The Road to Chautauqua

Left my home in Toledo for a cottage along Chautauqua Lake in western New York. It's a four-hour drive - essentially like driving to Chicago.

What waits for me there is a design internship at the Institution's daily newspaper. I'll give you the details some time tomorrow. Off to New York I go until the end of August!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Memoriam: Thank you for the journey, Roger Ebert

Image
Each week, my routine was the same. After watching the latest offering from Hollywood on the big screen, I composed my thoughts and analysis and wrote my review. Then, I read what Roger Ebert thought about the movie. This final step was important to me — week in and week out. If Ebert loved a movie I disliked, why was that? He always provided great commentary and gave me reasons to admire a certain film more or dislike it more. He has always been an important validator for me. It’s like we had a conversation about a movie each week. And now I’m on my own. I was devastated to hear about the loss of Ebert. He taught us all about movies and life. The New York Times called him “ A Critic for the Common Man .” He was the consummate writer, journalist, film critic and human being. Ebert just celebrated his 46th year as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times . I always admired Ebert’s ability to draw on his life experiences when reviewing a film. The first line of his 2011 mem...
Read more

Recent Star cuts represent growing trend

Post details: • Kansas City Star announced job cuts • Graphic designer creates Google Map to track cuts On Tuesday’s front page (6/17), the Kansas City Star staffer Dan Margolies wrote the Missouri-based newspaper is cutting 120 jobs (about 10 percent of its work force) – about 20 to 22 positions are expected to be eliminated in the newsroom. “These cuts are part of the way we must respond as we strategically realign our company for success in this digital age,” said Star Publisher Mark Zieman, who also called the move “a painful but necessary step,” in a memo to employees Monday. Zieman cited reductions in revenue because of increased competition and the current economic downturn as reasons for the cut. The Star is “struggling to replace lost print advertising revenue quickly enough with new online revenue,” the article stated. (Having one of the worst designed newspaper Web sites in the country and one that is hard to navigate, I can see why the Star is having problems online.) Oth...
Read more

Week one in Chautauqua

Image
Looking out the window of the tour, I thought to myself, "Where am I? What is this place?" That was last Tuesday afternoon, June 16th. Today, I'm still asking that same question to myself - if only to a smaller extent. I am spending the summer as a design editor at the Chautauqua Institution's daily newspaper, the Chautauquan Daily . I'll be here at this utopia-like place until the end of August. That may answer the first question I asked myself, but there's still the second... Trying to describe the Institution is very hard. Over dinner Tuesday night, Institution president Tom Becker gave us a better idea of the place. It's like chocolate in that it's incomparable to anything else, he said. For me, Chautauqua is like many things: a resort, a summer home or lake house, a small college town, Disney World and, in a sense, Monaco. On Monday, resident archivist and historian Jon Schmitz stopped by the newsroom and helped describe the Institution anecdo...
Read more