Charles Apple

Please join with me in wishing the very happiest of VizEds birthday wishes to Ji Qi, an artist with the Associated Press’ Money & Market team in New York.

Ji Qi
—

Originally from Beijing, China, Ji came to The Virginian-Pilot in January 2006 for a spring internship to fulfill the requirements for a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. By her second week, she had impressed me so much that I offered her our summer graphics internship.

We had a lot of fun that spring in the Pilot’s graphics department. Ji’s good friend Xinning Huang — who had earned her master’s degree from Mizzou the year before — was working with us. Ji and Xinning and the rest of us worked together on all sorts of interesting projects.

Xinning (left) and Ji with their Buddha-
like boss, yours truly, in April 2006.
—

As I was researching this post, I came across the evaluation letter I wrote for Ji as she was finishing work on her degree and preparing to leave us for a month or so. I don’t think I can say any of this any better now than I did then:

April 14, 2006

Dear Ji,

I was trying to think of just the right way to construct my letter of evaluation for your masters project here at The Virginian-Pilot this spring. And then yesterday, you inadvertently gave me the lede I needed.

The announcement of the closing of the big Ford plant here in town yesterday was unexpected and quite traumatic for the 2,400 workers there. We were scrambling to come up with as many graphics as we could to add to the Pilot’s five-plus pages of coverage.

A business editor told me there were two other U.S. plants where Ford builds its F-150 trucks, but as I told you yesterday, I needed to see that verified. So before I gave you the info for the graphic, I logged into Ford’s media site and spent quite a bit of time there, in vain, looking for a list of Ford’s assembly plants. In frustration, I went back to our business department for assistance and then asked for help from the researcher who had been assigned to the story.

After running into one brick wall after the other, I came dragging back to the department… only to find a finished graphic lying on my desk. While I was out running around, you had simply gone to Ford.com, found the info we were looking for and threw a map together. Problem solved.

Boy, I felt pretty stupid. I should have just handed the damn thing off to you in the first place.

And that’s pretty much the story of our spring here. You were an incredibly big help to us here in the Pilot’s graphics department. But despite that, I don’t feel I used you as well as I might have. You have a very good feel for content and a great talent for tracking down information for graphics. Yet, something like 80 percent of what you did for us this spring was locator maps.

The reason for that is quite simple: We’re locator-crazy here at the Pilot. We’ve been known to use six or seven locators a day. Even large papers such as the Chicago Tribune or The New York Times won’t use that many in one day. We sometimes get so involved in trying to meet that demand that our other work suffers.

That was the situation we were in when you arrived in January. I found pretty early on that you are one of the fastest mapmakers I’ve ever met. Wow; can you zip out a nice locator! You have a very nice touch for maps. You quickly learned to mimic our house style; you established a fabulous track-record for accuracy. And, most of all, you became quite adept at navigating our enormous collection of file and base maps. Damned if I can figure out our filing system.

By doing all this so well, you sure made life a lot easier for me. Suddenly, we were able to not only meet the demand for maps but we were able to get cranked back up on a number of ambitious enterprise graphics. I’m fully aware that Bob Voros‘ big space shuttle piece — or Xinning’s highway piece — wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t been here to free up them both by taking on so many routine daily assignments.

So while your portfolio may not have as many nice large pieces as we’d like, you certainly laid down a vast amount of solid, daily work that made me look awfully good to my editors.

And that’s what it’s all about, really. Making me look good to my editors.

OK, not really. What it’s really about, as you know, is serving the needs of the reader. And you certainly did that for us this spring. Pilot readers saw a lot more graphics and maps this spring because of your ingenuity and your industrious nature.

The Pilot’s graphics department celebrates
Ji’s last day in October 2006. From left to
right: John Earle, Charles Apple, Ken Wright
and Bob Voros.
—

Thank you, Ji, for the insight you shared with me about how we operate here in the Pilot’s news graphics department. The analyses and commentary you provided in your weekly reports — comparing the way I operate my department with The Missourian and The Staten Island Advance, for example — were very helpful. And flattering, too, I suppose. Not that that’s important. But you get my point.

Thank you for the simple little things you did, behind the scenes, to make life a little easier for everyone. A great example was when you translated a Chinese-language audio tape for reporter Steve Vegh. You went way out of your way to help Steve that day. Reporters and editors remember that kind of effort and kindness and they appreciate it.

Most of all, though, thank you for agreeing to be our summer intern. I realize there are a number of full-time openings out there — at really good papers — for visual journalists. You’re qualified to work any of those jobs, yet you committed yourself for another 12 weeks here at the Pilot.

You’ve earned my respect, my appreciation and my positive reference. Feel free to send any future employer to me any time for an honest and positive appraisal of your skills and performance.

In the meantime, please go back to Columbia Sunday and kick some academic ass. Finish up that degree and get back here in May for your summer internship. We’ll be delighted to have you here for another three months.

I’ll try a lot harder to find something a little more intellectually stimulating, perhaps, for you to work on. But yeah: We’ll have a bunch of locators for you to draw this summer, too, because we know you’ll draw them right and you’ll draw them quickly. And we know our readers love them.

Thanks so much for spending your last semester with us here at the Pilot, Ji. We wouldn’t have made it without you.

Please hurry back.

Best wishes!
Charles Apple
Graphics director
The Virginian-Pilot

—

Just as Ji was returning to Hampton Roads, Xinning left us to move to New York. As a result, we found ourselves an artist short. We were allowed to keep Ji around for a few extra weeks that fall to help make ends meet.

Ji, Elizabeth and Sharon watch Pilot artist
Ken Wright in the annual Buffalo Riders’
Parade in Portsmouth, February 2006.
—

When Ji’s time at the Pilot was over, she served an internship with Steve Dorsey and his crew at The Detroit Free Press. Then, not long into 2007, she was hired as a graphic artist in the Business News department of the Associated Press. She now works on the AP’s popular Money & Market product.

I’m very proud of Ji and her career. She’s one of the brightest folks I’ve ever met, owning master’s degrees in two separate subjects: journalism and history.

She earned her master’s in history from Peking University in Beijing in 2003. She worked on a master’s degree in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh before she switched to journalism at Mizzou in 2004. She served a graphics internship at The Staten Island Advance in 2005.

A few samples of Ji’s work:

See more in her NewsPageDesigner portfolio.
Ji shares a birthday with singers Rihanna and Kurt Cobain, supermodel Cindy Crawford, basketball great Charles Barkley, apparel designer Gloria Vanderbilt and legendary photographer Ansel Adams.

The latter seems particularly apt — Ji’s dad is a photojournalist back in China.

In addition, today is Hoodie Hoo Day.

I had never heard of this, either, but here’s how it works: Today, at high noon, you’re supposed to go outside and yell: “Hoodie Hoo!” This is supposed to scare off the lingering effects of winter and speed up the onset of warm weather.

I rather doubt this works. However, just in case, I thought I’d yell “Hoodie Hoo!” at a few co-workers and see if it scares them off instead. Which seems more useful anyway.

Best wishes, Ji, for a happy birthday! I sure miss you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Graphics, Happy birthday, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.