1. Bringing journalists into classrooms to talk to kids about their work — from covering the tuberculosis epidemic in Moldova, to Haitian families rebuilding after the earthquake, to desertification in China.

2. Working in a digital-first journalism organization with people who know what that means.

3. No longer being saddled with a “techie” label, so now I can just enjoy technology without being a helper monkey.

4. Working in Dupont Circle.

5. Crazy awesome photojournalism decorating in my office.

Dive Bermuda operates out of a private bay owned by the Fairmont hotel chain. Photo by Mark Schulte.

Caribbean divers generally don’t kill fish, but the lionfish has been targeted with good reason. It is a particularly rapacious non-native species that was introduced to the area in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew broke an aquarium in Florida and washed six into the Atlantic. With fanning fins, jutting spines and vivid stripes, it’s striking to look at, but the lionfish’s insatiable appetite makes it a serious threat to Caribbean fish and crustaceans. In just over a month, a single lionfish can wipe out most of a reef’s fish population.

“They literally eat themselves to death,” said Anne-Marie, one of the dive instructors on our boat. She said it was unusual to find one so large around Bermuda, and supposed it had eaten thousands of reef fish. Bermuda divers sometimes capture them and bring them back to the local aquarium for dissection. She said a recent specimen was found with dozens of grouper fry in its stomach.

A red lionfish in Thailand. The one I saw in Bermuda was very similar to this. Photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase.

So there we were, awkwardly drifting in what is essentially an underwater cave, watching Victor slowly approach the motionless lionfish, flashlight in one hand and a modern trident in the other. With impressive aim, he speared it from about four feet away.

Kind of cool in a childish sense, maybe. But I didn’t take up diving to watch people kill fish, and while the lions are undoubtedly a major threat in an ecosystem that doesn’t need more problems, watching that stunning animal slowly die in front of me was a strange and very sad experience.

I guess that would be okay if this guy were Abby Wambach, captain of a team that’s about to head to the World Cup. But he’s not. He’s “Mark Schulte,” random soccer guy you’ve never heard of. Nobody’s updating his page and he’s not even on a professional roster at this point.

Yet Google’s pretty sure you’re looking for him, not me. I’m insulted. Watch out Mark Schulte, I’m gunning for you!

I guess I can understand why the people who designed the program might want to avoid classes in WordPress theming, CSS3, HTML5 and JQuery: they’re difficult to teach well, and let’s face it, they’re difficult to learn and hence might reap the kinds of harsh evaluations that my classmate Ian and I explored in our final class of the program.

And maybe there are other reasons, but American should not tout its IJ program as cutting-edge while omitting serious exploration of these modern web technologies. Interactive journalists should know this stuff.

So this is my summer of code. I’ve started by building a custom theme on top of wp-framework. You’re looking at it now. In the months ahead I’ll continue to tweak it, bringing in as much specialized CSS, JQuery and HTML5 as it makes sense to do.

I’m mostly relying on Chris Coyier’s excellent tutorials for my training. Check them out at css-tricks.com.

As you might imagine, there is huge demand to see my Photoshop hack work in one place (ahem), so I threw together the home page graphics I’ve made this year for the Student News Action Network and dropped them into zoom.it. (Please bear in mind that this is a compilation of jpegs that are only 350 pixels wide at 72ppi, so it doesn’t take long to scroll too far in.)

And here’s a view of the same images using JQuery masonry. Re-size the browser window to see the bricks adjust.

The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley, that old weirdo, is chasing more than butterflies these days.

Roughly coincident with the New York Times’s paywall rollout in late March, the New Yorker is conducting an experiment on Facebook. But unlike the Times’ arguably more conventional approach, which is to require that online readers who access more than 20 articles per day subscribe on a weekly or monthly basis, the New Yorker’s wall goes up before you read even one article. The article in question, the only one available under these terms, is a longish piece by novelist Jonathan Franzen.

Of course, a Like wall isn’t really much of a wall at all, since it doesn’t cost users anything to Like Facebook content, and you don’t have to register. (Except on Facebook, and who hasn’t done that yet?) And even though it might be a bit of a stretch to ask users to Like something they haven’t even seen yet, the Facebook experiment is an intriguing extension of the magazine’s online marketing effort — especially in consideration of the publication that’s conducting it, not to mention the author of the piece and its subject.

There's no Like wall in front of New Yorker publicist Alexa Cassanos'
profile pic.

‘Deep’ thoughts

Alexa Cassanos, a publicist at the New Yorker, told Poynter that the primary aim of the project is to “find fans of long-form journalism,” to which end the magazine has also been selectively releasing some articles from each week’s issue on its website, along with chats and multimedia content. Cassanos told Mashable, “we want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level,” a seemingly elliptical statement that’s also more than a little amusing in light of the act that’s meant to represent this “deeper engagement.” What is more superficial a level of engagement than clicking a Like button?

Still, if the New Yorker is looking to spread the word about its (increasingly boutique) editorial mission, Facebook may be the best way to do it quickly, if not well. It’s widely considered among the more effective ways to conduct any viral marketing, at this point, so why not use it to find new readers, even if those are readers of a magazine generally associated with reading experiences that run to the hours, rather than the seconds or minutes a person might spend on most Facebook content?

Yeah, but do you like me like me?

The Like button, simple enough in concept (it dates 2009, when it was nearly launched as the Awesome button), is deceptively powerful. Like makes it easy to spread information, sometimes idiotic and simple, sometimes profound and complex, to huge numbers of people very quickly without any one user investing more of himself than it takes to click a mouse. Mark Schulte likes Einstein’s theory of relativity! And with its recent usurpation of the “become a fan” and “share” functions, Like is now a one-stop-shop for syndicating content through Facebook.

Hip hop superstar Lil' Wayne garnered more than 200,000 Likes in an hour, a Guinness record.

But how effective is it, really? Especially at tasks like expanding the audience of people who enjoy spending significant chunks of time reading rambling pieces about personal discovery? (Franzen’s article describes a journey he took to a remote Chilean island to escape, among other things, Facebook.) A 2009 study by online marketing firm Razorfish revealed that most people friend (now, Like) a brand because they’re a current customer or because they are looking for coupons. They follow brands on Twitter for much the same reason.

And in a blog post from last October, Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru cited data revealing that fewer than 10% of retailers view the network as an effective way of finding new customers. It seems reasonable to wonder whether those numbers might dip even further if they looked at magazine subscribers, especially those of the New Yorker.

Artists, though, seem to be in a mood to experiment with Like walls. Musicians including Lil’ Wayne and Jennifer Lopez have given away tracks to Likers recently, leveraging what’s become an important part of a smart big-time artist’s marketing strategy.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008. His unfinished novel, "The Pale King," will be
published next month.

Strange bedfellows

Cassanos has not (yet) answered a question I asked her about Franzen’s part in all this, but I bet I know the answer: the writer is totally on board. He and the subject (one of them) of his article, the late David Foster Wallace, would probably get a kick out of the idea of using Facebook to “deepen” anyone’s engagement with anything — much less with the kind of difficult, time-devouring, reader-confounding fiction they both practice(d) and which Franzen, in a blurb on the back of Wallace’s 1996 opus, Infinite Jest, said “can still run rings around the competing media.”

More Than Your Local Paper:
Exploding the Bounds of Learning with Global Journalism Online

Educators are inundated with buzzwords like 21st century skills and global education, but how do we bring them into the classroom effectively today? The Student News Action Network, an online high school journalism collaboration, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is building a network of kids around the world writing research-based journalism about topic-driven issues ranging from the March earthquake in Japan to the global water crisis to women’s rights in the Arab world. We will present a practical, scalable model for meaningful international student collaboration that teachers can use in the classroom immediately.

• Entry points that work for middle schoolers up to graduating seniors
• How journalism can be a powerful tool for learning across disciplines
• Modernize and internationalize your journalism program — painlessly!
• Cultivate a positive digital footprint that students can show off to colleges and businesses

I conceived, designed, and programmed this site in Fall 2010.

• Flash with ActionScript 3.0
• JavaScript
• WordPress
• AmCharts