June 29th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
It’s a little quiet round these parts at the moment, thanks to a couple of work projects, a couple of extracurricular projects and these pesky impending exams.
So here’s a quick look at a few things I’m working on. A more regular blogging schedule will resume after Friday’s NCEs.
While I’m at work:
City of Culture
Since March, I’ve been planning, organising and running the Evening News campaign to make Norwich the first UK city of culture in 2013. (Do you know how much cumulative time, energy and repetitive copy it would save if I could hyperlink like that on my paper’s website? Anyway.) I’ve written or at least planned a page lead at minimum most days since the campaign began, jumping to more than 2,000 words a day during the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Now we’re in the final push – the decision’s expected sometime in early to mid July, but we don’t know when. My job at the moment is to make sure we’re ready, whatever the decision, whenever it comes. Including if it comes on exam day.
Lord Mayor’s Celebrations
Every year since 1976 Norwich city council has held a celebratory weekend with a procession of floats. (The history of the parade goes back to the middle ages or further.) This year, the Evening News is printing 10,000 souvenir issues for the parade on July 10, with an 8-page supplement wraparound, as well as a lead a day in the week before the parade and the now-traditional 8-page picture-led supplement for the following Monday’s paper. I’m planning and writing most of the coverage for both, as well as shooting video and, bizarrely for me, sitting on the float judging panel.
Both of these are on top of the day-to-day general reporting life, tackling calls, early and late shifts, magistrates and crown courts, council committees and meetings, and other diary and patch jobs.
Oh, and revision. I forgot about the revision.
Extracurricular activities:
Six Months In Scents
I’ve just begun a blogging project I’ve planned for a while, challenging myself to write reflectively every day. I’m using my weirdly large perfume collection as a lens for a daily blog on scent, memory and the evocative links between them. Or I’m just writing an extended essay about the experience of community and collectivity around perfume that wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. Or I’m wearing a different scent every day for six months and waffling about how it makes me feel. It’s an experiment.
Live-action Pokemon Red game crossed with pub crawl
This needs no explanation. Well, actually, it needs a lot of explanation, and I’ll blog about it properly once we’ve considered the results from Saturday’s playtest.
Serious Business
My partner and I are going through the tricky business of writing up a business plan to turn Zombie from a not-for-profit hobby into a potentially profitable business. At times it’s mindtwistingly complicated but slowly it’s taking shape as a project that might turn a profit in a couple of years’ time.
On this blog:
I’m about 2/3 of the way through writing an enormous thinkypost about the aesthetics and grammar of hyperlinking in the wake of the Nick Carr affair. There are posts in the pipeline about Kingdom of Loathing‘s community, economy and monetisation, personalising journalism rather than customising experience, and a few other ideas that have caught my imagination.
But for now I think it’s fair to say it’ll be a little quiet around here till I’m the other side of the exams – even if it’s not so quiet anywhere else.
April 3rd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
It’s not the most beautiful meal in the world, but it’s one of my favourites: garlic soup.
The idea for this meal came from book called Outlaw Cook by John Thorne – both the initial recipe and the approach I tend to take when cooking it. The recipe as given is very simple, based on a Spanish dish eaten by those too poor to eat much else, and nicknamed ‘Water of Life’ for its heartening, comforting qualities.
One thread running through the book I the idea that cuisine is intensely personal. Outlaw Cook tells John Thorne’s own story of learning to want to eat and cook well – from eating packaged foods in bed to the discovery of pasta to building a bread oven in his back yard. And though my journey has been different there are elements that are very familiar to me. When I stood in my own kitchen for the first time age 16 I too had no idea where to begin.
Perhaps the hardest thing to learn so far has been how to improvise, understanding textures, tastes and flavours so that it becomes possible to conceive of a taste, go to the kitchen and create it from raw materials. Outlaw Cook was the first food book I read to revel in that sense of play in the kitchen. And that’s what garlic soup is about for me.
There are a few elements that remain constant every time I make it.
Garlic is the base, usually a combination of fresh and smoked, sometimes pickled, generally crushed or very finely chopped. Often there will be beans involved – kidney or butter beans usually, but sometimes others. Almost always I will grill strong cheese on top of stale bread and line the bowl with it, pouring soup on top. Rarely if ever will I add anything to thicken it.
The rest is pure invention every time, and a glorious way to bring fun to cookery.
To make today’s incarnation:
Crush together pink and smoked garlic, bird’s eye chilli, dried red chilli, sun dried tomatoes, sea salt and fresh thyme, to make a paste.
Sweat the paste in butter with bacon lardons and finely diced shallots.
Add a tin of butter beans, water, tomato purée and vegetable buillion, and simmer till it is tasty, not watery but not too thick or reduced.
In the mean time grill a slice of stale bread spread with tomato purée and topped with mature cheddar.
Serve the soup ladled over the bread and garnished with cherry tomatoes and a few very thin slices of fresh pink garlic.
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
March 23rd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
My copy of February’s ICON magazine finally arrived – including a selection of microfiction written by readers in response to a prompt. Here’s my entry, which you can find on p82.
She walks to town. I make maps from her iPhone’s footprints.
Her geocodes build a city for me to explore. Height. Plans. Street View. Sales. She pushes a cold nose up against hard glass, desiring. Each window is a tab.
I stride her steps at home between the hours. She sees new graffiti. I see blurred cyclists. She sees the grit and people. I see usability.
She looks up.
At night I move my small hands across the vast city of her skin.
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
February 15th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
Since I last wrote in this blog I’ve gained a husband, spent two weeks in the Lake District with just him and the sky for company, and been incredibly, wondrously happy.
I’ve also been thinking a little about making this blog somewhere that’s fun to write in and fun to read. It’s a little tempting at the moment to slash and burn – start again with a new style – but I’m not yet sure what I want to write about, and I think the only way I’ll find out is by doing it.
This space is going to be reinvented a little. It’s likely to include a discussion of metanarrative in Assassin’s Creed 2, an argument over whether tabbed browsing can constitute ludic reading (and what that means if it does), and a soliloquy to the sweet potato.
October 6th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
There has been a lot of noise recently over the leaked WaPo guidelines for social media use. The restrictive policy has been accused of making Twitter look like a minefield for reporters, shutting down interaction and engagement, and forbidding journalists to have personal lives online.
The guidelines go too far in suggesting – intentionally or otherwise – that it is impossible for reporters to have a private life online, and the argument that individual journalists should not express opinion has met widespread disapproval. But are there other arguments for splitting personal from professional chatter online?
Continue reading ‘Digital identity, space, strategy’
September 16th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
This week’s web work has been almost entirely devoted to fleshing out profiles on various social networking sites – LinkedIn, Wired Journalists – and finally sorting out the blogroll (you can see it there on the right-hand side). Here’s five tips I’ve gleaned for people like me who are just starting up with creating social profiles. Continue reading ‘Five web profile tips for newbies’
August 23rd, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
I’m a fairly recent Twitter convert, and there are two main reasons I’m sticking with it. First, it’s short, and second, it’s art.
Continue reading ‘Short is sexy’
August 15th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
Vadim Lavrusik over at Mashable has a post up detailing 12 things newspapers should be doing in order to survive. I’m going to try and start this blog on a positive note – I get enough “print journalism is doomed / ad revenue will never recover / there’s no way out of the decline / we’re all doomed” at work – and talking about how to survive the digital revolution seems like a good start.
Continue reading ‘A link to begin with – 12 things multimedia journalists should do’
