26 February 2009

"Got anything for me?"

I had been sitting at the desk for about ten minutes when I heard one of the sports guys (Scott?) start talking to Colin, a copy editor/reporter.

Apparently an intern called him earlier this afternoon and asked if they were going to have any work for him to do. Sports Guy Scott said, "Uh...Yes." Intern Dude said, "Ok. Cuz I just didn't want to waste any time and was just making sure."
...Interesting.

Wow. I don't know about you all, but in my world, that's not exactly something you say to a potential employer. That's not something you say to anyone you've agreed to go and work for. I know that I haven't had very much work experience besides bookstores and volunteering and now this opportunity at the Tribune, but calling in to say anything besides "I am dying of tuberculosis" or "This blizzard is so bad all the highways are closed" is, in my book, out of line.

I even secretly hate the part-timers from the bookstore who would tell me, the unbiased student who of course relates to everything via drunk stories, that they were really tired but were going to go out anyway and get completely sloshed and call in the next morning. I'm sorry, did I miss something? Are we supposed to be lazy and shirk all responsibility?

Of course some of you are thinking right now, "Oh, sure, she's one to talk, she's blogging while at work. Hypocrite." I'll just point out that the blog is required for the internship class, I'm in between projects (I don't write this all at once, you know), and, last but not least, I take no official breaks.

I told Sports Guy Scott that he should be sure to give that intern the most mundane job he can think of. As I write this, Intern Dude is typing up the schedule. And that, for a terribly evil reason, is immensely gratifying.

Oooohhhh....a new project! I get to triple edit the Tribune's Stylebook! Yay!
And by that I mean, oh help. This stack of paper is almost half of an inch high. I might need more than one felt-tipped pen to finish this baby up.

Now for a word question. Why do we pronounce "indictment" as [in-dahyt-muhnt]? It came from the middle English "enditement;" why didn't we just keep it the way it was? I'm sorry to say that before about two years ago, I had no idea that it wasn't [in-dict-muh nt]. I really didn't. I knew what "indictment" was, I just didn't know how to spell the real word.

I wonder how many other words there are like that? I used to be so vain about my spelling skills, hurrah for spelling bees. Then I started learning French, and speaking a different language with so many cognates whose only differences are spelling (usually "s" in French when it's "z" in English) really messes me up. It's like I don't know who I am anymore.

It's even worse when I realise (see? Example #1) that the British spell it differently than we Americans do; and like the proper snob that I am, I decide to go British. I don't know why part of me thinks that the British are cooler speakers than Americans are. We just sound so....dull. Like no one cares about speech anymore. They just want to get it over with; if they just barely manage to get their point across, that's fine by them.

I say that everyone should start caring and begin pronouncing vowels the way they were born to be pronounced! .......Uh.....And how was that, again?

24 February 2009

Wikipedia and Opining

Sometimes the addictiveness of certain websites really scares me. Take icanhascheezburger.com for example. I love that website (with a very mild, detached love I mean). It makes me laugh, and shake my head, and roll my eyes, and a lot of times I'll get on it to take a five minute break, but not stop looking at the pages of pictures for at least half of an hour.

It's really rather ridiculous. But today, it wasn't pictures of funny cats and their captions that got me. I fell into the Wikipedia abyss. "It's not a credible source," teachers say. "Stay away from it except for looking up simple things you are supposed to know anyway and will never cite in your papers."

But I was doing research. I was looking at conservative and liberal media, and trying to find a simple list of corporations (papers, networks) that would give me any idea of what everyone else thought. And I did find an article about "Media bias in the United States". It was very easy to find. I can hear the tiny voice in my head of one of my teachers scolding me and making sad tsking noises.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry I read the entire thing. I'm sorry I've turned into every other college student on the planet. It's very shameful, and I apologize.
But where else can you find easy information?
Wikipedia seems to have a little bit of something for anything you want to know. And other sources of information do not lend themselves to the usage of broke college students (hey, that's me!). Sometimes it's just not possible to find information in "credible" news sources.

And would Encyclopedia Brittanica have a side-by-side comparison of the most and least liberal news media organisations in the States? Nope.
"There are no topic results related to your search." Okaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy.... Great. Thanks.

Even I am really tired of hearing classmates and professors rant in class about the decline of the newspaper and how much they hate blogs and Wikipedia and Twitter (and who knows what else) because they demean journalistic integrity, but still. Since even I fall into this hole, I suppose I still don't have a set answer in my own mind.

I do find it incredibly amusing that some students of journalism hate blogs because they contain too much opinion. I am apparently not a "real" journalist.

Now, I really don't think...

Oh, I'm sorry...I forgot that opinion has no place in "real" journalism. I'm supposed to participate, but not contribute, is that it? How in the world can you write an article, not put your opinion into it, and keep a reader from falling unconscious after the second sentence?

Saying that makes me think of my AP History teacher, Mr. Lightfoot. He was an interesting person. Maybe I'll write a profile about him someday. The strangest thing about Lightfoot was his inability to answer questions. At least, that's what we thought it was. Turns out he actually hated history, and only wanted to teach biology. Go figure. Anyways, sometimes we would ask him who his favorite president was. Or even the top five. He would NEVER give us an answer! He'd say, "What I think doesn't matter. I don't want to color your judgment."

The entire class would always bristle at that. Color our judgment? What, are we lemmings? Mindless and hopeless with a penchant for only following the leader?
Yup. Apparently we are.

Why else would we spend so much time complaining that FOX is conservative, the Times is liberal, and that something needs to change? The conservatives want more conservative reports. The liberals want more liberal reports. No surprises there. I find, to my relief, that a large number of the people whining about media biases are at least the informed citizens.

And I believe they're all complaining because the liberals are afraid that people will listen to the Washington Times and turn into Bible-thumping pastors, and the conservatives are worried that people will listen to the Wall Street Journal and become, what? Sorry, I can't think of the opposite transformation. Something about gays? Probably.

Of course, the relief I felt after finding out that journalists are worried about the general population being led astray disappeared quite soon after I remembered that they are, after all, simply complaining and slinging mud at one another.

I did find an article, written in 2005, about the findings of one UCLA professor of political science. Of all of the outlets researched, apparently Jim Lehrer was the most central-thinking. Looks like I'm going to have to do some more research. I wouldn't want to read unbalanced material and stop thinking for myself.

Final thought: Apparently FOX News execs get morning memos detailing the stories of the day and how they will be covered? I actually have heard this before, but I'm still wondering about the truthfulness of the fact. Who's to say the other papers don't get the same thing?

17 February 2009

Hating conservatives and liberals

In honor of journalism and all that is fair and good in the world, I'm going to begin a mini research project.

I want to know why everyone hates conservative journalists.

I'm sure there is a good number of you who are now saying, "But I don't hate them! That's not true!"

It is true. Just try sitting in on one of my Journalism classes, it doesn't matter whether it's Reporting or International Media or any of the others. If you enter into ANY sort of discussion about what newspapers students read, there is ALWAYS at least one person who says something along the lines of, "Oh, and I look at Fox News sometimes. But I hate it."

And then someone mentions Rupert Murdoch, and then someone says something about conservative journalism in general. During the entire discussion, I sit in my seat trying to figure out why I hate neither liberal nor conservative journalism. I hate reporters who only ever talk about one side of the story, and then claim that they are unbiased.

What I really want to know is this: How do we KNOW that liberal papers are unbiased, and that conservative papers are biased? Or vice versa?

Because it seems to me that in the end, all it comes down to is a matter of personal opinion. So we'll have to see how this goes.

And on a completely random note:
The sports desk is listening to songs from the Little Mermaid (Disney, of course) on YouTube. It's very strange to hear middle-aged men singing along with a cartoon I was tragically devoted to when I was little. At present, I am afraid of sharks and fish in the ocean. Tragic.

12 February 2009

Disturbia: war.

First I should mention that I hate that song. But I've used it as my title today to preface some things that I've had a chance to see this past week.

I wish our world wasn't nearly this disturbing, it's really very terrible.
Here's a clip about a man charged with sexual battery against a SIX MONTH OLD LITTLE GIRL.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29165667/

I don't understand why people do this, and how you could resort to hurting another person, an infant, because he or she was bothering you. Why would you leave your daughter with a person like that? I don't know if he was the father, brother, cousin, neighbor, or whatever. You don't do things like that.

Second, two Florida teens were arrested for FAKING A RAPE on another teen boy from their highschool.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29167296/
also at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2009/02/12/0212simrape.html?imw=Y

May I just say, WHAT?! I...I just....I don't understand! What kind of family lives did these two boys have that even hinted to them that doing this was OK? Seriously disturbing. He "realized his actions were inappropriate"?? So that means that the peer pressure to prey on others is so great, that kids will go so far as to fake rape?

Let's move on to other parts of the world. I found this article published online today by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7887520.stm

"FIVE CHILDREN SHOT IN AFGHANISTAN"
I seriously doubt the troops were aiming at the children; what I would like to focus on is the fact that children were anywhere near that sort of situation. I've never been to Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, or any other countries in that immediate area. Yes, I'm the privileged white chick who, one might argue, understands only that Prismacolor pencils are the best and that some university professors respond better to BS than others. But I think I know when and where children shouldn't be around adults, and I'd say war is one of those times.

For that matter, adults shouldn't be around adults at that time. I'm tired of reading death counts and hearing about martyrs and children being killed because they were in the middle of a situation everyone says they hates yet no one can ameliorate. A couple of semesters ago, one of my journalism profs would give my class pop quizzes on the headlines of the day. The last question, 8 times out of 10, was, "Current Iraq War Death Count?"

I'd honestly never paid attention to it before. But when you're reading through the obit page every day, reading about people who you didn't know who are now being buried under dirt and flowers, and you're watching this number climb every month....

Maybe this is entirely unrelated, but I watched the Incredible Hulk last night with one of my favorite friends. I would suggest seeing it, Edward Norton, I would argue, was the best Hulk so far. In the beginning of the film, General Ross calls in a group of soldiers to hunt down Banner, who they've found in Brasil. Here's the pertinent part: Does the general tell the soldiers exactly what they were up against? That Banner would turn into a fifteen-odd-foot tall anger machine and tear them to pieces? Nope. He tells them that the scientist stole military secrets and was a fugitive from the law.

OK, so the film was made by Hollywoodiens. It's part fiction, part social commentary. It just makes me wonder, how much of the truth was told to the soldiers going into what we call the Middle East? In relation to what they were told, I don't care as much about what I, as a citizen, know. If it were between me knowing and them knowing, I'd want them to know.

When I get into things like this, all I can keep thinking about is how sad our world is. Look at some of these photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/08/europe_warehouse_a_home_for_italy0s_migrants/html/1.stm

Sometimes I wish I were more politically and economically minded, so that I could at least explain these things to myself.

10 February 2009

The heart of an editor and The Stylebook

It's another Tuesday at the Greeley Tribune, and Nicole, one of the copy editors/page designers here, keeps on breaking computers. She says the first time she did it, it was on purpose. The second time, all she had to do was sit down in front of the computer we use for photoshop, and it spazzed out. She went to open the program and the screen went BLLAAAAAAACCKKKKK.

I feel happy that I haven't killed anything yet. I suppose the day will come.

I feel like this internship is going pretty well so far. I mean, I haven't done anything incredibly stupid, and when I do miss things, they're usually special Greeley rules, or things I haven't been told to pay attention to in the past.

One of my projects earlier this evening was to edit a short article written by another intern named Jessica. She goes to UNC; I met her a couple of weeks ago and she seemed like the energetic, go-getter type. This idea was confirmed when I was told that she, unlike most every other intern here, is an English major.

I don't want to say that she's not a good writer. I think basing a person's writing ability off of a single example of newswriting is really kind of mean. But this piece. Oh, this piece. I read the lead (the first line). Twice. Three times. She'd never interviewed anyone before, and it showed: The entire article read the same way I'm sure my newswriting did when I was in Reporting 1. Dull. Very little personality.

That was the moment I realized I've turned into a newswriting snob. I don't think I was like this two years ago. It made me feel bad, like I'm a mean person who only finds joy in demonstrating my writing superiority over others. I told Casey this (he's one of my mentors) and he almost laughed and said, "Well, that's a good quality to have if you're going to be an editor."

The tiny snort of a laugh that Casey gave while keeping his eyes on his computer screen didn't exactly make me feel better. Editing some mini briefs he had written and finding mistakes in them did. So it seems like I'm either a very mean person....or I am going to be a fantastic editor, because I don't care about feelings when I edit. I care about the words sounding right.

Then again, I feel like a sort of diseased something is churning in the pit of my stomach. I never wanted to be one of "them." I've always hated pyramid-style articles -- hated writing them, hated being forced to read them -- and I have to confess, I'm a tad horrified with myself right now. It doesn't matter so much that I really did make it better. What matters was my first instinct to push the pertinent information to the top. Like my French prof would say, I've started my "chute au mal." My fall to evil.

But at least I really did make it better, at least, Casey said I did. I'm a big fan of reading things out loud, sometimes I'll plug my ears after editing a piece and whisper it to myself. It's a little difficult to do that and not feel weird, since the newsroom is really quiet after 5:03. With just sports and the copy desk still sitting around and working, the only loud things that happen mostly concern bantering and the police scanner. I had to do the ear plugging thing a couple of times with Jessica's article to get it right. See? Fall to evil.

Hopefully I can get to the point where I can just glance through things and not have to look up punctuation entries in the AP Stylebook. Oh, and concerning the Stylebook? Oy. I'd always been convinced that it was simply the collocation of strange rules written by a bunch of completely sloshed news editors trying to change the world of journalism.

Now that I've been using it more frequently, I am almost positive that my hypothesis is correct. How do you decide that in all American newspapers, "traveling" will only get one "l"? Or, for that matter, that all punctuation (except for that question mark) goes inside quotation marks? Oh, but there are even more exceptions.

I don't really know what they are yet. I just know that they exist. That's the most frustrating part of what I do: knowing that there may or may not be something wrong with a sentence, and knowing that its correctness lies solely in the hands of a bunch of drunkies. That if the sentence appeared in almost anything besides an article in a newspaper, it would be perfectly fine.

I can understand why being a copy editor isn't really on the top of the list for careers. You have to follow rules. Lots of rules. Some rules don't even have an explanation. In the Stylebook, they're just listed as a single word. Like "seesaw," or "'hooky' Not 'hookey'."But why isn't is "hookey?" Who decided? Was it a linguistics thing? Is "hookey" actually a bad word? How can normal people know these things, unless they had a hand in creating the Stylebook?

They can't. And that is why we editors are the elite (haha!). Although, the elite as compared to who, I'm not exactly sure. Who knows. But I'm sure that somewhere in the world, there exists a career that is the proletariat to our bourgeoisie.

05 February 2009

The best pictures

It's Thursday again, and the worst thing about today is that it was nice enough to wear shorts. I almost feel sad that I live in Colorado, and we seem to be completely skipping over winter this year. Whatever happened to the February flurries, the blizzards trapping my car in the driveway (at least, that's where it would be trapped if my parents let me park in the driveway, instead of on the street)?

Then again, I'd better not complain too much. Driving in snow and ice up to Greeley twice a week ...yech. That doesn't exactly sound fun. Or safe. And then I would never get here before 5, as it is my eternal goal to do, and then one day, one fateful day, I will have to ring the doorbell. It laughs at me whenever I leave work at night (or is it morning?) to go to my car. Someone put a piece of fake fauna on top of it, probably as some cruel joke to camouflage something truly evil with the reassuring presence of green vine leaves. But I see through the guise. I know what it really is.

Today, as with most Thursdays, I started the evening by checking the wedding, birthday, and engagement announcements. The first problem I ran into was totally me. I forgot how to enter the search commands so that all of the announcements show up at once, in a neat little row. I sat in front of the computer and wiggled my mouse around a little, perhaps hoping that I would accidentally click on the magic command. I didn't.

I should have just asked, but I've done this three times already (yes, three. Oh, so many times), and, as I've always known, I'm rather proud, and I like to figure things out on my own. This is probably something I should work on, i.e. change. I'm trying to ask more questions more often, but it's hard for a person who is used to being able to assume knowledge, if not fake it outright. If you haven't noticed, I'm somewhat ridiculous.

After I managed to find all of the announcements (though through a different means than normal; I'm glad I was actually able to figure it out), I found the best wedding photo ever. Well, maybe it's not the best ever, but it was so much cuter than all of the other pictures. I always make sure to look at the photo attachments when I check the engagement and wedding announcements. I think I do it for the sake of being girly. Or something. I don't really know. I just really like looking at these photos, and knowing that this is how the world is going to remember this couple.

Sometimes they're not very good pictures. Sometimes I look at them and inadvertently grimace, because neither subject looks very comfortable, or because the photographer thought that it would be oh-so-adorable to have every single one of his clients stand with the girl holding her hand on the guy's chest. Maybe it was cute the first time.....but the twentieth time? Not so much.

But today, the picture was of a December 2008 wedding, the Carrico-Dieke wedding. The woman had long blond hair, swept into long ringlets reaching halfway down her back, and she was smiling the smile that comes halfway between laughter and trying to hold a serious face. Her groom had long dreds tied at the back of his head, and his nose was pressed into the woman's cheek. He was grinning, and the white blocks of his teeth made me want to grin with him. A painting of two praying hands pressed together was in the background.

The reason this picture stood out to me is its moment. All the other pictures are too simple. The bride and groom stop, turn to the camera, and smile. Click. This photo wasn't staged. It was like the bride had asked for one more picture, the groom wanted to walk away, he wanted to kiss her. They started talking, they started laughing; the bride wanted to be serious and take the picture, so she turned to the photographer and started to smile.

Sometimes the best pictures are the ones where no one cooperates.

03 February 2009

How much do you read?

Instead of jumping right into work today, the people who make up the copy desk sat down and watched a "webinar" podcast created by Poynter Institute and News University. First of all, I had no idea that "webinar" was a word now. When will we stop making up words? How long until the entire English language is nothing but a monstrous conglomeration of compounded words?

Not that it isn't already, I mean. I suppose it's just the natural course of a language: Rise, fall, flounder, renaissance. At least, it's probably something like that. A girl in my International Communication class was complaining today about the French, and how American students are taught French, but it really isn't French, since we're taught to say "Je suis" but they actually say "[shwie]"......

It was a lovely rant, and I just want to point out, it had nothing to do with the topic of the degeneration of language, because, as other French-speakers might want to point out, "[shwie]" is pretty much like saying "I'm" in place of "I am".

Back to the webinar. Poynter did a study on people's reading habits and the most interesting piece of information was that people read more text online as opposed to in print. I think it has something to do with speed, like it takes longer to read something in print, especially if the story involves a jump. I know that is one of the reasons I stopped reading print things, at least, it's why I stopped reading the longer stories. I hated searching for the correct page to continue the article. Once I do find the page, the story is never in a similar place.

Does that make sense? If the story has to jump to a separate page, isn't it just common courtesy to start the story again on a similar area of the page? Maybe it just has to do with whoever did the designing. I know that so far, at the Tribune, I don't really see a rhyme, or even a logical rule of syllable counts, to which copy editor does which page. It's more like, "Who wants this one?" "I do." "OK."

This probably means I'm missing something. I'm sure people have their regular pages to edit.

The more I see of newspapers, the more I realize how much DOESN'T get into the paper. I've edited a lot that doesn't appear for a while, or that doesn't appear at all. Maybe they're just testing my editing style. I don't know. But papers are really quite small, in spite of the enormous amount of information that's out there to read. And then when I start thinking about how many different ways there are to spread that information, I'm amazed.

Just think about all of the different front pages that were created for Obama's inauguration. The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky put together a page of historic front pages from around the world. It's a strange feeling to remember that day, it was my first day working here, and I placed a couple of the pictures that made up the Tribune's front page. And now it's on page A7 of the Courier-Journal, under The Washington Post, and next to Le Journal de Montreal and The Jerusalem Post.

I worked on that page, even if it really was only adjusting a couple photo boundaries and using Google to find some clearer images. But still.....it's there. It's permanent. People will look up front pages from January 2009 and find something that I touched with my fingertips before anyone else did.