Selected pieces of ours will be distributed over the AP’s online network to over 1,800 member sites, which is a huge platform for us and quite the incentive to produce that noteworthy video clip — and they couldn’t have been more excited about this whole venture either (even if it was somewhat muted by 36 straight sleepless hours of New Hampshire primary coverage). It was quite reassuring to get such optimistic words from someone so credible, but we were also warned that with much attention will come much scrutiny, and we’d better thicken up our skin for the inevitable criticism. Ron even brought some advice from other heavy hitters, in the form of a video he compiled while in Des Moines, IA, of advice for us newbies from the likes of Tim Russert, Sam Donaldson, and Andrea Mitchell.

Yeah, I think that was about the time it really sank in what a holy-shit step this was in my online career. Thank God Sen. Biden told me I’d better finish my dissertation at the end of the campaign. Thank Joe Biden, says my mother.

The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it is MTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”

She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.

I do still need your help fleshing out my local beat. If you’ve got a story — and you’re willing to sign a Guest Release, damnit — get in touch. There’s a contact link right up at the top of this page. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a notebook with my dissertation thoughts in it somewhere under all this video gear.

What to say about Iowa?

First and foremost, thank you. Not to Iowans in their bizarre political shenanigans and inability not only to be polled but even to bother to get their lazy asses registered as voters prior to caucus night. No, thanks go to those of you who tuned in, made the chat room lively, kept me updated to the conversation via text message, and of course, dropped a little somethin’ in the tip jar. I really appreciated your virtual companionship on the nerve-wracking and ultimately disappointing campaign trail, as I do your assistance in subsidizing that trip of a lifetime.

I also really ought to thank the folks on Joe Biden’s campaign who put their trust in me as a hybrid supporter-citizen journalist and basically threw open their doors and let me pick and choose where I would do some reporting and where I would do some volunteering. The fact that they ever wanted my help with some YouTubery or other online communications efforts over the last several months has really kept me going when I’ve wondered why I’m trying to balance my technically-challenged dissertation and, well, anything that is not dissertation. They were a great bunch of people to work with, even though it was largely over the internets until the last couple of days.

Their trust was made even more special when it survived an ugly Off the Bus episode the morning of the caucus, thanks to the bizarre and unsourced rumor promulgated by one of my OTB cohorts, Beverly Davis. She claimed to have spoken to one of the Biden campaign’s “national consultants” at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and this anonymous source suggested that a deal was in the offing between Biden and Obama, described by Davis in such a way as to make Biden’s campaign for President sound suddenly less serious, more like the speculative “He’s just running for VP” crap that’s always alleged of any second tier candidate. No one at Biden HQ had any idea what “national consultant” Davis might have been speaking to, nor was there any such deal ever in the work; Biden has a fine day job and was in this to do as well as his bluntly stated positions could get him. The story was posted on the 2nd, I believe, and by the time I got to the office on Thursday morning it was already keeping Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach’s blackberry buzzing furiously. Lucky for me, Beverly Davis referred to herself in the aggrandizing institutional third person, saying, “Off the Bus spoke to…” about her drunken gossiper, leaving a tiny grammatical question in a few people’s minds at that morning’s staff meeting. “She didn’t mean Shelby, did she?” That was apparently one fleeting thought that was quickly dismissed — and solidly confirmed when I talked to staff in person. I wasn’t even in Iowa for New Year’s Eve, and they know me well enough by this point to have faith that I wouldn’t run with such speculative crap without confirming it more solidly with someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. There was a similar moment in Greenville, SC, when the wheels came off the wagon for a few minutes and the whole campaign caravan fractured into several disconnected clusters when the Senator wanted to sneak off for a quiet lunch away from the crowds and the remaining aides lost track of the day’s agenda for a few minutes. I lingered outside the college fair where Biden was supposed to shake hands for a while and his former bodyman and a state committee member tried desperately to reconvene the group via multiple cellphone messages. The latter, not knowing quite who I was (but only seeing my fake press badge), looked askance at me before he was reassured that I could be trusted not to use this perfectly ordinary moment of campaign chaos to write a smear article, or I would under no circumstances be allowed within earshot of these phone calls in the first place.

That kind of trust raises a much broader question about this new-fangled citizen journalism stuff, as was reiterated to me yesterday by Leonard Witt, professor of communications at Kennesaw State University and networked journalism enthusiast. I will be co-hosting a dinner table discussion on politics and new media with our friend Grayson at the upcoming Southern Social Media Convention in a few weeks at Leonard’s request. In our emails I mentioned that while in Iowa I was a sort of hybrid campaign volunteer/embedded reporter, and it was tricky explaining to some people how that worked; he said he, too, would have questions about how that worked, and justifiably so. Just what kind of “journalism” could you expect to get out of me regarding the now defunct Biden campaign? Would I basically be shilling propaganda under the cloak of news? Absolutely not. For the most part, I provided video to Huffington Post, so what you saw is what you got. The text article I wrote about the Greenville trip was basically presenting the mood of the meetings, the policy topics discussed, and even a mention of the caravan’s consistent lateness and my speeding across South Carolina to keep up. I was not blowing sunshine up anyone’s skirt, to butcher a cliche. But there was certainly a lot of trust between me and a campaign I liked, and I was not going to rush to publish something before making sure it was a real story just for the sake of a gotcha. After the Beverly Davis flap, I asked the communications staff what the real deal was and said I’d be interested in publishing my own piece on their response, whether it was a denial or a “no comment” or what have you. The Press Secretary pointed out that Marc Ambinder had already published the official campaign statement on his blog, and that slowly some of the major news outlets were updating their parrot stories appropriately; as far as the campaign was concerned, that was the end of the story. My decision not to follow up on my own was two-fold: first, and most objectively, I had plenty of other things to work on, story-wise, so if Ambinder had already written it up, there was little point in my repeating old news; second, and perhaps biased on my part, if I continued to make a story of the non-story, the non-story would BE the story, and I’d just give legs to what was bunk in the first place. I didn’t want to do that to the candidate I was most fond of, and so to that extent, I was a biased citizen journalist.

So what does that say about citizen journalism? I guess the usual as with any kind of reporter: caveat emptor. In most of these new media outlets, the goal is not to eliminate or stifle bias, as in the old model, but to own up to and publicize it. You want to hear a bunch of pro-Obama fuzzy lovin’? Read just about everyone else on Off the Bus. You want straight coverage of the positive points of second tier brainiacs like Biden? Try me. You want mud? Try Drudge.

For the record, here are some final video clips from Caucus Day that I didn’t have the energy to deal with for a while.

I’m in New York now getting ready for my MTV Choose or Lose ‘08 Street Team orientation, just in time to turn the page. (Expect some more videos this week.) I think with the testing and dissertation writing on the up-slope at school, and MTV reporting probably taking the rest of the time, it’s time to close the Huffington Post chapter. The Bev Davis fiasco was probably all the excuse I needed, anyway.

I’m probably also done with politics for a while. People have already been asking whom I’m for now, while the body was still warm even. Right now, I don’t feel like I’m “for” anyone. I’ll go into a little more detail on my thought processes here when I wrap up this MTV trip, but frankly, the rest of you haven’t got much to wow me with. You never gave the smartest, most qualified guy in the room a chance, so I’m disinclined to give a hoot about your celebrity right now — and I’m definitely not inclined to waste any more graduate school time getting them nominated. Talk to me when we’ve got one polished show horse standing, and I’ll see what I can do.

Now, time to go hemorrhage some cash in Manhattan!

I still haven’t packed for Iowa.

I leave at 7:24am for Des Moines by way of Chicago and I still haven’t validated the iBook/Sprint mobile broadband card/new Ustream.tv interface setup. I haven’t decided if I’m going to bring my miniDV camera, or leave it behind as dead weight and rely on the Canon S800 for digital video clips since I fear the miniDV tapes wouldn’t stand up to well in single-digit temperatures.

Ha, I’m worried about tapes and not my toes and nay-nays? Lord, let some of that Indiana winter strength come back to me after 11 years away from the Midwestern winter.

In case you forgot, I’ll (hopefully) be live-streaming video from random campaign locations, be it Biden HQ where underpaid college kids and recent grads (and many of Joe’s relatives) unleash bajillions of last minute phone calls, or from inside an actual caucus location starting around 7:30pm EST. There will also be occasional self-contained clips of the more interesting and news-worthy moments uploaded to YouTube for publishing at Huffington Post. All my stuff will be available here at shelbinator.com/iowa.

And lest I go a week without battering you with propaganda, with just a few hours to spare in 2007 I uploaded my last campaign spot of the year. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use a song I found on ccmixter.org that I mentioned a couple weeks ago: Ana (hisboyelroy’s smooth dub), released under CC:by-nc, after making a few minor edits myself. It’s an overly dramatic electro-world beat suitable for an overly dramatic video with too much slow-mo, but what the hell. This is my final case — and that of several Iowa legislators and elected officials — for a guy I truly believe best suited for not getting our asses blown up in the years ahead, and I desperately hope enough Iowans don’t buy into this “but he can’t win” crap, because that media message ignores the fundamental fact that it’s up to them, not the Washington Post or New York Times.

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Get your own embed. Or YouTube.

Wish me luck!

Tessa just made me aware of an outstanding bike-themed website for any angry two-wheeled commuter like myself — at least for entertainment and venting purposes. I’m not sure there is anything actually useful that will come of it, but Atlanta has joined a host of other cities on MyBikeLane.com, a site that seems to have originated in New York.

What’s its purpose? If you’re tooling along on your fixie, urban hybrid, or nasty yellowbike and come upon a gas-guzzling roadblock in the bike lane — and you happen to have really quick reflexes, good balance, and a shoulderstrap-mounted camera case — snap a picture of the yobbo. You can then upload the photo, report the tag number if you catch it, and bitch about it. The site keeps a tally of repeat offenders by tag number, but again, not sure that’s actually going to do anything.

There’s a big moral gray area here that I don’t know what to make of. On the one hand, while I’m much calmer, happier, and healthier on my bike than in my car, I’m no less aggressive when provoked by bad drivers, whatever my vehicle. I’m plenty likely to scream at, cuss out, flip off, and even in really bad circumstances, chase or strike an offending automobile. (I really love putting the fear of God and criminal court in a driver who comes too close with a quick swat to their trunk; when they hear the thud and think they might’ve just killed somebody, maybe they’ll hang up the damn phone and drive.)

And bike lanes are an important feature of any city that wants to improve its urban commute. Providing 30 inches of space for people to take to work without adding another car to the road is a good investment in progressive transit (not to mention the reduction of health care costs, as long as we don’t get run over).

But for the bike community to get hoity-toity about cars parking in our lanes like it’s a special infraction above and beyond parking in any No Parking zone, we’re going to have to police some of our own members and sacrifice our own self-appointed privileges. During my evening commute when there’s more congestion, I usually sit at every red light I hit on the way home, content to enjoy my music and the end of the day. But in the morning, I join most other cyclists I know in running any desolate red light and rolling through most stop signs. I shrug off such infractions by considering these our man-powered equivalent to the exception hybrid vehicles get to drive in the HOV lanes without passengers. We’re doing our part to cut smog, so we get a wink and a nod to a quicker commute.

And then there are the crazy bike bastards, weaving in and out of bumper-to-bumper traffic, going the wrong way in the opposite lane, and alternating between sidewalk and road as conditions suit them. During the Critical Mass rides at the end of every month, we get in the ballpark of 300 bicycles together to completely dominate all 3 or 4 lanes in one direction of major downtown arteries as we cruise around the city making our little “Bicycles are here, get used to it — heck get your own” statement, and that’s all fine and good (though I’m sure you disagree if you’ve ever been stuck behind us). But out of those 300 civil disobedients, there’s always a handful of yokels who consistently swerve over double yellow lines into oncoming traffic when the pace of the mass doesn’t suit them. I would guess they’re also the commuters who freak you out by weaving through your gridlock and cutting you off by hopping off the sidewalk. They’re really not helping the movement.

Bike lanes are our safety zones, where theoretically we are not supposed to be crushed to a pulp by big boxes of speeding metal, so getting cars to respect those lanes can be a matter of life or death. But it’ll also help if we respect the same boundaries as much as possible, no? Perhaps the MyBikeLane.com people can fire up a sister site called YourDeathWish.com for drivers to upload pictures of jackass biker punks on fixies making risky traffic violations of our own. There are no tags to keep track of, but you can usually identify us by the colors and badges on our snooty Chrome bags.

Yep, I’ve lost my mind. I’m going to Iowa.

I couldn’t resist the ultimate citizen journalism project of the winter, and considering how much time and effort I’ve put into this campaign, I’m not about to miss the champagne corks a-flyin’ when Iowa defies the polls yet again and Biden vaults into contention*. See how much fun they have in Iowa? With the snow and many layers of the clothings?

I’m heading over on the 2nd and coming back on the 4th, so if you’re interested in watching caucus day unfold from the battle front, stay tuned here. I’m bringing the live streaming gear (I may even upgrade to cellular broadband so I can roam beyond free WiFi clouds) and the other camera(s) will be cranking out the occasional YouTube product. I may try to go into an actual caucus — we’ll see — but I’ll probably base myself at the Biden campaign HQ in Des Moines and catch the occasional ride with volunteers to show their final hour ground game (heck, maybe I’ll even help out).

I’ll collect various players and communicative widgets for the trip over on a dedicated page, shelbinator.com/iowa, but it’ll probably wind up here on the front page, too, if I feel like activating a sticky-post plugin.

* Since even at this stage of the game I’m still hearing negative Nancies pull that “doesn’t have a chance” crap, I’ll share this thought from Chris Matthews.

After gorging on turkey and whatnots, we all took a walk along the beach (the Myrtle one). Turns out, if you do a 15 second exposure on ISO 800, you get some pretty cool images that look quite like daylight.

These were taken by nothing but moonlight at around 9pm. Giddyup.

Greenville, SC, is a lovely town; if you ever have the occasion, I suggest a weekend getaway there. I would not, however, suggest any kind of getaway in Islamabad.

While I was in Greenville interviewing Senator Joe Biden about Pakistan, among other things, General Pervez Musharraf decided to suspend the constitution in Pakistan and declare a general charlie-foxtrot. If I had only checked my stupid email on my crappy cellphone while waiting for my face time with the Senator, I could have gotten his first, raw reaction to the actualization of the kind of suck he warned us about in last Tuesday’s debate. Little old me and my camcorder. But no, I had to settle for the much less exciting, measured, official statement after we drove off in opposite directions and everyone checked their damn PDAs:

“General Musharraf’s decision to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution underscores the need for the United States to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy. President Bush should personally make clear to General Musharraf the risks to U.S.-Pakistani relations if he does not restore the constitution, permit free and fair elections and take off his uniform as promised. Then, we have to build a new relationship with the Pakistani people, with more non-military aid, sustained over a long period of time, so that the moderate majority in Pakistan has a chance to succeed.” –Joe Biden

But yeah, Greenville is nice.