George Washington liked FIGS? 2:30 minute video

1:22 PM ET | permalink

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Pop Goes the Weasel

Pop Goes the Weasel. Not just a silly song about a monkey chasing a weasel, apparently. Some claim it's Cockney rhyming slang for pawning your coat. Coat rhymes with stoat, weasel another word for stoat.

I learned this when Jessie Goldstein and I went to profile pawn shop owner Dave MacArthur. When I was up in Maine this summer, I learned that pawn shops up there were seeing a huge increase in business, people coming in, pawning or selling items to get money for gas and to pay the upcoming winter fuel bills. This was when the price of oil was going through the roof.

I made some calls and found out this was the case with pawn shops across the country. Since March 2008, owners were seeing a record increase in loans... and a lot of it directly traceable to the price of oil.

Continue reading "Pop Goes the Weasel" »

10:03 AM ET | permalink

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The Ballet Class

Two projects for me out of Knight. This is the first. I hope you enjoy it, if anything it reminds me of how much I love going to ballet. In part because the pianist is so wonderful. And how I let work get in the way of class too much. And I also learned to never again shoot anything on an ISO 800 setting on the G9. -- Vikki Valentine

11:54 AM ET | permalink

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COOPERATION

What struck me this week was the challenge of working in a group of four. When I'm reporting for radio, I'm by myself or with a producer, and even if the producer and I split up for some of the reporting, we're usually in synch enough that it's fine, and I usually have time to listen to the tape I didn't gather.

In my group this week, we split up some of the reporting -- I wasn't there for some of the tape-gathering, and we didn't have time to go through the tape in preparing our project. Very scary and frustrating for me!

--Joanne Silberner

5:15 PM ET | permalink

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into the knight

We watched a most incredible slideshow today - the Marlboro Marine by Luis Sinco for the LA Times. It seemed ridiculous in a way to discuss it afterwards. When a work is so powerful it's better to just let it lie still and quiet - at least for awhile. But of course the lights came back on, the mood shifted and we snapped back into our critical, dissecting selves. Now several hours have passed and a curious thing has happened. This was a piece with voice, some music and of course amazing photographs. Sinco's total emersion into his subject's life allowed us to see the pivotal, emotional moments one rarely glimpses. But as I started to say, something interesting has happened in the time since I saw this slideshow which is that I have forgotten most of the photographs, not all but most. What I remember, what continues to resonate through me is the sound of the soldier's voice. The quiet, gravelly quality of it. The rhythm with which he spoke. The description of looking down the barrel of gun at another person and seeing their life flash before your eyes just before you take it. It's been a long time since I've heard something I thought would stick with me for the rest of my life. But today I did. And interestingly it was not on NPR but on a slideshow for the LA Times...

rebecca

5:05 PM ET | permalink

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How to post emphatic video to the blog

To post video:

Upload the video to the knight_training folder on the Titan drive

To export your video from Premiere:

1. Make sure the timeline that contains your final project is selected, then go to the File Menu.
2. Export Movie
3. Give it a name and tell it where to save.
4. Click Settings. The first window that pops up is General.
File Type: QuickTime
Range: Entire Sequence
Export Video: Check
Export Audio: Check
Add to Project When Finished: Check
Embedding Options: Project
5. Next click Video.
Compressor: H.264
Color Depth: Millions of Colors
Frame Size: 640h 360v 16:9
Frame Rate: 29.97fps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Pixels (1.0)
Quality: 100%/High
Data Rate: Recompress: Check Maintain Data Rate
6. Next click Keyframe and Rendering
Bit Depth: Use Project Setting
Fields: Lower Field First
Optimize Stills: Check
(don't mess with Keyframe Options - it's probably grey-ed out anyway)
7. Next click Audio
Compressor: Uncompressed
Sample Rate: 44100Hz
Sample Type: 16-bit

4:54 PM ET | permalink

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Robert Krulwich

I think one of the things that most impresses me about Robert Krulwich is the evident delight he brings to his work. There is a "gosh, that's so interesting" quality to almost everything he does. I'm convinced that to be successful in communicating, you have to have that quality in what you do. You have to make people want to share the journey through a story with you. In a way, the topic doesn't matter, as long as the person talking about it is interesting.

It reminds a bit of how I chose courses in college. I went for the most interesting teachers, no matter what subject they were teaching. That's how I wound up in courses on Swedish History, Gothic Art and Architecture, and Irish Playwrights of the Early 20th Century.

--Joe Palca

4:32 PM ET | permalink

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The Real Deal pt. 2

As promised, here's a link to our McCain youth story.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92633252

Quinn O'Toole

1:28 PM ET | permalink

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The Real Deal

Ok, so it may not be the most creative use of the web ever -- but our group has produced an honest-to-goodness, living-and-breathing npr.org web page. (Okay, it doesn't live and breathe ... but it was kinda fun.)

Monday on ATC, Jeff Brady will report on the McCain campaign's efforts to court young voters -- a bloc that Barack Obama has a pretty strong hold on. The web page that goes with that story was written, produced, and entered into NPR's content management system by US. That's right -- radio people! Using Seamus! (full disclosure: big assist by digital media's Maria Godoy -- she's a peach.)

So, I'll post the link when it's live. Check it out -- there's a video and an audio slideshow -- in addition to the web text and the link to the radio story. It was a great experience, really seeing how npr.org works -- and as we've suggested, would be a great task to add to future Knight training programs.

-- Quinn O'Toole

5:52 PM ET | permalink

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Beginnings And Ends

On the last day of Knight Training, I figured what the heck. I'll post our very first project, partly to show how far we've come.

It's about the closing of a Washington D.C. independent bookstore that happens to be a few blocks away from NPR headquarters. Many of us visited it on a weekly basis to pick up books, DVDs and music for radio pieces, or sometimes just to have lunch in its pleasant little cafe.

--Neda Ulaby

5:12 PM ET | permalink

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