A welcome home meal: grilled salmon with Sauvignon Blanc June 23, 2009

When Patrick is home on the weekends from his law internship, I like to make some nice meals and try new wines.

We recently bought a bottle of Murphy-Goode Sauvignon Blanc (The Fume) that we’ve been wanting to drink and I had some salmon to cook, so I decided to come up with a meal that would feature both.

Here’s what I made: caesar salad with whole wheat croutons and a light caesar dressing, grilled salmon with key lime butter and a dessert of grilled fruit with honey yogurt sauce.

Grilled salmon with key lime butter, caesar salad and Murphy-Goode Sauvignon Blanc

The wine really brought out some spiciness in the caesar dressing, which I liked. The citrus aroma of the Fume also went nicely with the key lime flavors of the salmon.

I got a nice taste  of grapefruit from the wine, and  I liked this Sauvignon Blanc better than another I drank recently – the 2007 Cakebread Sauvignon Blanc. The Murphy-Goode Fume has a better balance and palate to it and is my new Sauvignon Blanc of choice.

But the grilled fruit with yogurt sauce was not the best with the wine. Some of the grilled plums were a bit tart. The yogurt had some tartness of its own and when combined with the wine it was all a bit much.

So the dessert is not something I would repeat with this wine. It’s not that either one was bad – they just weren’t great together. And this Sauvignon Blanc deserves to go with something great!

An online clip archive June 18, 2009

I’m using some of my post-graduation free time to create a bit of an online catalog of my clips. I think it’s important to have these online as I look for freelance/job opportunities and I think most are not accessible at The Palm Beach Post Web site anymore. I’ll put them up over time, in a series of posts. Today I’m just putting up some fun clips.

To start, here are some of my favorite stories from the years:

First, there’s the story I wrote about a celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe at a Catholic Church in South Florida. It was such an interesting experience, to see the way these people were celebrating their heritage, culture and religion. But the day was equally a celebration of the community – the children who’ve grown up together, the older people who’ve endured long lives of hard work to make it in a new country. It was a hopeful scene and one that made me appreciate the diversity of our state.

One morning while I worked the Sunday shift at the Delray Beach Bureau of The Palm Beach Post, my editor called to tell me he’d heard someone was moving a house downtown. So I drove down there and, sure enough, there were a bunch of people already getting drunk and cheering for this house that was inching it’s way down the street. I can only imagine how long they watched that house moving along…

I also wrote a story about a pro-am tennis tournament in Delray Beach. The focus of this story was former pro Anna Kournikova playing on a doubles team with former President George H.W. Bush (that’s the older Bush, in case you’re confused). Anyways, Kournikova served a ball right into Bush’s back! At first I was horrified, along with the rest of the crowd, I suspect. He’s not exactly young and that was a fast ball! But he laughed it off and made a little joke and then the whole arena started laughing. Kournikova was mortified but she got back to playing – more carefully this time!

I’ll probably add some more of these clips as time goes by. It’s nice to look back and see what I’ve done.

A blast from the past

So I Googled myself the other day to see how many of the stories I’ve written over the years are still online. A good number of them are, actually, but mostly not on the Web sites of the various publications for which I wrote them.

A lot of my old stories – mostly the ones about people and the restaurant reviews – were posted on blogs or company Web sites. It’s neat to see how my stories can live on like this, even when they’re not accessible anymore through the Web site of The Palm Beach Post, etc.

But I think what’s surprised me the most is that it’s the most simple, everyday stories that are still around. I guess that’s because they’re the ones most about people’s lives and they strike a chord with people. Plus, they’re good memories for the subjects of the articles.

Another very surprising thing is that I’m finding my old restaurant reviews on Web sites based all over the country! This does not really make sense to me…but okay.

This review of The N9nz Restaurant & Bar in Boca Raton now appears on a Web site called Austin360.com. So does this review of Sunny Italy Restaurant & Pizzeria Inc. in Wellington. How bizarre is that?

A few things… February 27, 2009

Hi!

Just a few things to keep you updated about. There have apparently been some delays (grrrr!) on the part of the person creating our web site with Florida Fly-Ins stories. You can still view projects from past years here, (sorry, none of my work is there) but the 2008 Fly-Ins content is not available online yet.

Also, I’m now working part time writing news and feature stories on medical research and people whose lives show how health care can make such an amazing difference! I’m really enjoying branching out into this new (for myself) niche of journalism and I’m learning so much. I’m also quite grateful to have a writing job in a time when so many reporters are losing theirs. Like the poor people at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. So sad!

I’ll update this page from time to time with new info, but mostly it’s an online archive of my multimedia projects. Hope you enjoy them!

I’m back! October 13, 2008

Readers – please forgive my lengthy hiatus. I promise I was busy while I was gone – the past several months have been very exciting – I finished planning my wedding, got married and moved, all while taking graduate classes. I survived, though, and I’m here to update you on my latest journalistic endeavour.

Last week I returned from a week-long trip to Guatemala with the Florida Fly-Ins program. Fifteen of us – professional journalists and journalism students – converged on the the region of Zacapa for the purpose of gathering enough quotes, info, photos and video to create an online magazine about the hunger and malnutrition that are so prevalent in the area. Each person will produce a story (written, photo or video) exploring the topic from a different angle.

I will write a story about 21-year-old Jose Salguero, a young missionary who treks out into the mountains and jungles of Guatemala to find starving kids and bring them back to the nutritional center at Esperanza de Vida (translation: Hope of Life), the organization for which he works. I don’t want to give away too much now – but the story is really amazing. Jose has been through so much in his own life, and the tangled web of social problems in Guatemala really make his ‘rescue missions’ more complicated than they should be.

Right now we’re in the stage of putting our stories together. In December we’ll hold an exhibit displaying our work, and in January we’ll publish the magazine online. You can view projects from past years by clicking on the link above.

A semester of video April 30, 2008

So, my class has spent the whole semester learning about telling stories through video. I’ve definitely gained more confidence in my video skills this semester, but I do have room to improve. I want to make my shooting and editing skills more polished, and I’d really like to explore more of the video editing programs out there. The two videos I made this semester are decent for first attempts, but there is a lot of potential for improvement.

I have enjoyed our class’ exploration of longer films to help us gain perspective about storytelling in shorter formats, which is what I will do the most as a journalist. As much as I loathed doing it the first time, I now see how making a log of shots before capturing the video from the tape is beneficial. The same goes for writing a script. It can be tedious, but it does make the rest of the editing process easier. And, I think the more I edit video, the better I will become at identifying the best shots and writing a script that really facilitates the storytelling process.

I also appreciate the intro we had to making Flash projects. It was quite fun, and I see a lot of ways I can use this knowledge in the future.

All in all, I really value the skills and concepts I’ve learned this semester and I anticipate many opportunities to hone these skills in the future.

Lending a Helping Hand

For our final project, my classmate Shifen and I decided to make a video about healthcare in the Gainesville area. While I knew before starting this project that there were big problems with the healthcare system in our country, I had never spent much time with people who lacked access to good healthcare – or at least not people who shared this information about themselves with me.

Shifen and I got in touch with the director of a local free clinic (called Helping Hands clinic) that serves people in need of care. He invited us to come and see how things were run. We met Terry, a man who volunteers at and receives care at the clinic. His story seemed interesting, and he agreed to be interviewed on camera next time we came. Terry was sick the next two weeks, so the time we had planned to spend talking with him we spent watching how the clinic worked and talking with other patients and volunteers.

It was good to learn about the challenges faced by people without healthcare access. Ultimately, Terry’s story still turned out to be the best, so we focused on it most. But, I appreciated the chance to learn more about the issue.

Assessing a Flash presentation March 12, 2008

I have to say, I’m not that impressed with MSNBC’s Presidential Candidates and Issues Matrix. The matrix is a grid representing each of the past and present candidates in the 2008 presidential race, and where they all stand on five big issues. There is a lot of information in this package, and the creators did a good job of keeping it fairly contained. I like how info boxes about each of the candidates and about the issues appear when the mouse lingers near a candidate or issue. Like this:

But, I think there is too much information the users don’t really need and not enough that they do. Example: all the candidates, even those who are no longer in the race, are still included (along with their descriptions and all their positions on the issues). Example: look at all the blank spaces in that screen shot above! Do we really care about those former candidates and their positions anymore? I’d say not. Their mug shots and info boxes make the page too cluttered with old news.

Conversely, the “All User’s Ratings” page is lacking and, to me, a bit boring. Here, users can click on a week and see how other users have rated each candidate on each issue. A color scale represents the degree of support each candidate has received from users on each issue. But, the color scale is too limited. It consists of dark reds and greens. Because some of the colors are so dark, it’s just too difficult to tell where most of the squares fall on the color scale. As you may be able to see below, the rating colors do not stand out enough from the black squares on the rest of the page.

When I’m on this page I also want to know how many people have voted on each portion of the issues matrix. For instance, is Hillary Clinton’s user rating on energy based on one person’s vote, or the votes of several hundred people? There’s no way to know on this Web site.

I don’t think this is a Web site people will want to visit more than once and, given the fact that there’s a time element dependent on visitors each week (the voting), that is a problem. The only things that seem to change are candidates’ photos (they get grayed out when the candidates are no longer in the race) and the hard-to-understand color rankings. To me, it just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Newspaper videos February 13, 2008

I found these videos on the Video Journal page of the Spokesman Review’s Web site. It seems like a good source of news videos. I like viewing and critiquing these because, though the nice, fun, human interest stories are great to make and view, a lot of newspapers are also requiring reporters to shoot these more hard news focused videos.

The video called ‘Milk truck crash on Interstate 90‘ is pretty long for the ‘story’ it tells, (a tanker carrying milk on a snowy road slid off the roadway and ended up on its side). People will definitely want to see the crashed tanker and it’s great that the action of getting the tanker upright was caught on film, but really, there is just too much footage of the truck on its side. It’s too repetitive.

Also, the narrator’s voice is far too monotone and he gives too much detail – he loses the viewer. The last thing is that all the footage is of the truck and the road – the reporter should have interviewed SOMEONE: a cop, a witness, the trucker. I must complement the videographer on his very steady hand and clean shots, but those seem to be the only positive aspects of this video. The video gives a chronology of sorts, but doesn’t really tell a story.

Another Spokesman Review video, ‘Helping Others,’ tells a nice story about a teen shoveling snow for people who need a hand. There are some really great shots in this video; I like the ones shot from the ground, which show the subject as he comes into the picture with a shovel or snowblower. The close up on the spinning blades of the snowblower is wonderful. There also is a lot more dialog in this video than in the last. The talking ‘conversation clips’ combined with the outside action make for an interesting mixture of shots.

Lastly, the quality of the audio in this piece is really nice – and the contrast of the bright blue sky and the crisp fresh snow gives it a very clean feel. I’m not sure if this piece really tells a story – though I think it comes close.

A great Web site for video novices January 22, 2008

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything here, but I’m back for another semester of multi-media training! This semester is all about video, a topic that, I will admit, makes me a bit nervous. My past attempts to make good, non-home-movie style videos have not been as successful as I would like.

But, my confidence is bolstered by my accomplishments last semester with photo, audio, editing and Soundslides – overall, I did better than I anticipated.

So – back to video – I LOVE this series of Web sites called ‘Make Internet TV’ (Thanks to my professor, Mindy McAdams for directing us to it). The simple tips are practical and easy for people who want to learn, but don’t have all the money or technical know-how to use lots of extraneous equipment – (use a broom to make a boom mic – use a skateboard to get a good panning shot – my kind of advice!)

And the simplicity of the illustrations makes it all seem so – not scary. As far as instructional Web sites go, I give this one five stars! I have a feeling I’ll be visiting this site many times this semester.