Final Process Writing

            Through thinking about my writing process I have discovered that once I have my first real viable idea I tend to have this niggling feeling that that story I’ve picked is the one that needs to be told. I often attempt to think of other topics just to be sure that there isn’t a better one floating in my mind but I usually come back to my first instinct—I like knowing that I can trust my instincts.

            The most frustrating part of my work for this class was trying to set up interviews. For the chapel piece I thought that I would have an easier time but no one has time. Not me, not faculty or staff. The most I could do was show up or schedule last minute appointments. Once the interviews began however, it was a different story. The people I spoke with speak so easily about themselves, their lives, and their passions—I think deep down all people are people people if you give them a chance.

            The most important change I made in my revision process was directional. I would always change the direction of my focus, sometimes just slightly but the result is magnified in the narratives. Working on finding my focus was somewhat of a breakthrough for me. Workshops were very helpful as well. Hearing about the things that people liked and didn’t like was helpful, as well as hearing what some of my reader’s wanted more of. I think that’s such a cool thing that we get to do in workshop—connect with our readers. In the real world, for a lot of writers, I don’t think that feedback is always there.

            Writing for this course has taught me that I don’t prefer working in a setting where I have to search out a new story every couple of weeks. I like to have the stories I choose to tell arise more organically than that. I learned how helpful workshops can be and that even without hearing feedback on my piece, reading and thinking about the elements of some one else’s work can help with my own work all by itself just by critically reading. This class reinforced and improved much of my previous work and I hope to continue to grow.

Breaking Through

Twenty six year old Daniel Martinez is working on a new concept in a new downtown office in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dan is a co-founder of Rhino Media Productions whose new office sits on Rose Street across from the Amtrak station. Its big picture windows, high ceilings, and open layout give its team of Media Ninjas room to roam while they fill the entire space with creativity energy.

There is a bottle of mouth wash sitting on Dan’s desk—“I hate coffee breath. It’s the worst”, he explains. Dan is working on a commercial for Biggby Coffee, a coffee business from Lansing, Michigan with several branches in the Kalamazoo area. He uses FinalCut Pro on his big screen Mac to get the edits just right.

Rhino Media is not an advertising agency but they do make a lot of ads. “We’ve made commercials for brand names like Doritos and Coke”, says Dan. They had the opportunity to work for these big names because of Rhino’s submissions to Poptent, a website built for video business upstarts like Rhino whose goal, at least for now, is to get their name and their work out into the world through any venues available to them.

The amount of commercial work that Rhino currently produces, is a concern for Dan whose real passion is telling people’s stories, especially the stories of those whose environment and circumstances don’t normally allow it to be told.

Dan, dressed casually in his black and blue Rhino polo with jeans and business loafers, says he grew up in a corn field. I grew up two doors down from him, in the small farming village of Lawton, Michigan. His path from his small farm town, surrounded by grape vines and corn fields, to small business owner has not been a straight one. Ever since those early days, Dan says, he has had a fascination with Africa.

“I used to have this vision of four boys in Africa, asking me to help.” After three years of college at Taylor University, Dan’s life, he says, took him in a completely different direction. In 2008 Dan pursued his dream of traveling to Africa. He found an opportunity online to go to Swaziland for three months. Dan went despite warnings about the high rate of disease and economic dangers, at the time, it was his calling.

When he returned, a second opportunity arose. This time he traveled to Uganda with a group called “Be A Number”, based in Marshall, Michigan, that contacted Dan and recruited him to work on a company documentary there. Their mission is “to empower those in extreme poverty to connect with you”. What Dan walked away with after building houses, editing film, and volunteering at the local Sunday school, is that “I needed to come back and tell stories. Everyone has a story to tell”, he says, and he wanted to tell the stories that don’t get told.

Kevin Romero is twenty nine years old. When I walk into his office on Rose and West Michigan to interview him he greets me at the door. He’s wearing a plain black sweatshirt, jeans, and a hip white and black white watch. He looks concerned. “How does this work?”, he asks, “how much time do you need?”.

Down to business it is, I think, and refocus my thoughts away from the small talk I had been planning. “It’s casual, I say, I’m going to record it if you don’t mind. We can start with where you’re from.”

  “Hartford”, he says, “a small town in a pretty rural city”, and he relaxes slightly—as much as he’s going to anyway. Kevin is soft spoken with a tough looking exterior. His full, thick beard and his serious, intense, brown eyes can throw you off when he tells a joke. Kevin is a people person and an artist. He grew up with big aspirations—major league baseball, painter, musician—today, he and Dan are the co-founders of Rhino Media. Business savvy Kevin is the primary owner. “We met bowling”, he says, through mutual friends. “I thought he was a fun guy, we started hanging out and I invited him to church.”

Kevin thought he might someday own a small business, “I was thinking restaurant, probably an Italian restaurant.”

“I got out of college and worked a couple of jobs and got a taste of some jobs I didn’t want to do”, like working in the Citibank call center. Through his manual labor job with a landscaping company he found his business mentor. “I took it upon myself to learn from him.”

One of his most validating jobs was his substitute teaching; he liked giving people hope and things to think about, to offer a unique perspective to high school students. He’ll have past students come up to him today and say, “Hey, you’re Mr. Romeo! Man I loved you”.

When Rhino started in 2010 Kevin had been developing his skills as a photographer. “We didn’t really know what we were doing, we wanted to be creative but no one took the reigns of the business” Kevin stepped up, “to put the skills he learned in school to use.”

Since then Rhino has been morphing and growing, building on who they are, Kevin says. “We’re all very relational people and we capitalize on that. It’s tough to balance that in a creative field; I think often times artists have a hard time being more into their work.” Rhino doesn’t embody that says Kevin.

Shortly, I will be working close at hand with these two young business founders as a Rhino Media Intern. Kevin doesn’t worry as much as Dan about the work they are doing in advertising the overtures of Dan’s goal of telling people’s stories are mirrored in Kevin’s belief in business and knowledge that everyone has a message—even if that message is to drink their coffee. Kevin’s goal for the company is to “up Kalamazoo’s game” as a place for business to thrive.

Dan is the idea man behind the Rhino in Rhino Media. Rhinoceros are mostly blind, he explains, they move in a “crash”. It is Dan and Kevin’s hope that Rhino Media will continue to break on through its obstacles as it has since its evolution as a “pipe-dream” to where Rhino is now, “on the verge of something big, says Dan.

Audio/Visual Slideshow--Chapel Times

Note/Mini-Process Writing

This piece is obviously incredibly incomplete. I apologize. Please don't focus on that if possible. I'd like to know if you think Dan is interesting so far and what you think of how I lead into the story. Of the several parts I haven't yet expanded, which ones are you most interested in? Right now I'm sticking with the Biggby focus, however I predict this focus may change.

So far I've only had the opportunity to interview Dan. And this isn't in the piece so I'll tell you, it was a full hour and half of 'interviewing' but in the course of our time together he caught up with an acquaintance, talked to her about a job he might have for her, overheard a conversation about Africa from a different media group that happened to be at that same coffee shop where we were, and that media group attempted to hire Dan as an extra for a shoot they were doing the following week. This isn't an excuse for being incomplete, but if you happen to read this first you can see where I'm going with Dan's character a little more clearly maybe.

I will definitely be interviewing his partners in media as well as Kyle, the Biggby Coffee franchise owner. 

Profile--Title Pending

Publication: Kalamazoo Gazette

Twenty six year old Daniel Martinez is working on a new concept in a new downtown office in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This new concept stars the Biggby Coffee Company that calls Kalamazoo its home, while it is currently working on expanding throughout the country. The various visual scenarios for this potential client are in the works, but Dan reveals the slogan for the concept, ‘Biggby Coffee—Just for Drinking.’ This is one of his team’s “big projects” says Dan.

Dan is the co-founder and co-owner of Rhino Media Productions whose new office sits on Rose Street across from the Amtrak station. Its big picture windows, high ceiling, and open layout give its team of Media Ninjas room to roam while they fill the whole space with creativity energy. There’s a bottle of mouthwash sitting next to Dan and his big Macintosh computer that his uses for his video editing. He caught me eyeing the mouthwash inquisitively as he finished up a bit of work. “I hate coffee breath, there’s nothing worse”, he states, a smile breaking across his face dissipating his concentrated features as explains, turning his attention away from the screen.

I am whisked away in his beige Honda, Dan is always on the go. He is wearing his Friday casual: jeans, business loafers, and his Rhino Media polo. His black hair is cut short. A genuine people person, he tells me about his life with ease. “Everyone has a story”, he insists. That’s what he walked away with after his time spent in Africa. One of his biggest life questions—“How can I tell people’s stories”. While a contract with Biggby doesn’t exactly answer this question, Dan isn’t concerned. He is however confident that as Rhino Media continues to grow, and crash through new boundaries, like the one standing between personal narratives and advertising perhaps, that they are “on the verge of something big”. 

Dan’s co-partner at Rhino, as founder and owner, is Kevin Romero who is pitching Rhino’s promotional video ideas to Biggby’s Corporate Division today. Back when Rhino Media was still in its “pipe-dream” stage, the members of the team spent much of their time at Kyle yle Kinney’s Biggby Coffee Franchise on Stadium Drive. After making some promo-videos for local franchise owners such as Kyle, Rhino caught the interest of ‘Biggby Bob’ at Corporate.

Reading Response--"U.S. Ideals Meet Reality in Yemen"

Finkel’s lede does so much for us in his piece titled, “U.S. Ideals Meet Reality in Yemen”. He draws me in with all the fast paced talk of days which turns out to be foreshadowing. I wonder, will he be foreshadowing the dismissive reference or is that just the starting point of what he will revel throughout his piece? We also know that the story involves an American—Robin Madrid and the President of Yemen. We already have to characters and a direction in one sentence. Then in small snippets the story builds. I know how it started and how it finished, interesting structure but it sounds like it’s meant for an audience that might not understand the complexity of what will come in the middle. And here we get to the point, the story of “what can happen when the United States tries to use democracy as a way to reform the world”. I’m hooked and I understand everything thus far despite my lack of knowledge in world politics. So I’m beginning to realize that the best journalism narratives are journalism but they read like a good novel. I’m concurring with everything Finkel is writing and it’s also opening my eyes to some things I used to believe about democrats and republicans. It’s so interesting that republicans complain about democrats spending on helping the poor in the U.S. but all the while republicans are spending billions overseas to help other people who may or may not really want it. This quote blew my mind, “I think there are times when you throw spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks” from deputy assistant secretary of state in regards to how America takes democracy overseas. I absolutely love the way that Madrid is described! There are so many details, some more relevant than others with such a quick pacing—I’m so into Finkel’s style right now. She’s very likable throughout the piece but seems so naïve…      

Reading Response--"Life on Chittock"

Aupperlee’s piece, “Life onChittock: Plenty of Eyes Watch Chittock Avenue, and There is Plenty to Watch”, has quite a bit of foreshadowing but not much pay off. I’m not a fan of the structure he uses to describe the blocks he’s talking about, “the 900 and 1000 blocks”, because I’m not really sure what it means. I’m not really sure which city we’re in either, I mean I assume it’s Jackson because I know that the author is from there but I really don’t get a sense of where Chittock hill is. I don’t identify with Edwards story of reporting speeding and then the police arriving too late—that makes a lot of sense to me that they would arrive too late. The ending seemed abrupt. What else happens? I’m left wondering.