Friday, May 25, 2007

I'm into this artist's work. Chris Jordan uses photo illustration to convey large, abstract statistical numbers.

For instance, Americans use 2 million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes. So there is one big-ass photograph that shows 2 million bottles. Another shows 426,000 cell phones (the number discarded every day in the U.S.) another shows 29,569 handguns (the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. each year) and on and on.

Smart, effective, if it looks this good on my monitor, I can't imagine how intense these must be at full size.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Two things:

1) Last night I took the last class of my undergraduate career. After I pay the school that outstanding $0.75, I should be receiving my degree in journalism.

2) So, a degree in journalism...from today's Los Angeles Times:

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.

The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

"A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages," said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.