Tag: politics

  • Scoop McNewsboy

    Just a short update on some stories that ran in the paper today. I’ve had a really good few days with a bunch of stories I’d been working on or planning for a while suddenly appearing all in a row this week.

    On the front page I had a story run about how the gubernatorial candidates in Texas for the November election are using social media. This was a story that had been on our budget for a while and that I was dreading. Whenever I write anything to do with politics and technology I always promise myself not to let myself get pulled into doing that again. My dread continued as I reached out to the campaigns and found that they were so busy it was tough to schedule interviews and get the ball rolling.

    But then the last two weeks before the stories were due, the interviews started happening and then, to my surprise, I was given access to the candidates themselves. The last week leading up to the story running got exciting and once I had all my interviews done I was suddenly thrilled to be writing it since I actually knew what I was talking about after all the reporting I’d done. It’s a nice place to be where you have much more information than you could possibly fit into a long story. Over the weekend some edits were made that condensed a chunk of the story; I wasn’t thrilled with that, but overall I’m happy with the way the whole piece turned out.

    The other story I had in today’s paper was some news we broke about South by Southwest Interactive starting up a Texas education-themed conference next March called SXSWedu. Not sure if I’ll be covering that myself or if people on our newsrooms education will be doing that, but it’s nice that we got the story first.

    The next few says I’ll be visiting the Game Developers Conference Online and doing a little coverage at the Austin City Limits Festival on some of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff being shown off and seeing if the cell networks hold up (something we end up having to check up on every year, it feels like).

  • That time I defended a billionaire from Facebook

    Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
    I posted a few days ago on Twitter about this big pipeline of stories I’ve been working on that are suddenly going to appear one right after the other for the next few days. The flood started today with a movie review I wrote for the Statesman of The Social Network (B+).

    I also did separate interviews with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, and actor Armie Hammer.

    A condensed version of the interviews ran as one piece in today’s paper, along with the review.

    I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.

    That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.

    This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.

    The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.

    It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.

    Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.