Agriculture Industry Could Get Environmental Standards Exemptions

my latest for The Epoch Times:

A pilot program agreement between Minnesota and the federal government may ensure cleaner waterways, but will come at a price. A Memorandum of Understanding between Minnesota, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), aims to establish a program to reward members of the agriculture industry who agree to meet certain water protection standards.

The voluntary program will give farm operators who adopt practices from the Clean Water Act (CWA) an exemption from future state and federal water quality standards for a certain period of time. The exemption period could last as long as 10 years. The CWA regulates pollutant discharges into U.S. waters and quality standards for surface waters.

read the rest here.

 

3 Days in Nablus, West Bank

Alexei Navalny’s Russia

For the last few years, a blogger in Russia has been using the written word to motivate political change. Alexei Navalny, who is a lawyer by day and blogs in his spare time, helped affect the outcome of a recent election.

Read more about Navalny here.

Navalny is seen here in a Reuters photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VII Photo also has some interesting and engaging photos that were taken of Navalny earlier this year by Stefano De Luigi. The VII photo gallery can be seen here: http://viiphoto.wg.picturemaxx.com/series/1.1974

 

 

Writers Live Their Craft

Most writers will agree that you need a regimen of some kind. I have to agree. Whether you’re a novelist, a journalist, or somewhere in between. A good place to start when you sit down to write is to put your phone away. Since most of us now have phones with email, your cell can be a major distraction. If you can train yourself not to pick it up and look at it every time you get a text, voicemail, or email, then great. But you might have to start with literally hiding or turning your phone off.

Actually, distractions in general are the first things you need to single out and eliminate or avoid to be more focused. In my mind, it goes hand in hand with developing a regimen or schedule for writing.

My experience has been that the more I hone in on the times of day when I am most productive writing (also very important), the more I find lots  of little things that can be potentially disruptive. Early morning when my husband has already left for work is a good time to write. Late evening when I have calmed down from the day is also a good time.

So what can be disruptive? Being in the middle of other people’s routines, for one. Trying to write when it’s actually time to be doing something else (like mealtime) can stop you from doing any real work. I have also found that writing too late at night can gradually wear me down. Going to sleep at a reasonable time whenever possible is always a good idea. Get up super early in the morning and write when you’re fresh, but don’t sacrifice your mental and physical health so you can write. Getting enough sleep is one of the most important things you can do for yourself.

Another important part of a regimen is having something specific you are working on or doing every time you sit down to write. Sometimes I sit down to write a blog entry. I don’t try to do anything else. Other times I sit down to write a book review or an article based on an interview or an event. Do one thing at a time, and do it well.

Physical comfort is another part of being productive when you write. If you’re someplace where you feel uncomfortable, it might be harder for you. You might do better with a lot of hustle and bustle (coffee shops) or you might prefer the most quiet environment possible (home). Pay attention to what helps you be productive, and then pick a time of day to work in that environment–no matter what you’re working on. I discovered that I can be very productive for about 2 hours straight at a local coffee shop near my house between the hours of about 9:00-11:30a.m. By about noon it gets way too rowdy, but before that it’s just right.

The hardest part about being a productive writer is doing the actual work of writing. But developing a routine or a regimen is immensely helpful–give it a try.

International Literary Festival Sweeps through NYC

By Genevieve Long Belmaker for The Epoch Times

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/55809/

NEW YORK—Literary luminaries and their admirers gathered in New York City all last week for a series of events, lectures, and presentations. It was the seventh year that the PEN World Voices Festival has brought poets, authors, and writers together.

The festival schedule boasted a wide array of lectures, discussions, and gatherings of all sizes.

Some of the events, including opening night events on New Yorks’ waterfront, feature world-famous authors and poets. Among them were Gioconda Belli, Iva Bittová, Mircea Cartarescu, Deborah Eisenberg, Evan Fallenberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Agi Mishol, Amélie Nothomb, Salman Rushdie, Wallace Shawn, Vladimir Sorokin, and Zha Jianying.

According to PEN, the festival included over 100 writers from 40 countries who came to New York City “to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice as a bold and vital element of public discourse.” Part of PEN’s mission, and running themes throughout the festival, include freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

During a talk on April 26 entitled “Solidarity with the Hungarian Theatre,” the discussion centered around the state of Hungarian theater and the performing arts industry at large. Featured speakers included Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó and Romanian-born Hungarian philosopher and essayist, G.M. Tamas.

During the discussion, Mundruczó repeatedly stated that the funding for the Hungarian filmmaking industry, which used to be largely state-subsidized, has dried up following recent sweeping changes in the government.

“The funding [for arts] was broken not because of government, but because it was corrupt,” said Mundruczó, who was speaking within the context of the political changes in Hungary. The country signed a new constitution yesterday.

G.M. Tamas, who is known for taking provocative positions on sensitive issues in his essays and writing, added that on top of Hungary’s new constitution, there is a controlling media law document that is over 200 pages long. He said it controls multiple aspects related to freedom of speech, from the dramatic arts to the media. Tamas warned that beyond that, there are also problems with the new constitution.

At another April 26, event Russian poets Igor Belov and Ksenia Shcherbino were joined by pianist Svetlana Smolina. Smolina performed selections from Russian composers—including some favorites from Rachmaninoff—in between poetry readings in Russian by Belov and Shcherbino.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE

Remembering Chris and Tim (via CJ Chivers)

http://cjchivers.com/post/4833123684/in-libya-remembering-chris-tim
In Libya: Remembering Chris & Tim.

Evan Hill of Al Jazeera wrote of the memorial service last night in Benghazi for Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington. Read it here. It includes this:

A reporter from the AFP news agency stepped forward to read from Gustave Mahler’s 9th Symphony,* a selection for Hondros, who was known for his love of classical music.

“Often I think they’ve gone outside / Soon they will get back home again!/ The day is lovely. Don’t be anxious, / They’re only taking a long walk / …. They’ve only gone out before us, / And will not long to come home again. / We’ll catch up with them on yonder heights / In the sunshine / The day is fine on yonder heights.”

To all who attended and participated, thank you. Thank you as well to Evan for writing something down.

*The recommendation that Mahler’s verse be read was made by Stephanie Sinclair of VII, who remembered that Chris had sent her these words some time back, when she was grieving a death in her own family. Thank you, Stephanie.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Odd Anderson/AFP, who rushed to the ceremony after riding back from Misurata on the Ionian Spirit, the vessel that carried Chris and Tim away from the siege.

The Trick of the Story Angle

Think about telling a story to someone. It could be anything: a car wreck you saw, the rude waiter who shocked your dinner party with his behavior, the job that’s just killing you, etc.

Now think again, and ask yourself a question. Why do so many stories we tell have such a negative angle? Consumers of the news, which is roughly about 75-80% of Americans, complain that the news is too negative. The news biz even has the dark, cynical expression: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Think of Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese tsunami, the recent storms in the US.

Human drama, misery, suffering, actions in the midst of chaos, salvation (personal or collective), and rising from the ashes of destruction are recurring themes in human culture. They appear in literature, art, movies, television, music, folk tales and fables, and on and on.

So if human beings are so stuck on misery, does a reporter always have to find the story angle that’s negative? I say the answer is no.

Yesterday an editor asked me to write about Earth Day, which sounded like a mind-numbing topic, and extremely vague. I couldn’t imagine anything with less drama than “a story about Earth Day.” But as a journalist, you have to be willing to find the story worth telling in everything you encounter, no matter how small.

I started by researching Earth Day websites, and almost fell asleep. So I called the organization Earth Day Network to ask a few questions. I had no idea what to ask, since their website was so dense it was hard to narrow it down. In the end, I found out that this organization is doing something called “A Billion Acts of Green.” They are serving as a database for people to log their environmentally friendly actions, which they will take to a once-a-decade UN climate meeting in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro.

It seems like there is no drama and no interesting angle in a story like this, until you think of the devastating impact that humans have had on the earth through industry, pollution, and just being humans. That’s the downside, that’s the blood for the lead.

But the real lead here is that there are still people who believe they can change things. Earth Day Network hopes there are at least 1 billion people willing to reduce their carbon footprint. If that kind of optimism can’t be called dramatic, I don’ t know what can.

One View on the Future of the Media Industry

By Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. He is the co-author, with Bill Kovach, of “Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload.”

Five myths about the future of journalism

There are few things journalists like to discuss more than, well, themselves and the long-term prospects for their industry. How long will print newspapers survive? Are news aggregation sites the future? Or are online paywalls — such as the one the New York Times just launched — the way to go? As media organizations plot their future, it’s worth discarding some misconceptions about what it will take to keep the press from becoming yesterday’s news.

***READ ROSENTIEL’S 5 POINTS HERE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-future-of-journalism/2011/04/05/AF5UxiuC_story.html

Quotes are the Voices in a Story

Reporters often talk amongst themselves about what makes a great quote in a story. For readers, a good quote is a voice that resonates with the topic at hand.  A great quote can make you hear the music of the human voice, even though you’re reading. Without good quotes you can have an article, but you don’t have a real story–just some dry facts strung together.

My favorite quotes are the ones that have emotion, life, and personality. I hate nothing more than doing an interview and only getting quotes that read like a press release. If I wanted to quote a press release, there are a million of them out there.

Think about your spouse coming home from work to describe a dramatic day at the office, but without quoting any of the participants in the incident. The story would lack context and relevance. You would struggle to connect to it. And let’s face it–every story that is worth telling has drama of some kind. That’s why they are told.

When you’re putting an article together, you usually have several quotes to choose from in your notes. Hopefully you have them written down so you can quickly browse through and see what sticks out. That’s part one of getting good quotes: doing good interviews. Remember when you’re interviewing to listen for what sound like good quotes and get those down, even at the expense of other things the person is saying. If you don’t understand something, ask the interviewee to backtrack and repeat whatever they just said that was so great. Nine times out of ten, the repeated quote will be verbatim the same, or better.

Once you’ve done your research and interviews and are ready to write your story and are browsing your quotes, mark the ones you think work best. You’ll have  a different perspective on things than when you did the interview(s). If there is an important point you missed, call the person to clarify. (Always get phone numbers, not just email).

I always write my first draft of my article without quotes. That first draft is my perspective on the story according to what I have heard, read, and witnessed related to the story. Then I go back through the article and start putting quotes in where I want to punctuate and emphasize the story’s main theme. My second draft is always the story according to the people I interviewed. Then I go through one more time and filter out all the repetition, confusing stray concepts, and hyperbole. The third draft is like looking at the story through a pair of binoculars: one lens is what I see, the other is what the voices in the story see. It’s never the entire story, but it should always be a clear view of a certain angle.

The worst mistake you can make with a basic news or feature story is to introduce your first quote too late in the article. I think people need to hear a voice other than the reporter’s early on, or they might stop reading. If it’s an important story, it’s a shame to risk losing your reader to boredom.

For example, this article: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china/wife-seeks-release-of-husband-and-lawyer-in-china-54591.html is about an extremely important topic of persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. But the reporters don’t let the main character speak until the fifth paragraph. Personally, I am straining to hear that voice from the first sentence because it’s such a compelling story.

Sometimes reporters have to deal with constraints and they can’t pepper their story with quotes. Sometimes it’s a matter of choice or style. There are stories which can even call for a quote as the first sentence. These cases have to be incredibly compelling and necessary, though. Beginning a story with a quote is generally not recommended.

This story about a man in Tanzania who got a cow from an Epoch Times reader is charming and full of lively quotes that bring the main character to life: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/life/a-tanzanian-elder-who-was-given-a-cow-by-an-epoch-times-reader-shares-his-good-fortune-54614.html.

You can almost hear him, can’t you? That’s the power of using quotes well: you bring the story and the people in it directly to the reader.

 

Don’t Write in Spite of Your Life

Yesterday I saw an article on the Internet about a list of the ten jobs with the highest rate of depression. Of course, writers/artists/creative careers was on the list (all lumped together). I have also heard many different talks and seminars in which the speaker discusses how to work around your life to be a writer.

It seems like there’s a message going around that nearly everyone is buying into: if you want your creative life to be your career, you have to deny your current life to “make it.”

This train of thought bothers me. To begin with, I’d venture to guess that every creative person works partially from their life experiences. For me personally, I wouldn’t have the life I have as a writer and journalist if it weren’t for the part of my life that pays (all of) the bills, provides stability, and gives me a robust environment to interact with other people.

Most creative types probably end up feeling frustrated because they want to put 100 percent of their time and energy into their craft. I have had those moments more than once. But on second thought, I am extremely grateful for the life I have, which allows me to also have a life as a writer. The two are in harmony, not in competition. And if someday I “make it,” whatever that means, maybe I will be able to devote my time to this craft full-time. But the moment I am in now is so rich and full of possibilities, I’d be crazy not to savor and appreciate it.