From the Actors

We asked our actors from The New New News Staged Reading to give their thoughts on the art and process.  Here's a few words from Becky Chong.  - ed.

My two cents.  Hahha...they're kind of all over the place but it's just what has been percolating.

The New New News reading was quite the educational experience for me.  I am not a user on Twitter and was surprised by how these mediums of communication (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc) are translated into the world of journalism.  What exactly is the face of today's Journalism--and is the current technology necessarily an advantage for catapulting Journalism where it seems to be heading? 

I do feel that in many ways it takes away the artistic value of journalism.  Max's thesis on the death of journalism* (and if people will even be teaching it in the future) is very disheartening. 

Many times it feels like, for the average user, that technological advances are happening way too fast and it's hard to catch up.  I perform shows at schools and I remember one elementary school where all the students were given rental laptops for the whole year.  That generation is growing up where magazines, newspapers, paperbooks, etc are a thing of the past and digital communication is the ruler; where reality television is a normal part of life; where with a click of their fingers, and within a few seconds, they can post a video on YouTube to make something news-worthy.  

One more thing that really shook me up was that you have to ask--if you have all these people who are telling these stories--how much of what they are saying is credible?  And what exactly in The New New News is true?  I left feeling even more confused as to what the real story was and what was chopped up to make it a luring, engaging story.  What is fact and how do you trust the media regardless of what medium its being distributed.  What is NEWS when the people who are covering the stories being covered become part of the news themselves?

becks :)

*The character of Max in The New New News is a Professor of Journalism applying for tenure. - ed.

Reporting on the inside from the outside in

I got my first real look at The New New News last night. I’ve been part of the high-level talks on the project, which was inevitable given my penchant for pontificating on media issues anyway, but have had to step back from the script meetings and workshop as producer duties (read: all the paperwork Paul and Dawson hate to deal with and hired me for) have demanded my time.

So, when I sat down for last night’s reading having caught only the last five minutes of rehearsal and a few minutes of director notes, I felt very much like I was looking at this from the outside. A well-informed witness to a moment deep inside the development process, but on the outside nonetheless.

And, as I told Paul and Dawson afterwards, I was at times more compelled than I thought I would be, and at times more detached and outside the narrative than I thought I would be. Which is really perfect for this stage. All the potential is there, and we’re at the right stage to trim away anything that is preventing that potential from reaching actuality.

A brief and purposely obtuse collections of my notes from last night: found Pete the most engaging – he’s the noble “should”; Art’s guru misadvice = SEO; desire for Robot Chicken static jump-cuts disturbing; [name redacted]’s transformation is beautiful and perfect and the arc to which all other character arcs should aspire; not sure Paul has his numbers right; sometimes yet-to-be-written scenes should stay that way; Terence McKenna on X, nitrous and 72 hours of Powerpuff Girls (I think this had more to do with what I wanted to see than what I saw); failure doesn’t die to live another day.

The clearest thought I walked away with, though, was that this form, the Living Newspaper, has a place in the present day and the present conversation. Theatre and journalism are struggling and failing in such similar ways, it seems natural they might find similar solutions, and I’m putting my money on local.

Special thanks to all the actors that spent their weekend working on this piece – you did an amazing job and we can’t sufficiently show our appreciation for you volunteering your time. Thank you Holly Arsenault, Noah Benezra, John Bogar, Betty Campbell, Becky Chong, David Gehrman, Stephen Hando, Amy Love and John Q. Smith.

Hashtag for Tonight's Live-Tweeting

I'm sitting in the theatre at North Seattle Community College watching our outstanding team of actors do a readthrough. The public reading is tonight at 7:00 PM -- will you be there? It's free!

I've even created a super-sweet hashtag so that nerds and iPhonies can live-tweet their experience:

#NNNews

That's short for The New New News which is the name of the play.

See you soon!

Sitting in on a Script Meeting

Paul and Dawson invited me to sit in on their script meeting last Wednesday; they were taking the sundry pieces and scenes that the two of them had written (mostly) independently and putting them in a sensible order.

Now this wasn't the first time in history that two writers put some scenes in order, so I won't pretend like this is headline news. But this play engages Seattle's recent history and a very particular moment in the development of information technology, and our focus on new and instantaneous media raises some interesting structural questions.

About a year ago I had the pleasure of interviewing David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet over the phone. Kronos Quartet frequently collaborates with artists and musicians who work outside the traditional Western musical vocabulary. David talked about needing to invent a brand new process every time they embark on a new project.

I thought of Kronos as I watched Dawson scrawl acronymic scene titles on giant post-it notes, scratch them out, and replace them with some other piece of code as Paul decided on the fly what he is and isn't willing to cut. Tom Paulson and I had a few moments of, "You following this?" because, as artistic collaborators so often do, Paul and Dawson had developed a project-specific shared vocabulary.

"Well, yes, I agree. It's just Oscar --"
"Right. Yes, absolutely."
"I'm wondering about --"
"Right. What about the tweets?"
"Well -- hahaha."

And so on.

There's no "right" way to tell a story, and there certainly isn't a template for a project like this. There are practical considerations -- the passage of time within a story thread, for example -- and considerations on pacing and flow that will guide the audience experience. What's really special about this play is that we're studying an instantaneous form of communication while working in an ancient (and in many ways, lumbering and laborious) form of communication.

We have a staged reading coming up this weekend and we'll see if it all goes together. I for one am looking forward to seeing those giant post-its come to life.

The Hamster Wheel

Journalism today is a Hamster Wheel, according to one observer:

"The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics."

That's a quote from this really entertaining article in the Columbia Journalism Review, by Dean Starkman. If you want to get a sense of why journalists (the ones who still have jobs) look so tired and can't complete their sentences, read this.

Blogger quits US News because her words made into ads

Here's an interesting case of how blurred the line is getting between reporting and advertising.

Mary Knudson, a prominent science writer, discovered that individual words on posts for a health blog she was writing for U.S. News and World Report were linking to ads for hospitals, drugs and so forth. Mary quit the job because she had no control over how her words were linked to advertised products and services.

Here's Mary's story -- "Why I Won't Blog for U.S. News and World Report" -- published by another science journalist (and friend of mine), Deb Blum.

Are you writing or being written?

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, and believe it is going to be important to the work we are doing with NewsWrights United.

(Full disclosure: I’ve been following Rushkoff’s work since the mid-90s, consider myself a huge fan, have participated on the discussion lists he moderates for over a decade and have had some correspondence with him. Grain-of-salt that as you will.)

Rushkoff’s central idea is that we have become increasingly disconnected from these machines with which we spend so much of our time. Computer training is actually application training; fewer and fewer of us understand how to program, have ceded the power to shape our world to others.



I’d argue (and maybe he argues – my copy hasn’t arrived yet) that this is especially true with journalism. Because everyone, absolutely every single information source, from content producer to aggregator, has an agenda. You can argue for the relative benevolence or FoxNewsiness of one agenda over another, but each writes from and to its own worldview.

If you aren’t taking an active role in your information gathering, if you aren’t thinking about the choices you make and looking for diverse perspectives in some kind of attempt to triangulate on a real truth, you are swallowing someone’s agenda whole. You’ve stopped listening to your own story, stopped writing your own narrative.

And this is where it becomes important to NewsWrights. Because, yes, we are just another voice hawking it’s agenda, it’s narratives. But the Living Newspaper is about more than the stories it covers. We present local, topical stories as live theatre because it is unexpected, because it is different from the ways we are used to seeing these stories covered and presented. And there is something in that move, in the audience being invited to think about not just the content but the form and the implications of the form.

When I taught composition, I explained it to my students as the move from reflexive to reflective. I was asking them to become more conscious of what they were doing with their writing, to ask themselves questions, to be purposeful. The Living Newspaper asks us to be conscious and reflective on how we get our stories and what that means to our concept of the world around us.

Are we writers or written? Programmers or programmed?

Library Use Way Up For Things Libraries Weren't Built For

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting in on a Book Club discussion with author James Gavin and Kirkland librarian Elsa Steele (as part of my work with Kirkland Performance Center). One interesting point of conversation, extant to our project here, was library usage.

As our information diet is consumed via devices of increasing technological sophistication, what's up with that old jalopy The Book, and its antique storehouse, The Library?

Well, the American Library Association (which, it should be noted, is obviously interested in building a positive image of the library's vitality) published a report in April, the State of America's Libraries Report 2010 that seeks to answer this very question. Apparently usage is way up and public opinion of libraries is way up, too.

This is pretty intuitive given the state of the economy. Who else is handing out free books and movies? It's also not surprising that Academic Libraries are adding more and more electronic resources, which I imagine are far more affordable and convenient than giant bound reference collections. There's also a pretty funny section on how badly libraries suck at using Facebook and Flickr (editorial note: who the hell cares if libraries use Facebook?).

A chief driver of library use was job-hunting. With its free internet and cheap printing the library is clearly ideal for this in-demand activity. What's really shocking is how much public assistance library staff are offering.

Two-thirds of public libraries help patrons complete online job applications; provide access to job databases and other online resources (88 percent) and civil service exam materials (75 percent); and offer software or other resources (69 percent) to help patrons create resumes and other employment materials. Forty-two percent of urban libraries report offering classes related to job-seeking, and about 27 percent collaborate with outside agencies or individuals to help patrons complete online job applications. (page i)

....

“Public libraries often are the only organizations within a community that can help individuals interact with government agencies and access e-government services,” ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said in an ALA press release in June 2009. “As more and more government information and services are becoming only available on line, there is an urgent need for governments to collaborate with public libraries to provide e-government services that best meet community needs.” (page 21)

Apparently librarians are social workers, too. Personally I think this is pretty embarrassing for the state of our social fabric.

These new trends must really be overwhelming the attention of our libraries because this report had virtually nothing in it about books! So if anyone has any info about that, let me know. Is this depressing?