Judy Schaim, co-chair of San Diego Pride, shared her perspective on the Proposition 8 debacle with writer David Harvey. File photo by Will Parson

On Wednesday, August 4, I got a call from Todd Gloria, San Diego District 3 Councilmember, around 1:30 in the afternoon. Judge Vaughn Walker had just overturned Proposition 8—California’s ban on same-sex marriage—and I had missed it.

“Do you want me to call you back in a few minutes? Maybe you need some time to digest this,” he said, laughing.

I muttered something about expecting the results and asked him if he was surprised by the verdict. I asked him what he expected next and about the rulings significance and then I realized I was writing the same story as a thousand other reporters.

I recalled a recent blog from Columbia Journalism Review on localizing a story, and I wished I had been prepared.

In the end, I found a stock question, “What should San Diegans do while awaiting an appeal?” and I ran with it. I asked 14 or 15 community leaders that question, and I used it to shape my story.

But it also forced me to leave out some really great details that didn’t fit my theme.

So while I was doing my best to localize a story, to make it relevant to my readers and to come up with a message, I also found that I was losing some of the best parts.

Too often I find that no matter how I try to shape a story, or what I want to include, it forms organically and something good gets lost in the mix.

Judi Schaim, co-chair of San Diego Pride told me that she didn’t get married the first time around, because she didn’t want her marriage to be taken away over politics.

She also told me this: “I’m 66 years old and in my lifetime I never thought I would see that same sex couples could marry so for me to see a flashback of history and to realize this is actually happening, it’s unbelievable, it’s awesome, it’s a dream come true. And it means that maybe I’ll be able to marry.”

She didn’t make the final cut.

And neither did Rev. Canon Albert Ogle of St. Paul’s Cathedral and Equality California—whom I didn’t ask my topical question. He spoke at the Day of Decision Rally in the LGBT Center in Hillcrest, and my very brief interview with him afterward was interesting enough—and not for his charmingly subtle Irish accent and clerical collar—that I wrote this post on Meridian so I could share it:

*****

David Harvey: You discussed winning over the religious community, families and others that supported proposition 8 with this decision and by moving forward, can you speak a little more to that?

Albert Ogle: “I think the coming out process is a conversion process, we’re first of all converted, but we’re gay and we have to deal with that, then our families are converted, they often don’t get there in a weekend but it takes time.”

In many ways I look at my experience as being, you bring about societal transformation and institutional transformation by doing those kind of one on ones, then all the sudden there’s a tipping point.”

I think we [the gay community] actually have much more in common with the religious right for making marriages work and showing that we are not actually a threat to marriage.”

I’ve had a couple of debates with the yes on 8 people and in some ways we use the same marriage preparation work and they were kind of surprised that we were doing 40 hours of premarital counseling with couples. We’re not a threat to marriage and if we start engaging in those sort of conversations we move forward.”

DH: When Prop 8 was being debated, in some cases it drew people away from the religious community. Do you think the overturning of Prop 8 can help rebridge that divide?

AO: “I think the judges decision is going to be helpful to some people who may be in the middle, because what he’s done is really looked at the facts. And we’re now separating what people hold as their beliefs. There are some people that believe the earth was created in 5 days and it’s 6,000 years old and most of us when we look at science we don’t believe that and they’re entitled to their beliefs, but are we enforcing that onto all our school to teach that, no. The same thing applies, people are entitled to their religious beliefs, but they have no right to impose them or make them the law of the land.”

The decision was also a victory for democracy over theocracy and this country has teetered on that—especially during the Bush years—where the separation of church and state is not clear. Here in California you have religious people who were forcing their views on everybody and Judge Vaughn Walker’s position was clear that as a democracy we can’t do that.”

Globally, we’re dealing with fundamentalism, we’re dealing with it in Christianity, were dealing with it in Islam, and in Judaism and one manifestation of that was the work we had to do to fight Prop 8.”

I’m going to Uganda later this year, and talk about a number the Christian right has done on a country, where they’re going to send gays to jail for life and possibly put them to death. The same people who are creating prop 8 are creating the laws in Uganda. I see this not only as a local concern, but this is happening all over the world and we have to fight it.”

DH: What do you think is the best weapon in that fight?

AO: Education.

People need to learn that there are different ways of interpreting. Some of us have a very different view of what we call the difficult texts. There are texts in the bible that condone violence and slavery, the oppression of women as well as the oppression of gays. As religious leaders we have to talk about those and explain these things. In Africa, for example, the seminaries do not teach human sexuality so they’ve never heard of Alfred Kinsey, they’ve never heard of Stonewall. They have no idea what we’re talking about when we talk about gay stuff. So if the religious right is going in with lies and misinformation, there is nothing to counter it with.”

There’s a lot of work to do still.”

******

You can read the Canon’s Day of Decision speech online, for more great wisdom on the balance of faith and equality, as well as his figures that help to dispel the myth that the courts are acting out of tune with public opinion.

Read the Judge’s decision, along with his decision not to stay the original repeal of Prop 8 past Aug 18th, here.

And of course, my article is available in an updated print version online.

Entomologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum perform a rough sort of insect species collected in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve during the 2010 BioBlitz, May 22, 2010. Photo by Will Parson.

Shooting video is something I’m trying to make a routine part of going out on assignment, even if I’m just supposed to be taking photos or writing a short article.

To make this feasible it’s easy to think of the video clips as “long photographs.” They’re very basic, standalone shots, but for someone like me who is new to video they have started getting me thinking like a videographer, and for now that’s good enough. Video doesn’t always have to complicated or well-polished.

For a story recently I was supposed to just take photos and write 500 words about the event. It was easy enough to set my camera on a wall and take a ‘long photograph’ of a bunch of entomologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum sorting specimens during their 2010 BioBlitz, where they count as many species in an area as they can during a 24-hour period. Read more about the BioBlitz at the Del Mar Times.

BioBlitz 2010 from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Lashing out at all my University of California, San Diego writing professors (and journalists worldwide) lamenting the decline of the paid writer, I had shunned financial independence and turned to the Web. I wanted to survive on freelancing, even if it meant only eating rice and hot sauce and creating a permanent ass imprint on my couch.

Little did I know that I was well on my way to become an online sweatshop worker.

I had joined what Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, and other critics have been calling “content farms,” such as emerging Web behemoth Demand Media, and this may be the future of the paid writer. We don’t have to like it, but content writing is being outsourced to the poor and the desperate.

Off to Work We Go

In early November, I signed up for Demand Studios, the factory of parent Demand Media, which pays between $7.50 and $20 per article and provides a ready-made list of titles. In the month of November, I made $407.50 writing articles like “African Restaurants in San Diego,” “How to Identify Inedible Plants in Oregon,” and “How to Find a Wife in Bulgaria.” In December, I wrote about drug tests, checking accounts, flight regulations and kilts. In January, I narrowed my focus to hotels and restaurants, scouring obscure Web pages, reading hundreds of reviews and wandering the streets of distant cities using Google maps.

I branched out in January as well. I signed up for Odesk and Freelancer.com, which connect freelancers to clients that pay various rates, usually about $3 for every 400-500 word article — often less. One client was asking for 100 articles on Christmas traditions worldwide and the average bid was between $200 and $300. The best paying job was for a photographic step-by-step Kama Sutra. They wanted 350-400 shots of an attractive couple and were willing to pay up to $3,000, but I didn’t know anyone willing to model.

I was accepted at Suite 101 and Life 123, where providers are paid based on readership and ad revenue, but promoting my articles at social-networking sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, and reddit proved to be more work than actually writing an article. I was hired at WiseGeek, a site with set rates like Demand Studios, but I still haven’t managed to tackle the heavy research needed to write such technical titles as “What is an Isometric Contraction?” and “What is Follicular Unit Transplantation?” They want around 500 words and pay $10 an article. They pride themselves on assigning writers a “personal” editor.

Pay it Forward

Notes in my weekly planner show that I made roughly $3 per hour in the month of January, and after putting myself through hell trying to make a living, while keeping the standard of my work up (I would still never use any of my Demand Content as a writing sample), I am exhausted.

It’s not exactly working in an impersonal factory, as some critics have come to characterize these online content-providers; my couch is really nice. But there were times I was searching for references, came across a Demand Media piece, and cringed at the thought that some of my work might be equally as trite, or worse, poorly written. It’s easy to lose focus when you’re plugging out 10 unrelated pieces a day for less than $100, and the titles rush by on the conveyor belt of search-driven content.

After a month of eating rice and hot sauce and hardly finding time to distract myself by youtubing Lady Gaga videos, I was almost ready to try something more lucrative than writing, like selling crack to middle school kids — or worse — working in public relations.

I made $937 in January. Some of that I spent on food, less of it on whiskey. I am starting February — the shortest month — poorer than I was at the beginning of the year.

But I’m still looking for jobs, and while I dislike working in an online writing factory, where I can’t meet or even have dialogue with my “careful” editors or fellow writers, I don’t have a lot of other options.

I mean, to be honest, I don’t even know where to buy crack in San Diego, let alone where any of the middle school kids hang out.

(For a great profile of Demand media, check out Daniel Roth’s article in Wired magazine.)

Photos by Will Parson

In his gym shorts and Army shirt, Sinh Tho Nguyen appeared out of place in the front row of a veteran’s memorial ceremony. But, sitting among dozens of servicemen and veterans in uniform, with various buttons pinned neatly to their caps, Sinh was the guest of honor for the unveiling of a memorial plaque for the late astronaut Wally Schirra at the top of Mt. Soledad in San Diego. Eventually one of the speakers briefly introduced Sinh and explained how the next day he was going to finish walking across the country in honor of America and its veterans.

As shuttles whisked away droves of aging veterans after the ceremony, I got a sense of Sinh’s purely selfless character.

A woman approached and told him bluntly, “You’re amazing.”

Sinh’s arresting reply, as lines formed on his brow, was, “No, I’m not.”

His answer left him and the woman in tears.

The next day, Sinh was on the corner of Newport Avenue and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard in San Diego’s Ocean Beach, waiting to finish the last three blocks of his 2,500-mile journey. He was surrounded by members of the local chapter of the VFW and a middle-aged group holding banners saying “Vietnamese War Babies. Amerasian. To Honor Our Hero Fathers.”

Sinh, born in 1969 in Vietnam, calls himself a war baby as well. His father, whom he never knew, was an American soldier serving in Vietnam. A veteran himself, Sinh served eight years in the Army and Texas National Guard. He lives in Forth Worth, Texas and works as a water meter reader.

With bagpipes playing, a small impromptu parade with Sinh at the front walked down Newport Avenue to the Pacific Ocean. Shops and restaurants gave up their denizens to a growing crowd that occasionally erupted in spontaneous applause. Tears marked some faces as Sinh moved to the sidewalk for hugs and handshakes.

On the boardwalk, Sinh stopped at a temporary memorial to stick his business card – the same one he’s been handing out to everyone he’s met since he started walking in Florida on June 10 – in the boot of a firefighter’s uniform arranged with those of other servicemen. With eyes welling, he gestured to a POW/MIA flag.

The bagpipes stopped to let Sinh be heard. He collected his emotions and shouted his mission one last time in hoarse, stilted English: “Lest we forget. I walk across America to honor those who serve.”

Sinh waded into the tide with his sign and an American flag, which he soaked in the water before draping some seaweed around his neck. With his back to friends and strangers watching from the sand, a woman commented, “Look at him, he’s so happy. He doesn’t want it to end.”

He did eventually leave, not on foot, but in an SUV. Even then, his hand was raised high outside the car’s window in the well-practiced gesture of friendship that he has enjoyed thousands of times during his five-month trek.

Sinh Tho Nguyen, a veteran of the Army National Guard, completes his "Shore to Shore" journey on foot in San Diego's Ocean Beach on November 8.

Change.org is hiring full-time bloggers to write about social causes from human rights to environmental issues to social entrepreneurship. Best of all, positions are paid and your posts would be viewed by over a million users. Check out the ad here.

MediaBistro also recently launched a user-generated blog “We the ‘Bistro” which allows any one to submit posts via email to a large audience of fellow media professionals. You can submit photos, video or anything relevant to media workers. I just sent in an old Meridian post to the email address post@mediabistro.posterous.com just to get my name out there and see how it works.

I hope to open up Meridian in a similar fashion so that readers can email posts containing their work or musings on issues facing young journalists. We’ve also been talking about starting up a guest post series to add more voices to this blog, so look out for that in the coming weeks!

Aitamurto is researching the way crowd funding and crowd sourcing change the journalistic process, and as both an intern and reporter for Spot.Us, I wanted to share my experience. First, I want to make one very important disclaimer:  I’m a young reporter with little experience in the “traditional journalism” field. As such, I don’t have much to compare Spot.Us with. I also have a unique set of interests (i.e. getting my piece published in print because for some reason that still seems to matter in the job world) which a more established journalist may  not worry about. I think the Spot.Us experience is different for each reporter, but here are the things I discovered along the way:

Transparency

Spot.Us was built out of founder David Cohn‘s desire to pitch stories to the world and get the public more involved in journalism, rather than have the whole process occur behind closed doors between a reporter and editor. With this goal comes transparency, where every thing from pitching, to fundraising, to investigative research happens in public domain. Cohn often echoes the sentiment of David Weinberger when he says “transparency is the new objectivity,” helping news organizations gain trust and credibility in the “age of links.”

Transparency also leads to another one of Cohn’s motos: “journalism is a process, not a product.” While media outlets have traditionally tried to cram all relevant information into one finished piece, web technology like comments and blogging  allow for continuous reporting that exposes facts and perspectives as they come to light, creating a more complete picture of a story than say one article with a limited word count can produce.

Collaboration

Another strength of the Spot.Us model is the potential for collaboration. Spot.Us strives to be a platform to connect reporters, news organizations and the public in a symbiotic relationship, where the community can help source information and fund stories they care about, the reporter can sift through facts and breaks down issues, and the news organization can score a quality investigative article with the help of public funds. While I didn’t witness a whole lot of collaboration with my story in particular, all one needs to do is look at the long list of donors and read the thread of comments on the investigation into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to see Spot.Us’ potential to galvanize the public around an issue of interest.

Personal Benefits for a Young Reporter

Some of you may be thinking that transparency and collaboration are all fine and dandy, but how does Spot.Us help freelancers in today’s tough economy? First, I think it’s easier to get an “in” with Spot.Us than with a traditional media outlet. While Spot.Us still has some editorial control about pitches they accept, the organization tries not to be exclusive and will take chances on good ideas, even if you’re young or your credentials are not entirely in line. Some may argue that this is a weakness, but it definitely helps young, ambitious reporters get a foot in the door, and through transparency, reporters will be held accountable.

The pay’s not bad either. If you can last the time it takes to fundraise, you will be rewarded with competitive freelance rates. I also didn’t have to go through the sometimes grueling pitching process! Cohn pretty much single-handedly promoted my story and used his connections to get it placed in a paper. I question whether I could have been published if I would have pitched the story on my own.

Room for Improvement

In the spirit of transparency, let me also share a few areas I think could use some improvement.

Outreach

As it stands, fundraising through Spot.Us is usually a pretty slow process only suitable for long-term investigations rather than more “news worthy” issues. There are often many communities and nonprofit organizations interested in the issues at hand, but due to limited staffing, these groups are not always taken advantage of.

News organizations are also hesitant to make partnerships with Spot.Us, possibly out of discomfort with being transparent since they’ve historically been concerned about being “scooped” or beaten to a story by a competing news organization. I think other news outlets see Spot.Us as an unnecessary middle man between the reporter and editor without seeing the added value of transparency and collaboration that Spot.Us can create.

Editorial Oversight

I think one of Spot.Us’ greatest challenges is its nonprofit status and subsequent lack of adequate staffing. While I think Cohn, with the help of Kara Andrade and others, has done an incredible job creating the organization from scratch, things like editorial oversight and fact-checking can be left up to “peer editors” or no one at all if a news organizations does not step in, which could compromise the accuracy of a story and the credibility of the organization.

Organizational Structure

Lastly, I think more emphasis needs to be placed on creating a more streamlined organizational structure through a defined business-development plan. It seems like stories are often tackled on a case-by-case basis in terms of fundraising, promotion, publication, and distribution rather than undergoing a consistent process from pitch to publication. I was initially wary about Spot.Us’ recent expansion to Los Angeles without all the organization ducks in a row; however, I think working with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism will be a great opportunity to bring more staff and student volunteers into the fold and hopefully help Spot.Us create a more sustainable structure the any city can replicate in the future.

It’s NYC Fashion Week and I am putting in 10+ hour days of editing and shooting so please excuse my absence. On top of these commitments, I started my gig with Sundance Channel last week. I am essentially blogging for my boss, Patrick McMullan.  I go out once a week to some party and take in all the sights and talk to whoever he wants me to meet (last week that was Amerie and Taylor Hanson), all while he tells me his thoughts on the night. Yes, life could be much worse. Check out the first post here.