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Travel Journal Photos |
Columbia shuttle crash I feel guilty that while I was hitting the bars of the East Village Saturday night, my buddy at Newsweek was putting together graphics on the Columbia shuttle. He had spent the entire week working on a cover story about the Neanderthal man. Their deadline is midnight on Saturday. In the course of 12 hours, they created a new magazine from scratch. They blew past their deadline by 90 minutes and my friend didn't leave until 3am. I flew to New York City on Saturday morning, just as news was breaking about the Columbia tragedy. All the airport gates had TV's tuned to CNN and they were replying over and over the flaming breakup of the spacecraft. Northwest Airlines took my mind off of it by spontaneously bumping me to first class--where in the event of a water landing, *I* had a lifevest under my seat and the people in coach had to scavenge various parts of the aircraft to stay afloat. Seriously, this was the main difference between the sections! Seeing the flaming remains of Columbia breaking up repeatedly on the airport TV before trusting my life to an airborne collection of mechanical parts and fuel wasn't the biggest jolt for me... that came later in Manhattan when I showed up for my hostel bed. I had stayed there two weeks ago and found it to be as swanky as hostels can get. When I was there, I made reservations to come back. "Remember me?" I asked them. No. As a matter of fact we don't. And we're completely full tonight. Sorry. This was how it went from the guy who checked me in the previous time I stayed there. Happily, within a few minutes he was able to get me a room a couple blocks away at a slightly cheaper, more spartan hostel. After that night, he promised I'd have a room for the rest of my nights in the city. And eventually, yes, he did remember me. At the time, I was constantly going in and out of their safe to retrieve film and camera gear. I am strongly hoping that I get a decent night's sleep tonight. Tomorrow I have to be at the United Nations at 9am for the first of two days of recruiting examinations. They will be testing my computer skills and knowledge of UN world policy. Going by their practice exams on their website, I'm far more worried about the world policy exam. The questions were so specific that it took hours to Google the UN website to find the answers. It's almost as if they're asking me to name not just the country, but to name the actual villagers they provided drought relief, performed peacekeeping, etc. Even if I don't hook up with the UN, I may have some other interesting opportunties around NYC. The most promising one so far is with the New York Times online edition. I had a long conversation today with the editor who creates their multimedia content. His main focus is to create the interactive animations and slide shows in Flash that present the news. We talked about using the web as a storytelling medium and how it requires a mix of visual and technical skills. The editor liked my website a lot and was happy that it got covered by the Times back in December. I felt good karma towards them and feel I could achieve a lot if I had the opportunity to spend time there. At the very least, there's a good chance I might be able to do an internship with them. The great part is that they would pair well with my Poynter Fellowship. The Fellowship is all about creating stories local to St. Petersburg, Florida and packaging them via Flash and HTML for the web. Coincidentally, the next block down 7th Avenue from the Times online edition, I got some good news from Frommer's Budget Travel. Connecting up with them was a great piece of serendipity set into action with a phone call from my friend at their sister publication of Newsweek. Frommer's Associate Photo Editor said she liked the slides I had sent them for their April issue. Several of them had been selected by her and passed on to the art director-- who has the final say on what goes into the pages. These included scenes from Poland, France and Canada. Although Frommer's was great, my friend at Newsweek is not done hooking me up. He is going to see if he can get me in to meet one of the top dogs at Conde Nast. While I'm at home, he's going to introduce me to some of head visual people at the Chicago Tribune. |
