Exploring the future of electronic publishing
Palak Patel chats with Kelly Stout, senior editor at Gizmodo Media Group. In this podcast interview, Stout talks about her time with Gawker, the pace of covering politics online, the pros and cons of a digital platform in modern journalism, and online comment moderation.
This interview was recorded on April 5, 2017.
As a huge fan of Katie Couric and her journalistic work, I was happy to discover that she has her own podcast where she explores the lighter side of her journalistic personality. The podcast takes a more casual look at the interview medium, and Couric definitely shows more of her own personality through these podcasts than her more straight-forward journalism interviews.
I found the episodes I listened to very engaging and funny. I didn’t realize how much I was learning throughout the interview because of Couric’s own ease with the process. Her honesty throughout the show, about her experiences as a female reporter, a mother, a woman, are inspiring, and her guests are equally engaging. Couric has a way of making topics that might be difficult or boring intensely interesting through her choice of interviewees.
One particular brightspot was Couric’s interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus from last year where they both discuss the show Veep and the impact it has had on the 2016 election. They also talk about the optimism they both have concerning Hillary Clinton. Couric’s interview with Louis-Dreyfus is light and funny, but not the entire podcast. She then speaks with journalist and writer Rebecca Traister to gain a different perspective on the election and the rise of Hillary Clinton. They both frankly discuss sexism in their field and the way the press has carefully constructed Clinton throughout her time in the spotlight. Both women weren’t afraid to be critical, but they were also very casual in their conversation.
For my final website project for this course, I’m interested in creating a personal website for myself. As a publishing student with a number of interests, I think it would be beneficial to use this website project as a way to create a space where I can display my strengths in a way that also showcases my skill with web design. Web resumes have become a new and different way to display your resume to potential employers, and many of the websites I looked at showed unique web design and considerable skill. While I personally don’t think I can create a website that is technologically complex, I think it would be helpful nonetheless for me to create a more significant online presence for myself outside of LinkedIn.
Ideally I will be able to use some variation of my name for my domain name, but my name is fairly common so it may be difficult to find a domain name that makes sense for a personal website for me.
The target audience of this website are potential employers. I hope to be able to include it with on my resume and in any future job applications to supplement my regular application. I would like to be able to include a plug-in of some kind that would make my website easily downloadable as a PDF document, if possible.
Since this is a personal website, there would be no reason for other people to provide content or comments to my site. As such, it would be a fairly stationary site with pages to show my credits and a page to contact me. I’m looking at other personal websites currently for other pages that I could add to my website.
I haven’t decided on a theme yet, but I want to keep my site simple. I would also like to be able to match my website aesthetically with my resume by using similar fonts and color schemes.
Good web design has become increasingly more important in the world of publishing. Your website needs to match your aesthetic, and a good website helps create a specific look that shows readers what matters to the company. Woven Magazine is an online and print magazine that focuses on the stories and interests of creative people. Their focus on creativity and storytelling works directly with their web design. They feature clean design with large images that capture the reader’s attention.
What captures the eye upon opening wovenmagazine.com is the large image that dominates the page. It’s clean and shows a physical issue of the magazine on a table. This tells me what the magazine looks like, while also showing objects like the camera that show what types of things are important to the magazine. The arrow in the bottom right corner tells me to scroll down to see more, which makes for simple maneuvering and management of the webpage.
As you scroll down, the page changes to feature tiled images with small amounts of text to indicate what the article or section is about. The tiled images are still quite large, but the design is clean, with plenty of white space. This design follows all the way to the bottom of the webpage, which shows nice continuity. As you scroll down, you also notice the sticky header at the top of the page, which makes navigating the website easy as well. If you click on the hamburger icon, the entire webpage turns into the menu, which features large page titles for easy navigation.
Overall, I really like Woven Magazine’s website. They use a lot of design features that I personally like, specifically the use of large images that take up much of the page. The sticky header is also helpful. Woven Magazine also uses clean typography and doesn’t bog the page down with too much text or images, allowing white space to work for the website instead of against it.
We’ve all seen the movies by now: Alien, Interstellar, Avatar, 2001: A Space Odyssey. All of these movies involve shooting people into deep space, allowing them to travel far distances and learn about the universe. Of course, these trips are often longer than your normal trip up-state. It takes years to get up that far into space. This is no problem for sci-fi, though. Just put these astronauts into cryosleep.
Cryosleep is the process of putting a person into suspended animation, usually through a drug or a hibernation chamber that is generally very cold. While this sounds very science fiction, it is actually closer to reality than we would think. The word “cryosleep” doesn’t actually describe the process that scientists are working toward. Scientists are working on technology that will help put a human being into a state of unconsciousness similar to hibernation. This is more accurately described as torpor.
While we haven’t reached the levels of sci-fi films, scientists and doctors have found positive effects from therapeutic hypothermia, which is the process of cooling a body down to enable it to heal. The positive effects of therapeutic hypothermia have scientists believing more and more in the possibilities of torpor, or cryosleep. The idea here is that if you cool a body down, it will have more time to heal. According to Matteo Cerri, a neurophysiologist and hibernation researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy, “If you lower the temperature of the brain, the neurons can use what they have for a longer time.”
There are obviously still problems with this process, though. Scientists have been testing out methods of therapeutic hypothermia with mixed results. Ice packs, cooling saline and RhinoChill (a cooling aerosol that is inhaled) have all shown both positive and negative results when tested out. The issue is that it is hard to cool the body without the body going into hypothermia, at which point the body will begin to fight back against the cooling in order to stay alive. This also doesn’t account for the fact that scientists have only been able to cool people down for up to 72 hours. And that there are often negative side effects, like nerve damage.
This is why scientists have to move more toward torpor and less toward therapeutic hypothermia. Torpor, like animal hibernation, is the process in which the body itself works to cool down, so it won’t fight back against the cooling. The goal is to figure out a way for humans to go into a natural state of hibernation. In order to make that happen, though, scientists have to gain a better understanding of what happens to animals internally when they go into hibernation, and then figure out a way to mimic that process in a human body.
While scientists are still working on these advances, we can only imagine what it would mean for the rest of the population once we have this technology. Not only will we have a way to explore deep space, but here on earth the possibilities are endless. We can put humans into cryosleep to prevent death when transplants are needed, or if medical advancements haven’t come far enough to cure an illness. It would help humans heal from serious injuries in a more precise way by allowing the body more time to heal itself. Until then, we can keep watching our sci-fi films and hope for the best outcome.
You must be logged in to post a comment.