My two-year blogging anniversary

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Yes, I’ve been quiet. But if there’s any day to break the silence, today is it.Yesterday, November 14, was my two-year blogging anniversary. Here’s my very first post, and here’s my one-year anniversary post.

Have you ever heard of the 2 Year Blogging Curse? I’ve always thought that if I could just reach that two year mark, my blog would be in the clear. By that point, it’d be habit to blog three times a week.

Of course, it’s pretty clear that this hasn’t happened. It’s been a year full of change for me. Last November, I was working as a part-time cashier and had plenty of time to blog. Now, I’m a full-time journalist, part-time professor, and year-long convention volunteer for Anime USA and Anime Boston. As a result, I’ve only blogged regularly for about nine months of the year.

But even with all that on my plate, I think constantly about blogging. As long as I have something to say, I’ll keep aiming for that three-a-week blog post goal. And now that I’ve had a nice long break, I think it’s time to start writing again. I’ll have lots to say (and lots of time to say it) as soon as Anime USA is over!

For now, I want to focus on reflection. Here are my six favorite posts of the year:

  • Welcome to the NHK, work and life. I couldn’t have picked a better time to marathon Welcome to the NHK. I was living with my parents because that’s all I could afford. I was working a part-time job that didn’t measure up to my potential just to feel less guilty about it. NHK reminded me that making the effort is what counts.
  • Katsucon from a wheelchair. This was a perspective from with I never thought I’d be writing! I fell down a Metro escalator and hurt my foot pretty badly (it’s okay now, I can even run a 5K!) and was in a wheelchair for three days until my MRI results came in. (After that, I was on crutches, and then in a walking cast, for two months). Being in a wheelchair made Katsucon different, but it didn’t dampen the experience one bit.
  • How a Civil War reenactment is like an anime convention. After working with Susannah, my writing style shifted on the blog. I wanted to be more open about my personal experiences. I had been pretty reserved ever since getting trolled by 4chan, but I decided to stop living in fear. As someone who makes my living online, I’m always going to be a target. So why worry about it? This post was as much about me as its subject.
  • On being a fan and a journalist, part I. (Part II is here.) After writing about sex offenders at anime conventions, I became a source for the Washington Post’s Otakon story. Maybe you’ve heard about that one. Working with Mr. Dulac forced me to test one of my deepest beliefs — that my interest in fandom only makes me a more dedicated reporter, not a more biased one. The experience was more complicated than I ever expected, but I was stronger for it.
  • The Otaku Journalist Manifesto. I wrote this one on a plane to San Francisco, intending for it to be part of a free e-book download. (You see, I really do have tons of plans for Otaku Journalist. I’m constantly thinking about ways to improve it, even when I’m not writing). That of course didn’t happen, but it got me to sit down and finally explain what I’m about.

I’ve actually written 96 posts this year (counting this one) since my last blogging anniversary post. If you’d like to go down memory lane with me, check the archives or refresh the random post button on the sidebar. It’s been quite a year.

Why anime convention t-shirts are a feminist issue

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There are a lot of issues out there for anime fans to devote their awareness to. We’re trying to help post-tsunami Japan, get voice actor Greg Ayres the dental treatment he couldn’t afford and combat copyright infringement.

However, sometimes the problems we face have simple, inexpensive solutions. I’m talking about reducing gender inequality at conventions simply by diversifying t-shirt sizes. As I wrote more briefly on Tumblr, it’s an easy fix that will go a long way toward making otaku women feel welcome.

In my staff t-shirt at Anime Boston 2011.

A couple days ago, I was reading Geek Feminism’s wiki about tech conference t-shirts. Usually, these only come in men’s sizes. That was no surprise to me. Tech is still an overwhelmingly male field, and women who enter it face gender bias. In fact, I just spoke to a blind woman in tech support who said she once faced discrimination in the workplace, not for her disability but simply because her supervisor didn’t think a woman could handle the job. That’s terrible, and it shows equality in tech is still a ways away.

However, my point is about anime conventions. Unlike tech conferences, we’ve already reached equality. In fact, at Anime USA which I staff, we have more female than male attendees (54 percent to 46 percent)! Trust me, I graphed the statistics.

Yet even with the numbers to prove that men are not even half our audiences, we still cater to the male body. This causes problems for a woman, like:

  • Her ill-fitting shirt makes her look sloppy and unprofessional. She is less likely to be asked for assistance by the attendees she’s there to help. As a result, she may be less likely to get promoted to a higher position.
  • Since none of the shirts flatter her, she could get the idea that it’s a problem with her body, not with the shirt. This lowers her self esteem and she isn’t performing at her best. And who’s to say people around her won’t criticize her appearance?
  • But if she wears another shirt, she isn’t showing solidarity with the convention. She won’t be seen as a team player.

You might say, “Well, t-shirts in women’s sizes are a great idea, Lauren, but who’s going to deal with the extra hassle and price?”

I’m glad you asked, Non Person, because I do have experience ordering convention t-shirts for Anime USA. We usually get ours through Reston Shirt in order to support local business. Not surprisingly, women’s shirts cost the same as men’s — there would be no extra cost. Plus, being that our convention already orders shirts from size S to size XXXXXL (yes, really), Reston Shirt is used to getting diverse size requests from us. I can’t imagine adding women’s S through XL would trip them up.

This doesn’t need to happen by tomorrow, but it’s something we should all be aware of. Until today it never even occurred to me that while I agonize over trying to look my best in an unflattering baggy t-shirt for the weekend, my fellow male staffers dress the same as they always do.

Women make up half of anime con attendance. It’s time we stop pretending the male body is the only body type convention t-shirts are meant to cover.

The Otaku Journalist manifesto

Journalism

It’s the title of my blog and in a way, it’s my title too. But until now, I’ve never explained exactly what it means.

I have been calling myself the Otaku Journalist for nearly two years. While I almost always have to explain the meaning of “otaku,” I wouldn’t replace it. A borrowed Japanese word which defines a passionate hobbyist, it’s perfect for my topic – reporting on fandom in all its forms.

In the past few months, however, I’ve begun to see Otaku journalism as a concept of its own. Here’s what I mean when I use this term.

A personal beat

Many newspapers assign reporters “beats,” or regular topics to cover.

Beats sometimes make up the sections of a standard newspaper: Cops and Courts, Politics, Business, Entertainment. This helps reporters to network with the same group of sources who will have relevant and helpful information for a variety of same-category stories.

However, if you’re a blogger or independent reporter, you assign yourself your own beat.

With that kind of freedom, you can pick anything. But if you want your blog to interest other people, it needs to hold your own attention first. It makes the most sense to pick a topic you’re already crazy about.

Fandom is what energizes me. Pick the beat that energizes you.

Authentic reporting

In journalism school, I learned that objective reporting should be my highest aspiration. I should never imply that I’ve ever held any sort of opinion. One of my professors even suggested that if we wanted to be good journalists, we wouldn’t vote in national elections – what if somebody found out who we picked? Needless to say, I’m calling BS.

Human beings are opinionated by nature. If we try to suppress them, they might unconsciously come out even more glaring than if we’d addressed them directly. To pretend to be a robot is not only impossible, it’s dishonest.

I’m not saying to take sides. But don’t be a cold observer. Bring yourself, your experiences and intuition, to the article. What drew you to this story? The things that interest you will likely interest your readers. Sate your curiosity as a human at the same time that you conduct interviews as a journalist. Readers will have the same questions.

Stories should be about people, and that includes you.

The new journalism

Journalism jobs are dead. Journalism opportunities are everywhere.

For more than a year, nobody paid me to do what I do. But I kept reporting. Because telling true stories about fandom is the only profession that feels right to me. So I went to school or worked at a gym during the day, wrote blog posts around that and felt complete.

Reporting is not even what I’m best at. It’s not the thing that can make me the most money. It is simply the thing I am most passionate about doing.

If you’re aspiring to be a journalist, you should feel the same. You don’t have to feel passionate about all reporting — personally I don’t jump for joy to write about politics, (but I do if I have to).

In short, Otaku Journalism is not just what I do. It’s a way of life for anyone who is passionate about something and has that undeniable itch to share it.

The joy and terror of teaching college

Careers

Today, I joined the adjunct professors’ union. I almost didn’t because the union leader thought I was one of my students.

“Is there a Professor Orsini here?” she asked haltingly as she looked around my classroom. It’s true, I look as young or younger than my 21-year-old students. Usually I wear my stiffest business clothes and too much makeup in order to look older. Today I was wearing jeans.

A picture of the Professor from the My Ordinary Life anime.Still not as young or adorable as this professor.

The union leader gave me a handout about the meager salary I’m making. I already know it’s low pay. I don’t work here for the money. I work here because I’ve always aspired to become a teacher (though in my daydreams, I don’t start until after my fulfilling and successful first career.)

My mom was an adjunct professor too, while she was working on her PhD. She didn’t make as little as I do, but she was working in the sciences, not the arts. When she saw how much I was going to make, she said to go for it anyway. “The better the school, the less they pay you,” she said. “They know that you’ll find being affiliated with their reputation equally valuable.”

Since I work at a private university, you can’t FOIA request my salary, and I’m not sure I should give it out. It is, however, comparable to what a Starbucks barista makes, minus the benefits.

I have a full time job and don’t need to make more money from teaching, but I still signed up for the union. I signed up because this is a job that deserves a living wage. Simply put, teaching is really, really hard.

In fact, that’s why I’ve been putting off writing about teaching my class. I’ve been teaching twice a week for seven weeks now, and I still feel like I’m about to go perform stand up comedy for a group of librarians.

Before I started, I thought I’d be able to relate to my students more. I’m only three or four years older than them. I know who Drake is (much to the surprise of my 18-year-old sister.) Plus, I’d be a professional journalist teaching a group of journalism majors. Surely they’d look up to me? Not exactly. They have aspirations to become Capitol Hill reporters and foreign correspondents, so I can only imagine what they think about my article on, say, @horse_ebooks.

When I told my former professor about this, he said, “That never goes away.” So I’ve stopped waiting for everything to suddenly click into place. I worry less about my students thinking I’m funny, cool or inspiring, and far more time making sure they learn the material. I’m not the “fun” professor, but I have brought this group of 17 students from knowing nothing about website building to mastering CSS design.

Comm 305 (the course I teach) is split between two professors. I teach Web skills to half the class in one room while she teaches video in the next. Next Friday marks the semester halfway point, so we swap groups. I’m so, so grateful for the chance to try again. I’ve stumbled through my syllabus once. Now I can pick myself up with an ounce more confidence than before and start all over again.

P.S. Miss my regular three-times-a-week updates? That’s always my goal, but lately I’ve been busy with my jobs. Until then, you should definitely check out my Tumblr, which I update every day. I’ve even put a handy link in the sidebar.

Behind the scenes on some recent stories

Journalism

For obvious reasons, I don’t broadcast my opinions in stories. However, I think it’s silly to act like I don’t have anything to say about them. Reporters are people, not beacons of robotic objectivity.

Here’s what I think about a few of my recent Daily Dot stories:

photo by stevendepolo

Cam girls share their secrets (with each other) and A peep inside the camming business

This was originally one story, but my editor wanted to divide it into community and business aspects, since not everyone is familiar with the term “cam girl” in the first place.

The day these stories went live, I wrote a quick blurb on my Tumblr about how tough it was to access the cam girl community. For about a week I sent out queries on forums and indie sites, trying to get that first interview. On the forum I would eventually profile, it took several days for me to prove to them I was who I said I was and not a horny guy trying to get a free Skype session. But once one woman decided I was telling the truth, the floodgates opened. I ended up getting eight different interviews, when I was hoping for three at best.

Once inside, secrecy continued to be an issue (and in that line of work, I can definitely understand). Though every woman used an alternate pseudonym while camming, several asked for me to give them a third fake name in the story. Others encouraged me to link directly to their cam sites, and I did. (Did I mention these stories are completely NSFW?)

I’m not usually nervous about what sources think when a story comes out, but this one had me sweating. The story took a month to complete — a week of research, a week of writing (between all my regular story assignments), and two weeks of editing just to make sure it was 100 percent accurate. I specifically chose not to link to the forum I profiled since it was a safe haven for these women. But was I still compromising them?

The day it went up, I posted it on their forum and held my breath. Most women said it was accurate, which is the best compliment a reporter can hope for.

“I love the balance between being realistic that not everything is rainbows and unicorns but also saying it’s not the slavish hell-hole that most people think it is,” one woman said in what was my favorite comment.

But it wasn’t all good. Some women were upset that I’d lifted quotes from the forum. Even though the people quoted had given me permission, the women had now decided that it might help people Google their forum. I really didn’t want to make an edit to the story (that’s basically admitting to the public that I made a mistake, and I never want to edit if I haven’t actually made a factual error) so I showed them how to remove the site from Google. But they didn’t want to do that, either. Eventually, they just deleted the quotes. All’s well that ends well.

Image credit: Bill Boulden

Every day he’s shuffling

First of all, puns are my guilty pleasure, so I am overly proud of getting that title approved. Get it? He’s a rapper AND he plays card games!

Overall, my profile on Tha Gatherin was the most enjoyable story I’ve written so far at the Daily Dot. I’ve played Magic: The Gathering for years so I didn’t have to worry about getting the technical details wrong.

Bill was, frankly, the kind of guy I’d like to get a beer with, or since I don’t drink beer, play a casual game of Magic. Like me, he gets his energy to keep creating from the enthusiasm of the fandom around him. Best of all, he had a really great sense of humor and didn’t get offended when I said things like, “Isn’t the idea of being a guy who raps about card games kind of silly?” (In fact, the band’s name was originally in jest, but just stuck.)

“I thought, what would a rapper’s Magic name be? It started as a funny idea,” he said in a quote I decided to use in the story. “The sheer ridiculousness of it is lovable in itself.”

I was so comfortable, in fact, that I misspelled his name consistently throughout the story and not even my editor caught it. (Bill caught it himself on Twitter after the story went up.) This is an example of when it doesn’t pay to be too comfortable with the sources you’re covering. Believe me, I took pains to make sure nothing like that happened on the cam girl story.

Photo credit: Timothy Madison

The Internet Tough Guy remains a mystery

I’m proud of this because I figured out something Reddit’s hive mind couldn’t, or wouldn’t, solve. For me, this story illustrated why what I’m doing is actually worthwhile — somebody needs to fact check the Internet.

Redditors took for granted that it was the same guy in both pictures, (and the guy himself, a Farker circa 2009, didn’t exactly do much to quell the hype.

That said, this story would have been a LOT better if I could have gotten in touch with Timothy Madison, the “after” guy, himself. Unfortunately, he doesn’t update his Fark or YouTube very often, and those were the only ways I could find to reach him.

I hope this was interesting for anyone who wonders about, to borrow a line from Susannah Breslin, how your journalism sausage is made. I’ve got plenty of opinions about all (66 as of this writing) my stories, so if you’d like to hear about them “behind the scenes,” I’d be happy to keep talking.