According to the site, TeenMomShoutOut is “a safe space for pregnant and parenting teens and their supporters to talk about issues that affect their community.” Rene set up a WordPress MU blog, aggregating the latest posts from individual blogs on the main page. The site gives pregnant teens and teen mothers a place to express themselves and use writing/blogging as a cathartic exercise. Already there have been posts about Charisse preparing a child for the realities of life, Blake wanting more for her child than she currently has for herself, Tiffany being following by a suspicious man and Verenice write about the importance of family in her life.

I am excited to see what other stories (and forms of storytelling) come out of this project.

It’s called I C U: Los Angeles Connections:

Every day, tiny stories spring up from the Southern California maze of freeways and neighborhoods and into the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. Most don’t have Hollywood endings, it’s just hopeful residents trying to meet, reconnect, share moments in some way. For the lucky few, lives change. Every week, video-journalist Katy Newton tracks down the faces behind the posts.

Des Moines native Linda Robbins Coleman compared part of her “Journeys” to the sounds of “a peg-legged pirate who happens upon some kind of Spanish festival.” Listen to the excerpt she described – and follow along with a simplified version of the printed score. (Or hear the real thing at the Des Moines Community Orchestra concert on Sunday.)

I even bought the CD, for the first time in I don’t even know how long.

The WiredJournalists.com mission statement reads:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind. Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

So sign up, join a group, collaborate and become a better journalist.

The site is described as “A place to discover photographers, photographs and news about photography.”

Seems like a great way for photographers to share inspiring work.

Apparently the first feature film to be shot entirely through the point of view of security camera footage, LOOK is not actual reality, but meant to show just how pervasive surveillance has become in our society. According to the official web site:

The Post 9/11 world has forever changed the notion of privacy. There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life.

Shot entirely from the point of view of the security cameras. Adam Rifkin’s LOOK follows several interweaving, storylines over the course of a random week in a random city. LOOK is a film about the things that people do when they don’t know they’re being watched.

Motodrom is a short film that Dai Sugano showed this past Saturday at the SFBAPPA workshop. This piece will definitely help me out when I am out in the field doing video for newspapers, especially when gathering sound.

We were lucky enough to see Lauren Greenfield’s latest work, Kids + Money, at the VII workshop in Pasadena. The link above is to the shorter version she did for The New York Times Magazine. It documents the views of eight teens from very different socioeconomic backgrounds on the topic of money.