Advocate Magazine » Podcasts

Advocate radio archives: When we were newbies

Advocate Staff — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:00:40 +0000

There was a time when Advocate Magazine was just Advocate magazine, but over the last few years, we’ve evolved into Advocate Media, comprising blogs, podcasts, videos, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and newsletters. Some of the aforementioned items concerned us, and in fact, Advocate editors had trouble becoming accustomed to using social media in our daily routine.

Below are excerpts from a 2009 podcast featuring our first web director, Kris Scott — the voices belong to her, editors Christina Hughes Babb, Rachel Stone and Marlena Chavira-Medford, and photo editor Can “Turk” Turkyilmaz. We admit: The audio on this thing is truly awful. And we introduced the podcast with a song. It’s supposed to be funny, but we have a weird sense of humor. We had fun with the podcasts in those days, because we were pretty sure that none of you listened.

• Excerpts are below, or listen to the entire show here.

Christina Hughes-Babb: Today’s topic is Advocate in the age of social media … I guess. I actually just made that up … Kris Scott has been leading the Advocate’s social media effort, so I’ll start by asking her, “Why are you making us do this?”

Kris Scott: I read recently that people are spending half their time on Facebook and, less so, Twitter than on destination websites, such as Advocatemag.com. So those who were once going to our website might be spending that time on Facebook now. I kind of think of Facebook as the Yellow Pages of yesteryear, in that, if you want to learn something about a business, you go almost immediately to Facebook, so we needed to have a presence there for that reason alone.

Can “Turk” Turkyilmaz: And it’s free.

CHB: And pretty easy to use.

KS: We used to be a monthly magazine and people read it and then put it down. This way, we can be in your face all the time.

Marlena Chavira-Medford: And people can now see our faces, on Twitter, rather than just our names and our bylines.

KS: And your pictures are all pretty cute.

CHB: Thank Turk for that … and we get to see our readers’ faces and get to know you.

KS: It is an amazing dialogue. And it helps you guys do your jobs, too, because, say you are covering neighborhood seafood places, you can get on Facebook or Twitter and get feedback from neighbors about their favorite places. … and we are going to be giving out free things so follow us … friend us?

Turk: Friending is on Facebook and following is on Twitter.

Rachel Stone: Yes, and Twitter is a good place to find breaking news, right?

MCM: We learned about Bliss restaurant’s new location on Twitter, and we announced that In–N-Out Burger is coming to Dallas on Facebook.

KS: And you can use it for fun stuff, like those photos we posted of the best-dressed fire hydrant.

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Advent Conspiracy: A spiritual ‘Occupy Christmas’ movement

George Mason — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:25 +0000

Conspire to take back the holidays

Do you like a good conspiracy? Ever wonder what it would be like to join one? Here’s your invitation …

The Advent Conspiracy is underway. You can renew Christmas by undermining what undermines Christmas. It’s a spiritual “Occupy Christmas” movement.

Many Christians order their days by observing a calendar of worship that owes more to the life of Christ than to the Roman moon. The year begins four Sundays before Christmas with Advent, carries through the seasons of Christmas, Epiphany and Lent during the winter and early spring, reaches a high point at Easter through Pentecost, and then coasts through Ordinary Time all summer and fall until starting over again at Advent.

• Listen to editor Keri Mitchell’s interview with the Rev. George Mason explaining why his church has joined the Advent Conspiracy movement, and how congregants are putting its tenets into practice. Read more about the interview here.

Ordinarily, Advent is a season of preparation for Christmas during which Christians make themselves ready again to welcome God’s surprising and transforming presence in their lives through the coming of Christ. The gift of Christ’s presence has called for the gifts of presents in response. Like the magi from the East who came bearing gifts for the Christ child, we give gifts to one another as signs of love and gratitude.

But somewhere along the way, merchants hijacked this tradition, turning it into retail heaven, and thereby making wholesale changes to the meaning.

The Advent Conspiracy wants to bring back the spiritual simplicity of Christmas without any Scrooge-like sneering. Over the four weeks leading up to Dec. 25, you may join others in this subversive act of insurrection. Worship Fully, Spend Less, Give More, Love All: These four movements build upon one another and lead to a more glorious experience at the manger.

Worship Fully. If you make worship your first priority, you are putting God first. Worship focuses our heart’s affection and our mind’s attention on the God who is alone worthy of it. Going to church (and if you are not a Christian, adapt here at will) inoculates you against the commercial allure of the mall. It fills you up spiritually so that you have no need and no room to add unfulfilling idols of material things to your life.

Spend Less. I know this sounds un-American right now, what with a fragile economy that needs you to heed the siren call to spend as if it’s your patriotic duty. It’s not. My guess is that you will spend enough, even if you join this conspiracy. But spend less: one less unneeded sweater, one less soon-to-be forgotten Best Buy gift card, one less coffee mug to go with a collection of past Starbucks Christmases.

Give More. Saving by spending less may be a good place to stop ordinarily, but Christmas is not Ordinary Time — it is a season for giving. Now you have more to give elsewhere. Where? To a mission enterprise locally or around the world that will change the lives of needy people more than that one less gift given to loved ones. But at the same time, give something more and different and better to loved ones. Make a gift. Give yourself in some way: time promised, a service rendered, the present of presence.

Love All. Here’s the big one. When you get this far, you might be feeling good about yourself. But the gift of the Christ child was God’s message of love for all. God didn’t choose favorites; God favored all. So whom do you need to love that hasn’t yet fallen under your category of “all”? Could be a family member who is hard to love. Could be a coworker or immigrant or politician or anyone else who is “other” to you. When you make a move toward that person or those persons this Advent, you conspire to usurp hatred and prejudice in the name of God’s love.

Conspiracy theories are usually nonsense. This one makes good sense.

• Learn more at www.adventconspiracy.org.

Advocate Radio: An Advent conspiracy theory

Keri Mitchell — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:09 +0000

If the demands of the holiday season already are causing heart palpitations, take a few minutes this week to read the Rev. George Mason’s worship column in the December Advocate (which should be delivered to your doorstep starting this weekend). It focuses on the Advent Conspiracy movement, in which Mason’s congregation, Wilshire Baptist Church, is participating.

Coincidentally, the Rev. Blair Monie, who pastors Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church and writes a worship column for the Advocate in other neighborhoods, also chose Advent Conspiracy as his December column topic. For this week’s podcast, we brought the two pastors together to discuss why they decided to join the conspiracy, and what that looks like for their churches.

“If we could simply accomplish one thing, that is that loving each other at Christmas is not synonymous with spending,” Monie says during the podcast.

The Christian season of Advent begins this coming Sunday, Nov. 27. Wilshire Baptist will be posting corresponding devotionals daily on its website and Facebook page, and neighbors also can request to receive them via email.

Listen to the 10-minute interview below.

We gave ourselves a facelift: Advocate magazine’s new look

Keri Mitchell — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:45:21 +0000

If you flipped through the print version of November’s magazine, you probably noticed that it looks, well, different. The section designs and fonts are updated, with the goal of giving readers more information while simultaneously giving the stories more room to breathe. Also, we’re hoping you saw quite a few invitations to visit our website. (Perhaps that’s how you ended up here.)

The last time we changed the look of the magazine was four and a half years ago, and much has changed since then — namely that we now have this robust, dynamic website with new stories, photos and videos added daily. If you’re reading only the print version of Advocate, you’re getting only a small portion of our neighborhood’s news. So we hope the more obvious, more colorful and more frequent mentions of website content will remind you to add us to your blog feeder, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, download our apps or even make us your home page.

With our new apps, can also peruse our redesigned magazine on your mobile device, whether iPhone, iPad or Android. (For the best user experience, make sure to download the entire magazine before viewing.)

Is there still room for improvement? Definitely, and we hope you’ll give us feedback on what you see in the magazine and what else you’d like to see. Email us or comment below.

For those of you interested in things like font choices and specific section approaches, listen to this special podcast with art director Julianne Rice and editor Emily Toman, who were the driving forces behind the Advocate print magazine redesign. After the jump, we’ve excerpted a few of the highlights and provided the full audio version, which lasts roughly six minutes:

Art director Julianne Rice: “With everything competing for a reader’s attention, we wanted the photos to speak louder. We wanted to silence a lot of the clutter that was going on.

“We’ve also tried to point readers to the web a lot more, so you’ll notice in the use of color that we’re trying to indicate where the reader needs to go on the web and how they can get more out of their experience using Advocate magazine — that we’re not just a print magazine. You can’t watch a video on paper.”

Editor Emily Toman: “I feel like there’s more clarity to our content in terms of how you’re guided through the magazine. I think [the redesign] allows us to give readers a little bit more content despite the fact that we are focusing on playing up photos.

Something as simple as the events calendar — I think that we’re able to list more without it looking crowded or cluttered. Previously we’d listed only a few [events] on one page, and the new design, with the font choice and the placement of everything, has allowed us to include more events on one page, and it still looks clean.”

Audio: Neighbor Sol Villasana talks about his new book on KERA’s “Think”

Rachel Stone — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:38 +0000

Sol Villasana is a lawyer who lives in Lakewood, and he grew up in the Little Mexico neighborhood. He recently published a book, Images of America Dallas’s Little Mexico from Arcadia Publishing.

Krys Boyd of KERA’s “Think” interviewed Villasana about the book this week. It’s interesting stuff about the history of downtown and what is now Uptown and Victory Park from the perspective of Mexican Americans. KERA’s studios are in the former Little Mexico neighborhood, and it’s a neighborhood whose history has been somewhat neglected.

Listen to the interview here. The book is widely available, including on Amazon.

Advocate radio interview: Big Tex

Christina Hughes Babb — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:39:39 +0000

Bill Bragg gives Big Tex his voice

Our guest for this week’s Advocate Radio interview podcast is Bill Bragg. Never heard of him? Possibly. But if you live in Texas, you’ve undoubtedly heard his voice. His most famous character? The State Fair’s Big Tex!

Advocate editors are obviously in awe of Bragg's gigantic hat

Bragg shares inside info about his State Fair gig and his radio project Yesterday USA Radio. He talks about various ways one can put booming vocals to work, and shows off what is possibly the world’s largest belt buckle.

LISTEN HERE: Bill Bragg aka Big Tex Interview.

Bragg sports Texas' biggest belt buckle

Advocate radio: Music Monday 9.6

Christina Hughes Babb — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 03:57:34 +0000

This week’s Music Monday features Trey Johnson, the subject of an Advocate Q&A last year. Johnson’s new album “Where the East Ends” contains an eclectic musical mix featuring band members James Driscoll, Rich Martin and Don Cento, plus appearances from a number of their contemporaries. Two faves, “Salt of the Earth and “Rain”, are on the podcast; you can hear the rest if the album here.

Celebrated chef Dean Fearing is known for his culinary art, but he’s got a little side project — it’s The Barbwires, known for their country-rock stylings. The Barbwires’ latest album is Bliss and Blisters, which has been called sophisticated … with echoes of Buffalo Springfield, Poco, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, and the Grateful Dead.

LISTEN HERE: 9.7 Music Monday

Advocate radio: Music Monday

Christina Hughes Babb — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:12:21 +0000

It’s Monday and that means local music on Advocate Radio. Today we have some good stuff:

I have a song off the new record from Jackopierce, whose Cary Pierce is the subject of the Advocate’s “Conversation Piece” in the East Dallas and Lake Highlands September editions. Pierce will be teaching choir this semester at St. John’s Episcopal.

During our interview, Pierce introduced us to a couple of students he met while teaching a songwriting class at Booker T. Washington High School. He’s producing an album for one of them, Tiger Darrow. You can listen to her single, “Only a Year”, on today’s podcast, and another former student Joshua Golberg’s first release, “Fly”.

Finally, I’ve got an cool country ditty from Chris Knight, not a local, but he’s playing at the Granada Aug. 28, so have a listen, and if you like, getcha tickets here.

If you have a song for Music Monday at the Advocate, send the track to chughes@advocatemag.com.

LISTEN HERE: 8.22 Music Monday

Advocate radio: Interview with Wayne Maynard, pilot

Christina Hughes Babb — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:35:50 +0000

Wayne Maynard just returned from his solo flight to the North Pole.

Neighborhood resident Wayne Maynard recently returned from a trip to the North Pole. The 61-year old took the solo journey in an effort to raise money and awareness for Grace Flight, a national organization that pairs volunteer pilots with people in need of transportation for medical or humanitarian needs. In this week’s podcast interview, Maynard tells us about the trip and his personal reasons for embarking on such an adventure.

Interview—Wayne Maynard from Grace Flight

Advocate radio: Interview—Vicki Hitzges, author and motivational speaker

Christina Hughes Babb — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:11:13 +0000

Vicki Hitzges at the Advocate office

Vicki Hitzges, motivational speaker, former television news reporter and author of the new book, “Attitude is Everything, 10 Rules for Staying Positive” joins us for a podcast interview this week. She shares some secrets to staying happy including tips on ridding your life of unnecessary worry, and talks a little bit about what she learned from the famous Zig Ziglar while working for him. To purchase an autographed copy of Vicki’s book, visit her website.

Listen to the podcast here:Interview-Vicki Hitzges