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

What the Law Allows

Podcasting, as it turns out, is currently surrounded by lots of legislation. This session explored in-depth copyright issues. We discussed Copyright laws that have been passed, the first in 1790, as well as one in 1976 that removed the defense that something was for educational purposes.

We talked about what things were eligible to receive copyrights, and which are not. Ideas, facts and titles are some examples of things that cannot necessarily be protected.

But podcasts are interesting in that it has not yet been determined if news content on them can be considered news. While stremaing is viewed legally as as public performance, a DPD podcast is distribution. Podcasts were called the TIVO of radio.

We learned that a copyright is valid for 95 years from its publication and 120 years after its creation.

Laser-dropping, the process of cutting two or more clips from a song and randomly using them on the air or in a piece, is not exempt from fees that have to be paid for permission. We also went into the importance of getting people to sign releases after they have participated in interviews online. The professor from Michigan who was leading the discussion shared a rather lengthy anecodote about a gubernatorial candidate whose campaign was ruined after he said something on a college radio station that ended up being spread all over the place until even the AP picked it up and ran with it.

Finally, we talked a little about Napster and the ligation in progress.

Jim Mustian

So you want to be a foreign correspondent?

This session started slow but ended being interesting for me. We watched a slide show about IES, which is a program that places students in internships in Europe, primarily Italy and Spain. This organization claims to help students on their way to becoming correspondents, with permanent work opportunities abroad. But only 7 percent of the students that receive positions are in any way shape or form affiliated with journalism. Their very best one is a girl they selected to come and give a brief testimony of her experiences.

The speakers told students in attendence how important it is to broaden horizons and acquire second language skills. The young lady who spoke had been placed in Italy and claimed to speak Italian. She did not, however, indicated whether she had learned the langauge within the four weeks she was there, or if she was born with it, etc. While they were right with their observations as to what students should shoot for when studying abroad, the following quote left me unimpressed with what they had to offer. "Someone will speak English, don't worry. And you'll be able to find a place to find a hamburger."

Part of the experience is not just learning Italian (or other foreign language) or broadcast journalism skills (they also kept a Webzine and posted video and news reports of a small town they covered) but also adopting a new culture. Going over in goups of 25, as they did, creates what linguists refer to as the ghetto effect, a phenomenon that precludes second language acquisition.

A gentleman seated to my right interjected at the end that he was from a university in St. Paul that offered a similar program in the German city of Trier, as well as an internship in the Twin Cities. I approached him and found it interesting that he was stationed at the same university I was at last year in Dortmund.

Jim Mustian

Feature Fluff a failure

I was disappointed with the third session I attended because of the misleading title. Expecting to gain clearer insights on enriching feature stories with interesting facts and visual descriptions, I was surprised when it turned out to be fifty minutes of the Post showing off its last ten or so layout designs for its features page. It was still informative, but when I think about fluff, I really think of content. The woman who led the presentation was very passionate and apparently also very into coffee.

These were the basic concepts covered in the session:
-use one image but play it big
-"Content drives design"
-creative cropping
-making things more digestable without dumbing them down

Jim Mustian

Covering the World

My second session was prettty impressive, despite an inauspicious beginning. Peter Baker, a staff writer for The Washington Post, was not introduced by anybody and quietly approached the mic. He told us he was "a horrible public speaker" but then proceeded to give some background on what he's done so far and what it takes to reach his level. He stressed the importance of internships to make contacts as well as good clips in a portfolio. He told us about the difference between covering issues abroad and topics in the White House. He used to be the chief of the Moscow bureau and said he and his wife both first took a year off of reporting and immersed themselves in the language. They still used interpreters while they were there for accuracy, but he said he was fluent by the time he left.

One student asked him if politics and goings-on in D.C. could easily be incorporated into even a campus newspaper. After establishing that this paper only covers local things, Mr. Baker suggested an angle of how the political things have implications on students. He pointed out that most people will go online for the big news anyway.

He gave tips for approaching the foreign correspondent position, and reminded us that you can't file a story if you get killed following a beat.

We also talked about how many newspapers are closing their foreign services and bureaus in other countries because they rely on big papers and the Associated Press for syndicated news coverage. This, of course, can be attributed to convergence.

Mr. Baker also discussed some of his more unpleasant stories and said he was working on the Monica Lewinsky beat when the Post broke the story.

Jim Mustian

How to get an internship...eerrr yearbook stuff

The first session I wanted to check out this morning was postponed unfortunately. We were told, however, that it will take place tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I was already up and didn't want that to be wasted, so I jumped in another room that had an interesting-sounding description. The session "Covering your Campus Effectively" turned out to be dedicated to yearbook staffs, something I am largely unfamiliar with despite my last-minute contribution to the work recently submitted for the Potpourri.

I was, however, impressed with the speaker, Sally Turner -- a professor at Eastern Illinois University -- and how organized she was. She pointed out some good things to keep in mind and gave some pointers on establishing good contacts to people on campus, i.e. people who will undoubtedly be chronicled in the yearbook. Apropos chronicle, that's what she called the yearbook as a whole. She also emphasized the need to capture lifestyles of the era so when people pick up the yearbook in 20 years, they will have a clear perception as to what was going on now. She also suggested doing feature stories on people she said who made up the "underbelly" of the university, such as cafeteria workers who have been here for decades.

Jim Mustian

First impressions of D.C.

Arriving about an hour and a half before our colleauges -- which actually turned out to be about two hours after their flight was delayed -- Lauren, Mary and I got off the plane with some physiological needs to attend to. No consensus was met on what to eat, but we found a common table. It wasn't until several minutes had passed that I realized how close Reagan airport is to the action in D.C., and turning the page of a newspaper I caught my first glimpse of the Washington Monument.

I must admit that the first few minutes were rather intimidating. People were looking at us like we didn't belong, and I felt like they were right. Businessmen rushing to catch their commuter flights and finalizing deals over the phone was the norm. A few college kids in jeans drew a few not uninterested stares.

The subway system is efficient and pretty simple to understand. It reminded me a lot of the subway in London. A guy on our metro was drinking a Bud Light in the open, which opened a humurous dialogue between me and Chris as to the legality and/or indifference to that in this area.

One of the girls travelling with us wasn't familiar with the unwritten rule that you stand to the right when going up from the subway, or on any escalator really. Added to that was the fact she had a massive suitcase at her side. In any case, people rushing to the next place didn't care, and I felt bad when one man embarassed her and loudly demanded she step to the side immediately. I think the guy embarassed himself though.

There are a lot of really nice cars here, and I have the impression there's a good bit of money here. I saw an ATM slip left on the machine as I was withdrawing some cash and just happened to notice that the man before me still had over $30,000 in that particular checking account. The Lufthansa flight crews appear to overnight in this hotel on a regular basis, and I spoke some German with one guy yesterday afternoon for kicks. This city is so diverse, he didn't seem to be the least bit surprised.

Jim Mustian