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The latest video column by myself and Rick Koster took us to new territory: music videos. Rick is a musician with extensive experience recording and touring with a rock band. I quit piano lessons in eighth grade. When I read Rick’s draft of this column, it was clear that we needed to make our own music video, which first meant recording our own song. Rick came up with the lyrics rather quickly (it was a little scary actually). We were at first considering using a loop from GarageBand or Soundtrack Pro as the beat, but couldn’t quite make it work. I had to teach myself garageband in between other duties one morning, and worked with Rick to create the beat. He created the basic beat with the kick and snare sounds on the “musical typing” window, and then I added in the additional cymbals, samples and sound effects. Before shooting, I watched VH1’s top 100 Hip Hop songs of all time, and then liberally borrowed some of the most common visual cliches while Rick did his best to lip-synch.

The video columns have sometime sparked an interesting discussion on how this sort of content fits into “Journalism.” In my view, there is a rich tradition of humor and satire in print journalism stretching from Dave Barry all the way back to Mark Twain. Rick wrote an online humor column before this of which we recorded audio versions. At the beginning of this year, we turned it into a video column, and it has consistently been among the most popular of our video content.