Category: Grad School

Encouragement From Jim VandeHei

Grad School, Guest Lecture,

Today for J800 my class attended a lecture and question and answer session with Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of Politico. Politico is a web and print based media outlet for national political news, that has been pretty successful in the last few years when other media outlets have been struggling (by that I mean they are actually making money instead of bleeding it, hiring young reporters instead of closing ranks on not letting anyone new in).

It was really encouraging to hear someone say that Journalism isn’t dead, and that if you are bright and driven you’ll be OK. The main thing that I took away from his talk was that if you know what you want to do and what you want to report on, you should  just be out there doing it. Don’t take any job that doesn’t have to do with your field, don’t settle. Make yourself known, and just keep calling until someone gives you a chance.

Even though I’m still leaning more towards a public information officer position than a full blown journalist position, it was nice to hear that it can be done. Not finding a job after going through all the effort of moving to Wisconsin to get my Master’s degree is definitely something that scares me. Listening to VandeHei made me inspired to start looking for an internship for next summer (which is my Thanksgiving break goal).

Book Review: Rolling Nowhere

Book Review, Grad School,

Today my group in J669 gave our midterm presentation on Ted Conover’s Rolling Nowhere. The book is Conover’s first, which was published in 1984. The premise is that as a young anthropology student, Conover spent four months riding around the county in empty boxcars with the homeless. He did it as an experiment for his thesis, but after he returned from the trip and finished his degree, he decided to turn his personal narrative of the experience into a book.

rolling-nowhere_145I am pretty happy with the way our presentation went. I have an unfortunate cold, so I was a little worried I would lose my voice or have to keep blowing my nose and be obnoxious while the members of my group were presenting, but Robitussin (arguably one of the worst tasting substances known to man) kept my symptoms in check long enough to get through our 1 1/2 hour discussion.

My contribution to our analysis was to compare and contrast Conover with the other authors that we’ve read as part of our class work for J669. I also contributed a little to the questions and discussion that we had after we all presented the parts we prepared individually. We talked a lot about the ethics involved in immersion reporting, and whether or not it would even be possible to give an accurate portrayal of homeless life given that Conover was an upper middle class college kid.

Overall I think it was a success, the class definitely helped us out by participating in the discussion and bringing up issues of their own to talk about. After I asked the first question, they really ran with it (prompted by Deb) and we didn’t have to add much more to keep the class talking for another 15 minutes. Its always good when you can fill the entire time you are allotted and we did that, so I’m optimistic.  I also got another paper back in J620 today and it was another A so I’m two for two in that class, which is also good.

I’m definitely headed into the home stretch of this semester. The only assignments I have left are my finals, and one more book for J669 (Sebastian Junger’s War). It has gone incredibly fast!

Sleepy Skyping

Grad School

This morning I got up at what I consider an un-godly hour (6am) to call a researcher in Wales for my last article for J800, before going to class. Business hours in the UK run from the very early hours of the morning here until around noon, which left before class as the best time to do the interview.

I wanted to just use Skype to call his landline, but when he found out I was using Skype, he suggested that we video chat. It is a good thing that I decided to get ready for class and got dressed before I contacted the researcher, otherwise he would have seen my pajamas. I do 90% of my interviews by phone, and probably the other 10% by email. I haven’t interviewed someone face to face in over a year. So compounded by the fact that it was really early, I was caught off guard with the fact that he could see me, and that I was talking about some really complex genetics – I am fairly certain I sounded like a babbling moron.

I think I got a few good quotes though, so at least it was worth it, though the more I write them, the more I dislike feature-length issues pieces. They are unruly to say the least, but I hope I am becoming better at wrangling information.

What Makes A Writer Special?

Grad School, Guest Lecture

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I chose to specialize in science. Whenever people ask, I typically tell them it is because I was really awful at science itself. This is only a half truth. I was absolutely awful at Chemistry and Physics, but I have always loved and succeeded in Biology and Environmental Science. I know my difficulty in chem and physics was directly tied to the trouble I have with math.

I know math has been described as beautiful for the ways in which numbers work through a charted path to arrive at a solution. But I have never been able to follow that path. I always get hopelessly muddled in trying to understand the principles to the point that I can’t follow the equation or the rule or whatever I’m supposed to be applying. I’m not stupid, so I wonder sometimes why I was so terrible at math. If I had a single teacher that cared enough to go off script and try to explain things in a different way, would I actually have been able to excel at a subject that didn’t come naturally? Things I”ll never know I guess. 
But anyway, consequently when I arrived at Lehigh I wanted to be a biology major, but I was so behind in math (barely scraping through Algebra III was a far cry from passing Calc I & II) that I would have had to pass pre-calc for no credit before I could even start on my major track. I wonder if in choosing to write about biology instead of struggle through the math that I needed to be able to do biology if I took the easy way out. Although, I’m not sure there is anything easy about being a science writer. 
I bring up my specialty and why I chose it because today in J800 Adam Lashinsky, a feature writer for Forbes, spoke about his work as a finance writer. He said he was working hard to avoid getting labeled as a tech writer, although he has done a lot of reporting on business in the Silicon Valley. His reasoning was that he wanted to be free to write about whatever interested him. 
There are positives and negatives to specializing, but for me it was the whole reason I got into journalism in the first place. I wanted to be connected to the science, so for me without that bond with my speciality I can’t say that I would be in journalism at all. I wonder if that will make me a better or worse science writer? 

Seeing Is Believing

Grad School

Today in J620 we watched the documentary Seeing Is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights, and the News by Directors Kateria Cizek and Peter Wintonick. The film is a little old, and because it is about technology it is thus a little outdated, but some of the general principles are still pretty interesting.

Video has tremendous power in terms of reporting human rights issues, both for good and for ill. In the film journalist Joey Lozano follows the Nakamata, a group in the Philippines that are given a video camera by the human rights group Witness, to help document their struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands from sugar cane producers. Lozano serves as a go between for the native people and the media, teaching them how to use their camera and helping them take their footage to the mainstream media in the Philippines to get attention for their cause.

This would be the good side of the power of video, it helped the Nakamata document violence that was being perpetrated against them, and helped to ward off violence once it was well known that they had a camera available. On the flip side, the film also showed that violent extremist groups also have access to video and use it to recruit new members and spread their own messages. The film specifically showed videos made by the Taliban and Neo-Nazi groups.

It was an interesting film, but at the same time I don’t think its exactly a revolutionary idea that video is a powerful communication medium. Since the film was made, I think that film has just increased in power for the good and the bad groups around the world. In doing my own research on the film, I also learned that Lozano died in 2005 of cancer. Its sad in its own right, but in the context that a disease took down a man that survived an assassination attempt, I find his story particularly moving.