vivianmarino

I recently became a contributor to a writer friend’s new venture: Midcentury/Modern, a magazine-style collection of stories written by and about baby boomers on Medium.com.

For those of you who may not know, Medium is a relatively new blog-plublishing platform founded by Twitter’s co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and it’s rapidly growing in popularity.

My very first contribution is an essay (a six-minute read, according to Medium) about my three-year journey back to school for a master’s degree in Interactive Media.

You can read it here. Feel free to comment on the Medium site, and if you like, even recommend.

(You don’t have to have a Medium account.)

On the official first day of spring in Northern New Jersey someone up there seems to have a wicked sense of humor. Here’s to warmer, sunnier, more colorful days ahead.

I was saddened to learn today of the death of yet another journalist friend — David Bird, a reporter for  the Wall Street Journal. He had been missing since Jan. 11, 2014, when, according to police reports, he left his home in Long Hill, N.J., for a brief walk through nearby wooded trails. David was a liver transplant recipient and in need of regular medication, and his disappearance led to an extensive search and the creation of a website — finddavidbird.info — devoted to his safe return. Dow Jones and Company, the Journal’s parent, even offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to his whereabouts.

Police announced at a news conference that a body pulled from the Passaic River this week was positively identified through dental records as David’s. (This disclosure comes a little more than a month after my friend David Carr of The New York Times died suddenly at work.)

I guess you can say that I learned to do journalism with David. He and I both attended Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., and were in many classes together. We also both wrote for the school’s newspaper, the Rider News.

David was a standout at school — funny, smart and probably the best student in my classes. I always thought he was destined for great things and never dreamed he’d someday be the subject of a national news story himself.

David loved journalism and yearned to make it big in the industry. He once wrote about the other David Bird, a staff reporter for the Metropolitan section of The Times whose byline occasionally made it to the newspaper’s front page. (The other David Bird, incidentally, got his start working for The Trenton Evening Times, not too far from Rider, while in college; he died in March 1987 of cancer at the age of 61.)

After graduating from college, David and I went our separate ways professionally — he to the Dow Jones new service, and I to The Associated Press. We reconnected in the early ’90s through a mutual friend. David had “won” a party at a Midtown bar, and I was invited. We stayed in contact for a year or two, but then lost touch again. I heard little about him until last winter when I read about his disappearance in the news.

It’s not known exactly how David died or whether foul play was suspected. Either way, it’s a tragic way for a life to end. My only hope, really, is that his family can find at least a modicum of closure.

After more than two months of uploading reams of content, then tinkering, and tinkering some more, I thought it was finally time to unleash my new professional website on the search engines. (The site was “live” from the start, but I kept it “hidden” from search engines while building it.)

And so it didn’t take long for the website rankers to take notice. That very high number you see to the left is my SEO (search engine optimization) ranking according to Nerdy Data, a self-proclaimed “Search Engine for Source Code.”

It was far better, actually, than the even lower ranking from Alexa, the Amazon.com subsidiary that provides commercial web traffic data — its global ranking was 23,477,497.

I’m not looking for a rush of traffic, really, just some interesting projects to work on. Still, I’d be curious to see if these numbers improved in, say, the next six to 12 months.

I’ll keep you posted.

After an epic, two-and-a-half-hour commute from work during a snowstorm (You don’t wanna know!), I had this little beauty waiting for me, the culmination of three years of challenging work, scripted, of course, in traditional Old English font.

I can honestly say that enrolling in the Interactive Media program at Quinnipiac University some three years ago was one of the best decisions I ever made, both professionally and personally.

Granted, it took me a year longer than most other students in the program to finish, but I have enjoyed (make that: savored) every step of the way. I’ve learned to code, animate, edit video, and create special effects and visual designs. I am now able to analyze web design through information architecture (I’ll never look at a website the same way again) and understand the role of a project planner. Along the way, I’ve also met a diverse group of talented people from around the country, both professors and fellow students. Everyone, regardless of age, background or profession, had something salient to offer.

Interestingly, my favorite classes, which I seemed to excel at the most, were the more technical ones that I had initially feared. They fostered creativity while helping to develop problem-solving skills – often that meant toiling ‘til the wee hours of the morning to get a code or special effect working properly, and loving every minute of it.

David Carr was a journalistic giant, a wordsmith like no other, eulogized as “the finest media critic of his generation” by his boss, the executive editor of The New York Times, and remembered fondly and passionately by the throngs of people who worked with him and whose lives he so deeply touched.

He was also my friend.

I first became acquainted with David, whose storied life was cut way too short, while working as an editor on the Sunday Business section of The Times in the early 2000s. (We were both fairly new to the paper, and he was assigned to the daily side covering the publishing industry.) But our friendship grew outside the newsroom. We lived less than a mile from each and so I saw him frequently around Montclair, N.J., home to myriad other writers, editors and television personalities. I encountered a few of them, too, but it was David who took the time to get to know me. (He was genuinely interested in people.)

He was a great listener and willing confidante. “Write a book about something you’re passionate about,” he once offered when conversation turned to career paths. And hilarious to boot. “I never eat the hot food in the cafeteria,” he told me. Why the heck not? “Because that’s where the company hides the ‘chip,’ ” he deadpanned.

We had coffee together and breakfast at Toast and the Tick Tock Diner, where he discussed his upcoming memoir “The Night of the Gun.” He invited me to his twin daughters’ high school graduation party at his home, and I got to meet his lovely family.

I remember the excitement and pride as he revealed, over eggs and bacon at the Tick Tock one morning on the way to work, the proofs for the magazine cover story that would feature excerpts of The Gun, which chronicled his years of addiction to drugs and alcohol with blunt and harrowing storytelling prowess. “This must’ve been cathartic for you – is that why you wrote it?” I asked. “I have two daughters about to go to college,” he responded. But I have a hunch that his intentions went well beyond the mere mercenary. Undoubtedly, he and his book helped many people in the throes of addiction as well as those wanting to hold on to their own recovery.

As David’s celebrity grew and his calendar filled, I saw less and less of him. But I was still able to hear his “voice,” that distinctive gravely Midwestern twang, in his astute Media Equation columns every Monday and in his other masterfully written pieces. His was a beautiful mind. His work and tenacity about maintaining journalism excellence inspires me to be the best that I can.

And so when word came of his sudden death on Feb. 12 – I learned of his passing in an iPhone news alert, the same way I learned of the death of another media great, Bob Simon, the day before – I took the news like everyone else who knew him: pretty badly. Yet there was also some level of solace in knowing that he died doing what he loved most: Not too long before he collapsed at his desk, the result of lung cancer and heart disease, he was on a panel interviewing the whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The next day The Times held a memorial of sorts in the heart of the newsroom – there were more people there than any Pulitzer announcement I’ve ever attended – and I listened as scores of his colleagues told their own David story. He had that special gift, it seems, of making everyone feel like a BFF. Myself included.

I thought I’d squeeze in a plug for another website that I recently designed and built (almost from scratch, I might add) for the final, capstone project of my graduate program.

Catching a Third Wind is a content-rich site – replete with a video documentary produced by moi – created to help those with  painful hip impingement, or too much friction in the hip joint. Among the ranks of sufferers are athletes like the Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, entertainers like Lady Gaga, and non-celebs like me.

My hip issues developed while I was training for the New York City marathon back in 2010, and resulted in two arthroscopic surgeries almost a year later to repair torn labrums and remove the bone spurs that caused the tears.

Just before my first surgery, and as I began my graduate program in Interactive Media, I started the Catching a Third Wind blog. My very first assignment in my very first class was to create a self-hosted blog (about any subject) and update it regularly. This blog not only satisfied the class requirements but became a helpful and cathartic part of my recovery – not to mention, the recovery of fellow sufferers who flooded my posts with comments and questions.

I decided to expand this blog into an informational website to satisfy the needs of blog visitors looking for more material about hip impingement. The revised site offers frequently asked questions, a resources page as well as core-strengthening exercises. And, yes, there’s still a blog component.

It was only fitting that the final assignment in my final class took me full circle.

Welcome to the future professional website (the very first!) of Vivian Marino. This is a labor of love, as well as a chance to shamelessly showcase all the skills I’ve accumulated over the years.

Please stay tuned …