jamesgotfredson.com

So I went to Nicaragua last week...

As most of you already know. :-)

The trip was with a fantastic, talented group of youngsters under the auspices of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management Microfinance Service-Learning Trip.

As you can probably understand, I need more than 2 days to process everything from my first trip to the developing world, so I’ll write much more later, but we *do* still need to fund-raise.

If you’re interested, our Facebook group is here: http://tinyurl.com/BCnicas

And the best 300 of my 1300 photos are here:  http://is.gd/pzeO

Hasta Luego,

James

What's a "non-traditional BC senior"...?

In case you don’t feel like searching through this entire blog to piece together what my definition of “non-traditional student” means, here’s a shorter explanation.

Right now, I am a 30-year-old undergrad History major at Boston College, having returned to school after 6 years in the workforce to finish the last two semesters of my bachelor’s degree. In my last go-round here, I was going through some tough financial times, and unfortunately, wasn’t able to focus on my academics. I’m happy to report that’s no longer the case! I have spent the last 6 years working my way back here, through a series of jobs that increased in responsibility, including residential construction, office temping in the accounting, legal and higher education fields, and finally, for the past 3 years as a lab coordinator at Harvard Physics, assisting two Sr. Faculty and their respective quantum physics research groups, doing everything from ordering coffee beans to administering over $5 Million in federal and corporate research portfolios. For the record, I am most grateful for this last job, as it was basically my own personal Business School.

If you asked me, I wouldn’t trade the past six years for anything.

I learned the meaning of the term “hard work” over and over again - whether it was shingling roofs on sub-zero days, digging foundations in 100 degree heat, or pulling together a 1,000-document, multi-million dollar grant proposal on *short* notice. I organized every single tax document for each customer of a CPA firm one tax season, and spent a year and a half temping, first for that CPA firm, then for a law firm, and finally for Harvard. Times were lean, I lived off of burritos, and PB&Js, and splurged on Dunkin Donuts every Wednesday. By some unknown reason, I was lucky enough to get hired part-time at an amazing local arthouse movie theatre, where we were allowed to eat all the popcorn we could handle PLUS see all the movies we wanted, off-the-clock. In short, I ate a LOT of popcorn (EASILY the best around) and watched a LOT of movies. More than anything else, the theatre introduced me to some of the most interesting, talented people in this city, including Sean, Ben, Liz, Jonah, Nancy, Dan, and Jillian to name just a few.  The Coolidge will always hold a special place in my heart for that.

During my previous stretch at BC, I constantly debated the question of what to do with my life. Given my upbringing in New Canaan, CT, I thought the choice came down to Wall Street or teaching - the classic “money vs. love” question. But I wanted to do neither - Wall Street didn’t appeal to me on any level, yet neither did teaching…yet - I knew very little at the time that I’d be able to pass on to a teenager to guide them on any sort of “proper” path.

It’s funny how physical suffering motivates decision-making. After coming home from nine hours of construction laboring, I used to go to the New Canaan Library, to read the magazines and go into “beta mode” for the night. One day, I read a fantastic article by Sebastian Junger of the brilliant Afghani general, Ahmad Shah Massoud, “The Lion of Pansjhir,” who was later assassinated by suspected Al-Qaeda agents posing as a camera crew, two days before 9/11. After reading Junger’s article, I realized that I had always had a passion for outstanding narratives, and all the better when they were true. While dodging bullets and enduring a 3-day bus ride, Sebastian Junger brought back from remote Afghanistan, a true story of an important figure who wouldn’t otherwise become known to Americans.

This was it.

Journalism presented the job I was looking for - travel the world to find important stories and bring them back home, all in the name of increasing our global understanding of each other, under the broader umbrella of social justice.

Blessed with that sense of direction, I set about studying the journalism industry every day after work. I read plenty of books, some of the best reporting out there done by Lawrence Wright, William Langewiesche, and David Remnick among others (see my previous posts on each). I filled up notebook after notebook with notes and ideas (a close friend calls them my “manifesto.”)  This gave me a sense of purpose, and helped motivate me towards saving up enough money to return to Boston and initiate this climb back to school.

I’ll stop here.

In my next post, as I promised in my previous post, I’ll explain why that 6-year-journey for a sustainable career path in Journalism has given way to my current job hunt for a teaching, legal or public advocacy job in Chicago come this June.

doy. no doy. DOY! NO DOY HICKEY!

As most Bostonians know, today was an unseasonably warm day, and I had a chance to walk through part of our city’s Emerald Necklace,  Olmsted Park (yeah, designed by THAT Olmsted). It was a nice walk, the paths weren’t too icy, and there was a lotta Nature going on - streams rushing along with all the meltwater, a whole gaggle (50+) of ducks and geese grabbing their chance to scavenge in the thawed ponds. All in all, the whole scene was pretty peaceful, and it got me thinking.


Along the way, I realized I probably shouldn’t close down/transfer my “name/resume” blog, like I said I was going to do in my last post, especially in this job market where I need a paycheck in less than four months. Regardless of how much fun my other blog is to update, my “name” blog gives prospective employers a chance to learn more about me than they might in just a short phone call or interview. Interviews are such a crapshoot anyway - you try taking 20 minutes to make a huge, expensive decision about hiring someone you may work with for the next 2, 5, 10 or 20 years, and you’ll see it’s a pretty big gamble. In short, I’m practicing what Joseph Stiglitz might call “screening”, or reducing information assymetry - helping my potential employers not “buy a lemon.”

At this point, I’m sure you’re ready with a great, big “NO DOY HICKEY,” but what this all means is that I *now* have to explain my shift away from journalism as the lever of social justice, in favor of my current move (and job hunt) towards education and law (next post), rather than just leave it unexplained, and let it tail off.

Oh, hello.

Sooo….I know what you’re thinking.

“Where are the new posts, dagnabit! I need to keep current about the intersection of media, technology and society!”

Ok, ok, simmer down; it’s still intersecting. But first, I have a few things to say.

First off, school’s going well and I’m one semester (this one) from graduating.

I made the Dean’s List in the Fall, and had a blast in most of my classes. I’m just starting my last semester, and so far, have another round of great teachers. My classes are mostly legal-oriented:  Supreme Court & Religion; Cyber Law; Civil War & Reconstruction, US Foreign Policy since ‘45; and Spanish. And I’m taking a service trip to Nicaragua this March to help with a micro-financed bakery. MSNBC did a clip on its Nightly News about a similar setup in Bolivia here.


Second, updating two blogs is a drag.

Updating this resume blog feels like a chore, and to be honest, sometimes I don’t feel like sharing everything that I’ve learned. I know, I know - not exactly open-source, but frankly, I’m conflicted by open-source. In some ways, I think it’s a great idea and makes a lot of sense - I use Wikipedia in ALL of my classes, and I’m a huge fan of MIT’s Open CourseWare. But in other ways, giving things away for free makes very little sense.

So I’m going to roll this blog - the boring “Resume Blog” in with my Tumblr, Late Bloomr. Sure, there’s going to be more cats & dogs, historical links, photography, street art, Japanese game show clips, etc. to weed through, but to borrow Virginia Heffernan’s description of John Maeda’s Simplity talk, “You get rapid, straight-to-the-bloodstream access to his mental life.”

In the words, of a famous New England transcendentalist-hermit, “Simplify, simplify!”

All of my posts will still be accessible on Google Docs, or as links on my other site, in case you need to read up about Web 3.0 or hyper-local journalism, but otherwise, this will re-direct over to Late Bloomr.

Oh, and if you haven’t taken a look at Tumblr yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s “stupid-simple”.

Last but not least, I have plenty to say about my seven year effort to find a stable career path in Journalism…enough to require a separate post - if you’re in the mood for some light reading. :-)

Use the *whole* buffalo.

Quick rant:

i’m sick of Twitter users who just post a link to every story or latest blog post on their sites. this is totally different from finding something and linking to it in a “check this out” way. I get that you think it’s important to get your message out there, but this is just endless noise - it adds little to the equation.

one of the many better points of twitter is to have a conversation, and i think that’s how it works best - i would LOVE a news organization to *get* this and tweet about what’s going on in their newsroom, or some background aspect of their news gathering operations - a facet of a story that they struggled with, or a concern they have about some form of breaking news - something productive that they can enter into the conversation. otherwise, it’s just advertising/spam.

take the new york times, sadly an easy whipping post lately. many of their sections are on twitter, just broadcasting links to their latest stories. what a wasted opportunity. Tell us something that didn’t or wouldn’t make it into the story - they could use Twitter to tell us that one of their foreign correspondents is on the streets of Islamabad, giving us insights into the attitudes of a cafe crowd. 

Think of your info operation like a tree, with your website as the trunk, the sections as major branches, the stories as smaller branches, and the extra details as leaves.

When news org’s are concerned about their future, one idea might be to make their content better, richer…attractive, enriching and necessary even, so we can drill down into a story the way that the web best supports. You already have the source material, the people on the ground, the contacts, the rich details - quit shaving them down - rethink what you already have - like the Native Americans did - use the whole buffalo.

Islamic Civ

We began Islamic Civ today with an audio resuscitation of the Qur’an, specifically the final verses (2:285-286) of the Sura II, as recited by a Malaysian woman.

My initial reaction was one of profound sadness, of how similar our world’s major monotheistic religions are - belief in one God, and how similar these verses are to the Lord’s Prayer of Christianity - and yet, how much ignorance exists in the world today, causing so much grief.

After that, I was struck by the beautiful yet haunting echo of this woman’s voice - and a deep feeling of solitude and spiritual communion that this woman calls to mind with her God.

Needless to say, it was a nice experience in our busy modern world.

Back to School, part 2

Hi Gang,

I wanted to give you all an update on my back to school adventures, now that I have my classes settled, and am getting into the swing of things.
I’m taking five classes this Fall and five in the Spring - two History, two Communications, and what will probably be my hardest class, Intermediate Spanish - towards my language requirement. I decided to finish as a History major as I had the fewest courses left in that to finish, but also because it would allow me to gain an understanding of the content of the news, the histories behind various regions, as opposed to having to take required theory classes in the Communications major, like Rhetorical Traditions, etc.

Both History courses are about the Middle East:  Islamic Civilization, and The Middle East in the 20th Century.

The first course is being taught by three different professors - one from History, Fine Arts and Theology - and it covers a very broad treatment of the world of Islam - the arts, architecture, maths, sciences, literature and poetry, as well as history. My first class back in over six years started off with the professors playing a traditional Muslim call to prayer (adhan) over the speakers in Fulton - it gave me the chills, I was so pumped. I also chose the history teacher as my advisor, Prof. Dana Sajdi, who has an incredible background. She was the first double major to graduate from the American University in Cairo, and the first to graduate with a degree in theatre. From what I gathered, she was raised in Palestine, studied in Egypt and Jordan, and did her Masters and Doctorate at Columbia. She’s pretty energetic and engaging - and she’s leading a trip to the Middle East next summer, first to Jordan, but also possibly to Medina and Mecca - which. would. be. amazing.

The next History course is The Middle East in the 20th Century, which is an upper-level elective, and the course that I had 200+ pages of reading for this weekend.
The professor, Ben Braude, said that he’s been teaching long enough to almost be teaching the children of his first students - buuut, that doesn’t mean he’s elderly - he’s also engaging, and a quick-study - he knew my name by the second class. Anyway, I’m taking both of these courses, so that I’m in a Middle East frame of mind this term - China will be next semester.

The Communications courses are also pretty cool. I’m taking News Writing and TV Studio Production. News Writing is taught by Joe Bergantino, who was the lead investigative reporter for WCVB in Boston for the past twenty years or so, and a winner of the Columbia-duPont Silver Baton Award for reporting. He’s also a Director of the New England chapter of the Center for Investigative Reporting, located at BU’s School of Communications (actually, a pretty reputable J-school, he said begrudgingly). They also have a large office at Berkeley’s Journalism School, so I’m definitely going to talk to him about that. Tonight, I’m presenting a case-study about an contemporary, ethical dilemna for reporters, and I decided to talk about Media Bias, vis a vis the Sarah Palin issues, recent changes at MSNBC, and the election that you might have heard about. So that’s News Writing.

TV Studio Production also seems pretty cool - last week, we learned how the teleprompter works. It’s controlled by a hand-held device with a knob that you turn to make the text go faster, slower or backwards to match the speaker’s cadence. Then we got to practice reading from it. This course culminates in a final project, where we actually create a 4-6 minute production, so I’m brain-storming about what to do for that one - I need to get some sense of how broad or narrow I should make it, given the time limit. I’m going to apply for a post-production internship with Frontline at WGBH in the spring, which this course will hopefully prep me for.  Working on Frontline would be amazing, and a big resume booster when shooting for my goal - a job in TV news production by next summer.

Last but not least, I’m taking Intermediate Spanish (college level Spanish 2 is equal to high school Spanish 4). The course is spoken entirely in Spanish, which I understand but can’t repeat/speak for myself. I’ll be concentrating on fixing that this year.

So that’s about it on the courses front.

I met with a History professor that I really admire about a possible work-study job and I think he has something for me.

His name is David Quigley, and I previously took his History of New England course, which covered the post-industrial bursts of cities we all know and loathe (Bridgeport, Worcester, Springfield, Providence, New Haven, even Boston. Prof. Quigley did his PhD at NYU and specializes in Urban History or Post-Civil War Reconstruction, AND he’s a Mets fan, so all in all he’s pretty cool. He already helped me out picking courses, and recommended the Islamic Civ course. He’s the Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at BC, which seeks to unify the liberal arts through lecture series, etc, towards giving A&S students a more cohesive education - I offered to help given my Harvard experience. The first speaker they’re having this October is Junot Diaz, an MIT professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a Dominican-American adolescent growing up in the Bronx - definitely a book I’ve been meaning to read, full of comic book references, etc.

So I’m up on campus now, in O’Neill Library. They’ve definitely done a lot of architectural changes since I was last here, and the place looks pretty amazing. They’re setting up for a Mass of the Holy Spirit at noon, which is a nice touch given that this is a Jesuit university, although it looks like rain.

On the apartment side, I’m planning to move in to my new place tomorrow. I’ve got Jen’s Volvo station wagin while she’s down in DC for the next month, and I’m anxious to get settled, and most importantly, start going to the Plex to exercise again. I think I’ll still ride my bike to school every day, but at least I won’t have to repeat the Lance Armstrong adventures of riding 5 miles each way from JP. Yesterday, I was running late - and that was a real lung-buster.

Oh, I should add that my medium term goal, following getting hired in TV news, is to prepare myself for possible grad school.

I’m not convinced that Journalism school (J-school) is entirely necessary yet, but some programs have interesting cooperations with their business schools, which I AM interested in.
(Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, USC, Berkeley toname a few). In particular, USC’s Annenberg School has a dual-degree with London School of Economics, so that’s what I’m looking for. So if any of you know anyone at any of those schools, or any contacts in the media business (TV news hopefully), let me know.

Long term’s a little far off, but I’ve been chasing something down in my head - kind of an amorphous blob of how journalism will evolve with ubiquitous broadband connectivity, near-unlimited battery life, citizen journalism and twitter-esque platforms in the developing world, and disciplined, coherent visual design towards more effective communication, a la Berkeley i-School’s Aesthetic Interfaces course, or even here at BC, Prof. Ann Marie Barry’s Visual Communication Theory course (as I guess it would be like - I haven’t taken it) - all leading to a clearer, faster line to whatever the message is.

So that’s the report from here. In case you couldn’t guess, I’m psyched to be back and really just can’t wait to be settled so I can focus entirely on school.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me get back here.
I’ll try to keep you updated as often as I can.


Thanks,
James

Back to School.

Oh, it’s you.

What have I been up to? Well, I’ve studied the heck out of this subject (the future of journalism), I’ve read the Interwebs a few times over, and engaged them with furious tweets, and I also got to meet some very smart and successful people in the industry. It’s funny, the duality of opinions on this topic - newspapers are fine/it’s irresponsible to teach print, TV news is fine/unstable - the internet’s the future, the future isn’t here yet. I paid $20 for a ticket to the Newseum (the same price as a ticket to MoMA, but I digress), but parts of it were worth the price (the Pulitzer Photo Gallery, Berlin Wall/Cold War and 9/11 exhibits).

What’s the answer?

Well, not surprisingly, it’s all evolving - citizen-journalism, hyper-local operations, blogs, advertising, marketing, crowd-sourcing, non-profit organizations, etc.

However, unlike Google or newspapers, I can’t afford to go all open-source and give the answer away for free, but I’d be happy to trade what I’ve learned for a good discussion over Twitter, email or coffee. I’ll give you a hint though - I’ve twittered about it.

It’s kind of a no-brainer that transition is so stressful - parts of the industry seems to be grasping in the fog - but some of the answers are already here, and we don’t need to revolutionize the news business, just continue to evolve as technology does, keeping the stronger points and eliminating the weaker ones. If this sounds too market capitalist for you, well, you haven’t been reading the same articles that I have. Ironically, this reminds me of the Post-Mao Chinese Film course I took last summer - the teacher had the darndest time convincing me that changes weren’t revolutionary, but evolutionary. Anyway, I’ll defer to Chinese Premier Zhou-En Lai, who, when asked about French Revolution’s success in 1989, said that “it’s still too soon to tell.” (Thanks Prof. Spagnoli for the reminder).

In the meantime, I’m back at school this Fall, and am very happy to be here. My sincere thanks to everyone who helped me get back here. My first course, Islamic Civilization, started off with a traditional Muslim call to prayer playing over the classroom’s speakers - it gave me chills. I’m studying History, specifically the Middle East this term (or Near East or Middle West, if you prefer), then China in the Spring, so I’ll have the beginnings of an understanding about our world, while also taking a few practical Communications courses, including TV Studio & Field Production, News Writing and Digital Nonlinear Editing. Hopefully, this combination will make me somewhat employable, or at least just enough to get the coffee orders right.

That said, I have 400 pages of reading to do this weekend, but I’ll try to update my blog more often with my new adventures. Twitter might be quicker to keep up with me - between that, my FriendFeed digital footprint and keeping tabs on my Delicious bookmarks page, you should have a good idea what I’m up to.

And if you ever wanna chat about the business, I’d love to hear from you.