Bourbon Street, with its bars, restaurants and clubs, is known as one of the most popular places to hang out in the Big Easy. Found on this lively venue are many street vendors and musicians who provide entertainment, often for a few fleeting moments before the crowds move on and they’re forgotten.

“It wouldn’t be Bourbon Street without them,” said tourist Ashley Clower. Here is a sampling of the entertainers who have found a home on Bourbon Street:

I’ve got the blues

Troy Tallent has been strumming his acoustic guitar and blowing his harmonica on the same corner of Iberville and Bourbon for the past 23 years. He sits on a dark purple fold-out chair, earning about $50 a day playing the blues. Tallent has acquired a following of fans over the years. He says they love his music because it’s mostly original.

“Nothing to brag about, but I have been on this corner since ’87,” Tallent said. “I’ve played at all the clubs and done all the street things, but I play here ’cause I know so many people.”

Tallent said he moved to New Orleans because of its history. He wanted to become a musician and wasletting no one stand in his way.

“The girl I loved for 16 years turned into a lawyer, and I don’t like lawyers, and I don’t really need all that,” Tallent said. “So I told her that if she was going to be a lawyer, then I was going to be a musician. So I left California and headed to New Orleans.”

Beer cans and tap dance

Passers-by often hear Jamal Robertson and Robert Gooding before they see them. They sound like a herd of galloping horses with perfectly coordinated moves. People often stop and stay for their entire set and leave a few bucks or at least a round of applause.

Robertson and Gooding learned to tap dance from watching a YouTube video. On weekends, the friends head to Bourbon Street on the No. 88 bus and tap dance, but they don’t have proper shoes. Instead, they crush beer cans and attach them to the soles of their sneakers. They have to find containers that are already empty because neither of them is of drinking age.

Robertson is 15 and Gooding, 16.

“We find them lying down on the ground and we break them and tear them,” Robertson said. “Then we fold them and step on them.”

The two friends say they each make about $80 a night. They add that they make good grades in school and their parents are proud of what they do.

“We’re talented,” Gooding said.

Roses are red

Virginia Schrang sells single red roses on weekends for $4 each. She wears a white, form-fitting lace dress, with purple and green Mardi Gras beads around her neck. She sits with her legs crossed on her bar stool and offers a rose to anyone passing by.

“It’s a romantic business and I love it,” Schrang said.

Schrang says she was a commercial model in Miami for 14 years, but wanted to focus on raising her four daughters and two sons, so she quit her job to stay at home with her kids. She also has nine grandsons, five granddaughters and a pool of great grandchildren.

About 15 years ago, the 71-year-old attempted to make a living solely by selling roses, but said it wasn’t enough money to support a family.

“But once I got 62 and got my Social Security, then with the rose business and Social Security I was doing good,” she said.

However, the economy still hit her hard.

“We used to work five days a week, but as the [economy] goes up and down, now we only work Friday and Saturday,” Schrang said. “’Cause those are the only guaranteed nights we are going to make money.”

Golden talent

A gold-faced man lugging a stereo and a large bucket in a wheeled cart entertains on Bourbon Street every weekend. Daniel Poole, who goes by the name “Solid Gold” when he dances, wears jeans, jacket and shoes spray-painted sun gold to match his name.

He performs a mixture of hip-hop and break dance moves. When his shoulders pop and his hips swing from side to side, people get excited and drop money, mostly dollar bills, into his bucket. Although he has enjoyed boogieing on Bourbon for the past two years, he aspires to be a dancer spreading his Christian faith through his art.

“I feel like entertainers are those people to fill the voids in people’s lives,” Poole said. “When you entertain, don’t just rap, dance and play football and leave. Give me a message when you’re done. Anybody can just dance or just rap, but I have a message.”

Poole says he paints his clothing gold to be noticed. That way, he can network and spread inspiring messages to his audience.

“If you want to get noticed in entertainment when everybody is running one way, run the opposite way,” he said. “You got to do the unthinkable to make it, because so many people are doing the same thing. I thought I would promote myself by being gold on the streets of a heavily tourist city. I can meet more people like that.”

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I woke up at 4:30 a.m., fell asleep in the shower and somehow managed to throw clothes on my body by 5:07 a.m. After a short prayer, by 5:20 a.m. I was driving three fellow journalists to Venice, La., to cover the oil spill. When we finally arrived a few hours later, we immediately got to work. I spotted a Coast Guard station and did an illegal U-turn to get to it. And that was just about how our entire day went : finding leads and chasing them.

Our day was long and eventful, but exciting. We felt like real journalists and the four of us even bonded over video blogs, po’boy sandwiches and hilarious sources.

All that fun was over when we returned — about 7 p.m., after 14 hours away — and had to write the stories. We were on tight deadlines and needed to get our stories posted quickly. I knocked out a short profile of two housekeepers who cook for their Coast Guard guests and then went on to my community service story.

I loved the profile. I fell in love with the characters and tried to make the reader feel that same love for them through my words. The community service story wasn’t as much fun, but I put the facts out there and produced what I thought was a solid piece of work.

When it was time for the editors to take a look I was excited. I went to cover the biggest oil spill in history and would have several clips with the New York Times Student Institute name on it! But my high was destroyed when the editors decided not to use my profile piece because the same characters were in the main article. I was told it was best for the website.

It didn’t feel like it was the best for me, but I dealt with it, because, after all, I still had the community service story.

Boy was I wrong. I was unclear of what my editor was looking for and I had asked all the wrong questions and got the wrong story. I was told that I would either have to turn it into a blog post or have nothing to show for my trip. I chose the blog post, but I was not happy about it.

My three colleagues got some amazing clips from the trip and I was left with a blog post. How would anyone ever know that I was in Venice chasing leads, hunting down shrimp boaters or following men grabbing bags of cotton to soak up the oil and throwing them into boats?

Naturally, I called my mother. I pouted to her. I told her I was the worst journalist in the world and I would never make it. I told her I blew my opportunity to cover a disaster. She listened. Then she brought me back down to earth. She reminded me that I have only been at this for a year, and I can’t win them all.

I went back in the newsroom with my eyes flushed with red and my iPod on full blast. Even after the conversation with my mom I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to finish my blog and leave.

I am horrible at hiding my emotions, so my sour mood was noticed by just about anyone who could see. Writing that blog post was so frustrating.
After a few talks with some of the editors who assured me things would get better. I decided to finish up my blog and search for a new story.
The next day I came in, still slightly upset about my lame blog post, but eager to write more and get better. I wrote two stories that day — I think some of my best work at the Institute.

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From left, Evelyn Alexis, 75, Dawn Williams, 52, and Leena Mcfield, 78, are part of the sizable Honduran community in New Orleans. "I had a hard time after coming back from Katrina," Evelyn Alexis said. "Your life has been shattered, everything and all the people that you know. But everything that I had was in New Orleans, and we needed to work our way to get back home." (Taylar Barrington/NYT Institute)

“I have friends who come down all the time, and they always talk about my mother’s cooking,” said Franz McField. “She does red beans and rice, which is native New Orleans foods, but when she adds her mutant pepper and little spices, it just kicks it up to another level.”

The Alexis family is a small part of the sizable Honduran community in New Orleans.

New Orleans has the third largest concentration of Hondurans in the U.S., dating back to the 1950s, when they began flooding into the Big Easy after joblessness swept their country due to the decline of the fruit industry. New Orleans was a natural migration point for immigrants from Central America, only 1,000 miles away. When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, the community in New Orleans grew even larger with people fleeing the storm. When Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, most of the Honduran community decided to rebuild instead of fleeing to their homeland.

Hurricane Katrina hit Evelyn Alexis especially hard, killing both of her brothers and her husband of 40 years. She fled to Texas with her son and contemplated staying there to avoid her gloomy new reality.

“I had a hard time after coming back from Katrina,” she said. “Your life has been shattered, everything and all the people that you know. My life has changed forever. My husband and I —that’s gone. Gone. But everything that I had was in New Orleans, and we needed to work our way to get back home.”

Evelyn Alexis, like many other Hondurans who immigrated to New Orleans, made the city her home. Even after Katrina, a majority of New Orleans’ Hondurans returned to rebuild and start over.

Dawn Williams, Alexis’ niece, was born in Honduras and moved to New Orleans at the age of 6. Although she is bilingual, her accent is inconspicuous unless she is in a room filled with her older relatives. She thinks of America as her home and says although she enjoys visiting Honduras, as she did a few years ago, she feels like a tourist there.

“We are very Americanized,” she said. “We were all down there on a trip a few years ago, and for us it was so amazing. We felt like tourists because we didn’t know a lot of the people there.”

Many Honduran-Americans feel the same; a significant number of them have been in New Orleans for over 80 years, and have become assimilated in American culture.

According to the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey, more than 4,500 Central Americans make New Orleans their home. There are no statistics available specifically for the Honduran population in New Orleans, but Ted Heken, chairman of the Black and Latin Studies Department at Baruch College who received a doctorate in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, estimates that most Central Americans in New Orleans have roots in Honduras.

New Orleans celebrates its Honduran community by supporting a Honduran Independence Day parade each year. New Orleans culture has also rubbed off on Honduras. Over the years that parade has a taken a decidedly New Orleans style, with participants dressed in Mardi Gras costumes and dancing to music with zydeco sounds.

“It’s almost like they transformed the culture from there and brought it here and continued it as well,” said McField, Williams’ cousin.

Angel, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, came to New Orleans specifically because of its ties to his homeland. His last name is being withheld because of his immigration status. He speaks very little English, but is determined to fulfill his dream of making enough money to bring his family to live with him in the U.S.

He moved from Honduras to New Orleans in October 2005 in search of work after Katrina. He planned to go back to Honduras, but never went back.

“I wanted to make money and send it back to my family,” he said, mainly in Spanish. “I was not going to stay here, but now I am a leader at my church and so many youth look up to me.”

One reason the community in New Orleans is unique is because there are few Honduran communities. Most of them are dispersed throughout the city.

“That group is mostly a suburbanized group and roughly middle class,” said Heken. “There is no defined Honduran neighborhood. They have been in New Orleans for such a long time and have assimilated within the culture and no longer need that ethnic enclave.”

Franz McField has his own opinions about why Honduran communities never established themselves as an enclosed community in New Orleans, while other Latino groups have very specific areas where they reside.

“I think you often times get a lot of immigrants together, living in a community together,” he said. “I think they get lost to a certain degree into their difference and separation from the general population. “I think these guys (Hondurans) saw what was out there and they weren’t going to get stuck together all the time and not really exposing themselves to the things that were out there.”

Although members of the Honduran community do not live in proximity to each other, they still maintain their cultural ties. Floyd McField, who is Williams’s uncle, and Lenna McField’s husband, watch soccer games together every Sunday afternoon in a nearby park, where many of the participants are Honduran. Alexis attends church every Sunday, where the members come from several Latino countries, including Honduras.

“Hondurans are united with other Latinos by language and a shared sense of Hispanic ethnicity,” said Richard Campanella, lead professor of geography at Tulane University.

Honduran-American families also put a strong emphasis on education.

“In our family it’s not if you are going to college, it’s where you are going to college,” said Williams, who has embraced that idea. Everyone in her family, with the exception of her parents, has graduated from college. Williams herself has three masters degrees and a doctorate.

Lenna McField, Williams’s aunt, migrated to the U.S. because of her husband’s job as a merchant seaman, but also because of the educational opportunities in America.

“They could have got a good education in Honduras, but everything just would have been in Spanish,” she said. “America was the best place for the children.”

Campanella said Hondurans are still coming to New Orleans because there is a strong local job market, even during a recession. He also said the presence of a Honduran community here and the city’s similarities to Honduras also make the place attractive. The humid, tropical climate and the greenery are just some of the similarities between the two.

“Here in New Orleans it just reminds us so much of home,” Lenna McField said.

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Drivers in Shreveport might start slowing down after more than 100 traffic tickets were issued in a three-hour period on Wednesday. Shreveport police officers, in conjunction with Louisiana state troopers, are cracking down on speeding on Interstate 49.

“We are looking for dangerous drivers and speeders,” said Doug Pierrelee, public information officer for the Louisiana State Police. “We are looking for crash-causing drivers.”

Nearly 40 law enforcement officers were scattered throughout the 200-mile interstate. About 15 officers were concentrated in a two-mile stretch on I-49, just south of Interstate 20, the site of many reckless-driving complaints. The experiment was an attempt to combat reckless driving between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., when many drivers are hastily heading to work.

The heavily patrolled two-mile stretch on I-49 has an abundance of crashes every year, Pierrelee said. Because of a federal code, officials say they are unable to disclose the exact number of accidents. Ron Webb, a councilman in Shreveport, said this has been a major issue in the city. “When I see people around the neighborhood they ask what are you going to do about all the speeders?”

Webb says he cautions his wife to be careful on the interstate because there are often drivers going 70 or 80 miles per hour. The speed limit is 60.

Pierrelee says, this is his department’s attempt to be proactive, and address the daily barrage of complaints. He says they are, overall, concerned about safety.

“I don’t like writing tickets,” he said. “But it’s easier than working a crash.”

Those driving at least 15 miles over the speed limit were fined a minimum fine of $150. The violators have 60 days to pay their fine and have the option to appeal the penalty through the district attorney’s office.

“I know it’s going to work,” Pierrelee said. “Tickets work.”

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The chief mechanic of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig testified Wednesday that a BP official and a Deepwater rig manager were arguing on board the rig, just hours before the April 20 explosion.

The testimony of the mechanic, Douglas Brown, was given during the first day of the second session of federal hearings about the explosion that has led to several million gallons of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. BP leases the Deepwater Horizon well from rig owner Transocean.

Brown said he witnessed an argument between a BP representative and Jimmy Herald, a Deepwater Horizon offshore manager, around 11 a.m. on the rig. According to Brown, the debate ended when Herald left the meeting grumbling to himself, saying “I guess that’s what we have those pinchers for.” Brown told investigators he believes this statement was in reference to the shear rams on a blowout preventer, the device used to slam a well shut in an emergency. Eleven hours later, the well exploded and the preventer failed to work.

“Somewhere before 10 o’clock you heard a large air leak sound,” Brown said. “We started hearing gas alarms going off and they kept piling on top of one another and more and more over the radio. And that’s when the power went out, and we were in the dark. After that was the first explosion. There was a hole in the floor and I fell through it. When I tried to get up the second explosion happened.”

The U.S. Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service are conducting a joint investigation into the April 20 blast and subsequent oil leak. One round of hearings was held two weeks ago and focused on the explosion itself. A second round started at a Kenner Hotel on Wednesday, focusing on the emergency preparedness of the crew, and a third round, known as the “technical verification” stage, is tentatively planned for July.

Investigators have said a final report will be released some time after the hearings conclude.

Brown’s testimony was the most vivid during a day that was dominated by technical explanations. During questioning from a BP lawyer, Brown was asked detailed questions about the emergency preparedness of the Deepwater rig, including what emergency materials were in the lifeboats. In response to many of the questions, Brown’s lawyer told the court that his client had suffered a severe head injury as a result of the explosion and would be unable to answer very specific questions.

At various points during the hearing, Transocean officials said that BP was responsible for certain tasks, while the sole BP official to testify raised questions that implied that Transocean bore more responsibility.

During the testimony of Steve Tink, BP’s health, safety and environmental manager, the atmosphere changed in the hearing room. People crowded in, but instead of taking any of the nearly 30 empty seats, they stood in the back and listened intently.

Tink’s testimony pointed special attention to a document that described the company’s safety plan. The precise content of the document was only broadly discussed, but prompted numerous questions. Tink claimed to have never seen the document, but it was later revealed that he wrote it.

“This document was done by my people,” he said

Tink said he was unable to answer many of the questions posed by the commission, stating they were not in his area of expertise.

The hearings are scheduled to resume at 8 a.m. Thursday and continue through Saturday.

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This is an update of an earlier article.

For the past month, Laura Underwood, a hair stylist in Houma, La., has swept the floor of the Aha! salon, gathering hair clippings and stuffing them into grocery bags. She also asked other salons for their leftover hair but under one condition—that they wash it first. Before long, the back of her SUV was filled with bags of hair, making it hard to see out of her back window.

A Matter of Trust volunteer at the Destin, Fla., warehouse packing hair and fur donated from around the world into nylon pantyhose. The organization is hoping these hair booms will be used to aid the Gulf Coast oil spill. (Lisa Gautier/Matter of Trust)

Underwood, an environmental activist, is gathering hair clippings for hair booms. She understood that the nylons packed with hair and fur would be used to clean up the most recent oil spill. Matter of Trust, the organization that initiated the hair craze, is encouraging donors like Underwood to drop off the hair and fur that donors would otherwise dispose of.

“I love to clean up,” said Underwood. “I think they rely on modern technology too much, and sometimes they need to step back and see that nature works better.”

Underwood, who also works for animal rescue, discovered Matter of Trust while visiting Internet sites for ideas on ways to help the oil spill relief efforts. Being a hairstylist, she jumped at the opportunity to donate hair and wrote to other activists about the plan.

“I just wrote on all of my Facebook friends’ walls, and before I knew it, some guy from California was contacting me about shaving his sheep and sending me the fur,” she said.

Since this campaign began in April, Matter of Trust has received similar responses. As of May 5, the organization said it had received over 400,000 pounds of hair and fur.

It has been unable to update these numbers because of the overwhelming response, said Lisa Gautier, president of Matter of Trust.

“It is pouring in now from all over North America and beyond,” Gautier said in an e-mail interview. “And we weren’t counting on the alpaca farms—we have to do a new tally.”

According to Gautier, the 35,000 participating salons each cut about one pound of hair per day and dog groomers cut three to five pounds per day. In addition to this, classrooms, scouting troops and plenty of individuals are donating their own hair.

“It goes on and on,” Gautier said. “There is so much hair.”

Matter of Trust has been storing the hair donated in 19 warehouses along the Gulf Coast preparing for the word from local hazardous materials teams that the hair was needed. They might be waiting longer than they anticipated, though, after the latest announcement by the Deepwater Horizon Response Team. The team said on Friday that it was no longer considering hair booms as an option to soak up the oil.

“Our priority when cleaning up an oil spill is to find the most efficient and expedient way to remove the oil from the affected area while causing no additional damage,” said Charlie Henry, NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator in Robert, La. Hair booms were used in a field test in Texas, but, “One problem with the hair boom is that it became waterlogged and sank within a short period of time,” Henry said. It also did not collect as much oil as commercial booms.

The Deepwater Horizon Response Team and BP have ruled out the use of hair booms, but they do encourage suggestions for more cleanup solutions.

“As of yesterday there were 77,000 calls made to the call center and 21,000 e-mails,” a BP spokesman, John Curry, said. “Clearly there are lots of people that want to provide ideas; maybe that’s how this thing started, but I don’t know.”

Curry also stressed that it was not BP’s decision to reject the idea of the hair booms but was the call of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Although it seems this entire project has been a waste of time, Gautier believes it will work out.

“The county hazmat teams are mad and contacting us,” she said, though she would not say which authorities she had been in touch with. “We are lovers, not fighters. This is a good karma program; it will all work out as it should. It’s a Matter of Trust.”

Underwood is also not discouraged and still believes that the hair booms are a good idea. She says that public pressure has helped in situations like this before and it might again. She is still encouraging her clients to continue gathering their trimmings and is even looking for customers to shed a bit more for the cause.

“People shave their head for cancer every day,” she said. “So why not for the earth?”

Rosa Warren contributed reporting

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This is an update of an earlier article.

Since late April, salons in different parts of the country have been gathering excess hair from haircuts in hopes it would be used to clean up the oil spill. But even though the idea was rejected on Friday by the people in charge of all response efforts, neither the salons nor the organization that started the initiative are letting up.

The plan was proposed by the San Francisco-based organization Matter of Trust, which calls for donations of hair and fur that are placed in nylon stockings and then used as booms to soak up the oil. According to the organization’s president, Lisa Gautier, the group has donors from all over the world and sends each donation to one of 19 warehouses along the Gulf Coast whose use has been donated to the organization.

As of May 5, the organization had collected more than 400,000 pounds of hair. She said the group has not been able to update the count because the donations won’t stop pouring in.

“The world is so full of generous people,” Lisa Gautier said in an e-mail interview. “This is proof.”

Despite the efforts of Matter of Trust, the Unified Area Command for the Deepwater Horizon/BP Response, in charge of coordinating the cleanup, announced Friday that while this suggestion was submitted to BP as an option for containing the oil spill, it was not considered feasible.

The command cited a February 2010 side-by-side field test conducted during an oil spill in Texas, in which a boom with commercial absorbents picked up more oil and much less water than a hair boom, “making it the better operational choice.”

“Our priority when cleaning up an oil spill is to find the most efficient and expedient way to remove the oil from the affected area while causing no additional damage,” said Charlie Henry, NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator in Robert, La. “One problem with the hair boom is that it became waterlogged and sank within a short period of time.”

In Louisiana, hair has been collected by many salons and dropped in locations for Matter of Trust. Lauren Underwood, a stylist at Aha! Salon in Houma, said the effort has attracted considerable support in her town. She said she has collected two SUV trunks full of hair thus far and has no intention of stopping.

“I was under the impression that BP was already using our booms to pick up the oil,” she said. “The other booms don’t work as well and are not as environmentally friendly.”

But there has been no confirmation from government officials or BP representatives that donated hair has been used in any cleanup efforts. And the disaster response command said on Friday that it was asking individuals and organizations to discontinue the collection of hair for use in hair booms.

Gautier said her group will continue to collect hair from salons and that the hair collected is staying in their warehouses for now. She said she had arrangements to provide it to local cleanup teams in the Gulf area, but that may be on hold given Friday’s announcement.

“We are lovers not fighters,” Gautier said. “This is a good karma program. It will work out as it should.”

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On Thursday, a Greenpeace boat with seven journalists aboard traveled along the Gulf Coast and stopped at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then they saw it: The oil spill causing one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s history.

The reporters told me they had gazed in shock as they watched the oil slowly creep onto land and saturate the sand.

Sadly, there was not enough space for me on the boat. Three colleagues and I had traveled that day to Venice, La., the state’s southernmost tip, in hopes of witnessing the oil spill for ourselves. It didn’t happen, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Greenpeace, the largest environmental group with 4,000 staff members worldwide, has been offering free boat trips to media outlets to spread the word about the devastation. At the rate of at least 5,000 barrels a day seeping into the Gulf of Mexico, this spill could become the worst in history.

Greenpeace representatives said they send out several boats per day. We didn’t make it on any of them.

We tried to bum rides out onto the water with local shrimpers, or with just about anyone else with a craft that floats. Then we considered hiring a boat. Simple enough, I thought.

Wrong.

The cost of a taking a four-seater boat to the spill off Venice was $600, plus the cost of fuel. That’s how much, the boat owners said, that they would charge for a typical fishing run.

It was much more, however, than I was prepared to spend. I’m sure my reaction gave away that I was a rookie correspondent. My eyes bulged and my head cocked back as if the words had punched me in the face.
I tried to compose myself and said “Oh, cool — well, let me call my editor and see what he says,” even though I already knew the answer.

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Avid, the video editing program, is my sworn enemy. It enjoys taking a significantly long time to capture videos, forces me to use its color-coded, strange-looking keyboard and thrives off erasing my work when I take bathroom breaks.

After it deleted parts of my video before broadcasting class last semester, I swore I would never use it again. But recently Avid and I crossed paths.

During a workshop on using video equipment, Mark Raymond, the head honcho of technology at Dillard, told us that we can do more things with Avid than other video editing programs such as Final Cut.

Raymond also gave us a crash course on using video equipment, such as how to get good sound while shooting and how to correctly balance a tripod. I use a small, high-definition camera to shoot my stories for school, so it was inspiring to finally get the chance to work with a huge camera with lots of buttons. I felt like a journalist instead of a student just videotaping.

Then Raymond began talking about Avid.

With Avid, he said, you can compress video easier for the Internet; you can use two computer screens instead of one so it is easier to view your work; and you can use the keyboard for shortcuts instead of using a mouse.

“The trick is to be very organized,” Raymond said. “Name your stuff accurately and make one folder for interviews, another for B-roll footage and then one for voice overs.”

As he was talking, though, I was thinking to myself: Why are we learning all of this when Avid was going to delete my videos anyway?

I had walked into the overly air-conditioned room where the workshop was held with my pen and pad in hand ready to infiltrate the evil editing system’s plans. I figured that in order to defeat it I have to understand it first. So I listened and learned. Raymond gave us some invaluable information and even glimmers of hope.

When the workshop was over, it was finally time for me to put my new knowledge about defeating Avid to the test. This week we have been working on the video bios for the website and this project was my first chance to edit on Avid.

I found some good sound bites and dragged them onto the timeline and played it back—that’s all. But I know better than to trust Avid just because it miraculously worked for me once. It usually works fine when you are looking, but just don’t go to the bathroom.

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Who knew that 8:30 p.m. could ever qualify as the middle of the day? Well, at the Student Journalism Institute, all 24 of us are learning this lesson well and fast. Our midday session, the last one before the ceremonial opening of the newsroom, was all about video. Jeremy Beiler, video journalist of The New York Times, talked about integrating video and written words.

“A video is not a repeat,” Beiler said. “It’s an expansion or addition to the print story.”

The lights were out during the previous presentation and someone had the terrible idea of leaving them off during the video presentation. Since yawning is contagious, I had to stop looking at my colleagues so I wouldn’t pass out during a session I had to blog about later. Luckily, the video we watched was stimulating and was about one of my favorite subjects — food.

Howard University senior Tahirah Hariston takes notes duirng a panel at the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. (Imani M. Cheers/NYT Institute)

Our eyes burned after the lights finally came on, but everyone pretended to be chipper. Luckily, our efforts were not in vain because this session was useful; Beiler gave us three vital steps to remember in producing video:

1. Find out who your characters are and what the story is about. Also, make sure you can find a way to shoot them in their element as well as any events they are attending that relate to the story.
2. Go out and shoot the story and get as much footage as possible.
3. Do a paper edit first, and then do the actual editing of the footage.

He told us that anyone considering working with video for the next two weeks would first be taken through a short course. The invitation was met with sighs of relief and a flood of confessions about how little video editing we had actually done.

My confession: The editing program Avid is my sworn enemy. It deletes my work when I take a bathroom break after working on a video piece for hours. This week I will defeat it.

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