jeela g ongley
Wrote about Grammy-winning artist Daniel Ho for the new Halekulani in-room magazine that came out a couple months ago. Only later I noticed: there is also a version of the story in Japanese! I’m officially translated!
Check out the articles (PDF).
Only slightly dampening my enthusiasm is the way they transliterated my first name.
Just call me Gee-la, I’m used to it. =\
Got to do a fun story for Mālamalama about University of Hawaiʻi locations featured on the TV show LOST, as the show heads into the series finale. The story was a photo-driven feature in the print issue and a narrated slide show online.
Here is the slide show:
Art Director Rowen Tabusa did both the slide show and the print layout. I especially love the print version for looking Lost-y with the bamboo grove background and for being smack in the center of the magazine. heh. It’s quite the popular story online, too, with two thirds of our total visitors taking a look at it.
Tho it doesn’t seem like it would be, this was actually a challenging piece. I was dealing with lots of different people—from ABC and each of the locations; trolling LOST fan sites for information; and trying to verify everything I was getting. Which isn’t so different from what I always do, but was a lot for such a short story. Unfortunately one major mistake crept into the print version, but it was corrected in the slide show (quite cleverly, I thought).
Modest as it is, the story feels like another deliberate baby step forward in the integration of print and online storytelling for Mālamalama magazine.
Since I last updated the links in my list of published articles, HI Luxury posted all their content online. Nicely done! View my author archive. Will have a new story listed there in the April/May 2010 issue. :~j
UPDATE: Here is my story about the Trump Tower lounge Waiʻolu.
Short video feature we did for the January issue of Mālamalama magazine, below. I did the interview with Paxton, oversaw the editing of that portion (i.e. chose the quotes—what is that job called?), wrote the narration and am the narrator.
Is that really my voice? It sounds so deep and sluggish. Can that be adjusted to sound perkier? yeesh.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! I just noticed that YouTube now has an automatic captioning based on Google voice recognition! How long has that been there?? that’s AWESOME!! Tho it looks like you need to view the video on the YouTube site to get that option (look for the CC button in the control bar).
That is the answer to many an accessibility prayer… Never mind that “University of Hawaiʻi” is alternately transcribed as “university of havana” and “university of why,” those both sound like great schools, too. LoL.
Hmm… so I see another month is about to slip by without me clocking in on this blog. Can’t have that. Without any ado, here are a few things I been up to:
This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.
My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).
This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.
Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.
I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.
lately, workwise
Malamalama, the magazine where I have been a writer and online editor (content manager) for the past several years, is being cut back from three to two print issues per year.
However, they’re adding 4 web-only issues to the production schedule–in addition to weekly updates–which means more online content is needed, especially audio and video. As a feature journalist and content producer the chance to work with an enthusiastic team on new media projects is super fun, even with the increased workload(!).
So far we’ve taken a collaborative approach to the producer’s role of these web extras and are improvising and learning with every assignment. I’ve mostly been the one to collect and edit the interviews (with sound help as needed) while magazine art director Rowen Tabusa and photographer R. David Beales handle the visual content and editing. Then I write the meta data or descriptions, upload the content and often do some online promotion.
Links to our web extras with a few notes on productions are below.
Feedback is very welcome!
Eating cheesecake and sampling cocktails, yeah, I know, I make it look easy. But the painstaking hours of research paid off because both these articles look good enough to eat. And drink.
A Sergio Goes photo takes full page in the Hana Hou piece and the four (count em, 4!) pages in HI Luxury include a shot of my girl Chia making a sour face while muddling limes. haha.
April/May 2008
Hana Hou
HI Luxury
Wrote about a great spot that Rowen has been telling me about for over a year, The Dragon Upstairs. The piece came out okay. But the place itself is very cool and a must-do in Honolulu, if you appreciate jazz even a little bit.
I submitted one more story to HI Luxury, and I’ve enjoyed working with them. The staff I’ve talked to seem like fun, intelligent people. Hopefully someone as sparkly-prosed, literate and in-the-know as myself ;~j takes the nightlife entertainment writer position and that door will close for me.
I’m also resigning quadmag.com, my pet project of the last ten years. I will always represent for that site, but I’m officially retired. (I’m living the dream! retire by 30 haha.) We’d love to see it keep going, but with TeN in San Francisco and Lance in Portland, it’s been hard to keep the momentum and these technical lumps are demoralizing. I’m just done.
Updated the list of articles for December and January to include a New Year’s Eve piece for HI Luxury and a story on UH summer programs in historical preservation and archeology on the Big Island of Hawaii for Malamalama.
Also added is the list of my Malamalama stories from Feb. 04 – Jan. 07. These are on subjects I usually wouldnt even think to write about (except the one on KTUH radio). I learn a lot writing about such diverse topics in history, the environment, tourism and the arts, as well as the interests of the institution behind the curtain.
The layout on the website doesnt do much justice to the photos and illustrations. The PDFs of Malamalama that are available for download are much better.
Finally, managed to get together links for some early Hana Hou stories. That’s the inflight magazine for Hawaiian Airlines. I need to write more for them, they do a really good job.
Updated the list of articles to include the October/November issue of HI Luxury magazine, which has a piece by yours truly called “Get Up & Get Down: Happy hour and more at the Hanohano Room.”
This magazine impresses me more and more with each issue. Unfortunately the band was not correctly identified in the caption; Maria Ramos and Deshannon Higa of grOOve.imProV.arTiSts are decidedly not Son Caribe(!). I’ll have to try to make that up to them. The photos again are by Chris McDonough, and those are my unmanicured fingers holding the electric blue cocktail on the main page.
One of the first real interviews I did after graduating from journalism school was in 1998 with Del tha Funkee Homosapien, a solo emcee and official or unofficial head of the Hieroglyphics crew. Their whole collective came to Honolulu to film a video for the song “You Never Know.” The song and the video don’t even really go together, but the week or two they spent here confirmed that Hawaii and hiphop did.
As an eager, wanna-be, hiphop journalist, I finagled a bunch of interviews for RE:ACT magazine, which was actually more of a zine, but I would never call it that. I spent hours talking with Del, A-Plus, Tajai, Casual, Pep-Love and the video director, whose name escapes me, as did his interview, due to an amateurish technical error on my part. The Del interview was the most in depth and exists online on a very early version of the quadmag site.
A short piece in Malamalama this month called “Athletes Gain from Academic Strength Training.” What? You wanted more? LoL.
The article on Spiritual Ecology is the one I wish I had written, tho athletics was a fun topic given the recent Once a Warrior commotion. The people I spoke with for the story are really committed to helping athletes learn how to learn, whereas the book’s angle is apparently more in line with the athletes getting their work done for them. How shocking!
My story next issue (January) should be fun! I got to go to the Big Island and ramble around old kalo (taro) terraces and Volcanoes National Park.
