Lincoln City

I don’t know what it was like in Lincoln City, but here in Sioux County, Iowa, the Fourth of July was filled with unique Americana. We spent time at a demolition derby, and hung out with local teens at “Cruise Night.” It was truly an all-American experience out here in the land where agriculture is king. Below are two samples of our work from Iowa that I wanted to share with you. The first is my attempt at good photography at the demolition derby.

The second is an audio walk and talk between myself and Andrew as we strolled through the middle of cruise night.

Check out a sneak peak of how Lincoln City answered our national question: How would you rebuild the world with technology?

Jace Schwartz and Susan Smith talk about the generation lap they experience as mother and son. In this special sneak peak of their conversation they are talking about text messaging.

Our week in Syracuse is almost over, and if you’ve been following our twitter feeds, you’ll already know that it has been very successful. Of the 5 videos and 1 multimedia gallery we have planned to produce from our trip to Lincoln City, we have brought 4 to the 99% complete mark. Now we wait just for our final branding and graphical design so that our projects will fit the final theme of the site when we publish.

On Monday morning we leave for Hopkinsville, KY. We will be doing many of the same things we did in Lincoln City while we are there, but with a new twist. Hopkinsville is a military community and we intend to find stories about youth and technology in that setting.

Much more to come. Keep checking our blogs and our homepage.

Here are the results from our survey of Lincoln City High School students. We had 43 responses. Click here to take the survey yourself.

Some interesting results include:

• When asked what media they use first each day, not a single student said newspapers.
• The first thing they said they used each day was their cell phones.
• Most internet access came through a shared, family computer
• Desktops were more common than laptops
• Students said they were were most willing to give up video games.

Andrew and I just wanted to take a break from packing to make sure we gave shout outs to all those people who’ve helped us during our time in Lincoln City. You’ve made it incredibly successful and educational for us. I hope I don’t leave anybody out of this list:

Christy, Dave, Heather, Barton, Allyson, Roger, Kip, Kaity, Kira, Lori, Jordan, Mark, Brian, Jim, Casey, Jace, Susan, Majalise, Seth, Dee, Dale, The Lunch Bunch, Scott, Taft High School, Career Tech High School, Chinook Winds, Kiwanis, Tsunami Coffee, The News Guard, and everybody at the beach from all over the country.

Thanks again!

Sunset Over Pacific (Phil took that one! Hurray for his one DSLR picture that worked)

But this is not the end… Andrew and I will keep on posting as we get our content edited down and our stories perfected. We also hope to keep in touch with most of you, and invite any of you to contribute your thoughts to our blog. We both believe that our interaction over the past 11 days has been more than that of journalist-subject. We have become friends.

Our return interview with Roger Robertson in the morning, on KBCH 1400 AM.
(If media player does not load, try refreshing, our apologies)

Andrew and I are spending our last day on the Oregon coast trying to gather the last bits of content we will need to complete our stories. Currently we are outside Taft high school waiting for the end of a Safety “code yellow” and drug dog search so that we might go in and finish photography and videography of two of our high school subjects.
Sitting here blogging from our mobile devices and in real time reminds me that I am very much a part of the story we are covering. It is as interesting as it is unorthodox. Journalism usually preaches separation, but this two-faced project requires as much performance as it does reporting. Twittering, blogging, posting our dreams for the future of journalism all the while sheding light on the topic.

What was your last text message?

During our prep/training for News 21, one of the ideas that continued to get kicked-around, but eventually hit the cutting room floor, was asking people, “What is your most recent text message?”

We decided to re-kindle that idea and spent Taft high school’s lunch hour asking students. Here are our findings.

This image and it’s description is from the girl mentioned in my post called “Making Lemonade.”

“I was about to fall asleep when out of no where an idea popped into my head: a self-portrait of me pulling back my scalp to reveal a bees’ hive. I quickly got up and hashed out a few rough sketches before the image eluded me. I woke up the next morning, dusted off my color pencils, and got to work.”

Here also is an image from Kaity’s memory of what our interview looked like. Yeah, that is a picture of us asking her questions. And the quote is right on.

Kaity's memory of the interview

Today our amount of content has surpassed our abilty to edit it, probably because today we split up to cover more ground.
We have been working to continue editing on the piece from Kaity Curry, as well as following a family from the casino whose patriarch repairs slot machines. Later in the day we worked to gather more b-roll for the story about tech punishments in the adopted family and another family sit down interview.
We promise to post more dynmic content tomorrrow as we wade through the fifty gigs of camera cards and 2 hours of tape from today.