Romenesko = Irksomeness, Gruesomeness, Tiresomeness

I was just typing up an email to someone where I mentioned Romenesko, the popular Poynter blog. Turns out, spell checker has some interesting suggestions for spelling.

Take a look:

Closeup:

Another Sept. 11

Another year passes as America remembers that solemn day 7 years ago.

On that day, I sat in an Arlington, Va. high school, located just 10 miles from the Pentagon. I remember how the sky was such a clear blue that day, how it was a bit chilly that morning. And, of course, I remember the shock of it all. The television on in every classroom. The frantic call to my father who was in downtown D.C.

I remember going to bed that night with the realization that the world was forever changed.

I remember those events so clearly, as do many other Americans, and yet, as we continue to move toward the future, the press coverage of the anniversary events decrease.

While The Washington Post had excellent coverage of the Pentagon Memorial opening today, coverage across the board by major networks was minimal, perhaps a little more prominent than last year but only because of the presidential race.

Requirement: Student Newspaper

I’ve been working at The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s independently-run student newspaper, for five semesters now, just over two years. Until this semester, I have always been a reporter.

I still remember my first story. A student group concerned about animal rights was petitioning the Penn State dining commons to switch over to cage-free eggs.

To be polite, it’s not my best article.

And that’s the thing with journalism: it takes practice. Since that first article, I have grown exponentially as a reporter and writer, going so far as to write in-depth pieces last semester.

I’ve talked with students who are trying to make a difference by making the campus a little more green. I’ve talked to Iraq War veterans returning to Penn State. I made the two hour trip to visit Shanksville a couple days before the Sept. 11 anniversary last year. I’ve talked with professors whose only hope is for a day when young people will understand the importance of voting. And I’ve even been so lucky as to interview Valerie Plame Wilson and Barack Obama.

These experiences could not have happened in the confines of the classroom and I have, by far, learned more from my Collegian experience than all my journalism classes combined. I’m sure many young journalists have experienced much of the same.

The blame for this lack of classroom education? It doesn’t fall entirely on the J-schools. Penn State could do a better job by requiring fewer theory classes and more reporting classes (which would, in a perfect world, combine multimedia reporting as well as print).

But part of the blame falls on the students themselves. Sitting in my upper-level news reporting class, two students rudely type away on their computers while the professor talks about the importance of leads. One is playing a card game online, the other is checking her friends’ AIM statuses. The typing and mouse clicking are so loud that I have trouble concentrating on what the professor is saying.

Luckily, I know what goes into lead writing, but most of the other students in the room haven’t written a lead for a year, maybe more, since they took the lower-level reporting class.

I faced a similar situation while in my copy editing class last fall. At the end of the semester, we had a group project where we edited stories and placed them on a front page layout in Quark, complete with photos. Despite the professor’s excellent teaching skills that harped on AP style for a number of common items, I was left substantially editing the other student’s copy.

$10,000,000.

Um, no.

$10 million.

Sacramento, CA

Nope.

Sacramento, Calif.

These are the very basics of editing, and the essentials that any reporter should know by heart from the AP Stylebook.

You can’t learn journalism in a vacuum, or a classroom for that matter and a semester’s worth of reporting or editing is quickly forgotten. While not everyone can write for the student newspaper on campus, everyone should tryout. So what if you don’t make it? You can try again the next semester and editors will look highly on your determination.

You have to be your own advocate in today’s journalism industry and the best way to start down that path is to join the student newspaper. It’s the best prerequisite not only for your journalism classes, but also for your future career.

J-schools continue to falter

If the newspaper industry is dealing with rough times, J-schools are equally faltering as they attempt to wade the transition from old media to new media and develop classes to teach students the skills they now need in order to be competitive in the real world.

Alana Taylor, a student at NYU, discusses her experience at the school in a post at MediaShift. The class Taylor is taking, “Reporting Gen Y” is, at the very least, a move forward by the university which understands that its students need more than just good writing and/or editing skills to be successful after graduation. She points out that the professors at NYU typically require students to bring the bulky print edition of the New York Times to class instead of relying on the internet version.

But for many students, this awakening is coming too late — Taylor comments on “Reporting Gen Y” which includes several ‘duhs’ for her. But, as is all too common, her fellow students don’t seem to already know the value of blogs, of Twitter, of other networking or journalism tools. For her fellow students all this talk about blogging was new.

I faced this myself when I had to ask the Board of Editors at the Collegian last week if we could get our paper on Twitter.

“First of all,” I said, “who knows what Twitter is and what exactly it does?”

(blank stares)

After a brief summary, I explained the benefits that other news organization have found by using the service and told other editors how through RSS feeds we could set up the account with virtually no maintenance whatsoever.

While the editor in chief was quick to accept Twitter (as an experiment at the very least), I’m still astonished at the lack of online innovation and knowledge among other reporters and editors. Perhaps they don’t understand the social networking site? Perhaps they think it’s dumb — why not just use Facebook or Gmail status, some probably say? But have they ever used it, to its full advantage? That’s the sort of problem with Twitter. You have to really use it in every single way possible as a journalist before you can reasonable say yes it does work or no it doesn’t.

I myself was skeptical about Twitter at first — how could this help me report? How many of my friends actually use it? But, I’ve found the service exceedingly useful through feeds from news organization as well as networking with other young journalists. It even got me into Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalist, an up-and-coming blog just for young journos to discuss the industry.

Blogging is another sticky point. I’ve heard editors and reporters alike grumble about having to post on a blog, some saying they don’t really understand it. I know less than a handful who have personal blogs.

While I’m sure it’s hard for J-schools to keep up on the new technologies that emerge each year — like Twitter — they should be stressing that blogging is essential (and fun!); they should be teaching audio and video skills; the skills that have been around for at least five or more years but are still not taught enough.

Every student who pays a ridiculous amount of money to go to J-school, in my case, well over $100,000, should come out knowing how to edit audio, edit video, stream live video, use flash, use soundslides and more.

Evaluating one of the best sites out there

This post originally appeared on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalist, a blog for young journos.

Well this post poses a bit of a dilemma for me. I work as a copy editor for The Daily Collegian, an independently-run student newspaper at Penn State. Therefore, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to critically evaluate the paper, although I will say that we are doing more to update our blogs and bring more multimedia content online.

The other newspaper in town, the Centre Daily Times is our competitor so it’s probably not fair for me to comment on them either.

Which leaves my “hometown” newspaper — The Washington Post. I prefer the paper’s design to that of the New York Times which I think sometimes has too many one column stories on the front.

Online, the Post does an equally, if not even greater, job of presenting the news and providing plenty of multimedia content. The front site is amazingly easy to navigate with a photo in the left hand corner to draw the reader in and then a one column view of the top news with small text and links to stories near the bottom of the page.

It also appears that the Post is now twittering live sports but has somehow added the feed directly to their Web site thereby eliminating the need for readers to navigate away from washingtonpost.com to view the feed. This is great because it eliminates the view of some editors that using Twitter during live events could direct traffic away from the main site. As an editor, I would continue to push the use of Twitter, expanding it to other events, such as White House press conferences, Supreme Court hearings among other news events.

The Post has been great about adding video and audio content online and its easy to find stories with such content from the front of the site because of the icons that lead the way. A video and photo gallery bar is located near the end of the page — perhaps that could be moved up for made vertical so that it could fit in the large amount of white space the Post has to the right of the page.

Another great thing about the Post is that it frequently sets up Q & A’s between the reporters and readers, especially with more interesting or investigative stories.

One thing that has to go is the multiple pages for articles. With the Internet, this is no longer necessary as text can virtually go on forever. It’s annoying to have to click to go to the next page and sometimes I don’t read the story past the first part because of that.

For some stories, the Post will prompt you to login or sign up but the site is so good that taking a few minutes to sign up is well worth the time. I’ve been using the site this way for years and only occasionally have to sign in when I’m on a different computer.

Overall, the Post should be what local papers strive to imitate, albeit with a much smaller staff.

Gustav shows best/worst reporting

Reporting about natural disasters is a staple of journalism and brings out both the best and the worst in articles and newscasts.

Reporters and editors at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans stayed at the paper despite evacuations, warnings and power outages. The paper itself has not been printed since Saturday and power went out Monday, so the newsroom has been running entirely on backup generators. The paper has been continuously updating its Web site the whole time. One staffer even rode out the storm on a shrimp boat!

At Louisiana State University, 10 staffers of the student-run Daily Reveille remained in their newsroom, updating their Web site even though the university announced it would be closed through at least Wednesday. Now, LSU has extended its closure through the remainder of the week because of the excessive damage to campus. Yet, the staffers still remain, taking photos of the damage on campus so that those students who evacuated can see what’s going on. During the height of the storm on Monday, there was even a live video feed from the top of the Reveille’s building on campus, although the newsroom lots its power and therefore feed during the afternoon.

The dedication of both these staffs made seem odd to some non-journalists. Aren’t they risking their lives? Shouldn’t they be heading the evacuation warnings? But keeping a horde, albeit small horde, of reporters and editors behind in a city served by a local paper is essential in today’s world and highly valued by those who did have to flee the area. While national organizations such as CNN and MSNBC do roll into town for large news events such as these, the coverage is not nearly as local and extensive as it is when the town paper covers it.

But where there’s a disaster, there’s always a news reporter putting him or herself in harms way when in front of the video camera. As the Washington Post points out:

Is it really a hurricane, or even just a “tropical depression,” unless a TV reporter in a hooded windbreaker is flopping around in the wind and rain like a landed flounder?

Is it really a weather story at all unless the TV people can go outside in the storm and, while risking bodily injury, warn viewers that they shouldn’t go outside in the storm and risk bodily injury?

During Hurricane Gustav, reporters from CNN and Fox News braved the elements to show people just how dangerous it was.

CNN’s Rob Marciano was nearly blown off a New Orleans rooftop as he pointed out the “whitetops” in the surging Mississippi River. His colleague Don Lemon was at street level, in what appeared to be a big open parking lot, warning viewers that wind-borne debris “can really shear through you.” Another CNN correspondent, Brian Todd, hit the jackpot: He had to hang on to a pole while doing his report from Baton Rouge.

The winner:

Geraldo Rivera. Fox News Channel’s self-described “warrior journalist” wasn’t content to shoot his story about New Orleans’s levees from the relative safety of a sturdy bridge or overpass, like his colleagues at MSNBC and CNN. Rivera went to the base of one of the levee walls, practically daring it to collapse: “The walls are holding,” shouted Rivera, as if covering the fall of Jericho, “but it is fierce here.” At least he got splashed by the “over-topping” waters.

Project Pearl

Journalism students at Georgetown University are taking off where the FBI left the investigation into who killed Daniel Pearl, the American journalist kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, a Marie Claire feature reports.

This immense project, now in its second year, is actually yielding tangible results — the students have uncovered 15 real identities of the 19 suspected of having been involved in Pearl’s murder. Now, the students just need to track down their whereabouts.

The article only briefly mentions, though, the dangerous nature of taking on a project of this scope. Unless these students are somehow very carefully protecting their true identities, they could be putting their lives or potentially their loved one’s lives at risk especially if they get too close to discovering the remainder of the suspects and their locations.

While many of the students are relatively safe, being residents of the United States, others are from Qatar, India or other foreign nations, where they could be much more susceptible to kidnappings, perhaps even by the same group who kidnapped Pearl.

Still, investigative journalism has really gone to pieces lately, at least in my mind, and maybe there’s a thing or two those editors and reporters at the Washington Post, New York Times and USA Today can take away from the example of these young journos — that sometimes, its worth taking the risk to uncover the truth.

Even my cat watches the news

Or the CNN scrolling bar….

Social Networking and Career Building

It wasn’t too long ago that social networking sites, like Facebook, were viewed as a potential liability when applying for a job. But now, these types of sites are becoming more and more networking sites as opposed to just a ’social’ function.

Facebook, though, still needs to be viewed with caution, especially among college students who post a ridiculous amount of photos and status updates that reveal waaay too much information. Learn about privacy settings.

LinkedIn has increasingly become the site of choice for business professionals to post resumes, get recommendations and seek job opportunities in their field. (I have a profile myself, which you can view here). I’ve been using LinkedIn for a little over a month now, but don’t really like that I only get 5 introductions. But having a profile in the site is a real advantage and it links to my Web site where potential employers would be able to contact me directly.

But another requirement should be added in today’s job market, particularly among journalists: A Web site with its own domain name, complete with resume and clips, as well as a blog. As journalism continues to move online, I also wonder how essential a blog is becoming — I would bet its becoming more resume-worthy with each passing year.

Tired of Being Self-Taught

Note: This post also appeared at Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists, a new blog ring for young journalists that I am participating in.

When I was somewhere around the age of 13, I created my first Web site and quickly learned the ways of basic HTML. In the past 10 years, the web has changed dramatically and I have been unable to keep up with all the changes. It’s moved toward not just being text-based, but video and audio-based. I’ve had to learn, little by little, how to use programs such as Frontpage and Audacity. However, there’s a ridiculous amount I have not learned and my time at Penn State has not helped much.

The journalism program at Penn State has only recently added a ‘Convergence Journalism’ class, where students can learn to shoot and edit video as well as audio. It’s a class i will be taking in the spring, along with the only web design class I could find, oddly enough under ‘Arts.’ In that class, I will learn XHTML.

I received an email last week about a new six-week course called ‘Webcast Production,’ where I could learn how to set up and produce a live Webcast. So why didn’t I rush to sign up for the course? It is meant for broadcast communications majors and has two requirements, one of which is the base level course called ‘Cinema Art.’ The description for that course — “The development of cinema to its present state; principles of evaluation and appreciation.” That totally sounds like something I need in order to understand how to make a Webcast!

Journalism and newspapers have been moving online for years and we can no longer make the distinction between skills needed for print versus skills needed for broadcast or radio journalism. We need and deserve to be better prepared for the industry we will enter. By providing more integrated courses, allowing students to become proficient in programs from Quark to InDesign to Final Cut, universities could raise the bar and provide their students with better skills, and ultimately, job opportunities.