Two days down

It's been two days of hitting the ground running.

I nervously pointed my car westward on Monday morning not quite knowing what was going to lie ahead. There is the usual paperwork filling-out, newsroom chatter, meeting new people and hitting the ground running.

And I had to hit it running. I settled into my new desk, looked up and had several story ideas in my inbox -- mostly profiles of local businesses. It's a good way to get the lay of the land in business journalism. I spent a lot of Monday burning up the phone lines, leaving messages and setting up interviews -- which I began to do today, heading up to Broad Ripple to talk with the founders of a startup company that's everybody's dream -- come up with an idea that people like, get a cult following and then watch it take off and try to keep up.

Then, I came back to the office, transcribed the interview and started writing my lede.

And I wrote it again.

And again.

And finally walked away from my desk, wrote a photo assignment, shuffled it off to Andrea Davis -- my editor -- and asked her to tear them to shreds. In a nice way, of course.

Writer's block never leaves the writer. Neither does the pit of uncertainty in a creative pursuit -- is this good, is it wretched, is it something in-between?

Enough about my tortuous efforts to write for a bigger audience and in a much different style than I've ever written before.

One of the biggest reasons for doing this internship was to be able to glean real-world experiences and bring them back into our student newsroom at New Palestine High School so I can better instruct my students and create as real-world of a publications environment as possible. One of my top priorities for next year was to use our website more for breaking news, multimedia and have our staff do shorter stories and briefs to better cover our building in-between the times the printed paper comes out, and then use more in-depth, timeless stories and folos in the printed Crimson Messenger newspaper (and even more timeless stories in our Avalon yearbook). 


On Day 1, I had a perfect object lesson to take back to my students.

The IBJ is a weekly publication, but the age of Internet journalism has meant there's no such thing as a deadline cycle anymore. While longer, more timeless and in-depth stories go into the paper each week, there is also a digest of daily news, which gets emailed to readers each afternoon and posted online. The IBJ has done a great job of merging its printed product with the online product. Each has its own character, but each complements the other. Print stories are available online, but only to subscribers. The shorter, more timely news stories are freely available to all online. It keeps reader loyalty and contact on a day-to-day basis.

As a story broke Monday afternoon that the city had chosen a bid to demolish the old Keystone Towers high-rise near the Indiana State Fairgrounds, I was tabbed to write the first draft of a brief that would be online within minutes. The staff would follow up with a more in-depth story today. It's precisely what I'm hoping my students will be able to master in the fall. Object lesson #1 just ended up in the hopper.


The one thing that surprised me was the newsroom culture. As I noted earlier, before I began teaching in 2006, I spent nine years working as a reporter for two community dailies in Greencastle and Greenfield -- the last four as the sports editor of the Daily Reporter in Greenfield. In both, we had smallish newsrooms -- five in Greencastle, up to 12 in Greenfield -- who sat pretty close to one another and were always communicating. The newsrooms were very active, busy, noisy places where people were always talking -- either taking a break, chatting about a story, going over an edit, talking about a photo shoot or a graphic, discussing page design -- something. Of course, we were small staffs putting out daily newspapers and we were always on the go -- to a game, to a meeting, to an interview, just to fill the next day's publication.

At the IBJ, it is a very quiet, professional culture. Very little idle chatter crosses the newsroom. Reporters are seemingly constantly working on their own stories within the confines of their cubicles. It is a very productive newsroom, and it shows from the quality of journalism in each week's paper (and on the web daily). However, it was quite a culture shock to me coming from the frenetically-paced small daily newsrooms to one that is so quiet and where the staffers are so directed. At every place I've worked, the staffers are very talented and take a lot of pride in what goes under their bylines. But this staff has a much different way of approaching things.

It's one I'll get used to, without a doubt. It's actually great, because another thing I wanted to get out of this internship was to experience another type of journalism that was very different from what I had experienced working for small community dailies. It gives me another piece for the file cabinet of experiences to take back to New Palestine.

But I think I've made it past writer's block now. I still have this lede to finish.