25

Jan

An update on my tenuous future


I have exactly one week to hear back from Newsday and The Los Angeles Times before I step back and force myself to resign from caring.

That doesn’t even mean they will have made their decision in that time. The e-mail from both companies said late January/EARLY February, so technically, in my mind, that means they could wait until the end of the first week in February to let applicants know.

(I’ve analyzed this a bit.)

It’s the LA Times and Newsday — while I subconsciously feel like I know I wasn’t even chosen as a finalist, I’ve kept my conscious mind very optimistic. Why wouldn’t they choose me, pah pah! And why would I ever aim lower — what does that even mean?

If I don’t hear back from either, I’ll give NPR another shot, and apply for OPB’s summer internship. I have to validate myself by filling that hole of time in which I won’t be going to school but may not have many other opportunities. I want to fill every gap with experience and clips. I want my resume to be this beefy, sweaty, heavy piece of fine print business paper that’s so luscious and juicy to behold you’ll want to slip it into a folder and file it in the safest and most convenient of places. Or frame it!

In the meantime, once I have my degree in hand I’ll keep my eye on The Oregonian’s one-year internship in a predatory manner — the second one opens up, I’ll be sliding that thick manila envelope in the mail once again.

13 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Gravity in the never ending news hole/Growing up

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17

Dec

A time to dog ear pages


(This is me not apologizing for not updating in two months. Take note.)

I’m at home in Woodinville for my last ever three-week winter break. Next term, I’ll embark on what will hopefully be my last term at Oregon State, depending on if I can swing things my way.

Right now, all nestled in at our quiet, Christmas house in Hollywood Hills, my dog is laying beside me groaning and twitching in his sleep and  my parents are upstairs snoring so loudly I can hear them half a house away. I’m here, all sleepy and content in my fat, winter-y hibernation state feeling like I should still be in Portland, fast asleep, ready to wake up early to ride the MAX downtown to The Oregonian.

My internship at The O ended last Friday. Because A) my skills at writing long form narrative are seriously underdeveloped, B) it’s very fresh and still a little too emotional and C) I have a hard time accepting that my time there is actually over, I can’t begin to try to give any sort of chronological homage to the 11 weeks I spent there.

It seems rude for me to neglect blogging about that experience, as if I’m avoiding it, but at this point I still feel so close to it that I can’t put it into words. I couldn’t write well about it; I could only gush.  It would get out of my control. And gushing is sloppy and flaccid writing, so until I find a way to write tightly and eloquently about my (amazing, unparalleled, paradigm shift) experience at The Oregonian, I’m going to only write sparingly about it. It deserves more time and effort. That chapter deserves organizing; review; careful poring over the notebooks (I kept them all) and thinking back on all the people I met, the hands I shook and the things I learned.

I did learn the importance of writing tight and bright, I’ll say that. I can’t write about my time there in any lengthy sequence, so I’ll say it was simultaneously the happiest and most confusing time of my life. I was the most stressed and the most at ease. I was completely out of my comfort zone but felt like I was right where I belonged. And I left there surprised and thrilled and energized. Like I kind of knew where I was and where I was going, and other people were starting to know it too.

I’ve never been more humbled than by the e-mails, letters and stops by my desk on my last day. I feel like right now I’m standing at this very obvious and quickening threshold, and it’s a bit frustrating because I can’t just leap into doing what I want to do — there’s that whole school road block in my way. And people keep telling me it’s not going away.

For now, I’ll do what I have to do. I’ll take my 18 credits, make a solid effort to actually go to all of my classes, pass them and hopefully, Inshallah, graduate in a timely manner. I’ll freelance, wherever possible, and work for minimum wage to survive in the hours between sleep, barn work and school. I’ll buff up my resume and hammer out cover letters, choose and organize the obligatory five clips and dry clean all my interview pants and jackets. I’ll pick up some new pantyhose, some without any runs in them. I’ll try to keep my hair highlighted and my roots at bay in case the opportunity to interview arises. I’ll keep my nails filed and my teeth sharpened. And I’ll stay on top of it. All of it.

(There now, brevity and constraint. Bam.)

14 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Growing up

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18

Oct

Nice old men still read the paper


I have this bad habit of prefacing my blog posts with some sort of apology about not posting often enough. You should know, dear reader, that I haven’t been posting because I’m shoulders-deep in articles/work for The Oregonian (yessss!), and when I’m not in the newsroom or working on an article I’m either commuting to Corvallis, spending precious few hours sleeping, in class, or riding my horse.

On the topic of my internship at the O, I can’t possibly begin to go into what a surreal and incredible experience it’s been working in that newsroom, among Pulitzer winning reporters and some of the nation’s best writers and journalists. I’m just in awe every day. I don’t feel like I fit in, but that’s a good thing — it keeps me on my toes. I’ve never felt so lucky in my life. I applied for an internship with the O three times. On the third, I got one. For this 11 week period I get to grab casual coffee with reporters whose work I’ve quietly idolized and followed for years. I get to pick the brains of living journalism legends. I can’t say more, because the thought of it makes me completely inarticulate.

Tangent.

I was talking with this old man today. What started as a casual discussion praising Oregon for all that it offers (the mountains! The city! The friendly people! The beach! The generous drivers!) turned into a conversation about the newspaper industry. We started talking about the future — which papers might survive, which won’t, which might have a chance and which deserve to fold altogether anyway. He’s a local Oregonian. He subscribes to a few papers, and he reads them all. He is in his 70s. Smart. Easy smile. Modern in the sense that he’s aware of the changes befitting the industry. Like many people his age, he is a loyal reader and subscriber. He loves the newspaper, but he particularly loves good news — he even used a key descriptor that would perk any journalist’s ears — he loves to read “human interest” stories.

He likes it when newspapers are able to give honest, intelligible answers to political questions and can help the reader sort out the messages of different candidates and the provisions of different measures during election season. He likes when they put the leg work in and read the fine print and then translate it in a way that makes sense to most readers. He says that’s what a newspaper should do. It should assist the community and provide the news — not just the scandals.

What he doesn’t like are superfluous stories about crime, especially petty crimes. We must be hurting for news, he implied, when newspapers are running stories about local celebrities and their unpaid parking tickets. To him, that’s not news. He wants good news, and he knows there is plenty of it out there to report on.

I listened. It was a beautiful Oregon fall day and we were standing outside under the late afternoon sun. I knew there wasn’t much I could do but listen. I’m not an editor, I don’t run a newspaper; I’m not even permanently employed at one. Maybe I never will be. But I also know that his concerns aren’t the ones editors and publishers worry about — they’re focused on what people 50 years his junior want to see in a newspaper, if they’ll bother picking one up at all. That’s what they have to be focused on in order to survive. He knows that, too.

By the time our conversation had died down, the sun was setting. I’m still thinking about what he said, and it’s starting to form into an idea in my head, adding to a cluster of notions of what I think a newspaper should be. It’s kind of a living web of thought that changes and grows with every new internship, article and experience I have in this industry.

There’s no guarantee that I’ll get a job at a newspaper after I graduate, especially in the first six months. I heard a statistic on that somewhere once, but it was depressing so I shut it out of my head and now I don’t remember it. Maybe if time goes by and I really can’t find a job, I’ll start my own idea of what a newspaper should be — online, of course, and attached to all the new media/social media bells and whistles that are must-haves at the time.

You can’t fight city hall.

14 years ago Short URL Comments

Gravity in the never ending news hole

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10

Sep

Post wisdom teeth wisdoms


Ohhh, blogosphere. And Twitterverse. How neglectful I’ve been. I feel like all my rare and randomly-written blog posts include the word neglect in the first line: I’m sorry.

I got my wisdom teeth out today. I’m currently sitting on my little ol’ Dell at my parents’ house in Woodinville with two bags of frozen peas plastered to each side of my face, secured there by four of those long athletic hair bands that girls use to hold their manes back when they’re working out/washing their face. (Side note: When I bought 25 of those bands in assorted textures, designs and colors, I KNEW they would come in handy someday. Five years later…)

In the last few weeks, I’ve been too busy to even get on Facebook much — oh, horror of horrors. After I ended my internship at Capital Press two Wednesdays ago, I immediately started packing my life (which seems to get bigger and require more boxes each year), cleaning up my house, and beginning the process of moving out of my beloved south town and dropping crap into my parents’ garage (time bomb, start ticking). A few really exciting (and extremely cost-effective) opportunities have come my way in the last few months, both of which will put me out of my comfort zone… so I’m going to take them.

I start my fall academic reporting internship with The Oregonian Sept. 27, which basically feels like it’s going to be my final and perhaps most significant opportunity for a launchpad into the world of professional journalism. Big plans and lots of things to do beforehand — still need to talk to my college adviser and the office of financial aid about taking a term off but still taking credits. I still need to get my hair done (my roots are about two inches long right now), nail down the logistics of leaving my lease and having someone else sign in and, oh yeah, find a place to live in Portland.

As far as that goes, I think I’m gonna look for a place close to the MAX that’s farther outside of Portland. A room in a house or a studio would be fine at this point. Anything aside from a cardboard box under Burnside Bridge would be just great at this point. I’m aiming for a place that has good running nearby and a good park where my dog can make happy puppy bathroom time. And as much as I would love to spend a beautiful Oregon autumn downtown in the heart of the Rose City, it’s pretty impossible to find a place to lease for three months, with a dog, in the realm of $500.

Somehow, I’m still not panicking. Somehow. Procrastinating is an art form for me. Deadlines are like my little sidekick. They empower me. That’s probably why I love journalism so much… Bam.

The other opportunity involves a decision my parents and I made to move my show horse out of training for the first time in the three years we’ve owned him and bring him to a barn in Corvallis so that I can ride him and train him myself. Since we bought him in 2007, Carlos was a show horse, through and through. Understanding his talent and potential as a four-year-old at the time, we bought him as an investment. We decided we’d build him up, show him all over the place and get his name out there, then sell him, hopefully for a profit and to a good home, when the time was right.

Then the economy crashed, the nationwide slaughter ban was passed, and people started letting their horses loose on government land or on Indian reservations (halters still on, etc) because they couldn’t even afford to feed them anymore… let alone the idea of trying to sell them in a worsening recession. This made the situation for anyone with a good horse to sell really volatile and virtually impossible.

The horse (Carlos, who by this time had become our horse and more importantly my baby) didn’t sell. We didn’t even market him, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to get a third of what we paid and there would be no guarantee that he would be go to solid owners that wouldn’t turn around and sell him again or let him go to waste. So recently we made the decision to give him a little break from constant showing and take him out to Corvallis for a few months of grass hay, reckless running and straight being a horse.

When I found the place that I decided was perfect for him just outside Corvallis, the barn owner showed me a slightly dingy but charming single apartment in one of the barns with a beautiful screened-in deck that faces out into endless pasture. So if everything works out, after I finish the internship at the O, I’ll spend the rest of the school year living at the barn (WITH my horse, something I’ve wanted my whole life), mucking stalls and feeding horses constantly, and taking on yet another new adventure.

I’m young, still in school, sporadically employed and the only other living thing I’m responsible for currently is my dog. At this point in my life, it’s all about taking chances and forcing myself out of my comfort zone.

14 years ago Short URL Comments

Gravity in the never ending news hole

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20

Jun

First week face off: Reporting vs. copy editing


I’m back from the dead. I’ve been a neglectful blogger… call me a deadbeat.

Quick update on the past few months in the world of amateur journalism: I survived spring term relatively unscathed. I passed all my classes (first time that’s happened in several terms), secured two internships for the next six months (which I was terrified about, I had no luck/new prospects until about a month ago), and kind of started to rearrange my life. I started thinking about the future, and about how a year from now, I’ll be an adult.

I went home to Woodinville last weekend, and while I was showering in my clean, spacious shower that never seems to run out of hot water, I realized that I will probably never live at home again for more than a few weeks at a time. This summer, due to the fact that I was lucky enough to procure a makeshift internship at the Capital Press (a 35,000 circulation agriculture weekly — probably the West’s most prominent ag paper), I’m living in Corvallis and making the 50 minute commute to Salem each morning. Thanks to another stroke of luck and timing, I’ll be interning at The Oregonian as an academic reporting intern during fall term.

The thought that I’ll never live under my parents’ roof for any extended period of time again is terrifying. Maybe there will be a period after I graduate when I won’t be able to find a job and will just move back in, but for some reason I don’t think that will happen, even though I shamelessly want to. I know my parents would welcome me and love me and feed me milk and home-cooked meals, but I’m sure they would want to set up a vague date of when my welcome as a freeloader in their home would officially expire. Until then I would just feel the clock in the back of my brain ticking like a time bomb for every week that I lived as a deadbeat daughter.

All of my roommates and most of my friends graduated last Saturday. The majority of them have plans for even higher levels of education. The ones who don’t have a very solid idea of what they’ll be doing with their time in the next few months, and some already have enviable jobs lined up.

But what does an underdog journalist with a degree in new media communications from OSU do? I could be like a few of my friends and former Barometer editors and apply to the best and brightest grad programs for young reporters across the country. If I were as talented as some of them, I would get picked up by a major publication fresh out of college and at least make some money traveling and freelancing. As far as journalism goes, I know there are more gritty, aggressive young reporters out there. I’ve always been a good writer, and I ask good questions, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to Pulitzer-winning journalistic skills. I am organized, and if nothing else, stubbornly tenacious. That’s what I have.

The reason I began on this blog post was kind of a reflection of what I’ve learned in my first week of working at the Capital Press. So far, the internship has already been incredibly valuable. Last week, since their head copy editor is on vacation, I’ve been helping to fill in on the copy desk. I’ve learned that I’m more detail-oriented than I ever thought I was, and I love doing layout and working on page design, even if it is on Quark — which crashes even more frequently than InDesign. I’ve also figured out that I have a lot to learn… and have kind of realized that reporting is what I ultimately want to do. But regardless, if I get to work in a newsroom, I think I’ll be happy.

I really like copy editing in general, but it’s so much more stressful than reporting, it’s unbelievable. I could never appreciate that fact until this past week. I would like to take this moment to bow down to all the real world copy editors who have to both edit stories and do pagination. You basically wait around for the talented reporting super stars of the paper to get their work done and then scramble like hell to grace a page with their copy. God forbid you should have to cut a few words or change their headline because it won’t fit.

(I should note that none of these writers have that sort of ego at all, but I can see why all the real-world copy editors I’ve ever known are always stressed out and pissed off. The pressure to edit every mistake out of a story and then strategically place it so it fits, pops and makes sense to the reader on the page — and the fear of screwing it up — are hard to get used to.)

It was different doing the job of a copy editor or layout designer at the Barometer… either you edit copy or you lay out pages, and all your pages can jump, so who cares if you can’t fit someone’s whole story that they spent an entire month researching on one page?

Another thing that’s hard for me to swallow about the copy editing role: You’re literally inside all day. Last summer when I interned at the Gazette-Times, there was never a day when I didn’t get to leave the newsroom and either walk or drive to somewhere in Corvallis and interview people — usually outside. I spent a few days at the Benton County fair, da Vinci Days, and any other outdoor festival I felt like covering.

As a copy editor, you don’t get to run around town, drive different places, meet people that you would have never interacted with otherwise and talk about their lives, their work, their passion, or the things they’ve accomplished, often in the face of crippling adversity. You don’t get to visit their homes and look at their pictures or sit in their kitchens and feel them unwind. You don’t get to talk to their kids, or meet their pets, or listen and scribble down notes as they teach you, front to back, about something their entire world revolves around. In copy editing, the human factor just isn’t there. Mind you, the human factor is often a pain in the ass, but it’s the reason most journalists do what they do — because we’re story tellers. We love sharing information, and above all, we love to learn.

In my second week at the CapPress, I’ll still be doing a good amount of page layout and editing, but since the chief copy editor will be back I’ll probably be thrown into writing stories, or getting coffee, or shining shoes, or something. You know, odd jobs. And while waking up at 6:10 every morning has been a relative pain (I’m nocturnal), I think it’ll work out in my advantage in preparation for the day when I …gulp… grow up and have a… um… real job.

Shuddercringebarf.

14 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Gravity in the never ending news hole

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04

Mar

If the ‘Big O’ can do it, then…


I’ve seen it on O Live, CNN and MSNBC more times than I can count. The content usually varies, but this particular choice of a source to use in a credible, breaking, crucial news story is always slightly baffling to me. Not that I can say it’s right or wrong… Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of it too… but I also have to admit that I hold The Oregonian, for instance, to slightly higher standards than I hold myself.

As I said, I’ve done it too… When I wrote my first real profile piece on an OSU student who had just passed away from a sudden diagnosis with malignant melanoma, I indulged myself and used this irresistible little piece of social media — this window into her life — as a source. I did it for many reasons, and while I questioned my morals as I was writing that final graf and closing the story off to send to my editor, I never even thought to change it.

I admit to it. I used someone — not just anyone, but a dead girl’s — MySpace as a source in a news story.

In my defense, it really did add to the story. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that it added tears to the story. People who had never met Kendra Hoffhines before read it and were weeping anyway, just because the story itself was so tragic, but when they got to the final graf where I quoted her fragile, sweet and incredibly par-for-her-personality “About Me” section on her MySpace, they were probably in hysterics. I was, too, when I wrote it. I never met her in life, but I know that Kendra Hoffhines was probably the sweetest, kindest and most delicate human being who ever walked on Earth. I still think about her. All the time, actually.

Since that time, I’ve always used that story as one of my clips when applying for a reporting job or internship. It probably isn’t among my most solidly-written articles, but it’s still my favorite. I was asked a year later (during an interview for an internship at a newspaper, coincidentally), why I had used her MySpace profile as a legitimate source in the story, and why I thought it was okay to do so. The question caught me completely off-guard, but the answer that I managed to stammer in incomplete sentences was the truth. That “About Me” section, in two or three sentences, completely encapsulated who this beautiful, intelligent, enthusiastic person was. In it, the reader saw her story and her life, her hopes and dreams and what she looked forward to in her future. They saw that, despite the outlook, she never stopped looking forward to her future. In that case, I didn’t care if it seemed wrong. Her MySpace was public and, at that point, basically served as a memorial for her. I said what I thought.

I got the internship. The story also won second place from the Oregon Newspaper Publisher’s Association for Best Feature Story in 2009. No bragging rights assumed, but from that I gathered that the recognition the story gained basically meant that quoting Kendra’s MySpace hadn’t been an issue.

Since then, I’ve tried to avoid, at all costs, using social media sites as sources in a story. My offense was before the time of Twitter, but now, news outlets seem to feel that it’s completely reasonable to source people’s tweets — which may or may not even belong to the people that they are attempting to quote, especially when that person is a celebrity or public figure. I understand why they do it (you might as well — it’s right there in the public and often times conveys a lot about what a person actually thinks), and sometimes it’s the only way you can give attribution to a tidbit of information that makes a story that much more interesting or, in many cases, sensational. But I’m still a little iffy on whether it’s ethically acceptable or not.

I’m not the type of person to rule anything out entirely. If I did, I would be a hypocrite, as rules are always made and broken in journalism and in the new media world. But judgment calls on this issue should be made on a case-by-case basis and taken seriously. Maybe in its next edition of the Stylebook, The Associated Press will offer stricter guidelines on when it’s permissible to quote a social networking site.

\’Saying goodbye to Kendra\’ Here is a link to the story on Kendra, by the way.

And here is the controversial excerpt in question: Kendra Leigh Hoffhines’ “About Me”:

“I’m a Christian girl, working on my fourth year down here at OSU, anxiously awaiting graduation, my wedding next summer, moving in with my soon-to-be-husband and beginning the next chapter of my life. It’s been an adventure thus far.”

14 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Gravity in the never ending news hole/NMC 301 Posts

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