Lab Notebook – August 19, 2012

[Secondary gains for #accessibility: Molly Ringwald says describing movies to her blind father made her a better writer. I think my son would agree about the serendipity of reading to a blind father.]
Her father, a talented jazz pianist, is blind, and Ringwald says she often sits with him during movies and plays to describe the action. “I actually think that that informed my writing,” she says. “That’s something that I’ve done for so long, that it’s made me, perhaps, observe things in a different way.”

[Reverse engineering search results on the back end - I do this to find my way through my own content] This week came news that the Homicide Watch D.C. might go on hiatus because its founder and proprietor Laura Amico has been awarded the Nieman-Berkman fellowship. Amico is attempting to keep Homicide Watch alive with a Kickstarter campaign to turn the website into a teaching lab for burgeoning crime reporters. In this interview from November, 2011 Brooke talks to Amico about the site’s mission and how it works.