Reuters' Iraq package is awesome

If you haven't seen Reuters' multimedia package on the 5-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, do yourself a service a click HERE. It's pretty amazing.

Apparently, I was in Slate

During some late-night Googling of myself, I found a blurb on Slate.com from August...apparently this blog was quoted, with regards to the Daily Show's Iraq coverage. Cool!

If only Slate knew I was full of crap!

Live Vlogging: A summary

Whoa. Yesterday was pretty cool. I live vlogged all day long, using a sweet Nokia N95 phone sent to me by MTV, and using software from Flixster to upload live to the Web. When it worked, it was amazing. But there were a few glitches in the Matrix, and I'd guess the majority of my interviews are zooming around in cyberspace somewhere. But the ones I posted were good, and the energy in the caucus was amazing. Not to mention how innovative this project was.

Every Street Team member in a Super Tuesday state was blogging, vlogging and reporting throughout the day. We had streaming coverage from our states all day long. It was off-the-cuff, it was raw, it was good, fun journalism. Not even CNN or NBC can say they did what we did. I didn't see them in Kansas, that's for sure.

Check out ChooseOrLose.com for our coverage, but be aware that the videos are being archived offline on Friday, Feb. 8.

More to come!

Live vlogging Super Tuesday

Tomorrow, I will be live vlogging Super Tuesday from my home base in Lawrence. MTV has sent us these sweet Nokia N95 phones that can broadcast directly to the Internet. So myself and the 20-odd other Street Teamers (Teamsters?) with elections tomorrow, are flooding the Internets with coverage. They'll be streamed live on MTV.com and ChooseOrLose.com, and MTV will be breaking into its programming periodically to show clips from our reports. I'll be filing reports all day long, including at the caucus itself and a Young Democrats watch party at Old Chicago in Lawrence. I'll also be blogging throughout the day. w00t!

This is an incredible way to cover Super Tuesday. Future of media? I think so. Check it tomorrow.

A headline to beat

The Chicago Tribune has the greatest headline I've ever seen, from a story about haikus written on a CTA stop wall:

"Haiku for the walls/at Harrison stop inspire/CTA, students

2 schools in South Loop/turn subway station into/poetry canvas"

From potholes to wheatfields

So, it's begun. My year-long journey on the campaign trail for MTV has officially started. I spent four fantastic days in New York City getting the lowdown on what this Street Team '08 project entails: everything from legal mumbo-jumbo to listening to AP reporters Ron Fournier and Kevin Roach dish on covering politics.

We stayed at the very cool Time Hotel, right off Broadway on 49th Street. Our first evening in New York, we gathered at MTV studios for a booze-free happy hour, then shuffled into an auditorium, where Sway sang our praises and told us what MTV thought of this project. They're psyched, man. Nobody's ever given regular people the tools to cover an election like this before. MTV's done similar stuff with Choose or Lose, and Huffington Post has "Off the Bus," which is headed up by Jay Rosen of NYU, who spoke to us, as well.

A bleach-haired John Norris gave us interviewing tips and folks from the Knight Foundation (our awesome patrons) and Gannett discussed the importance of our project. Holy crap! These people are seriously excited about what can come out of this. I am too, but I guess I'd forgotten how excited you can get about huge projects like this. Thanks, PR.

Normally, I leave New York and say "eff that." Maybe it's because I lived in Chicago for so long and have a grudge against New York; maybe it's a Midwest thing. I don't know. But I think I like New York now. Believe it or not, it's a wee bit more exciting than this area. Who knew?

I think it's because I got to see more of the city than just the tourist spots. Last time I was there, in 2005, we did Times Square, Central Park, the Dakota, Ground Zero and Wall Street, and the Statue of Liberty. This time, I just went to Union Square and hung out with my gorgeous friend Maria and her gorgeous roommate, Gillian. My j-school friend, Josh, who had a winter internship at Time, Inc., came along and it was glorious. It beats the crowds at Times Square, that's for sure.

So, I'm back now, and filed my first story today. Check it out, and check out the Street Team often to see what's up in the world of politics!

MTV! MTV!

I've been cutting back on my blogging lately for a number of reasons, but I thought I'd revive the Web Stained Wretch to tell my reader (there's more than one?) that I've been named one of 51 MTV News correspondents for the 2008 election. I'll be covering Kansas for Street Team '08, a band of citizen journalists from across the country, including DC. I'm pretty excited about this opportunity to tell the story of young people in Kansas.

The stories will be uploaded to think.mtv.com, the main Choose or Lose portal. They'll also be broadcast via MTV Mobile and, get this, the AP Online Video Network.

So if any Kansans out there have issues or stories they want to be told, drop me a line. As the dictionary would say, w00t!

Biggest. Interview. Ever.

A few weeks ago I had the surprising opportunity to interview Ron Jeremy for a story I was doing for the Kansan. I was profiling Jody Maxwell, a 70s porn star from Kansas City (turns out she grew up in the same neighborhood as I). One of her former co-stars was porn god Ron Jeremy, and I somehow got the interview. Everyone I talked to for this story, part of the Kansan's annual "Sex on the Hill" supplement, was very nice and open. It's definitely the strangest story I've ever written, but perhaps the most fun, as well. Check it out HERE.

I am a machine

Since I've started grad school, I've not had that many opportunities to do a lot of writing in class. Luckily, I have started writing for the University Daily Kansan, the well-respected student daily here. Most grad students don't write for the paper, but I want to have as much writing under my belt as I can.

I'm going to get a lot more experience.

Today, I was hired on as a part-time reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World, the daily here in Larryville. I'm psyched! I guess this means I'm a working journalist. It's cool and weird at the the same time. Mostly cool, though.