The Daily Plan-it / Dean of Students Blog, Columbia J-school

Bill Wareham, managing editor of Minnesota Public Radio (one of the most influential news organizations in America) recently visited the school and had some nice things to say about our radio curriculum and Professors John Dinges and Rick Karr:

Both fellows have distinguished bios - John is a former managing editor at NPR (the full bio is here) and Rick has done stints with NPR, PBS and more (full bio). But these guys may be doing their most important work ever at Columbia, where they’re educating the next generation of radio journalists.

The heart of the radio workshop is the weekly webcast, which comes together every Friday during spring semester at 4 o’clock ET. This mix of daily news and features is a pretty good replication of what goes on daily at public radio stations across the country.

What impresses me every year is how good these students are, even if they’re still a little rough around the edges. We’ve had several graduates of the program come through MPR (the latest, Jess Mador, started a couple of months ago), and all have been strong journalists.

You will be hearing many of these voices on public radio in coming years, but if you want to hear them now, the workshop archives its programs here.

Read the full item, with links:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/newsroom/archive/2007/04/hearing_the_fut.shtml.

Prof. Dinges, who is a terrific evangelist for radio, encourages all students to think about doing radio, even if they are not broadcast majors (we have courses of various lengths). He say, “Some students now seek out Columbia for radio, more each year as word gets out. But still the majority of our students discover the possibility of radio while here–including about half who started out with the intention of being print journalists.”

He’s right. Over the years, I have seen dozens of students had what I call their “radio epiphany” while taking a radio course here and go into careers where radio is their major outlet - or one of their major outlets. Increasingly, even newspaper reporters are asked to collect audio clips, make podcasts, etc. And when it comes to new media, radio and audio skills are especially invaluable.

If you are incoming student (or a continuing PT student): please do consider taking radio classes when you are here. More on radio at Columbia here: http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/radio/

Below are two essays written just before Graduation 2006. The Class of 2006 SPJ fundraised to give a $500 cash award at the end of year to two students who demonstrated their personal growth during the year. To be eligible, students had to: 1) be a paid SPJ student member; 2) submit an essay 300-500 words answering the question: “If I could tell myself in August what I know now, it would be….” All entries were judged by a panel of alumni organized by the alumni office during the first week of May. The awards were announced and given during Journalism Day. The winners were Elisabeth (Lisa) K. McDivitt and

- - -

“If I could tell myself in August what I know now, it would be….”
By Elisabeth (Lisa) K. McDivitt, MS 2006

If I could tell myself in August what I know now, it would be nothing. I would meet myself on the steps next to the statue of Thomas Jefferson, and my August-self would be looking at the school, feeling small and unsure. I would have an urge to say something at first: “Don’t worry, you’ll pass!” But then, just as I would be about to tell myself the outcome, I would back away and let my August-self, filled with anxiety and irrationality, proceed up the steps with the entire discovery still ahead of me. Because if I said anything to me then about what I know now, I would be taking it all away.

I would be taking away the moments where, after all of my senses had been deadened, I got to surge to life again.

I could tell myself that RWI would remind me of my 10th grade AP biology midterm, when I didn’t know any of the answers (not even the extra credit question asking for lyrics to a Jimi Hendrix song), and I would feel simultaneously unlearned and uncool. But that would deprive me of the surprise when, as second semester was starting, I had that sensation where you’ve been standing in a doorway, pressing your elbows against the sides, only to walk out of it and have your arms float up on their own. I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun of learning to love to write again.

I would want to tell my August-self to pay more attention to the city, to look up every once in a while. But that would take away the moment when I actually did look up, and I finally saw the way the tops of the buildings make avenues in the sky.

Or, I could prepare myself for the time in November when I was coming home from Brooklyn on the F train, glaring at the map of New York, while the florescent lights reflected off the plastic and glared right back at me. I was filled with anger at this city that I couldn’t call home, with its cut-up land, its bridges and subways. I didn’t belong to any of it.

But that would spoil the day, months later, when I would be in that same cramped seat on the F train, headed off to dinner with friends. My elbow would knock the book of the woman sitting next to me, and I would apologize. She would look up and smile this warm, forgiving smile, and I would smile back, because we were neighbors. New York neighbors. And I suddenly realized I was home.

So, as I would be walking down the steps of the journalism building, passing my August-self heading up them, I would not say a word. I couldn’t ruin the surprise that, even though I thought I was too old for it, I was about to grow up.

o o o o o

“If I could tell myself in August what I know now, it would be…”
By Carolyn Slutsky, MS 2006

Dear Carolyn,

Relax. Take a deep breath.

Now get on the subway and hit the streets. See the old lady sitting in the park? She’s nice, and she’ll be happy to talk to you about the oil spill in her neighborhood. That guy behind the counter in the pharmacy? That police officer? Friendly, open people. Don’t be afraid to introduce yourself, to ask them questions. When you’re pacing the narrow hallway of your apartment, cringing about confronting the lying principal, just pick up the phone and make the call. Don’t be intimidated: once you introduce yourself, 90 percent of people will just start talking, leaving you time to collect your thoughts and think of follow-up questions. If you’re talking to an old person, or a PR flack, or anyone with a little time on their hands, they’ll be more than happy to talk to you (and talk, and talk…).

You know more than you think you know. Remember all the books you’ve read, all the late-night conversations you’ve had, the times when you’ve navigated foreign countries in which you didn’t speak the language. Surely you can get a reluctant doctor to speak to you about his patients, or a Latina administrative assistant to tell you why she gave $50 from her meager paycheck to a political candidate.

Go with what you have. When a meeting falls through, when a source fails to call you back, don’t panic: Everything will be ok. You’ll reschedule, you’ll find a back-up source, you’ll be industrious and spin the article another way. Despite the fact that you may be freezing on a bridge straddling the border of Brooklyn and Queens, or sneaking around a library interviewing Muslim women in hushed voices, when the deadline approaches, you will have a story. It may not be the story you set out to get, but that’s fine. That’s journalism.

When you have a choice (and sometimes you won’t), write stories that enflame you, that make you feel enraged or enlightened. If people around you are interviewing corrupt politicians or investigating undocumented workers for an immigration story and all you want to write about is pierogis in a Polish restaurant in Greenpoint, go for it – your story will end up in the New York Times, and your cheeks will blaze with pride.

Most of all, enjoy this year. It will fly by, and you will make friends and have experiences like no others you have ever had before.

Wear comfortable shoes.

And take it easy; but take it.

-30-

FLASHBACK: Student work starting a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11/2001…
http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/terror/

Dear Students:

Five years ago, on a bright Tuesday morning, members of Columbia J-school’s
Class of 2002 hit the streets for the second week of RWI, their reporting
and writing course. It was Primary Day, which meant our students were spread
out across the city, including parts of downtown and what would eventually
become known as Ground Zero.

As the catastrophic events of that day unfolded, our students became part of
the reporting corps that covered the attacks and their aftermath. In
addition to writing stories for their classes, many of them became New York
correspondents for their hometown media outlets across the country and
around the world.

More than 130 of these print stories, including 43 from that Tuesday, were
posted on a hastily-created site, “Terror & Response.”

Prof. Sig Gissler reminded me that it might be a site worth bringing back to
the surface. Here it is:
http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/terror/

From the introduction:

“For students at the Graduate School of Journalism, the attacks on the World
Trade Center represent a watershed event in their education and careers.
They are covering the main story and its myriad after-effects, emphasizing
the views and voices from their neighborhood beats throughout the city.”

Pictures taken by our photography students, some touching our school’s
cameras for the first time that week, have been posted recently by Prof.
Sara Barrett on the bulletin boards on the third floor. Please stop by to
take a look.

We will see if we can unearth the radio coverage by the broadcast majors.

If you have comments about any of this, please feel free to post them in the
comments section at the bottom of this DOS Blog posting:
http://deanstudents.blogsome.com/2006/09/08/student-work-911-stories-from-20
01/

- Sree Sreenivasan

From InsideHigherEd.com, the FREE web-based competitor to the Chronicle of Higher Education (founded by former Chronicle staffers and something I read every day - it also have a daily headlines e-mail list you can sign
up for)…

Beloit College has released its latest “Mindset List,” to help academics
understand what freshmen know — and what they don’t have a clue about. This
list has been prepared each August since 1998.

You have probably seen similar lists about young people these days… Our
youngest students, are, of course, just a touch older.

The full list is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/23/frosh

Some of the ones that jumped out at me:

2. They have known only two presidents.
3. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt.
6. There has always been only one Germany.
20. Text messaging is their e-mail.
22. Mr. Rogers, not Walter Cronkite, has always been the most trusted man in America.
24. Madden has always been a game, not a Super Bowl-winning coach.

And so on… I felt really old the other day, talking to a group of top high school journalists and no one among the 40 had even HEARD of Andy Warhol or the quote about “15 minutes of fame.” I was trying to tell them that “in the future, everyone will have 15 readers,” but that went right over their heads. Sigh.

- - -
A couple of reactions I got to this posting:

• Sree, the list has become interminable and full of junk, frankly. The ones you selected are worth pondering.
• A riot and scary. At least the list did not contain that they never get news
  from newspapers.

  And one of my colleagues, Jen, pointed out this NYT story about a professor who went undercover as freshman: What a Professor Learned as an Undercover Freshman

  -30-

The New York Times
May 15, 2006

Times Are Tough for News Media, but Journalism Schools Are Still Booming
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

LINK: http://nytimes.com/2006/05/15/business/media/15students.html

But there is one corner of the profession still enjoying a boom: journalism schools.
Demand for seats in the nation’s journalism schools and programs remains robust, and those schools and programs are expanding. This month, they will churn out more graduates than ever into a job market that is perhaps more welcoming to entry-level multimedia-taskers than it is to veterans who began their careers hunting and pecking on Olivetti typewriters.

Columbia references:

• Michele Steele, 27, who is graduating from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, has a similar outlook. She has been hired as a reporter and anchor for the video network at Forbes magazine’s Web site, www.forbes.com.

  “Certainly the industry is changing,” Ms. Steele said as she monitored the Forbes Web site in the school’s new Roone Arledge Broadcast Lab, named after the former head of ABC News. “But the changes are positive.”

• At Columbia in New York, one multimedia student, Julia Kumari Drapkin, said she was having just that experience.

  Ms. Drapkin, 27, a photographer who had taken pictures in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, went to Columbia to broaden her skills. She said that some news organizations were not yet ready to allow photographers to write, for example, or shoot video, but she did find a summer internship at Time magazine and its Web site, where she said she would be encouraged to help “rethink the photo essay.”

  “In this changing media landscape, there’s an opportunity for us to be able to do a new kind of reporting,” she said. At Time, she said, “there will be conversations about how to handle the new media and I want to be part of that conversation.”

• At Columbia, Emily Brady, 29, was waiting to talk to a recruiter from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper beset with woes ever since a circulation scandal in 2004. “You don’t go into this profession to get rich,” Ms. Brady said. “There are financial sacrifices, it’s a tough profession, you’re under fire, and it’s not necessarily the most popular thing to say you’re a journalist,” she said. “But it’s a calling.”

See essay by Prof. Freedman below - the editor also recommends Prof. Freedman’s new book, “Letters to a Young Journalist.”

CBS Public Eye
March 31, 2006

Outside Voices: Samuel Freedman On The Difference Between The Amateur And The Pro
By Samuel G. Freedman

To its proponents, citizen journalism represents a democratization of media, a shattering of the power of the unelected elite, a blow against the empire of Big Brother. Citizen journalism does not merely challenge the notion of professionalism in journalism but completely circumvents it. It is journalism according to the ethos of indie rock ‘n’ roll: Do It Yourself.

For precisely such reasons, I despair over the movement’s current cachet. However wrapped in idealism, citizen journalism forms part of a larger attempt to degrade, even to disenfranchise journalism as practiced by trained professionals.

The following story quotes Prof. Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and Seymour Topping, his predecessor.

The Baltimore Sun
February 4, 2006

Telegrams’ fate - STOP
Western Union sent its final message last week, and fans say something romantic is being lost

By Stephen Kiehl
Sun Reporter

EXCERPT: But for many, the telegram holds an appeal that has never waned. As a formality, the Pulitzer Prize Board has continued to send telegrams to the Pulitzer winners each year, even though the winners first get the news through phone calls.

“In the age of lickety-split Internet traffic, it’s a charming, old-fashioned way of informing people,” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Asked what the board would do this year, he said, “We’ll cross that telephonic bridge when we come to it.”

EXCERPT: Seymour Topping, who covered China for the Associated Press, said that after news conferences in Beijing he would race by rickshaw to the cable office to be the first to get the news out.

The New Yorker (Feb. 6, 2006) has a Talk of the Town piece about the journalists who still drink Tab soda. Among those mentioned: Prof. Stephen D. Isaacs.

Steve Isaacs, a self-described “Tab nut” and former Washington Post editor who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School, has been told by several doctors not to drink it. “I tell them to go to hell,” he said recently. Isaacs used to work at CBS, where his boss, Van Gordon Sauter, often drank two Tabs at breakfast. Now Isaacs may be the most influential Tab advocate in the business: he begins each semester by holding up a Tab and asking students to come up with a hundred story ideas inspired by the can.

The entire story is here:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060206ta_talk_mcgrath

The Wall Street Journal
Thursday, December 15, 2005
OPINION

Mightier Than the Pen
Why I gave up journalism to join the Marines.

BY MATT POTTINGER
Mr. Pottinger, until recently a Journal correspondent in China, is scheduled
to be commissioned a second lieutenant tomorrow. He spent the last three
months at Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Va. As of early December,
his three-mile run was down to 18 minutes and 15 seconds.

Here’s how it starts:

When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines, I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that’s not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn’t a straight line.

See full story here. Reax?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007681

If you haven’t read it yet, please read the incredible NYT Magazine cover story for Sunday, Nov. 27, by adjunct professor Barry Bearak (he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NYT co-South Asia bureau chief). It’s called “The Day the Sea Came,” and looks at what happened to six survivors in Indonesia during the tsunami and in the months since. According to an editor’s note, it’s the longest piece ever published in the magazine. At 18,000 words, I imagine it’s one of the longest stories by a single writer in the history of the entire paper (in fact, I’d like to hear of anything that was longer). If you missed the hard copy, there’s the online version at http://www.nytimes.com/magazine (at least through the end of this week).

On that site, you can also see an archive of the NYT’s multimedia coverage from Dec. 26, 2004. They did a very good job of covering the tragedy as it happened. Now, with Bearak’s piece a year later, you get to see the devastation in context.

Because of the holiday weekend, I was away in Baltimore and didn’t see the magazine till Monday night. I did something I had never done before: read an NYTM cover story at the first sitting, beginnning to end. Usually, when the Sunday sections arrive on Saturday, I pick up the magazine and start with The Ethicist, William Safire, Lives and flip through the mag, eventually coming back to the bigger stories later in the weekend. Not this time. What an amazing piece of journalism - as someone who followed the tsunami coverage closely, I thought I knew what happened that day, but he showed me so much more and took to me places I never thought I’d go and made me experience things I had no idea about. I urge you to put away a copy, printed or electronic, for your files.

//Sree//

Dec. 3, 2005: ALUM SARAH BACHMAN RESPONDS: I, too, read the whole article at first sitting. Bearak’s byline always signals great content, writing and heart.

Signature Bearak anecdote: The poor fisherman who survived by his
wits and grandfather’s instruction pleading with an official. The
official says only the landlord who owned the fisherman’s humble
rented shack deserved full compensation for his lost property. The
fisherman and his family get nothing. Many writers would say, in so
many words, that the tsunami changed everything and nothing.

(Reminds me of another signature Bearak anecdote in a story from
Bangladesh about a village trial of a man who threw acid on the face
of a married woman who had turned down his romantic advances. The
village elders let the man off lightly. The woman remained horribly
disfigured. The woman’s husband was despairing, thoroughly disgusted
with the village version of justice but unable to change it. In the
story’s last line, he says, ‘But have you seen her?’)

I also appreciated the first person account at the end of the tsunami
story saying exactly how long Bearak had been in Aceh, how many
people he interviewed, etc. Usually, that stuff is buried in an
editor’s note, but this time, it was integrated into the article.
Putting a human face on the story-teller made both him and the story
more down-to-earth, puncturing the epic feel of his great metaphors.
Another instance of heart.

I wonder how the editor decided to run the story? Was the decision
made mostly on the take-your-breath-away writing, or because of the
unusual and utterly devastating nature of the disaster produced
unusually compelling stories, or for some other reasons? What would
it take to get more long narratives like this one in print?

Sarah