As details emerge about the night George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, no detail trumps the fact that a man with a gun felt threatened by a teenager without a gun. If self-defense is Zimmerman’s claim, it’s disturbing that he maintains their altercation warranted killing.

My view of the Trayvon Martin case is compounded by my memory of cases from the distant to the recent past. Elements of this story remind me of Yusef Hawkins (1989), Latasha Harlins (1991), James Byrd (1998), Amadou Diallo (1999), the Danziger Bridge shootings (2005), Sean Bell (2006), and more — all cases from my lifetime that show how certain people, when faced with their own fears, can really undervalue black lives (even other black people can do this, i.e. Danziger Bridge).

not only have black males been in these shooting cases but black females as wellIn a similar way to how we call child abductions “Amber” cases, I think of murders of unarmed black people as “Emmett Till” cases (1955). But Trayvon Martin’s case is actually more similar to Latasha Harlins’ case, showing that not only have black males been in these shooting cases but black females as well. Harlins had a bottle of juice, Martin had a pack of candy. Both were teenagers and each faced an adult with a gun. Yet in both cases the gun-wielding adult said that they felt more threatened by the unarmed teen.

Harlins’ case upset me because I was very close in age to her in 1991 and also living right there in the Los Angeles area where she was killed. In fact, city-wide anger over her case contributed tremendously to the tension in L.A. that led to the 1992 riots (but what gets discussed much more is the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King).

History lesson on Latasha Harlins

In “NYPD Towers May Defuse Cop, Community Friction“, I got informative reactions and useful details from people in the impacted neighborhoods, people in the police department as well as people from the company that manufactures the towers.

I pitched this idea to City Limits’ editor because I’d seen these towers in my own neighborhood and wanted to look into what sorts of conditions, incidents and circumstances cause the police to erect inescapable watchtowers into certain communities over others. Some of what I found surprised me:

The NYPD’s program of introducing ominous observation towers in certain New York City neighborhoods could be working in more ways than one. While the 25-foot-tall mobile surveillance posts are supposed to improve crime investigation and crime deterrence, they may also be reducing tense confrontations between foot patrol officers and civilians.

Update: The City Limits editor and publisher were both excited (i.e. they tweeted) that this piece got picked up by a widely-read outlet, MetroNY. The commuter newspaper ran a very abridged 218-word version of my original 1550-word story right on the inside page (page 2) of their March 1, 2012 edition, which means the City Limits brand (plus my reporting and my byline) reached a few million more people than we could’ve originally expected it to from our website alone. View the MetroNY version:
• on metrony.com
• as a cut out
• as the full PDF

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is building this progressive program from its current iteration as a distinguished fellowship, then into a full Masters degree beginning next year. It’s exciting and there’s more information about it on it’s backer, the Tow’Knight Foundation’s website, 2012 Entrepreneurial Journalism Program Gets Underway.

I’m pictured above, second from the left next to Prof. Jeremy Caplan. To my left are fellows Noah Rosenberg and Ashley Milne-Tyte, we’re all listening to the J school’s dean, Stephen Shepard as he introduces us to the program during orientation week.

National Association of Black Journalists’ regional New York City chapter is an important professional organization to news people of various backgrounds because it not only supports African American journalists, but it equally supports African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and journalists of color who may require backing, networking, or recognizing by an established institution.

To give the new board a better platform for rebranding, I volunteered to redo the organization’s website (which had looked so dated and functioned so poorly for years that it compounded the demoralized energy around the group). So on February 4 2012, just days prior to the first big meeting with the new board, I launched an attractive WordPress-based redesign of the nyabj.org that boosted the sense that promising activity lies ahead.

City Limits has covered urban news and investigations in New York City since the late 1970s. They recently launched a new subdivision or newsroom at large called the Brooklyn Bureau to cover the whole world of civic and social issues in this one borough alone, and I’m one of the investigators.

This report is an education piece about Medgar Evers College’s challenges in improving its performance, politics, and public perception. Much had already been reported about conflicts and dissent among some faculty, but I probed for a number of weeks to get new developments concerning their coveted facilities. Read “Science and Politics Collide in Medgar Evers Faculty Split.”

Even though the students have done good work each fall, I hadn’t been thrilled with the site templates I’d implemented ever since I launched the site in 2007. I consider previous iterations unofficial placeholders, hardly even betas because they just didn’t do even the most basic parts of what I envisioned.

But this time around, especially with the prevalence of sophisticated theme frameworks, I’m ready to show off FIRST TAKE‘s site for constructive criticism. As always I’m still experimenting with different designs but I’m finally pleased with what I was able to do this year.

The professionalism of the site effectively engaged the students as well, pushing them to produce much better looking work than students had in previous years. This year’s students figured out how to use the featured image tool, how to embed video code and other tricks that impressed me.

Here’s the 2011 homepage:

A story about Republican students doing bake sales on various campuses is a hot topic on CNN and is trending on Twitter this week but it’s been done before… by me.

So I dug up the story that I did way back in March 2004 on this exact same topic when the idea had caught on at various campuses, including Columbia University. My piece, “Affirmative Action Protests: Half Baked?” was posted on the now defunct Africana.com so all I still possess is this PDF version of it.

I’d spoken with David Johns, a student active in Columbia’s Black Studies department, and toward the end of the piece I wrote this:

According to Johns… very qualified people are admitted over other very qualified people, but the university still only admits “qualified” people based on GPA, test scores, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and an essay… “I think a diverse campus just challenges some people’s sense of entitlement,” Johns says, adding that he missed the whole bake sale. “Fortunately, I was in class earning my grades.”

Hit the ‘click to interact’ button then play with each group label on the left to see changes over time. A bar chart might show it better but the real stand-out oddity here is that since the late 1980s the total number of Black women in the labor force is greater than the total number of Black men, and this relationship is only flipped among Black Americans – for other groups the men still outnumber the women, even though women are catching up fast. This is crazy to me, it’s shocking everytime I think about it and at the same time I feel naive for being suprised at all, considering other social realities that aren’t missed on me. But still, it’s nothing to be quiet about. Dataviz is the least I can do.

Here I’ve pulled the figures for just the African American demo to show, in side by side bar chart form, the 1980s to 1990s swtich. The whole country and the whole world is shifting from industrial economies to information economies, so the nature of work itself is less physical, and therefore gender agnostic.

Other tidbits in the data: Hispanic women will surpass Black women before 2016. Hispanic men are joining at the fastest rate. White women are joining faster than white men (unfortunately the source doesn’t have Asian American labor numbers till 2000).

Produced using IBM’s Many Eyes and Google Chart Tools respectively.

I took a few moments to capture video once I saw the surprise waiting for riders at the east side’s 103rd Street subway station. Uptown riders were forced to contend with a serious hazard that went on for hours during a recent storm, partially due to foundation work happening above for a new condo being built.

Video captured and edited with my iPhone and the iMovie app.

Along with the woman in blue, Serbino Sandifer-Walker (plus a third panelist, Amani Channel, who presented via Skype), I explained how efficient and practical mobile editing is to the room of field journalists. My presentation walked through capturing HD video with the iPhone, producing an engaging report with its iMovie app, then uploading directly to the web without ever needing to transfer media to desktop or laptop software.

These are a few photos from the afternoon. One shot shows a handful of folks who stayed afterwards to continue talking, so we all took the group shot. They were pretty impressed and said we put on one of the best sessions of the conference.

Here’s my piece, “Will We Soon Work Among Robot Reporters” about implications of an automated service that writes prose which is indistinguishable from what real reporters write, i.e. if the reporting is only about things such as sports scores or financial analysis — mostly numbers-driven news.

This is interesting because while machines can’t conduct interviews or get out in the field or interpret irony or humor or tragedy, there still might be other types of news reporting that we could let machines do for us if they can in fact do it better. It’s at least an inevitable debate.

UPDATE: Response from interviewee:

“Saw your article earlier this week, really well done. It’s the most even handed piece I’ve seen written about us so far. Many thanks”
Larry Adams, VP Product Management

UPDATE: My friends at NostrandPark.com just posted this mention about my block association’s recent rally, which includes a link to my video report.

American Experience organized this traveling event involving young student activists of today, 40 of whom were selected out of 2,000+ applicants, to take a two-week journey with a number of elders who were student activists 50 years ago. This was in honor of the 1961 Freedom Rides.

I was there to honor them as well because my parents, Robert and Helen Singleton, were two among more than 300 Freedom Riders.

Captured, edited and produced with my iPhone.

It’s a huge book but definitely a cover to cover read. I raced through its 500+ pages in three weeks on my Nook. During the book club talk I used my Apple TV to pull up recorded speeches, these photos, and even videos to add multimedia to the conversation.

Please forgive how some of these images are stretched and pixelated.

I fully credit the sources: C-SPAN2 BookTV’s coverage of the Harlem Book Fair, 2008; MAD MEN Season 2 DVD featurette, 2008; KTLA-TV City At Night’s 1961 archived footage of nonviolence training.

But he couldn’t treat lyrics as just data because language has context and meaning that computational analysis can’t fathom. So to make his project appeal to real people he gathered real people to discuss the human and cultural things that the data miss in these roundtables. At the table were people who Tahir describes as “Rap enthusiasts, historians, creative technologists, cultural critics, linguists, teachers, MC’s and academics.” The topic of session #4 was The (Im)Possibility of Quantifying Art & Metaphor in Rap, at least that’s where the conversation began.

This clip is from somewhere well beyond that. I’m sure that somewhere someone else has clips of me expressing my ideas but here in this clip I captured a moment during which Ken Montgomery, Mallie Mickens and General Steele dominated the conversation.

In the photo, I’m pictured on the right in red hearing a point being made at that moment by Mallie.

Photo by Raafi Rivero

From left to right we are me, Abhay Saxena, Mallie Mickens, Ida Benedetto and Jay Finch. I heard about this hackathon from my friend Tahir because he was working with Eyebeam at the time and he knew I’d be interested.

This was also my introduction to Hack/Hackers and I’ve been an active member of the NYC group ever since. Read more about the hackathon event.

Russell Simmons is always busy and pretty hard to get a hold of so this was a phoner and of course the call dropped a couple of times. It would’ve been worse if it was for radio or podcast but this was just for an online Q&A so our conversation was candid and casual. He’s actually an interesting person to learn a lot from so I appreciated talking for as long as we did.

Online I lead the piece with, “Russell Simmons revolutionized both rap music and hip-hop fashion by growing them from marginal street fads to mainstream must-haves, starting with the record label he co-founded (Def Jam) and his clothing line (Phat Farm). Now 50 and pretty much retired from both worlds, hip-hop’s original businessman is focused on charities and empowerment causes. Simmons spoke with Time.com about his politics, his recent book Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success, his fortune and his little princesses.”

I thought the interview’s funniest moment was this:

Q: What in your book is new and fresh?
A: [Laughs ] Nothing! … Did Muhammad say something that Jesus didn’t say or that Abraham didn’t say before him? I’m not suggesting I’m one of those people, but [it's about] obvious truths. You already have everything you need.