Celebrity Bio: Matt Taibbi's Political Journalism

Matt Taibbi may be the most caustic political journalist in the country. He may also be the most insightful and the most hardworking. His articles for Rolling Stone are some of the most painstakingly researched political pieces appearing in any publication. They’re also generally damning to his subjects, who include Wall Street fat cats, fellow journalists and all stripes of politicians and public figures.

Taibbi doesn’t believe in the brand of objectivity that organizations like CNN and the New York Times practice. “There are a lot of people who take issue with the whole approach, who feel like if you’re going to present this factual case, that it shouldn’t be so polemical and so opinionated and have that much narrative in it,” he told the New York Observer. “I just don’t think there are rules about these things.”

In one of his more famed articles, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a nearly 10,000 word exposé of Goldman Sachs, Taibbi described the investment giant as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It’s descriptions like this, combined with research that brings to light the fact that Goldman paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits between 1999 and 2002, that shows his rare talent.

There is no quicker way to get on Taibbi’s radar than practicing what he considers bad journalism. He’s thrown a cream pie into the face of a New York Time’s Moscow bureau chief and, more recently, written an online piece called “Lara Logan, You Suck” (before Logan was assaulted during the Egyptian riots). Logan’s offense was saying that she didn’t think it was right that a Rolling Stone colleague of Taibbi’s had built up trust between himself and a source and then used the damaging words that this comfortable source had uttered in an article.

Questions for Matt Taibbi:

1.                  How much assistance does Rolling Stone give you in your research? It seems like you wouldn’t have enough time to write all this and do the research.

2.                  How do you get inspired to write about a topic?

3.                  What do you look for in a quote?

4.                  How do you get people to say such interesting things to you?

5.                  How much time do you spend interviewing people?

GPC Professional Profile: Nikita Howard, MediaSpot lab supervisor

“We’re kind of like a hive mind, if someone has a problem we know who’s good in that area and we send them over to help the student,” Drew Hudson says, describing the specialization present in Georgia Perimeter College’s MediaSpot, a media lab where students can use state of the art media software and check out cameras and other equipment essential to creating multimedia projects.

In the hive mind that is the MediaSpot, Nikita Howard is the queen bee, Hudson says. Howard is the MediaSpot’s media lab supervisor and she runs the lab with a kind but firm, sometimes even stern, hand, according to fellow employees and students. “As a supervisor she’s great when she needs to be,” audio specialist Brian Johnson says, adding that it’s not always her being the boss, that she’s one of them.

Nikita Howard, Brian Johnson and Drew Hudson working at the Clarkston MediaSpot
photo by Adam J. Waldorf

Howard is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, where she actually worked in a similar situation to her current job in a computer lab. Her degree is in journalism, so her specialization in editing software and film isn’t an intuitive connection.

She took a circuitous route to film and video production. In high school, she studied law. She was diverted from a possible career in law when she became enamored of the boy bands of the late 1990s, specifically ‘N Sync, the band that spawned superstar singer/actor Justin Timberlake. She started a newsletter about boy bands and decided to major in journalism.

While at Clark Atlanta, the film club there contacted her to help them put out a newsletter. The newsletter never happened, but Howard threw herself into the film club. “There’s only a select few people. There are people that come and do the program and there are people that come and DO the work. So once you get involved with it, it was writing, it was photography. I was in charge of the film club and I said we’ve gotta shoot something. We had gone maybe two months into the semester and people were asking what are you guys doing anyway. I said we need to write something and we need to do it. And that was my first short.” She aggressively pursued filmmaking, ‘I found myself as the president with no shooting background. All the other members were film majors or TV majors, I was a journalism major. I said, “Oh, crap, I’m going to have to learn how to do this.” I started really conversing with my teachers and my mentor is the guy that ran the computer lab.”

Professionally, Howard has done independent work. “I worked at Apple for a little while and that enabled me to get more technical and get the programs for cheap, which is fun.” The equipment enabled her to work making commercials for car dealerships on an international and local basis. She notes her work could be seen in Canada or West Virginia among other places.

Howard sees a return to making film shorts in the near future, but she loves her job and wants to continue. “The coolest thing about my job is seeing someone come in and they have an interest or they don’t have an interest and watching them develop,” she says. “We’ve been open for over a year now and we’re starting to get people who are coming in and doing stuff and showing us their work. Or they started with a class project and they actually were interested in the software so they come back and do it for another class. It’s good to see people using the resources at their disposal and getting professional feedback.”

Travel piece: Atlanta's Goat Farm

Art in the Goat Farm's Rodriquez Room
photo by Adam Waldorf

art hanging outside at the Goat Farm
photo by Adam Waldorf

photo by Adam Waldorf

A goat at the Goat Farm
photo by Adam Waldorf

photo by Adam Waldorf

photo by Adam Waldorf

photo by Adam Waldorf

Miles Kondylas and Sylvia Dowling, co-owners of CLVR ATL, at the Goat Farm
photo by Adam Waldorf

The Goat Farm's coffee shop and library
photo by Adam Waldorf

The Goat Farm does not have traditional hours of operation. In fact, there’s nothing traditional about The Goat Farm. “The Goat Farm is here to push culture forward through comprehensive support of the art’s,” Goat Farm owner Anthony Harper says.

It’s a rustic 12-acre former cotton mill/goat farm, but it’s along Atlanta’s beltway. Outwardly it seems that it must remain untouched from the beginning of its long history, but examine inside and you will find modern art studios, earthy as they may be. The artists that are invited to take up residence there paint and build pieces that could not have existed in the long ago days of the location’s past. The deeply idiosyncratic and varied acts of Atlanta’s music scene perform at the Goat Farm on a regular basis. It features artist exhibits, practical and artistic workshops, story circles and probably at some point any artistic endeavor imaginable. It is truly a home to Atlanta’s alternative community.

Location and hours of Operation

            The Goat Farm is located @ 1200 Foster Street, Atlanta, Georgia

            There are no regular hours of operation, but they often have events at night and workshops during the day.

Events at the Goat Farm

There is no specific Goat Farm website. Most events are advertised through word of mouth, which in this era means Facebook event pages. The strategy seems to pay off; events regularly have hundreds of people responding that they are attending.

            The closest thing the Goat Farm has to an official website is their official Facebook page, which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Goat-Farm-Atlanta/162337850449783. One can find listings for some, though by no means all, events and workshops happening at the location.

The Goat Farm’s mission

            More than 300 artists occupy The Goat Farm. They are enabled to live and work without the mundane, everyday worries of the struggling artist. Sylvia Dowling, co-owner of CLVR ATL a creative events group associated with the Goat Farm, believes this is a necessity to helping budding artists. “Most artists can’t get paint all over their house or have a dance floor in their basement,” she says.

The Goat Farm’s facilities

           

The Goat Farm has five new performance and exhibition halls and spaces. They have 5,000 square-feet set aside for contemporary dance and creative studios. Also on the grounds, there is a coffee shop with a library of fascinating and obscure books, an organic farm and an education center.

According to Miles Kondylas, the other co-owner of CLVR ATL, the Goat Farm is good for “anything from fundraisers to music events to art galleries. The broadening of the Goat Farm’s horizons is evolving not only the artist community that lives here, but people that participate on all levels.”

Times Square in Atlanta radio broadcast :20 and :10

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Press release: Study Abroad students display art in Clarkston exhibit

Study Abroad students display art in Clarkston exhibit

10/06/2011
Contact: Kristi O’Neal
Phone: 404-406-2451

E-mail: sylkweb@yahoo.com
Author: Adam Waldorf

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For Immediate Release

Aurelia Kime admires Kristi O'Neal's Vampire Panda Dreams of a Holiday
photo by Adam Waldorf

Study abroad students will be displaying their art through Oct. 28 in Visions of Europe (Part Two) Experiences through the eyes of Georgia Study Abroad students. The exhibit is displayed in the Fine Arts Studio Gallery on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building. The second part of a two part exhibit, Visions of Europe features photography and drawings from students who traveled to Europe, to places including Greece and France. Part one featured water colors.

According to Kristi O’Neal, the exhibit’s curator and a study abroad student as well, it is meant to encourage students to study abroad. She is an art major at GPC who received a Benjamin Gilman International Scholarship to study in Greece last summer and she emphasizes the importance of understanding and learning from other cultures. “When you can understand the world around you, you are better able to understand yourself and you’re better able to make a difference in your own community,” she says.

Fran Holt, assistant professor of English and Humanities, Clarkston campus, judged both parts of Visions of Europe. She was a professional photographer for over 20 years, but was amazed by the quality of the art, much of it by first-time artists.

Holt, who taught Humanities in Costa Rica in summer 2005, also encourages students to study abroad. “The best possible thing you can do, whether you do art courses or other courses, is to go on a summer abroad,” she says. “With the study abroad [program], you get to interact in other cultures. You get to see what the other cultures have done and you get to see what you can produce from your own background or how you can relate it to who you are and what you want and what you’re doing and that’s really important because the world is getting smaller and smaller.”

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Georgia Perimeter College, the third largest institution of the University System of Georgia, serves more than 26,000 students through four campuses and several sites in metro Atlanta. For additional information, visit www.gpc.edu.