Tennenbaum

Elizabeth Kolbert: Obama’s Keystone Decision

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:12:32 -0400

Elizabeth Kolbert: Obama’s Keystone Decision:

Elizabeth Kolbert with a strikingly elegant op-ed on what’s at stake with the Keystone pipeline.

Can Vice Get 20-Somethings to Watch the News?

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:23:48 -0400

Can Vice Get 20-Somethings to Watch the News?:

This Brooklyn-based hipster outlet has exploded over the last decade.

Oldie but goody - I’m a big fan of the show!

staff: Tumblr Tuesday: 2013 Webby Award Winners Edition The...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:21:43 -0400

staff:

Tumblr Tuesday: 2013 Webby Award Winners Edition

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring the coolest stuff on the Internet, and we’d like to highlight just a few of our favorites from this year’s round of winners. Congratulations to all!

Webby Person of the Year: Frank Ocean
“Frank Ocean has had a truly remarkable, impactful year as both a musician and cultural icon, showing a deep understanding of the Internet as a communicative tool for social change.” — Webbys

Webby Artist of the Year: GRIMES
“Grimes has used the Internet to spread a unique and compelling mix of cutting edge music, visual art and DIY style that has defined her as one of contemporary music’s most interesting and engaging artists.” — Webbys

Art: The Creators Project
An ongoing global arts and technology initiative created by Intel and VICE.

Best Use of Photography: Humans of New York
Glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City.

Political: Comedy Central’s Indecision
News, politics and other jokes from your friends at Comedy Central.

Personal: Daily Dishonesty
Lovely little lies from a hungry graphic designer.

Celebrity/Fan: Team Coco
The official Conan O’Brien Tumblr.

19 Ways To Love Yourself

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:36:51 -0400

19 Ways To Love Yourself

good: Welcome to the Global Citizenship Project- Mary...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:00:11 -0400

good:

Welcome to the Global Citizenship Project
- Mary Slosson wrote in Technology, Living and Poverty

Welcome to the brand-new GOOD Global Citizenship project, a space where people who give a damn connect around issues of global health, poverty, and development.

Whether we live in Los Angeles or Lagos, Seattle or São Paulo, we are all part of the movement to creatively engage with each other and our surroundings to improve and strengthen our communities and our world.

Our mission is to uproot the idea that knowledge flows from global North to South, and that poor equals helpless and needy. We are more alike than the way we talk about power and poverty implies.

That’s where you come in.

We are looking for a truly global community of contributors from all walks of life. We encourage anyone to contribute to this conversation by posting relevant things you’re discovering online and simply tagging them with “global citizenship.” But we’re also looking for a select group of experts to contribute original thoughts, reporting, and help us identify key stories going on in your area. If you want to get involved with this growing Global Citizen Network let us know by applying here.

We hope you can join us in the celebration, and we’ll be in touch soon with exciting new ways of working together and bringing more GOOD to life.

Continue reading on good.is

rediscovering Peter Beard

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:15:36 -0500

rediscovering Peter Beard

Excerpt: Joseph Mitchell's "Street Life"

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:24:01 -0500

In my time, I have visited and poked around in every one of the hundreds of neighborhoods of which this city is made up, and by the city I mean the whole city – Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond. I have gone to some of these neighborhoods only once or twice, but I have gone to others – or to certain streets in them – over and over and over again, sometimes for reasons that I clearly understand and sometimes for reasons that I dimly understand and sometimes for reasons that I don’t understand at all. Certain street haunt me and certain blocks of certain streets haunt me and certain buildings on certain blocks of certain streets haunt me. At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other – on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which ahs a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavement…… - Joseph Mitchell

Champion Email Writer

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:20:54 -0500

One thing I know I’m good at is writing great emails. Personally, professionally.

Birfday pugs! (at The Double Windsor)

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 14:17:00 -0500

Birfday pugs! (at The Double Windsor)

OFA HQ

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 11:16:49 -0400

OFA HQ

Back in Action

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:43:46 -0400

Ok. Finals are over, my sister graduated college, I moved, and then had the pleasure of working with the Clinton Global Initiative. The past few weeks have been crazy, but I’m back in BK and ready to hit up Code Academy in my spare time.

The Jeanne Marie Laskas Archive on Longform

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:42:02 -0400

The Jeanne Marie Laskas Archive on Longform:

longformblog:

From Joe Paterno to coal miners, the rodeo to fruit pickers, our story picks by theGQ correspondent.

Business Plan (Part 2)

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:40:13 -0400

So, I spent the semester thinking about what I was going to do for my business. I couldn’t get away from the idea of doing a blog on social good, social change. But what was my angle? That was the missing link.

Meanwhile, I’ve been job hunting and thinking about what conversations and job posts made me really excited. And it turns out, women’s rights resonated with me quite deeply. It sounds funny that I wasn’t aware of it sooner, but working for a woman Senator has given me time to put this passion into words. It also was the missing link for my blog.

So, let me introduce to you Politica, a blog focused on women in the public, non-profit, media and social innovation spaces. The URL is taken, so you can find it right now at politicasrock.tumblr.com.

I’m looking forward to the project!

The Best Political Tumblrs (Chris Cillizza)

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:40:40 -0400

The Best Political Tumblrs (Chris Cillizza):

Tumblr gets political.

Q and A with Bryan Farrell of "Waging Non-Violence"

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:03:13 -0400

Below is a Q and A that I conducted with Bryan Farrell, one of the founders of “Waging Non-Violence”: a blog that focuses on grassroots environmental movements. Their tagline? People-powered news and analysis. Check it out below!

Tell me about your publication

Well…we’re coming up on our third year this May, and we started it three years ago. Me, my friend Eric and my other friend Nathan had all discovered this common interest of ours in non-violence. We felt like there should be some kind of news publication that focused on the kind of work people do using non-violence. There were some websites for organizations that were really old – War Resister’s League, for instance - these are old school pacifist groups that have been around since WWI. Consequently they are filled with old members and they’re not savy with the web or journalist per say.

We were all coming from a journalism background. I met Eric at the Nation, and we both went on to Rolling Stone, Nathan worked at NY times. We had this combination of an interest in non-violence, social justice and journalism. So we said we’ll give this a try and start a bog and see where it goes. We didn’t have high hopes for it exactly but we thought we’d take it from there.

And?

We were surprised from the wealth of material that was out there and we thought “Oh my god this is really something…there’s just so much to comment on.” Initially we’d do our best to pick out the hot stories and cover them, but it’s tough when you’re writing a story that takes place in India.

So we reached out and cultivated writers, and we cultivated our own editorial role.

We knew we had a vision that we wanted to pursue. We got some funding last summer, and since then our site’s has really taken off. We’re seeing seeing our vision come together, and we’re paying ourselves and our writers.

Our grand vision is that the site would have bureau chiefs around the world in different regions and they’d be responsible for finding the right people, and it would filter up. And the site in itself would be a hub or a wire service for news on activism.

We’re really just trying to produce quality content, to synthesize and it and make it entry level for people who aren’t activists or scholars. This stuff comes up all the time: within the last year we had Arab, OWS and many many other big stories involving non violent action. These stories never get covered from the start, they only get covered when they become something [big]. So we try to cover stories from start to finish.

Where did you get funding?

We did it pretty informally through group in DC that put out publications on non-violence. Once we started gaining a little momentum for the first year we were on their radar; they seemed interested and we knew that they had the funds to support this kind of work. We pitched it to them very informally and we got a modest amount .

What about your Platform?

We want to be online, we don’t have any interest in doing print. We want shift the site more towards magazine style. Long essays and such, high quality. If you look at the site now it’s blog structured and you can’t feature all the stories at once, so we want to break out a little more [with design].

How did you do your marketing?

Having been journalist we all had connections. We’re in the progressive media and we’d also been freelancers, so we’d written for most of the top progressive news sites. We had contacts their editors and they’d republish our stories.

Our goal was getting our stories republished: Common Dreams, AlterNet, Truth Out, they get a lot of traffic and don’t generate a lot of their own content - they aggregate the top stories. We’ve also gotten things picked up in publications like the Nation, in the progressive media world.

And that’s how we’ve been doing it – we would send out an email blast to these places using our connections there and letting them know we had a good story and they’d publish it. Still that’s the case where most of our stories are being read elsewhere, most of the traffic to our stories on other sites. But, our sties really grown, minimum a thousand hits a day.

Do you use Social Media too?

2/3 of us aren’t very good at Social Media; it’s not where my mind is at. So it was a real challenge to force myself to tweet and put things on FB but within the last couple months we actually brought on a social media person . Good mutual relationship- they finding the right avenues for us, so that’s really become very important. Just two weeks ago I wrote a story and it spread like wildfire thanks to Facebook – it’s good to really get something out there. FB is the real generator, I’d say.

Advice for people wanting to start their own blogs?

Narrowness, to some extent. Our site is both narrow and general I feel – many news sites cover all these different regions and issues, yet it’s through a certain lens, so in that sense it is narrow.

So I think what makes a blog successful is if it has a clear lens. eventually would like to have the kind of reliability where a huge story like Eypt is happening, that people would be like “Oh, I need to go see what they’re writing on Waging Non-Violence.”

We don’t really know hat kind of audience there is for this stuff quite yet. We have a small committed group of who are similar to us, really into non-violence, but it’s not something that most people are into. So we also have to figure out a way to make it broadly appealing. I think that’s also really important, depending on the kind of blog you’re running. If you have a subject like ours, you have to try to explain why it’s exciting and why it’s interesting and draw people in.

Why Non-Violence

The power that comes from non-violence, it’s not just pacifism, it’s not just opposing violence, it’s actively doing so using strategies that plug into basic human dynamics that we generally over look or forget. And it’s kind of amazing when you see how it work. For me, it came mostly from reading so much about it: where you learn that non-violence was used effectively in cases against some of the worst aspects of humanity, including the Nazis. Almost every country in Europe has a story where non-violence worked, and in large scales. In Denmark, they saved 8,000 of their Jews overnight by a covert mission of smuggling them into boats to Sweden, and the managed to kick out the Nazis from their country by using work slow downs and being non-cooperative. So that’s powerful, it works against the worst dictators

Once you realize that this stuff works you just want to share the information. You want people to understand that they have the ability to make change and we don’t have to wait for our politicans to do it. Obama is gong to raise over a billion dollars and all the news coverage that’s going to come out of that, the hours. So much money and attention, and for what? Imagine where that could really go to use.

And I think people need to remember the power they have within themselves and really use it. Using the tools of non-violence you can put pressure on the “pillars of support” of any institution to get what you want, to get the justice that you need.

And a quick word on your funding model?

We have a fiscal sponsorship, which essentially makes you a project of a non-profit. We want to move in that direction; it’s expensive, so until we get the money to go through that process we’re going to stick with this.

I don’t think we had many other options. We could have gone into advertising but hat’s really hard off the bat, if you’re just starting out, you don’t have any readers to promise advertisers. It was sort of out of necessity. We weren’t going to find support from businesses and also we all honestly had ethical dilemmas with that anyway. But we knew we had support from some of the organizations that actually do produce material around non-violence, so that relationship worked. So partially necessity and partially our morals and wanting to not be beholden to advertisers and that whole system. So much of our content is about activist opposing corporations, so it’d be kind of silly to have Google Ads on the side.

Thank you Bryan!

My amazing sister’s artwork. Stunning!

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:22:49 -0400

My amazing sister’s artwork. Stunning!

good: Sometimes it’s easy to make fun of the government’s...

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:22:21 -0400

good:

Sometimes it’s easy to make fun of the government’s science projects. It was easy to make fun of the kids who crushed it at the science fair in elementary school too, but the kid with the functioning marshmallow cannon probably has a much cooler job than you do today. Now, a rare bipartisan coalition of politicians—plus an assortment of scientists, universities, and business leaders—are reminding us that when it comes to doing our research homework, it’s better to take the long view: Even weird science projects can pay off big down the road.

Here’s how the U.S. government is helping to defend weird science.

good: Yeah, yeah, there’s an app for everything. But rarely...

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:14:47 -0400

good:

Yeah, yeah, there’s an app for everything. But rarely does an app encourage you to buy less.

That’s the idea behind Indeed. Read all about it at GOOD.is.

By the Book, Madeleine Albright Style

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:14:30 -0400

By the Book, Madeleine Albright Style:

What does the former SoS read?

Rhino! (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:52:11 -0400

Rhino! (Taken with instagram)