Finding the next campus-gate

This session was about investigative reporting, and the speaker was great. He gave me so many good ideas for investigative stories that I'm immediately going to start working on tomorrow. He also stressed accuracy, which can easily be overlooked when you get excited about a story, and giving all sides of the story the chance to respond. He showed us different Web sites and other places to look for good story ideas.

Although he stressed being polite, he also said: "If you're not pissing someone off, you're probably not doing your job." And I find that quite amusing.

Leigh

Keeping the dream alive

Friday morning I tried to go to "Thinking like an editor," but it was overflowing with students. So, I went to this one instead. It was about literary magazines, so it didn't really apply to me that much, but it was still interesting. It also helped to hear about business models and publishing, because I know zero about all that. The speaker was very encouraging, though, about continuing to write and to do whatever you're passionate about even if it doesn't seem like a success.

Leigh

D.C. in the mist

On Thursday, Leigh, Mary, Richelle, Andi, Chris and I decided to go explore D.C. The first thing we did was go to Chinatown and to our dismay- it wasn't the kind of Chinatown we thought. There were no fake Prada purses, so I was definitely disappointed.

As a group, we decided to check out the monuments, which seemed much closer on the map than they actually were.

While being "misted"on, we walked all the way to the Capitol. We looked at it, noticed how pretty it was, and started walking to the Washington Monument. On our way there, we noticed the surprisingly large amount of people jogging around. These people were hardcore. They were jogging in shorts and sweaters in the cold mist. Only one of them smiled at us.

It took us about 20 minutes to get to the Washington Monument from the Capitol. It looked closer because it was SO HUGE!

This monument received many laughs for its particular shape, but, all in all, it was pretty spectacular. Once we got to the Washington Monument, Chris and Richelle spent most of the time imitating a former faculty member.

Even once we got to the monument, we had to walk even farther to reach the base.

Leigh, Andi and I decided we wanted to touch the monument, so we made the trek to the base. Chris, Mary and Richelle stayed at the bottom.

In the end, Chris, Mary and Richelle decided to take cab to Starbucks and then return to the hotel. So it was Andi, Leigh and I left to wander around to view the monuments.

After the Washington monument, we stumbled upon a monument we didn't even know existed. I don't know when, but sometime between the movie "Forrest Gump" and now, they built the WWII Monument, which is breath-taking. Around the beautiful fountain shown in the picture, they had a block with a metal wreath on it. Each block had the name of a state on it. I took a picture next the Louisiana one :)

This place was full of tourists! We were surprised since we were seriously the only tourists around the Washington Monument. We soon realized that there were a bunch of middle school trips going on at that time. Many of the boys had those Sketchers shoes with the rollers.

The WWII Memorial led to the reflecting pool, which led to the Lincoln Monument. On our way to the Lincoln Monument, we asked a man where the Vietnam Memorial was, because if it was not 10 feet away, we weren't going. It actually was about 10 feet away. We decided to check out Lincoln, then see the Vietnam Memorial on our way out.

The steps leading to the Lincoln Monument were very steep and very slick from the rain. We were hoping to see an adolescent bust it, but we were not so lucky.

There are no words to describe the Lincoln Monument. I can say it is beautiful, magnificent, even wondrous- but none would truly do it justice.
There were signs asking people to be quiet in respect.

We walked around, looked up at Lincoln in silence and read the Gettysburg Address, which was engraved on one of the walls.

Then we went to the Vietnam Memorial. We looked at the huge wall of names, which I was not comfortable taking a picture of, and visited the Women's Memorial. It was very humbling.

I also learned, while silently observing the Women's Memorial, that an 8th grade boy likes his women thin, but with muscles. But not too muscular like a bodybuilder. Just as long as he couldn't beat him in an arm wrestling match.

After the Women's memorial, we spent the last hour looking for the Metro station.

See, we never really bought a map of D.C. Andi memorized the map she found while researching D.C, but we did not have a map in our hands. All that we had was the Metro map, which gave a VERY general location of the Metro stations. We were looking for the Smithsonian, because there should have been a station near there. We never did find the Smithsonian...

Instead, we accidentally found the White house. We asked one of the guards where the nearest Metro was, and he told us it was 3 blocks that way -- which was great, but when we went three blocks that way, there was no Metro station.

So after we realized there was no Metro station, we walked into this food court looking thing and asked a guard where the Metro station was. Apparently we were looking for the Federal Triangle Metro station, and it was "just around the restaurant and take a left."

We went around the restaurant, all the way to the road and looked to our left... No Metro station. By this time we're delirious because our feet hurt, we're soaked and we still can't find the Metro!

We went to some valet parkers in front of a fancy building and asked them. They said it was behind the building, from where we just came!!!!! He said go behind the building and we should see a big blue M... We can't miss it. Did that-- no M.

Leigh, Andi and I walked behind the building, and found some servers taking a break. We asked them where the Metro was, and they started arguing in Spanish about whether it was to the left or right.(as translated by Leigh Gentry)

Finally, a server actually steps forward and says, "What are you looking for?" He tells us to look for a rose sculpture, which by now we've passed twice, and to go down some stairs behind the rose. Take a right, and it will lead to the Metro.

At last: some SPECIFIC directions. No one told us that the Metro station was on a lower level behind the rose statue. We came to the conclusion that the last guy must have been from the South, because all Northern people are not nice.

Then we found the Metro station, rode to DuPont Circle and decided to eat some well-deserved supper at 10 p.m.

After supper, that was the end of our adventure.

Kera Simon

Final thoughts on D.C.

While the rain precluded extensive tourist activities, I used my time wisely for the most part and tried to see as much as possible. Anytime I go to a new place, I'm always overwhelmed with the realization, perhaps a cognitive dissonance, that life has been going on there forever without me even knowing about it. I left with some interesting impressions, and frankly, surprised. When I thought of D.C. before this trip I thought of a boring, flat city with only a couple of gray monuments sticking out here and there. But I left having seen some really pretty sides of D.C., especially the neighborhood we were staying in.

When we were checking into the hotel on Wednesday evening, I took a seat next to a telephone and memo pad. I looked down and caught a glimpse of some writing on the pad and picked up the sheet for a more thorough examination. "The city of acronyms and obfuscation..." began the rather poetic scribbling. I thought that over for a while and wondered who might have written that. Taxation without representation.

Jim Mustian

Headline writing

One of the more valuable sessions I attended. Because it was led by Tom Pierce -- formerly of the St. Petersburg Times -- it was SRO, but I was able to see a good bit of the slides through a crack in the door. I also received a very informative handout summarizing the principles of good headline writing. To avoid redundancy, Pierce showed bad examples in his slide show and pretty much just pointed out what would be a good idea to avoid. Ambiguity, cliches and headlines that don't come close to encapsulating the story of pulling in the reader are among the things to be avoided. He said he is a strong advocate of making headlines amusing when it's appropriate and using puns. The handout is very detailed and even says which fonts and font sizes to avoid. He suggests first writing out the most important words regarding the story and just playing around with them, never just thinking out a headline in your head.

Jim Mustian

What do you mean you can't find a feature?

I didn't get to see too much of this one as I was behind a door for the first few minutes of the presentation. I was also pretty miffed that Tom Pierce's sessions all seemed to be SRO when they covered an array of topics I think most print journalists attending the conference would have been interested in. They certainly should have given him a bigger room to work with.

From what I could gather, Pierce talked about finding good feature story topics all over campus by looking deeply into what kind of faculty members are on staff as they are usually people who have already gone a lot of places and done a lot of interesting things. He also said international students should necessarily be considered as topics.

He started the session by listing the four types of feature stories: those that are interesting, those that are important, those that are neither and those that are both and said we would be focused primarily on the last category.

Jim Mustian

Bob Levey, the self-declared legend

This session was by far the most entertaining and was also very informative. I went into this session having entertained the notion of someday undertaking some column writing and left sure that I would soon be a part of it.

Mr. Levey was a journalist at The Washington Post for 35 years -- he covered hard news including sports for 15 of those -- and has also written three books. He has a really booming radio voice and also worked in broadcast for eight years. Mr. Levey addressed the responsibility all columnists have and he also praised the opportunity of being a voice to a community. He boasted about having raised $13 million through fundraising for charities in his time and said this demonstrates how a columnist can have an impact.

He went through the daily rigors of coming up with a topic and compared and contrasted column writing to news and feature writing, emphasizing the importance of having first done the latter. He reminded us that -- while the stylistic rules still apply for the most -- columnists are free to address matters that are too unprofessional to appear in a news story and mockingly pointed out that you don't have to have "a nutgraph" as in feature writing where you tie everything together.

Levey joked about his age and told us a few times that none of us should be writing sex columns because we are inexperienced. His l0ve for journalism is still palpable and he claims to read six or seven newspapers each day.

I loved this session.

Jim Mustian

Watching the dogs

Kenna Griffin from Oklahoma was all over the place and in our face from the beginning of this session about better covering student government, but she came with a compelling message. She claimed that keeping watch over organizations in power is the primary role of a journalist. She gave several examples from her own school setting in which officials in charge of financial decsions and acted unjudiciously and at times even stole money. She said their coverage of this issue won several awards.

She gave a few vague tips for keeping an eye on the people in charge:
-don't just cover the administration, as they only release good news
-attend all meetings (which I recently found out we as a paper are not doing)
-know the law in the area
-rotate the beat, at least every semester, to keep ideas and perspective fresh
-remember students aren't always interested in political processes
-focus on related news
-avoid conflicts of interest

The last one was one she stressed for a long time and said that under no circumstances should people in the student government be involved in decision making that goes on in the newsroom.

Jim Mustian

CNN's Sam Feist discusses media's role

The next session I attended was for just about everybody, I believe, and hundreds of people were in the ballroom. CNN's Sam Feist talked for over an hour about his strategies for getting people to watch his programming and how important it is to love what you're covering. Feist is the manager of the program "The Situation Room" and gained the audience's respect when he began name dropping. "I've known Wolf [Blitzer] for 15 years and I still don't know his political orientation," he said at one point while stressing the importance of leaving personal political beliefs at the door. He said sporting bumper stickers or campaign buttons are grounds for being terminated at his company. That's because trust and objectivity are "the most important thing" in journalism, and he said those should at no time be compromised.

He gave as a contrast to being accountable the example of how Barack Obama's education was erroneously reported to have been strictly Muslim. He talked in detail about how CNN got a reporter on the story immediately and broke the news that the claims were completely convoluted, alluding the incompetence of his competitors.

The thing I'll take from Feist's presentation, I believe, is that the press is the "only real check" on the government and that doing your job well in this industry can have a real impact on the world, as has been continually demonstrated.

Jim Mustian

Your news could be too pale

I tried to attend the replacement session for yesterday's "How to get an Internship" but left shortly after the guest speaker arrived ten minutes late and unprepared. Most of the other rooms were packed so I stumbled into one with a few seats open. The topic was diversity and how many different sides are actually being represented and reported in the campus newspaper. Two girls from L.A. discussed the dangers of having only limited perspectives and brainstorming meetings and explored the challenges of establishing long-term relationships with minorities that might be suspicious of your motives for wanting to obtain information. One of the girls told an anecdote of interviewing a black student who refused to comment on the issue saying, "You're just talking to me because I'm black."

Another thing stressed was the need to check stories for typical stereotypes. "We can fulfill the role of journalism a lot better [by doing that]," said one of the girls.

Among the ideas discussed was coverage of holidays like MLK day.
They also suggested affirmative recruitment for opinion pieces.

Jim Mustian