Katharine Lackey

Photojournalism Portfolio

Penn State Thon Soundslide

Each year, thousands of Penn State students join together to put on a 46-hour no sitting, no sleeping dance marathon to fight childhood cancer. Donations go to the Four Diamonds Fund,which helps families whose children have cancer and are being treated at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center.

A new line dance is created each year and is performed hourly to help keep the dancers motivated. Here’s a soundslide I created at this year’s event (which took place Feb. 20-22) for my multimedia class. You will see I experimented half-way through with a technique I’ve been waiting to try for quite some time. I’ll post more soundslides later of additional photos from Thon and from the two photojournalism classes I took this year.

Working with horses, a passion

My final convergence journalism project.

Working with horses, a passion from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

For Suzanne Myers, waiting for the end of work at her job isn’t just a matter of wanting some time to relax; it’s looking forward to being at the part-time business she operates — Myers Stables. For her, working with horses is a passion and lifelong dream.

From a very young age, Myers was adamant about training the horses she would compete with in 4-H events and began to develop her own techniques as she learned from good horsemen and horsewomen.

Myers developed into a successful horsewoman, eventually opening Myers Stables in Port Matilda with her husband, Glenn Myers, in 2001. She started her own training program called Next Level Horsemanship about a year ago. She accomplished this while continuing to work full time at Penn State’s Animal Diagnostic Lab and being the mother to an 8-year-old daughter, Brooke Myers, who also rides and has begun to train her own horses.

Suzanne Myers has been training horses professionally for 20 years. Developing the Next Level Horsemanship program allowed her to market her business on a broader scale.

“The decision to train professionally was one that I made a long time ago. It’s truly my passion without a doubt and it’s all consuming in my mind,” she said. “I live, breathe and sleep wanting to work with horses.”

Last year Myers earned national attention in the horse community when she won the 2008 Mustang Challenge the first time she entered the competition.

Trainers competing in the Challenge are given 90 days to take an unbroken mustang and train it to allow a rider on its back and to perform basic maneuvers. The mustangs are then sold at an auction. The sale proceeds benefit the Mustang Heritage Foundation. Myers used her winnings to purchase Jazz, the mustang she competed with in the event.

“To not hear your number called until the top 3 was just amazing. To think that after all of the hard work, time and consistency that it might actually pay off was just very exciting,” she said. “And then they announced the second place winner and we knew that we had done it.”

Following the challenge, Myers became involved with a trainer incentive program, which places mustangs into successful adoptive homes by first gentling them with a trainer, through the Mustang Heritage Foundation.

“It was a great learning experience for us and a great networking tool as well. We’ve met a lot of people, different trainers from across the country,” she said. “It’s been a very good thing both on a personal level and as a trainer and as a professional to have those contacts in the industry.”

Handling mustangs during the training process is different than dealing with a typical horse — their instincts for survival have been honed over several years, Myers said.

“This difference primarily addresses the need for us to spend more time desensitizing these horses to us and the things we’re using around them in an effort to retrain their flight instinct and to get them to understand that we are not going to hurt them,” she said.

Myers says she hopes to move her business into a full-time venture within the next year, hosting more clinics and taking on more clients.

“We’re in a stage of aggressive growth right now and we’re doing a lot more clinics this year than we did last year and hopefully next year we’ll even bring it to a more far-reaching national scale,” she said.

As for how she juggles working a full-time job, being a wife and mother all while running a successful business on the side, Myers just brushes it off.

“Sometimes it’s exhausting,” she said, “but you just do it.”

Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps

Brooke Myers, 8, is already training and riding horses and even plans to compete this summer with the mustang her mother trained, Jazz.

Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

Childhood memories

Like her daughter, Suzanne Myers became interested in riding and training horses when she was a little girl.

Childhood memories from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

Final photojournalism project

“I’m setting the ink.” “Dude, there’s no ink … it’s Wordpress!”

Got a link to this funny YouTube clip today from landlinetv, a funny sketch comedy channel. Basically this is what would happen if we hired old journalists today — and by old, I mean like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type journalists.

TweetStats

So if you’re curious to find out exactly how addicted you are to Twitter, check out TweetStats.

After entering your Twitter username, TweetStats will compile a bunch of cool information about how often you Twitter, who you reply to the most and more. Here’s some screenshots:

The number of tweets per month/day — which also shows your addicted-ness level or whether you just dropped off the face of the earth for 3 months.

You can find out what day(s) you Tweet the most. Saturday makes sense for me — Tuesday not so much, I have class from 10-4… hmmm. And when you post the most Tweets / how often you’re not going to bed until 3 a.m. And your tweet density which combines the days and hours you tweet into a neat looking graphic.

Finally, my fave is the tweet cloud! You can see how often you write about certain words — obviously my most used are new, blog and news. I wonder if ‘new’ though includes ‘news’?

Colbert on Newspapers

Dog groomer describes recent council actions

Local business owner Kelly Shaffer, ran into issues with the State College Borough Council last year after neighbor’s complained about her dog grooming business.

Dog groomer describes recent council actions that affect her business from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.

Journalism internships go unpaid

An article in the American Journalism Review says more and more newspapers are offering unpaid internships, or in some cases, making colleges or students pay for the internship themselves. While the trend is not surprising given the state of the newspaper industry, I really question the long term effect such practices could have on younger journalists.

We all know that securing internships are vital to entering the profession upon graduation, but for students who don’t come from wealthier backgrounds, an unpaid internship may be … well … unaffordable. Add in the costs of paying for credits, which many news organizations now require for internships, and you have interns basically paying to have an internship.

However, I disagree with one expert’s opinion:

The best interns will follow the money, says Penny Bender Fuchs, director of career placement and professional development at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “It’s that old line, ‘You get what you pay for,’” she says. “The most talented students are going to continue to seek the paid positions.”

Everyone is still going to seek the paid positions but with major newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune offering only unpaid internships, I think some students will begin to choose quality over money: The ability to work in a large newsroom will begin to trump the fact that interns are paid for their work.

I was in such a situation last summer when I interned at USA Today. Not only was the internship unpaid (except for a small travel stipend), I had to (meaning my parents) shell out somewhere around $1,000 for the credit required to even get the internship. While my experiences there were invaluable, my rapidly declining checking account is a testament to the effects the summer had. (The previous summer, I worked 35 hours a week at a rate of $15 per hour for comparison.) Basically, I will graduate with no money saved up while at the same time trying to find a newspaper job. I’ve already gotten over the fact that I very well may end up working a retail job after May 16 until something better comes along.

While I did apply for some internships this summer, I had to focus on paid ones because I cannot afford to pay living expenses while working for free — the only reason I was able to take the USA Today internship is because I live 10 minutes away. I can’t even really afford an internship or job at this point that doesn’t allow me to live at home because of the economy and newspaper situation.

Back to the article — What’s most disconcerting is the fact that some newspapers are asking colleges and universities to hand over the money to pay for a student’s internship.

“It would be a desperation move, I think, on the part of the university. It’s one thing to offer an unpaid internship..as painful as that can be for [students], it can still provide an opportunity for them,” he says. Asking schools to pay for internships sets “an awful precedent. I can’t think of a similarity in other industries outside of the media where this would be done.”

Tuition at Penn State increases every year and I’m sure it’s the same for many schools around the country so I don’t really see how this is a viable option to get students the experience they need. The only hope that remains, therefore, is scholarships. Hopefully through university and alumni scholarships, students, colleges and newspapers looking for interns can find some middle ground.

Into the Twittersphere!

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you’re really missing out. The explosion of Twitter’s popularity in the past few months has amazed me as I’ve watched countless doubters and self-described “enemies of Twitter” convert in what can only be called some weird sort of religious-like cult movement.

My prognosis since I started using the social networking site remains the same: Those who use Twitter and use it to its full potential will find themselves addicted to it within a week.

My favorite excerpt from this video:

“But I don’t care what other people are doing every second of the day.”

“Neither do I, but we do want other people knowing what we’re doing, right?”

“No, no …”

Well that and the failwhale that eats up all the Twitter people.