Each athlete has a really interesting story to tell about his or her career and what got them to the point where they might be able to compete in the Olympics. The clear story, however, is persistence. The rowers seemed to have every advantage, beginning from the time the met a coach with lofty goals in high school.

Claire Laubach story from the December, 2011 Washington Times.

Laubach, who was a great athlete in multiple sports, was just following the prescribed path and having tremendous success until she was cut from the USA Senior National team just before the Beijing Games. Learning an important skill turned her career around, and now she’s one of the key members of the team that’s already qualified for the Games more than six months early.

Han Xiao story from the January, 2012 Washington Times.

And Xiao, the son of a Chinese immigrant who learned ping-pong in his basement, tore after the game with a remarkable tenacity. However, he may be a stronger player today at 25 than he was when he was racking up national titles as a prodigy a decade ago.

4-H council leadership page required lots of thumbnails and adding site copy from the legacy site.

The majority of the work revolved around cropping and sizing photos with photoshop, uploading those assets into Ektron’s media asset library, pasting in page text content, uploading .pdf documents and refining some of the copy that had been written by an outside agency.

Environmental science and alternative energy page required re-writing of site copy.

Much of the work I did can be seen on the 4-H science, citizenship and healthy living sections, where I re-wrote almost all of the copy to be more direct, concise and as free of unclear “buzzwords” as possible.

Engineering and technology page

One thing I’ve learned as a journalist is to strive to make copy readable for the average person, and I think I did that well here.

Much of the rest of the work on this project required downloading documents from the old server and uploading them into the document library within Ektron. The office didn’t really have a CMS prior to this job, it used Dreamweaver’s file management system and a live web server to run the website.

Scottie Reynolds feature from Northern Virginia magazine.

My feature on Scottie Reynolds, the former Herndon (Va.) High and Villanova basketball star, was in the November issue of the Northern Virginia magazine. Reynolds was one of the most challenging interview subjects I’ve ever tracked down, bouncing from a pro basketball team in Springfield, Mass. to Puerto Rico to the Philippines. We’ll see where he ends up next.

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s Northern Virginia blog picked up the story on Dec. 6.

Story on Virginia state high school cross country championship meet.

The second event was the Virginia state high school cross country championship meet. Pretty amazing to see this kids run their hearts out.

The top individual winners in Class AAA were Sophie Chase of Lake Braddock and Ahmed Bile of Annandale. George Mason High in Falls Church, Va. won the team titles for both boys and girls. I also covered Albemarle High near Charlottesville for the Daily Progress. Albemarle finished second overall in the Class AAA boys competition.

The story for next year? Probably video of how wasted the kids are at the finish line after running as fast as they can for 18 or 19 minutes. Many of them need to be helped to their feet after crossing the line.

Twins recruiting story from ESPN.com.

James Wagner of the Washington Post wrote a story last spring about Caroline and Katherine Coyer, twin basketball-playing sisters from Oakton (Va.) High School. I figured it was worth expanding upon. In the story are anecdotes from the Coyers and other twin sports-playing sisters around the country – the Rolfzens from Nebraska, the Foulshams from Penn State and more. Please take a look at my story on ESPN.com. Thanks to Phil Dolinger for his great photos.

A look at some of the sites saved on Dan's iPhone.

I’ve also been impressed with the ease-of-use on the Grantland site. I’m told it was built in HTML 5, which affects the way its displayed on the user’s screen. If you see the site on full-size monitor, it adapts. If you see it on an iPhone, it adapts, too. Great stuff.

Tour de France story for the July 25, 2011 issue of ESPN the Magazine.

I stayed in a Formule 1 hotel, the kind where you meet no one but a computer keypad at the door and the shared showers clean themselves.

Earlier this year, I was asked by an ESPN the Magazine editor to write a short story about where one could plant himself, down to a specific meter, if possible, for the best view of the Tour. Here’s what I came up with, with help from Tour de France expert John Wilcockson.

You can view the virtual issue by following the widget below.

I’d like to call this post “Giving The Finger to Legacy Media Sites,” but I know that’s not going to be picked up by search engines. I’m a Web journalist, and I bow down to search. No search engine would understand the nuance in the headline.

Yes, I believe the trend of established media organizations launching redesigns of their websites with much fanfare (see Washingtonpost.com) and the “redesign” still taking cues from a template from two decades ago, is a mistake. It’s worth “giving the finger” to those sites. But what I really mean is those sites should take a lesson from the way today’s news consumers use their fingers when navigating mobile devices.

Photo taken with iPhone 4 for story on Patch.com

The Web Journalism class I taught last semester at the University of Maryland, College Park, welcomed NPR user interface developer Wes Lindamood, who quickly told us that his Project Argo blog team worked with mobile applications in mind and made sure their tools were backwards compatible to desktops and laptops.

For someone who always considered himself a “modern journalist” it was an “aha” moment. My circa 2008 Verizon cell phone in my pocket was saving me money on data charges, but putting me behind the curve.

Since that day in early February, I’ve made an effort to familiarize myself with the mobile journalism world as much as possible. Bought the iPhone 4, added iMovie for iPhone to my shopping cart. Downloaded the Photoshop mobile version, added Twitter and Facebook apps.

The Blue Screen of Death

My girlfriend says I’m addicted to my phone, and while she may have a point, I counter with the idea that the phone and newer tablet devices are much friendlier to digital news consumers than a laptop. No power cables, at least for eight or nine hours. No crazy bugs or blue screens of death (at least so far). You find something camera-worthy? Your 5-to-8 megapixel camera is always in your pocket. The best thing about consuming information this way is that if you have your Twitter and Facebook preferences set to your satisfaction, reading news can no longer be compared to eating spinach. If you’re following me or my organization on Twitter, you’ve made a choice. It’s active buy-in, not passive spoon-feeding.

To that point, I argue that news websites are still trying to polish a piece of coal into a diamond if they’re working on an old-fashioned newspaper-style template for their home page and sub-fronts. (Ahem, NPR.org.)

Take a lesson from Lindamood and take your content mobile, but also make your website mobile-user friendly. Instead of trying to train the new breed of user to interact with your site the same way their predecessors did a decade ago, embrace the training they’ve already received from iPhones and Droids, and display your breaking news Web stories in the same style as a Twitter timeline. Interface with your reader in a modern fashion instead of making your reader behave as if it were 1999.

What’s the payoff?

It’s fine to opine about how mobile-user friendliness can bridge the gap between “old media” and “new users,” but what’s a benefit of this perspective?

I say it’s stronger journalism. And strong journalism these days means an engaged audience. An audience that feels like a collaborator, not just a receiver. It requires a newsroom that believes sometimes “giving the people what they want” based on search trends or local buzz is a positive step, not just folding to pressure.

My Dipity timeline below attempts to show how Gay Talese’s famous Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” had it been assigned today, could have been influenced by social media. Perhaps Talese might have even gotten an interview instead of being forced to eavesdrop.

Social Intelligence home page.

You’re 30 and looking to move up the corporate ladder. In the last few years, you’ve avoided unemployment (no small feat as your company downsized), socked away a few thousand dollars in your 401(k) and are even thinking of moving out of your cramped apartment if you can scratch up a down payment for a house.

That kind of progress is admirable, and as you fill out an application for a job at a new company, (dreaming of that raise that would make the new-home down payment a reality) don’t forget about your past. While a background check that likely includes a credit report and verification of academic degrees is, and has been, the norm for years, some companies are being even more thorough than that.

According to a story by Gizmodo posted earlier this month, companies like Social Intelligence are now running social media background checks on potential employees. Do you have a skeleton lurking in your digital closet? Just because you made a snarky post on a forum back in 2004 or made a comment on a friend’s party-all-night photo from Las Vegas a few years ago and forgot about it, doesn’t mean a computer will.

But before you spit up your latte and log-in to Facebook and that MySpace account that you forgot to deactivate a few years ago to do a clean sweep, take a look at what Gizmodo’s writer Mat Honan figured out. The gadget-review website submitted six of its staff members for background checks, and Honan’s profile was the only one flagged.

A few things to know:

• Social Intelligence scans the most recent seven years of Internet history
• It does not pass along photos
• It looks for inflammatory keywords linked to your name (racist or sexist comments, assertions of violent acts and references of drug use)
• It does not generate a report if a candidate passes the background check

Honan, who has admittedly worked for some snarky, subversive publications and has cultivated an edgy Internet presence, says he failed the check miserably.

Our sympathy goes out to him. But that’s not the point of his story.

He scanned Social Intelligence’s report and turned it into a slideshow on the site, complete with comments.

In the end, Honan says it’s worth being wary about these Internet background-check companies. But they have their limitations. For example, he notes that some secondary Facebook accounts belonging to his colleagues didn’t come up. Sketchy photos from his Flickr account and posts on Twitter that were accessible via a Google search also failed to make the cut. Perhaps this is because the reports generated by Social Intelligence are created by human beings, not just some computer program, so there’s some judgment in what qualifies as flaggable behavior and what does not. He writes:

As an employee, you don’t want potential employers knowing certain things about you that might make you a less attractive candidate due to their personal biases. As an employer, even if none of those things matter, just accidentally finding them out can be a problem.

All this goes to show that job-hunting today, and just keeping a job, is a mine field. See Honan’s report below:

Mat Honan’s Social Media Background Check

A screenshot of Dan Friedell's Devin Vandyke slideshow.

One of the good things about working for Patch.com as a freelancer is that the editors are pretty open to experimentation.

A few months ago, I did a piece for the Oakton, Va. site about the local high school’s strong girls’ basketball team. We miked up the coach and did a nat-sound audio photo gallery.

I decided to try a similar thing with my story about Devin Vandyke, a rising senior at South County Secondary School in Lorton, Va. I was writing about the recruiting process for Vandyke, who has decided to play football next year at Virginia Tech. We talked about how he received a fair share of letters, but also lots of contact on Facebook from coaches who were interested in getting on his radar.

So I took about 30 photos of his recruiting materials with my iPhone and then asked him to go through some of the items he had received – credentials, yearbooks, hand-written letters, etc. – and tell me what he thought of them.

It turned out he was a great narrator. Only one take for the audio. And I think the multimedia project turned out well. Let me know what you think.