Newley Purnell

My buddy Matt Gross just began what is quite possibly the coolest travel writing gig imaginable: He’s traveling around the world in 90 days and blogging about his adventures for the New York Times. He’s on a budget, but luckily it’s not too restrictive. Here’s his first post, from Lisbon.

A few snips:

Every week, as I make my way eastward, I will be sharing travel tips, discussing the limits of ultra-discount airlines, exploring the concept of Slow Travel and, if I’m lucky, discovering a microscopic town or burgeoning metropolis with untapped vacation potential. I’ll seek stylish shoes in Barcelona and fine wines in Georgia, and delve into the logistics of yurt camping in Mongolia.

And:

Some guidelines first. Circling the globe presents an seemingly infinite number of travel options, and narrowing them down requires one to be patient, open-minded and occasionally arbitrary. I am beginning in the Mediterranean because it’s summer and I want to go to the beach. Odessa is also on my list, precisely because I had heard little about it except that it’s a hot party zone. And while I went to Shanghai last year, that city struck me as so fast-moving that I couldn’t wait to see how it’s changed in the intervening months.

Matt’s itinerary has him hitting “Lisbon, Istanbul, Tashkent, Beijing, Shanghai, Ulaan Baatar and San Francisco.”

Sweet.

Be sure to share your suggestions and travel tips by posting a comment.

Great column from Simon Dumenco in AdAge:

…it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

Dumenco says there’s a false dichotomy between traditional journalism and blogging — that the two aren’t necessarily different:

A lot of the tendency to draw lines internally, I think, has to do with the fact that most old-school publishing organizations with online components invested heavily in the ’90s in then-state-of-the-art, but now-cumbersome online publishing systems, which are functionally very different from more nimble blogging software solutions. But over the next few years those legacy systems will be phased out and everyone publishing online will be using some form of what’s now commonly thought of as blogging software.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: In the very near future, there are only going to be two types of media people: those who can reliably work and publish (or broadcast) incredibly fast, and those … who can’t.

This list of the best newspaper corrections of 2K5 contains some true, true gems.

Like this one, which features the most evocative — if wrong — lede in the history of journalism. Click on the image to read:

And this one’s pretty good, too:

(Via The Taipei Kid.)

BBC:

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has tightened its submission rules following a complaint.

Prominent journalist John Seigenthaler described as “false and malicious” an entry on Wikipedia implicating him in the Kennedy assassinations.

When he phoned Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, he was told there was no way of finding out who wrote the entry.

Wikipedia has since removed the entry and now requires users to register before they can create articles.

How many people can say they’re just one of three bloggers in their family? Well, eat your hearts out, all of you, because not only is my kid brother Mechum penning missives from Seoul, but my Dad has also recently joined the ranks of the blognoscenti.

That’s right, he’s now rappin’ at ya live from Pendleton, Oregon, where he’s a high school teacher at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. And he doesn’t simply have one personal blog. Oh, no. That would not be the Purnell way. My Dad — Brian (or Bri Guy), to the rest of the world — is presently rocking three, count ‘em three, blogs.

He’s got two for his various high school classes: Nixyaawii Community School Art and Nixyaawii Community School Journalism. And Dad has even introduced his j-class students to blogging; one of the most prolific posters so far is Min, an exchange student from (where else?) Korea.

Just yesterday, my Dad answered the call to create a new site for his entire school and — why not? — made it a blog (numero tres for him). Doing so was actually quite savvy, since a blogspot blog is not only free and easy to update, but he saved the school money on registering a domain name and possibly paying someone to create a site from scratch.

So anyway, great work, Purnell clan alpha-geek paterfamilias. You’re making your boys proud.

When he was all of nineteen years old, Truman Capote wrote a novel that is only now being published; he said he’d destroyed it. The current New Yorker has an excerpt from the book illustrating that Capote’s genius for stylish prose manifested itself at an early age indeed:

Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or in Stamford and Greenwich. Since she had turned seventeen, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed the most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not know who it was that replaced her, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name.

(Emphasis mine.)

“Capote,” a new biopic I mentioned earlier, opens next weekend.

(Via Maud Newton.)

Capote, Truman+Capote

Peter Hessler, who wrote the exceptional “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” has got a new book coming out in April. It’ll be called “Oracle Bones : A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.” Those’re the only details I’ve got. I may just have to pre-order this one.

(Hessler’s author bio in last week’s New Yorker mentioned his new book; I haven’t read his article in that issue yet, but it looks great — it’s about Chinese auto makers and Chinese car culture.)

A new Truman Capote biopic is opening on September 30th. The film tells the story of Capote investigating and writing the classic “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. The movie’s called “Capote,” and the trailer is promising. Philip Seymour Hoffman will play TC, and the movie also features the excellent Catherine Keener and Chris Cooper.

Capote is one of my favorite writers. He wrote stunning prose and he lived an out-sized life, once allegedly proclaiming “I am three things: An alcoholic, a homosexual, and a genius.”

His first novel, Other Voices Other Rooms, which he published at age 24, contains passages so eloquent that, if you have a single sensitive bone in your body, may well make you weep.

Such as:

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hyprocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Capote

Woman snaps photo of NYC subway pervert and posts it on flickr.

Will this loser meet the same fate as the Korean dog poop girl? One can only hope.

(Via Dana.)

NYC, NYC+subway, dog+poop+girl, subway

Funny stuff.

I’m still sifting through emails that piled up last week; while I find my footing, here’re a few items of interest:

–Be sure to check out Dana’s re-vamped Number One Hit Song.

–CJR: “A Technical Guide for Editing Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson from the other end of the Mojo Wire”

–ClickZ: “Study Bolsters Blog-Related PR Practices”

The trend toward PR agencies setting up blog-specific practices got a boost this week, as a new study found that more than half of journalists use blogs in the course of their work.

–Taiwan Tiger:

In the neverending attempt to conserve and save money here in Taiwan (not like anyplace is exempt from that, of course….), comes this gem. My school, instead of placing separate toilet paper dispensers in each stall of the faculty bathrooms, has a central dispenser…

–The writing process simplified: “Sniff. Explore. Collect. Focus. Select. Order. Draft. Revise.”

The Economist: “Is Rupert Murdoch right to predict the end of newspapers as we now know them?”

OJR: “Advertising, editorial lines blur as bloggers’ salaries tied to traffic.”

Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business

Also, as an aside, I discovered recently that Bluffton, South Carolina, right down the coast from my home town of Beaufort, is doing some really interesting stuff with Weblogs and grassroots journalism. (I’d never have expected it, as South Carolina is, how should I say this, not exactly a hotbed of new media innovation. But anyway.)

On their site, BlufftonToday.com, they encourage readers to send in news items, and all the staff writers have Weblogs. It’s pretty interesting. Pretty Korean, in fact.