On his lunch break, Creative Review’s Gavin Lucas came across an uproarious street scene. According to Lucas, it “turns out that long established Soho record shop, Harold Moores is closing for a re-fit. In order to prepare the shop for its revamp, staff are chucking out thousands and thousands of records (well over 20,000 by my reckoning)—which were dumped, rather unceremoniously, in a skip outside the premises.” Watch the vinyl enthusiasts circle the dumpster like vultures around the carcass of a gazelle:

(Thanks, Hardformat.)

Source: Creative Review

Earlier this month Salt Lake City Weekly profiled Sending Messages, a candid podcast series composed of personal narratives, poetry, short fiction, spoken word, and interviews created by students at a youth corrections facility in Utah. Rather than talking about gadgets and Justin Bieber’s haircut, the students pour heart and personal experience into the podcasts.  Gavin Sheehan reports:

Episodes have covered a wide range of emotional topics touching on family, high school, nightmares, addiction, new experiences, death, love and, most importantly, looking ahead at life to come. The stories don’t glorify or sensationalize bad experiences and are written with an audience in mind that never has experienced anything like these students have. Stories and poems are carefully crafted to get the point across with various perspectives from teenage minds that have undergone more than some adults will in their lives—baring all as a creative and sometimes therapeutic outlet, while serving as thought-provoking listening for the audience.

Listen to the four episodes of Sending Messages.

Source: Salt Lake City Weekly

Image by topgold, licensed under Creative Commons.

Earlier this summer, Village Voice staff writer Elizabeth Dwoskin filed a story about Debrahlee Lorenzana, who had been fired from her job at Citibank because, according to her arbitration suit against the company, her body was too distracting for her male co-workers and managers. They had repeatedly attempted to control her wardrobe choices, which were not particularly revealing, it seems. The story went viral and was covered by major news outlets all over the world. Writing recently for the Columbia Journalism Review, Dwoskin remarks,

I watched this unfold in real-time—a punch-drunk, surreal, I-don’t-want-to jinx-myself-but-I-don’t-think-this-will-ever-happen-to-me-again sort of experience— extremely pleasurable, and also slightly disturbing. As a journalist, you spend so much time plugging away at stories that you hope will impact society. Then, suddenly, you hit on a sexy banker who lost her job, and, delighted as you are, you also can’t help but wonder: Is this what it takes to be talked about all over the world?

As Dwoskin points out, this is the weird reality of writing in an internet-mediated news culture. New stories can live and die by the page view. Notoriously, the blog Gawker once made editorial strategy of bonuses paid based on the number of views their stories received. That has changed a bit, as Gawker itself reported earlier this year. These days, bonuses are tied to the number of unique monthly visitors each site in the Gawker media empire garnishes over its monthly target. Exceed the expected number of visitors, and a particular site’s editor-in-chief has a bonus to divide among the site’s writers. I can’t declare this, prima facie, bad policy, but it certainly suggests the sort of viral-ness anxiety that Dwoskin is talking about.

In the end, even Dwoskin’s original story is in some way about the “viral” nature of certain kinds of superficial information and attitudes, as the alleged sexual appeal of Debrahlee Lorenzana increasingly became the central factor in her comfort at her job and for her professional prospects at Citibank. She tried to dress down, tried to appear less attractive (as her bosses apparently demanded), but her job became harder and harder to do. For all the questions about Lorenzana’s character that have cropped up in the aftermath, you can’t deny that her appearance came to dominate the story of her employment in a way we haven’t quite heard of before.

Sources: Columbia Journalism Review, Gawker

Image by Ivan Walsh, licensed under Creative Commons.

Let’s say you’re the art director at a small press that publishes fantasy fiction exclusively. A hefty tome entitled something like The Elysian Gems sits on the desk in the art department. Now, your dilemma is that you can’t decide between the cover image that depicts a dragon and the one that depicts a group of drunken dwarves verbally abusing a haughty, teetotaling elf king. If only you had a statistical breakdown of the previous year’s trends in fantasy fiction cover art! You would know which choice was more original.

Well, worry no more. The folks at the publisher Orbit have released a chart contrasting 2008 fantasy cover art trends to those in 2009. The results are, uh, revelatory. For instance, the use of swords in cover art has declined considerably (GASP, no!). The appearance of bows and arrows also appears to be down, while dragons—reliable as always—have held steady. Orbit also began tracking some new visual elements this year, such as my two favorites: Hooded Figures and Damsels (No Distress). It’s probably the most advanced scientific project of the last twenty or thirty years.

(Thanks, GalleyCat.)

Source: Orbit

Image by ttarasiuk, licensed under Creative Commons.