Twitter, newfound love of my life

I heart Twitter.

For those who don’t know what Twitter is, here’s the description the Web site gives:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“

So basically, Twitter is saying what you’re doing at any given moment in time in a small space, which is then shared with the people who “follow” your updates.

At first, I wasn’t sure. It seemed kind of like a stalker tool.

But then I started using it. And I was surprised how easy it was to get involved in the online journalism world. It’s like mini, 140-character limited blog posts.

What I love about Twitter is what I love about the blogosphere, only enhanced: It’s a great opportunity to bounce ideas off of people, some more experienced than you, and get instant feedback. It’s having a conversation that everyone can see and join.

For instance, yesterday I asked “General opinion question: When interviewing teens/preteens for news features, should you get a parent’s permission?” I wanted to know for a story I’m working on. Within minutes, I had a few responses.  It’s a really great opportunity to get different, professional points of view.

And in essence, that’s what I love and crave about journalism: The constant feed of ideas, opinions and information.

Twitter definitely has its tech issues. And, like any group of nerds, we have our lingo. But it’s easy to learn — get started, join the conversation and hope you don’t encounter the infamous “Fail Whale.”

My username is hilaryalehman for anyone who wants to follow me on Twitter (I also have an RSS feed in my sidebar). And some of the more active journalism users, to start you off, are jiconoclast (Patrick Thornton), jdasilva (Jessie DaSilva), jayrosen_nyu (Jay Rosen), bydanielvictor (Daniel Victor), ryansholin (Ryan Sholin),  selfmadepsyche (Megan Taylor), and meranduh (Meranda Watling). That’s really only a sample. If you want to see a complete list of people I follow on Twitter, click here.

Which brings me to my next point. I’d like to introduce a weekly segment of my favorite journalism twitter of the week. So, drumroll, please:

Tweet o’ the week, July 18-25: jayrosen_nyu

An intern’s how-to on making the front

Having finally achieved the Intern Grail of having a story on the
front page, I got to thinking: what factors go into making a story
front-page worthy?

I clearly am not the authority on this, having broken A1 all of one
time in my 10 weeks here, but here’s what I’ve gleaned from being
around People Who Know Stuff.

How to crack the front page during your internship, In My Humble Opinion:

1) Cover a really big breaking news story. The setback to this plan:
You are an intern. Depending upon what paper you’re interning at, you
might not have the opportunity to cover the big news stories. Those
stories will often go to reporters who have proved their ability to
cover big stories on deadline.

2) Do your research. Find out what issues are important to the
community. I knew the animal shelter story had created controversy
before, and it’s on my beat, so I thought I would pursue it. If you
can dig into something high-profile, the potential is greater for that
story to have better play in the newspaper.

3) Be newsy. Even if you’re working on a feature, tie it to something
happening now. It might be interesting, but if you don’t have a news
peg, your story is likely to be buried.

4) Be original. Another story on how cool long-lasting lightbulbs are
or the potential for ethanol research, even if you have a valid news
peg, probably won’t make your section front. I’ve found that even
weaker “news” stories with an original angle usually get section-front
play, if not better. Combine Nos. 3 and 4, and you’re gold.

5) Be enterprising. Many of my best stories so far have been stories
I’ve found on my own. As cheesy as it sounds, you bring your own point
of view to the news, and that’s valuable. If you think something is
interesting, pitch it. Not having been in the same newsroom for years
gives you fresh eyes on the issues that editors often welcome. Plus,
enterprise gives you a clip that shows off all your skills as a
reporter, from conception to execution.

After a front page story, I can die happy

So I’m late to the game here, considering this story ran last week on Wednesday, but I did have my first Page One story of my internship. It was a story I pitched, about the progress Animal Care Services has made two years into a five-year plan to end euthanasia in the city shelter system.

Cue confetti, streamers, etc.

This was a hard story to do. As my editor said, it could have been twice as long, but I underbudgeted (whoops). Also as my editor said, that’s the new discipline — squeezing a lot of information into a small amount of space. Thus, a progress report on two years of city work in 25 inches.

Plus, it’s difficult when you know a story will generate public interest, but isn’t going to generate the type of public interest everyone necessarily wants. I know Animal Care Services was hoping for something more positive — but I report the news, which isn’t necessarily the news as they see it. I was careful in this story to make sure I had someone from the city respond to every criticism because I didn’t want it to be a hatchet job. I also wanted to show that some progress had been made. But whether that progress was enough — well, that was something the public had to decide.

Something I didn’t expect that was a side-effect of the story was that I had several phone calls and e-mails inquiring about a basset hound that was in the photo accompanying the story. From that interest generated, I’m sure he got adopted.

It’s always good to have a reminder that you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time and that sometimes it’s hard to write a story that shows all sides of the issue.

This story was that reminder for me.

My crazy night on the cops beat, and other observations

Summary of this blog post: The two cops reporters who had a baby be born and went on vacation, requiring me to serve on the cops desk Sunday night, picked a really bad time to do those things.

I kid. Kind of.

I trained for the cops beat last Thursday under the tutelage of a fellow intern — relatively uneventful, other than the FBI digging at a local landfill and a press conference I had to jump over a train to get to. (Yeah, about that — the train was stalled in front of where we needed to be, cue jumping across train platform. I didn’t really think the press conference was all THAT important, but hey, I just do what they tell me. And yes, I was terrified the train would start moving.)

So when I say that was uneventful, well, I compare it to my first night working night cops.

OK: Night cops. If you’ve never worked a cops shift before, it’s honestly an entirely different breed of journalism. You’re always listening to the police/fire department scanners, trying to pick up the words “DOA,” “Hurst tool” (the jaws of life), or, even better, “shooting.”

Before I had gotten there, the cops reporter before me had written a brief on the drive-by shooting of a 6-month-old girl that had happened overnight. So I took the police scanners from her and started my shift.

Night cops on Sunday is usually pretty tame, especially in San Antonio, which up until now I considered a pretty boring city.

Until about 4, things seemed to be going that way. Then I picked up “shooting” on the scanner.

I frantically call police dispatch, Mapquest where this place is, and head out in the company jeep used by cops reporters.

As I’ve noted before, I have an awful sense of direction. Somehow, I manage not to get lost and make it to the scene.

No one was dead; there were no pools of blood in the street. There had, however, been a drive-by shooting that caused a driver to “badly negotiate a right turn” (the police sergeant’s words, not mine) and hit a house/gas line. One of the passengers was grazed in the arm. A TV reporter found out I was the Express-News intern and said, “Oh, they let you do this? That’s cool.”

I head back, write up a brief and give it to my editor. I head out to the 6-month-old’s house to see if I can talk to her family. No one’s there, so I head back to work. I’m almost there when I hear the word “shooting” again on the scanner.

It’s about 9:30 at this point, so I pull up Mapquest again and head back out.

I’m at the same exit I’ve taken once before today when I realize I’m at the same neighborhood as the last drive-by. This time, two people have been shot with bullets, and two kids have been injured by shattered glass. No one’s life is threatened, but the street is filled with ambulances, cop cars and TV reporters “going live,” so it’s a bit more intimidating.

I go back to work and write up another brief. I hear the word “shooting” another time on the scanner and want to cry.

“You’re just not going to catch a break tonight,” my editor says.

I call police dispatch and find out it’s only a house in the same neighborhood that was shot — no people.

By now, my briefs have been combined into a story, since three kids were hurt in a 24-hour period in drive-bys.

I’ve put the cop-reporter jeep into the garage, and I’m getting ready to leave for the night when I hear that a man has been shot in the chest in — you guessed it — a drive by. It’s in pecan valley, which after the first three shootings I recognize by name as being in the same neighborhood.

It’s 11:45, and I’m only 15 minutes from my shift being over. I’ve also just parked the jeep.

“Do I have to go out again?” I ask my editor.

She tells me to get what details I can over the phone. I do, and dictate across the room as she’s leaning over the page designer’s shoulder editing the story.

Finally, I get to go home and sleep.

“At least you got a story out of it,” my editor says.

At least I did.

Less about blog posts, more about zoos

I’m a little bit exhausted from all the controversy this week, so hopefully this post won’t be controversial (I’m crossing my fingers).

I was trawling the Internet this week, via Google News, for stories I could use on my beat, namely animal and zoo stories having a San Antonio connection. One of the queries I submitted was “san antonio zoo.”

I linked to my first zoo story in a previous post. Imagine my surprise to find this blurb:

Zoo has trouble feeding family of 900
Kansas City Star, MO - Jun 24, 2008
The Kansas City Zoo is not alone in this pinch. The San Antonio Zoo busted its food budget by 39 percent in May, and the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Ariz., …

That “39 percent in May” is directly from my story — a number that I reported, i.e. taking notes during a phone call.

So, out of curiosity, I clicked through to read the story.

It’s a really great story. It has more details and it’s a bit more in-depth than mine was.

But note the Kansas City story’s lede:

“Like other shoppers, Liz Harmon must cope with rising grocery prices. But Harmon has more than 900 mouths to feed.”

Funny. Now take a look at my lede:

“Rising food prices might make it difficult to buy a week’s supply of family groceries, but imagine having more than 3,500 individuals to feed.”

Of course, that’s the obvious lede for this story. The more pressing question is the figures.  I found a Missouri broadcast media station that cited the Kansas City story’s figures without attribution.

And look at the publication dates: June 13, June 24 and July 1.

My story ran June 13.

With the Internet, the world is your beat. The lines are getting blurred as to what is acceptable and what is just inserting local tidbits into another newspaper’s story.

I want to be clear: I don’t think that that happened here. It does trouble me, though, that newspapers are starting to use figures from other sources without attribution. Broadcast has been ripping stories from newspapers for ages — but since it’s a different medium, it wasn’t viewed as competition in the same way. I have a problem with print media jumping onto that same bandwagon. How can we verify the accuracy of stories if we don’t do the reporting, and especially if we don’t attribute the source?

Maybe the Kansas City Star did call the San Antonio Zoo, but frankly, I doubt it. I think it crosses a dangerous line to begin that practice. It’s a slippery slope from not attributing sources of facts to outright plagiarism. The Internet makes it easy to find national angles to stories, and I think that’s great. I just think it needs to be clear where the information comes from in the first place. Otherwise, we lose a lot of our credibility.

I’m flattered that my story was good enough to contribute to the Kansas City story. After all, I was always told by reporting professors to “localize” national stories for class.

But if I hadn’t attributed a figure that I got from the New York Times in a story for my reporting class, I would have been in trouble.

That’s the difference.

The fallacy of naivete

“Naive” seems to be the buzzword of the week.

Jessie DaSilva, a good friend of mine and fellow journalism student, wrote a widely read blog post this week about the changing face of journalism.

Aside from the content of the post, if you read the comments, you’ll notice that one of the greatest criticisms of her opinions as expressed in the post is naivete. Some of these people make good content points as well — but underlying it is the sentiment that she’s too young to know any better.

One of the great things about my internship this summer has been the chance to meet a lot of people, some of them old-timers, who still believe in journalism, who say that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

So what do you call those people? Do you call them delusional or say that they have their heads stuck in the sand? Do you liken them to the band playing as the Titanic sank?

Whatever you call them, I bet you don’t call them naive — because they have decades of experience behind them.

It’s time we recognize the naivete argument for what it is: ageist. Because it’s wrong to say that someone’s opinion doesn’t count just because he/she is under 30.

We are all scared about the future of journalism. I’m scared of finding a job that gives me health insurance, while others worry about feeding their families. It’s depressing and terrifying.

But don’t call me naive just because despite all of that, I still decided to go into journalism. I come from a family of journalists, and I’ve seen this all firsthand. I know the stress that late nights, budget cuts, deadlines and stressful newsrooms can bring. But I’m choosing to be optimistic about the industry. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll move onto something else: I’ll teach, go to law school or do something else that will pay the bills. But I want to give journalism a try first because I think it can make the world a better place.

Also, I try not to criticize people who are upset with journalism as “old-media types” or “disillusioned” because I don’t think that’s all-encompassing or fair, and it’s often stereotypical. There are plenty of young, bright-eyed journalists who have come to feel that way, too. These people have experiences that have gotten them to where they are. They have a right to their beliefs about journalism.

I expect to be afforded that same respect.

I think it’s easy to call people — young people — naive when you don’t understand their motivations.

It’s a lot harder to understand persistent optimism in the face of acknowleged adversity.

I’ll close with a comment on Jessie’s post from Andrew Tan, also a friend and former journalism student:

“Reading all all these comments trying to dismiss DaSilva as naive I can’t help but feel a bit disturbed.
To try to dismiss anyone, especially a journalist, as naive is ridiculous. The entire profession is based on the notion that there is a ‘Truth’ out there that journalists can always get closer to.
While such a thing seems like such a small light in such a great distance, the faith that that distance can be conquered and that light can be brightened is what keeps journalism going. To try to dismiss someone as too naive to be jaded is the antithesis of the purpose of this profession.”

Uniting under the banner of journalism

It’s been hard this week to be positive about journalism.

We lost about 900 journalism jobs.

There have been blog posts galore about what exactly has put the industry in this situation, and feelings have escalated.

On Twitter and on the blogosphere this week, I’ve seen numerous arguments about what’s wrong with journalism: Giving away content for free? People who think we should charge for content? The housing bubble? The economy? Illiteracy? Egotism? Bias?

I’ve been terrified by the loss of faith among journalists. To me, that’s more disheartening than the actual state of the profession.

This isn’t just about me paying the bills once I graduate.

Sure, if journalism isn’t around for me to work in, I’ll be upset. My dream might be crushed, but I’m only one person. I’ll move on.

But the world won’t. Government won’t. Democracy won’t.

I guess I feel that way because I’m one of those old-fashioned people who believe that journalism is about truth: speaking truth to power, finding the truth, publicizing the truth, somehow getting at the truth by exploring all viewpoints.

I don’t care what medium that’s in or how it’s presented stylistically as long as I’m allowed to do that. It could be in Haiku, for all I care.

I think, in the midst of all the blogging and ad-hawking and politicizing and doing more with less, we’ve lost sight of that.

We’ve lost sight of what wins Pulitzer prizes and brings down leaders and governments, what protects the innocent and damns the guilty.

Part of what excites journalists and the general public about journalism is the philosophy, the search for knowledge. That’s complicated, and it’s not something you can quantify.

But all we can see lately is the bottom line and the jobs bottoming out. We’re divided among ourselves, arguing over the inverted pyramid vs. Gonzo and HTML vs. newsprint. That’s all fine for discussion – and everyone knows I love a good discussion – but the rancor I’ve seen in recent weeks disturbs me.

I’ve been guilty of it as well (see previous blog post). We’ve all chosen sides. But I think it’s time to stop wasting time. It’s time to start taking a proactive approach to saving journalism.

Maybe this sounds cheesy or cliche. If it does, I’m sorry — because I can’t help but feel that we’re shooting our own wounded.

It’s time to utilize expertise, both old and new. It’s time to try everything that fits within our ethical standards. It’s time to convince our friends and family that they need the media. It’s time to stop fighting among ourselves and figure out a battle plan for the economic woes ahead.

I’m not saying we need to end discussion. I’m just saying that the discussions need to get us somewhere instead of stagnating.

To me, the thesis of journalism has always been that words are powerful.

It’s time to use that power to keep our profession alive – not to tear it down.

In a world where the guards need to be guarded, I have to believe there will always be an absolute need for some form of journalism.

It’s my calling. It’s what I want to dedicate my life to.

Who’s with me?