SPRING PREP: Spring Kickoff Day
SPRING SEMESTER KICKOFF DAY
An annual day of academic, career and writing/reporting tips and advice, before the semester formally begins. Brought to you by Student Affairs, Academic Affairs and Career Services
Mandatory for full-time MS and MA students; all other students, faculty, staff are encouraged to attend.
Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009
10-10:30 am: Breakfast served - coffee, tea, muffin and bagel baskets
10:30-11:15 am: WELCOME: Deans Grueskin & Sreenivasan
DISCUSSION: Career Planning Strategies
Dean Sotomayor & the Career Services Team
- how to make best use of the Spring semester for job hunting and job planning
11:15-11:45: DISCUSSION: Surviving & Thriving in the Spring Semester
Deans Huff & Sreenivasan
- how to excel in the Spring, academically and otherwise
- preparing for graduation (never too early!)
- explanation of year-end prizes
[be sure to read Spring survival tips from alumni]
11:45 am-1 pm: LECTURE HALL
WORKSHOP: Lessons from a major PBS documentary
Prof. June Cross
What’s it like to create a Frontline documentary and what are the lessons that are applicable to all types of long-form storytelling? Prof. Cross screens parts of “The Old Man and the Storm,” a Frontline documentary that aired on PBS earlier this month, and discusses tips you will all find useful. NOTE: The documentary is is available for viewing in full, along with many special online features here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/katrina/ (she will also talk about how the website was put together)
WSJ review: “June Cross tells the story of 83-year-old Herbert Gettridge, a master carpenter struggling to rebuild his home in New Orleans’s Katrina-devastated Lower Ninth Ward.
1-2 PM - LUNCH ON YOUR OWN
2-3:30 - two concurrent events, pick one
[option A - WORLD ROOM]
PANEL: Everything you need to know about business reporting if you aren’t taking a Spring business reporting course
Presented by the 2009 Knight-Bagehot Fellows
No matter what kind of work you are going to do after you graduate, knowing business reporting is going to be very helpful to you. Foreign journalists to arts reporters to science writers are increasingly being asked to report on economic aspects of their beats - especially in these financial times. A group of 2009 Knight-Bagehot Fellows will present several useful tips and how you can incorporate business and finance into your stories.
Thomas M. Anderson is associate editor for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine based in Washington, D.C. and gives financial advice to more than 800,000 readers. He has won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a series of articles about mortgage lending practices.
Brian Hindo arrived at BusinessWeek as an intern in 2001 and now, as editor of the corporate strategies department, writes mostly feature-length pieces. Last spring he was name to the “30 under 30” list of the best young business journalists by the TJFR Group.
Natalie Obiko Pearson covers OPEC and African energy for Dow Jones Newswires, based in London. Previously she was the oil and business correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela, for the Associated Press.
Daniel Sorid joined the Associated Press in 2006 and has been supervising the AP’s weekend investing service, Extra. Between 2000 and 2006, he worked at Reuters News as a reporter in New York and San Francisco, and oversaw training and development at Reuters offshore U.S. business newsroom in Bangalore, India.
[option B - LECTURE HALL]
WORKSHOP: Writing - and Publishing - Your First Book: An alum and brand-new author explains it all, along with his editor, David Patterson
Stephan Faris, J2000, author of the brand-new “Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley” provides in-depth advice and tips on the becoming-an-author process. Faris, who has written for Time, Fortune, The Atlantic and Salon from all over the world, wil discuss his book and use it to break down the entire process from idea to proposal to research/reporting to writing to publishing and marketing. Even how to get blurbs like the one below. His editor, David Patterson (bio below), will be joining him to explain the writer-editor relationship and how books are acquired. More on him and the book at http://www.stephanfaris.com
“Stephan Faris has written a superb, first-hand account of the imminent results of climate change. His exceptional writing provides a vivid sense of the impact of global warming happening now. Forecast is a must read for all those who want to understand the seriousness of this growing problem threatening our planet.” - General Anthony C. Zinni USMC (Retired), author of The Battle for Peace
David Patterson is a Senior Editor at Henry Holt and Company, where he acquires nonfiction. Authors he has acquired and edited include Michael Mandelbaum, Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, Joe Mathews, Daniel Okrent, Rahm Emanuel, and Marilyn Thompson, among others, and the books include Nate Blakeslee’s J. Anthony Book Prize winning Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, Charles Peters’ Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing “We Want Willkie!” Convention of 1940 and How it Freed FDR to Save the Western World, and Eric Burns’ Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism. Forthcoming titles from him include Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food, Peter Manseau’s Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead and Nicholas Schmidle’s To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.
3:30-4:00 pm - BREAK
4-5:15 pm - LECTURE HALL
DISCUSSION: What every journalist needs to know about the business side of the media - advice and tips from Ken Lerer, chairman and co-founder of the Huffington Post; and Hearst New Media Professional in Residence.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Lerer will look at various aspects of the media business, the future of journalism online and offer specific tips for anyone interested in joining - or launching - a media startup. He will also discuss his plans for the Spring entrepreneurship sessions and how you can participate.
5:15-6:15 pm - STABILE STUDENT CENTER
Spring Kickoff Reception - refreshments will be served
Informal reception - a chance to meet your classmates and professors before classes begin.
6:15-7:30 pm - LECTURE HALL
Talk by Kimberly Dozier, CBS Iraq correspondent whose new book is “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq,” about being injured as part of a car bombing.
On Memorial Day of 2006, award-winning CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier went from covering the story to being one when a car bomb blew up yards from where she was reporting in Baghdad. The blast killed both members of Dozier’s crew, a U.S. Army officer, his translator and an Iraqi civilian, and left Dozier fighting for her life. She’ll discuss her year-long recovery and the critically acclaimed memoir she wrote about it on Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 6 p.m. in the Lecture Hall.
Dozier’s many journalism honors include a 2008 Peabody Award, a 2008 Edward R. Murrow Award and four Gracie Awards from American Women in Radio and Television, one of them honoring her reporting in Iraq. Last year, she became the first woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation’s Reagan “Tex” McCrary Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Formerly the London TV affiliate and radio correspondent for CBS News, she reported from Iraq from 2003 to 2006. She now covers covers the Pentagon and White House, but hopes to return to the Middle East.
She’ll talk about her work as a foreign correspondent and share tips and advice that will benefit all journalism students. More on her and her work at http://www.kimberlydozier.com/
“BREATHING THE FIRE is a harrowing tale of courage, survival, determination, fellowship and the high price of covering a war. Kim Dozier is a master storyteller and one tough journalist. Her family is lucky to have her back - and America is lucky to have her on the front lines of reporting.” —TOM BROKAW
7:30-9 pm
SPJ Happy Hour @ Havana Central
Gather for informal drinks and a cash bar at a local watering hole.
