This week was a lot of fun work wise!
A few weeks ago, PRINT researchers Adaeze and Bree told me about research they had done on a pirate living in Pennsylvania named Charles Goss. Goss was one of the many pirates who fled to the colony to start a new life following fear of arrest in other American colonies. Many of these pirates even bribed colonial leaders into keeping quiet and providing them refuge. Quakers specifically were very kind to these pirates and actively protested any attempts at legal action against them. Their research began with a letter from David Lloyd to Phineas Pemberton, which detailed the escape of two other pirates from the county jail as well as the murder of Charles Goss. At the time of Goss’ murder, he was on his way to say goodbye to his lover when he ran into a French merchant who tragically stabbed him to death following an altercation between the two. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a real-life story about Pirates who have secret love lives, escape jail, and fight with each other?
In my mind, it was the PERFECT story to post on the PRINT socials for Halloween!
My main projects this week were to work on the Halloween post and my LIFE article. The Halloween post ended up taking a lot more time than I expected, so I’ll have to work on my article this weekend as well. Unfortunately the draft I made for my article got deleted from my computer, so I’ll be honest when I say the Halloween post was my distraction from the fact that I’d have to start all over.
One challenge I had when making the post was that there was SO MUCH information that I had to squeeze into about 10 small slides. My goal with PRINT’s Instagram page is to really lean into a younger audience, and knowing from personal experience, anything over 10 slides with that sort of content would cause people to lose interest (despite how interesting the story may be). Additionally, even if I wanted to do more than that many slides, Instagram caps the post at 20 pictures, so with a title slide, a resources slide, a slide referencing the letter that inspired the post, and an ending card, I would only have about 15 slides available total. However, as Adaeze was looking into the story further, she discovered that there were so many people and events involved in Pennsylvania’s pirate debacle that were important in providing context in the post. I had to figure out how to narrow everything down and weed out what wasn’t important when discussing the specific pirates I decided to showcase. Of course, Goss was included.
I hope everyone had a great Halloween! I know I did! This year my girlfriend and I went as Strawberry Shortcake and Huckleberry Pie but maybe next year I can convince her to be a pirate with me LOL!
-Kelsey R.
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