I will later paste this into the body of an e-mail I owe several friends

It has been busy here. I have barely been home, except mostly to sleep, since moving. Thankfully, the "hi-goodbye" phase of the summer is over. I will miss the friends who have just moved, and the ones who have just breezed through town from various distant places (Korea, Boston, Miami, etc), but it will be nice to have a night home to finally get my kitchen organized, too.

A technical writing job has fewer interesting anecdotes than a newspaper job, too, so I've had less motivation to write about work. Readers familiar with -->company<-- are already aware of the crazy art and the free tea and the lush landscaping that await employees, and it's not interesting enough to otherwise detail. The quickest route to my office involves crossing a fake stream via stepping stones. There are fake ducks along the way.

I might have some thoughts about the transition to a large company with the atmosphere of a college campus, but I'm still kind of nauseated by the contrast. Out of sadness for the newspaper industry, I mean. Though at the same time, I was proud of how well we managed with so little. I think we all were, even when it was really, honestly, far too little. At least we could say we worked that hard with no safety nets.

Extracurricular projects in the works. Exciting times.

faster, faster

Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, and stayed until 1847. He then spent the next seven years polishing his manuscript. Today, he would have been expected to tweet the whole time: "Pulled bean field weeds, thought of great line about hearing/stepping to different drummer, need Indian meal 4 bread, pond looks nice today." - Bill Leuders

I think there's a place for the rapidfire communication we're evolving into. One of the big drivers of innovation is the exchange of ideas, the introduction of novel thoughts and problems into your sphere of understanding. This could mean reading books, but it could also mean reading your friend's Facebook status, or an offhand comment in an e-mail. Or a meandering Gchat that turns into an idea for a short film. Isn't that how it happens in most movies? Someone is conversing about something completely unrelated to their problems, and then, AHA, problem solved, they run off excitedly to their chalkboard full of numbers. I can never find anything I'm missing until the moment after I've asked someone else if they've seen it.

But I agree that any trend toward valuing the immediate at the expense of slow, thoughtful ideachewing and factverifying (when you are in a field that requires factverifying) is not just sad, but frightening. I shudder at how many asinine political slogans are being ReTweeted as absolute truth, with a "word, sister" tacked on at the end. Republican or Democrat, I don't care. And the Thoreaus of the world (writers or inventors or chemists) all need time to be alone with the creative energy they've gained from communication, to turn fodder into fuel.

Even poem-a-day-writers will be spending the next four months on revisions.

Here is a good day off:

Not pictured: sunshine, bicycle, cats, fresh coffee, Baraboo River, birdsong, crabapple blossoms, a couple decent rough drafts, a good, good friend I will soon be seeing.

I am eyeing my home internet account as a string (& bill) to cut with the biggest pair of scissors I can find. Especially since my modem seems to have finally kicked it, just in time for my rates to go up. No thank you! Books are nice.

It's definitely a stupid move in the age of 21st Century Journalism, when my job is supposed to include being more internet-savvy than anybody else, but, given that I'm pretty bad at work-life balance, I might as well force some on myself.

Questions that stress me out: what is the future of journalism? how are you, yourself, all alone, singlehandedly -- going to defeat The Internet And Bloggers and save your profession? can the New York Times make paywalls work? what is the world-saving value of a person, 24, with a bachelor's degree in TruthseekingSlashStorytelling and approximately 1.5 years now of assorted hands-on experience?

I get a big thrill out of seeing newspaper delivery vans when I happen to be driving around at 4 a.m.

Learning curves

Since I'm still a greenhorn to journalism, I have a lot of days where I have to deal with both the usual demands - accuracy fairness conciseness completeness and a captivating lede - and figuring out the sheer logistics of a type of story or photo that I have not yet done.

Last night was kind of a perfect storm of both. As I'd written before, the school board here was looking for a fairly significant property tax hike to cover the gap left by the state in this year's budget. Last night was the taxpayer vote to approve that hike, following two hours of a regular meeting at 6 and explanation of the proposed 2009-2010 budget at 7. My story on the regular school board meeting hinged on the results of the tax vote, but my main story would be the results of the tax vote. The tax vote would be the last item in a meeting that started at 8p.m. My deadline was 10:20 p.m. I had already gotten wind that there would be many, many taxpayers showing up to voice their opinions, and the debate portion of these meetings was likely to run long.

So, grasshopper: summarize the results of this very complex debate in which there is much frustration on both sides, take a photo of a frustrated person that will fit into a horizontal photo space, get all the names and numbers right, and do it all on time. And don't drop your camera, laptop, or phone while you're juggling equipment in and out of the lecture hall. I'm sure there were people there who were more tired than me, but I probably had the fullest bladder and the emptiest belly in the room by the time everything wrapped up at 9:20. And I still had to run back to the office and finish writing.

Anyway, so I learned that a laptop can be useful in emergencies when you need to write the middle sections of a story before you know how it will begin and end, that it's STILL obnoxious to be the person who arrives early and sits in the end seat in a lecture hall, and there's a lot of controversy over certain aspects of school district spending that I will have to explore later.

The vote failed, p.s.

Voicemail left for me by a source, on a colleague's answering machine. Imagine the voice is about 80 years old. I kind of love this man.

"I'm looking for the young new reporter lady...this is NAME about ISSUE here...and she was writing the article and I can't find her um phone number here in News Republic, I hate these *doggone* program things that you can't get to the people when you want to talk to 'em...so I just don't have her number so I'll have to get through to her tomorrow, thank you, bye bye."

It's not that reporters love pain/suffering, it's that they know(or at least strongly suspect) there are always problems everywhere and they feel like they've done a good, thorough, useful job when they find one and can write something about it. "If it bleeds, it leads," is actually a therapy maxim for reporters who have been writing too many cheery, uncontroversial community member profiles.

"...how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?”

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

Letter from Jerusalem

By Daniel Estrin

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

This wasn’t a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters’ notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report...More

The end of funemployment

I got myself a newspaper job. I've got a long post to write about why I still want to be in traditional media right now and how this whole job hunt has been and what I have said every time an editor asks me "So what the heck do YOU think is going to happen to newspapers?" but I have to buy a car, find an apartment in a town of 12,000 people, and finish my last two weeks in Madison.

Then you'll find me in Baraboo, writing here on education and general assignment topics.

Well!

Somehow I lived this long without learning that following up by phone/e-mail on job applications was common wisdom and might be a good thing to start doing if I wanted to have any kind of chance against all those fired journalists out there.

SO.

Knock knock. Who's there? The death of the newspaper industry.

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State-run television stations won't cover launch of opposition party
Nic Dawes, Mail & Guardian

The election manifesto launch this weekend of the Congress of the People will not be televised live by the SABC, the public broadcaster has told Cope.

...

Extensive live coverage of Cope's national convention and subsequent Bloemfontein conference on December 16 drew intense criticism from the ANC, which accused the broadcaster of bias in favour of the breakaway party, hinting that the coverage was the fruit of loyalty at the SABC to former president Thabo Mbeki, many of whose allies are senior figures in Cope. Zikalala is reviled among supporters of Jacob Zuma for his perceived backing of Mbeki.

A source close to Zikalala told the Mail & Guardian he had been instructed by chief executive Gab Mampone to reduce coverage of Cope, following pressure from ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe.

SABC television would cross live "for five minutes" to the launch, to speak to its reporter there, Xundu told Ngwema.

...

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