After numerous nights sans sleep, I’m proud to announce the release of NYC24: BODY, the online news magazine I helped edit and build.

Check it out!

Here’s our press release:

NYC24.com Launches The Body Issue
Real stories, reported from New York City

Feb. 15, 2008 — The New Media Workshop at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism announces the latest issue of NYC24.com, an online news magazine, http://nyc24.com

NYC24 (pronounced “N-Y-C-two-four”) brings you eight feature stories about NYC, centered around the theme of BODY. This collection of multi-media stories burst with the strange, sexy and fun things people do with their bodies. The site is entirely conceptualized, reported, shot, produced and edited by the students.

Editors for BODY:

LISA BIAGIOTTI, PHILIP CAULFIELD, KENAN DAVIS, ELIZABETH R. STARK

In this issue:

* An Afro-Brazillian martial art draws new devotees by ELSA BUTLER & CHANNTAL FLEISCHFRESSER

* Circus performing or yoga — how ’bout both? by LISA BIAGIOTTI, PHILIP CAULFIELD, KENAN DAVIS & ELIZABETH R. STARK

* Craig Hormann’s Ivy-league path to the NFL by DAVE BURDICK & ANTHONY VANGER

* New York’s Tall Club: Do you measure up? by TOM DAVIS & SYDNEY BEVERIDGE

* Make your skin bling with sub-dermal piercing by KATYA SOLDAK & VERONICA ZARAGOVIA

* Sword-swallowers show us how it’s done (hint: don’t drink) by MATTHEW P. MOLL & YIAN HUANG

* The ultimate three-minute love affair: Tango by KAREN ZRAICK & JAY CORCORAN

* Burlesque: Fabulously fit at any size by SANDRA LARRIVA & MATHILDE PIARD

Visit us at http://nyc24.com

In my unending quest to avoid TV, I’ve discovered a new diversion beyond clips and shows from ComedyCentral.com and AdultSwim.com — a friend hipped me to FreeDocumentaries.org.

The site believes that documentaries can effect real world change, and hosts a bajillion excellent movies from the more famous (Born into Brothels, Supersize Me) to the obscure (We — Arundhati Roy’s Come September speech set to archival footage and electronic music).

The streaming video quality is pretty good, and scalable to your whole screen. Bored tonight? Give it a shot.

With all you’ve probably been hearing about Facebook lately, you’d think the entire world is being taken over by an evil empire, intent on sucking out our souls, wasting our time, and invading our privacy. But maybe something good has come out of everyone’s favorite social networking site.

The Facebook Review is the first literary magazine that seeks to use Facebook as its platform to publish members’ creative work. Set up as a group, users can join and then read and comment on the work. Submissions for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews are all accepted and decided upon by an editorial board consisting of the last issue’s contributors, which is a pretty nifty system (called an “editorial train”). Submissions are made by sending a facebook message to the managing editor, and issues are posted as “news updates,” with new installments going up daily.

Issue 2 features a pretty amazing short story titled “The Vegan Muffin” by Tao Lin, an up and coming writer who will be reading at Fringe’s own “Dirty Water” reading on December 16 at Grub St, 160 Boylston St, Boston. Check it out!

In this morning’s “Around the Water Cooler” segment of Good Morning America, I learned about the new Amazon Kindle. It’s concept isn’t new — it’s a wireless reading device that can hold up to 200 books, can display current newspapers and can even connect you to over 250 blogs. It’s a s thin as a pencil and only costs…$399.00!

Forgive me for saying so, but I like to be able to take my books on the train with me, throw them in my bag, hand them off to my friends when I am finished, and read them on the beach. I remember the e-reader craze of the early 2000s. They never caught on. What makes Amazon think that these e-readers will be different?

I may be old-fashioned, but I still like the idea that people can stroll into the library, produce a card they got for free, and have access to books. I like the fact that when my friend is finished with “the book that changed her life” she can hand it to me and not worry that her life-savings is suddenly in my possession.

I admit that the idea of Fringe readers downloading the latest issue to their e-reader to take with them on the bus or train appeals to me, but part of our manifesto states that we want to be accessible. Isn’t that what online magazines and blogs are all about? You don’t need anything but a public computer with Internet access in order to partake in the discussion. You certainly don’t need $400.

What do you think? Would you carry one of these around as your exclusive reading material?

What is Feminism? Can Christians be Feminists? Can Conservatives? Can “Pro-Lifers?” Non-white women have often been marginalized within feminist discourse; poor women are nearly non-existent as valiant voices. Also, many issues have divided feminists like sex work or lesbian rights. About five years ago, I listened attentively with my Intro to Women’s Studies class as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta and leaders within Third Wave Feminism, preached to the choir at a neighboring university. Our class was trying to define feminism (so cliché right). We got as far as “feminism is the idea that women are equal to men and thus should be allocated equal rights and opportunities.” But, how do we define “woman?” Feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty importantly questions the overgeneralization of women’s experiences and the emphasis of placing gender at the center of oppression without complicating it with race and class. While working at a feminist magazine where all of the content was written by and for girls, I came across the same question when an intersex person sent in a piece for publication. What is a woman?

The existence of “pro-life” people who claim to be feminists, also begs the question of what is a feminist and what is a woman. I just had to ask Baumgardner and Richards: can you be “pro-life” and a feminist? Surprisingly, their answer that day was explicitly yes! They cited a list of ways “pro-life” and “pro-choice” people could work together to make a change in our world, like making education and contraceptives available. But, because the idea of personhood is the root conflict for “pro-life” and “pro-choice” people, a definition of feminism remains in limbo. In an age where technology proliferates and ideas over what is “natural” are debated, who decides what defines a person? Or more precisely, who has the power to decide?

In my last post I discussed the way main stream media (MSM) inevitably ran the small press out of business, and now I’m going to finish up my critique through a discussion of how I think MSM actively broke its trust with readers.

The press should operate as the fourth estate — a check on government power through the free exchange of ideas. (But whether the public actually wants this from MSM is another blog post). Impartiality is embedded in the concept of journalistic objectivity — reporters are supposed to check their biases at the door. Also, ideally journalism should give us the facts. MSM has failed on all three accounts.

1. MSM has not provided the public with accurate information:
   • Many journalists have recently been caught plagarizing. Jayson Blair is the obvious example.
2. MSM has failed to operate adequately as a check on government power, particularly as applies to the Iraq war, which broke the contract in two ways:
   • Because MSM didn’t scuttle fast enough, we went to war. We didn’t hear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, we didn’t find out about torture soon enough to prevent it — the Bush administration was not held up to scrutiny in the days surrounding 9/11. Journalists were sleeping on the job.I understand that the Bush White House, and perhaps other White Houses as well, grant better access to and answer more questions from favorably inclined reporters, as opposed to ones who ask tough questions. This is a plainly unacceptable situation, and I would like to see reporters banding together to boycott substance-less press conferences where only the softball questions get answered.
   • Because reporters rolled over and accepted the administration’s press conference rules, they lost the credibility that objectivity brings. Right-leaning news organizations got great access but weren’t very critical, left-leaning organizations got bitter and preachy. In a sense, Bush polarized the media, although I’m sure earlier administrations helped.
3. MSM has failed to operate impartially:
   • In an ideal world, newspapers would disseminate information freely and reporters would not be paid. The absence of money would help ensure that reporters were in it for the truth, and not for cash. Obviously, we do not live in an ideal world and newspapers and reporters must be paid for their work, but MSM has taken things too far. My perception, which I believe others share, is that news corporations are owned by uber-conglomerates that hawk a wide variety of stuff, and I don’t have time to parse these relations myself. I worry that this commercial bent is slanting news media, imbuing it with consumerism. The news is not the news, but PR information fed to me (and perhaps to reporters also) to get me to buy stuff.
   • Newspapers have money, and are often run by white men. The lacking diversity of op-ed pages in the nation’s newspapers has been widely lamented — few women and writers of color figure into these pages, although this has been changing for the better. However, I think that many people perceive newspapers as old boy’s clubs, where the old boys hire and pay people who are like them to produce the news, which makes newspapers sound suspiciously like the establishment they are supposed to be covering.

So, I can pay to read inaccurate biased news written by white guys that subliminally tells me to buy stuff (MSM), or for free I can read inaccurate biased news written by a diverse population that is not unilaterally motivated by money (Internet).

Somewhat reductive, I know, but is there any wonder that folks have turned to media on the Internet?

During a recent Critical Issues lecture, the professor asked me if I thought the growing popularity of web communities was evidence that the public had lost faith in mainstream media. I believe I sputtered something at the mic, but the question got me thinking and I would like to respond to it more fully here.

I believe that the answer is yes, and that the public’s lack of faith in mainstream media outlets comes from two sources:

1. Unavoidable byproducts of having big media.
2. Big media getting lazy and not doing its job right.

The first source directly led to the formation of Fringe. There’s been some speculation in the literary community that big media (aka corporate bookstores) ran a lot of independent bookstores out of business. These independent bookstores were the main subscribers to literary magazines, so when the bookstores collapsed, many journals went belly-up. It sounds like regular capitalism at work, but this had disastrous consequences for journals catering to specific niches and minority groups.

Big media is concerned with eyeballs, which translate into profit, and niche journals don’t have as many eyeballs. This might not have been a problem for small publications catering to latino writing or feminist writing, except that the literary market isn’t very large to begin with. So these tiny journals went under, unfortunate because many of them had given writers like Sandra Cisneros (early pub credits in Revista Chicano-Riquena and Nuestro, both now defunct), Dorothy Allison, and many many others their crucial early publication credits, which often help writers get noticed by larger publications.

We founded Fringe because we worried that the dearth of niche publications would have a trickle-up effect, making it harder for minority writers to get published early on, which would make it harder for bigger publications to notice them, which would homogenize literary culture at the upper levels. (Check the NYT’s hormonally imbalanced, melanin deficient list of best books to get a sense of the homogenization.)

Did the corporate bookstore say to itself, “let’s screw over minority writers”? Of course not. But the unintended effect of big media has been to make the already fiscally unfeasible print-jounal model even harder to sustain. And so we turn to the Internet, where space is cheap and circulation costs nonexistent.

I’m guessing that other media — newspapers, music, etc — have followed the route of the literary journal. Corporate media caters to the most marketable and mainstream group, but many individuals want to read about their specific interests. As a model, MSM hasn’t yet found a way to fill the void.

I’ll cover source #2, the way MSM has actively broken the trust, in my next post.

That’s right. I’m a virgin. And I’m nervous about my first time.

Disclosure: I was raised by the technologically averse. Mom and Dad didn’t get an answering machine until I went to college in ’96, which is when I got my first computer. Cable wasn’t even available at my parents’ house until after 2000. The blogosphere? What?

I can’t help but share some of the aversion – I’m afraid to chat online, because I don’t like the idea of conversing with strangers I can’t see or hear. In a blog post, your words are naked, and your naked words are your intellect on display. No hand motions to get your meaning across, no inflections. Naked. In front of the world. AND people can make comments to your “face.”

Can you blame me for being nervous?

Despite this, blogging intrigues me because of its dependence on the written word. Although methods of communication change, written words remain central to the way we express ourselves. The blog allows us not only to express, but to connect our words with others, to link to each other in a virtually tangible way – the words are like webs themselves. The addition of music, pictures, and video to our lines is like modern illumination. Genius, really.

As a writer and editor, my highest aspiration is to add to the long, sacred tradition of written art, no matter the medium. I hope to contribute to that tradition with my blogs, and to encourage other first-timers to get started – the blogosphere is wide open territory, and we should all grab a piece.

Whew – I made it. That wasn’t so bad. I’ll work on linking next time.