Quick turnaround

If there's one facet of my writing that I need to work on (news or otherwise), it would be the speed with which I churn out a story. I believe that I am simply to slow--at least at this point in my career--to be an effective sports writer.

I don't know what it is that keeps me from getting a story out quickly. Perhaps it's that I'm simply to cerebral when it comes to writing. I think about it too much before hand, trying to organize it all in my head before I put it on paper. And then a lot of times I find that if i just start putting something on paper, it get's me going creatively and then it's much quicker to find my story and go back and reorganize at the end if necessary.

These blog posts are really great for me in that I don't have to think a whole lot about writing when I write them. Most times I just write whatever pops into my head. But with news stories it's not that simple for me.

That's why I am always amazed at the quick turnaround that sports writers have to achieve. For example, just last night I caught the end of the San Jose Sharks victory over the Dallas Stars after my brother's Christmas choral concert. The Sharks took the victory 5-2 over Dallas and the game concluded at just a few minutes before 10 p.m.

Shortly after, I checked the San Jose Mercury News to see if there was a game story up yet. I was not surprised to find that a game story had been posted at 10:38 p.m., a short 40 minutes after the game's conclusion. Professional reporters achieve this all the time.

Nonetheless, I still find it impressive how they can write a story so quickly and efficiently, two aspects of my writing that probably could use the most polishing.  

Virginia on my mind

Even if you don't watch television news, or read the newspaper, some events are so monumental that it's almost impossible not to hear about them. The 2007 Virginia Tech shootings would probably fall under this "monumental" category. The story was national in scope. Thirty-three people were killed in what was the most deadly shooting in modern American history.

It was to my shock and horror, when I was checking the news outlets at work today, that I read of another campus shooting at Virginia Tech, mere hours after it happened. Immediately, I feared the worst. But as I read on, I realized it was nowhere close to the 2007 incident and thankfully not a shooting spree at all.

Two people died in the shooting. Sadly, one of them was a police officer and father of five who was shot while making a routine traffic stop. According to reports, the assailant was strangely not involved in the traffic stop, and simply walked up to the officer on foot and ambushed him. The second death is believed to be the shooter, who most likely turned the gun on himself not far from the first shooting.

I don't understand murdering another person, least of all in a situation like this when a shooter has no apparent motive. I hate reading about stories like this one. They're just too sad. I don't know if I could ever cover a story of this nature. For some reason, I feel as though the details of a person's death should be a private thing, as should the grief of any family or friends.

Seeing enough stories like this could definitely have an effect on a reporter, which makes me glad that I'm trying to be a sports reporter.

NBA drama

Much like two political parties squabbling over something I don't care about, NBA owners--until very recently--had been locked in a stalemate with players over a new collective bargaining agreement which sought to decrease super-inflated salaries of star players and take some of the financial strain off of NBA owners.

I'm not a very big NBA fan, so I have not been feeling the pain of a lockout that led to the cancellation of more than a quarter of the NBA season. Instead I got a considerable amount of entertainment following the lockout in the news and on the radio, which covered the event particularly well.

Throughout the lockout which began almost immediately after the end of the last season back in June, there have been intermittent updates on the progress of the lockout. And as the lockout wore on, I would hear every other day of how talks between players and owners were resuming, only to break down days later.

I would have fun hearing and reading quotes from players and owners unwilling to budge and refusing to make certain concessions; much the same as I do when congress is having a particularly heated session (again probably over something I don't care about).

I am glad now that the lockout is over, both for the franchises that had a lot to lose in the event of a lost season, and for the NBA fans. The news' analysis of the new CBA, thinks that the NBA players are the losers in the new agreement, and they're right. The new luxury tax will make it harder for teams to go over the salary cap and thus keep player salaries down. But I think the group that lost the most was the fans who missed a seeing their favorite basketball teams because of a bunch millionaires quibbling over a few dollars.

(Social) Media whore

Social Media has seen a giant boom over the last few years. Stocks are rising at ridiculous numbers as social media companies keep branching out into other forms of media and hiring at an unstoppable rate. If you look on Craigslist.com, seemingly half of the job listings are for social media related positions.

Social media is at least partially responsible for keeping the economy afloat, and is one of the industries that is actually doing well in this economy. That's what you would think anyway, from the frequency with which social media appears in the news.

Seemingly every day there is something in the news about a new acquisition by a social media company, a new feature on their website, or a new facet of the company that they are debuting. The San Francisco Chronicle has an article in their business report seemingly almost every day about some social media company.

There's no denying that social media is hot right now, and that it's fueling a lot of jobs and providing a little spark for the economy, but I don't think it is going to last. Much like disco music, I fear that social media is just a fad. Right now it's hip and fresh and they're making movies about it, but it could just be a big bubble that's set to pop.

Really? More football?

Another football post? This is certainly unexpected, even for me who's writing this post.

The Oakland Raiders are locked in a tight battle with Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos for the AFC West title. They still have a pretty good chance of being a playoff team, but they really need to come up with the W's in the home stretch.

Getting a win this coming Sunday is going to be a tall order against Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, who are having a tremendous season and are currently undefeated at 12-0. This is  in large part due the play of Aaron Rodgers who is looking phenomenal right now. Last Sunday's match-up against the New York Giants looked like it was going into overtime. But Rodgers made it look easy, getting his team into scoring position on only two plays and eventually ending it in the final seconds of regulation.

Aaron Rodgers is more and more looking like the stuff of football legend. And I'm not saying that because I'm particularly knowledgeable when it comes to football history, but because that's what all of the sports news outlets are saying. But it doesn't take a football genius to recognize the incredible ability of Aaron Rodgers. He made the Giants look like a bush league team in the final minute of that game.

Raiders QB Carson Palmer acknowledged Rodger's greatness in several news publications including the San Jose Mercury News and admits that Sunday's game going to be an uphill battle.

At any rate, it will be an interesting game to watch this Sunday and with the 49ers already having clinched, you can bet that I'll be tuned into "The Aaron Rodgers Show" on Sunday afternoon.

Part-time reporting

Often times being a newspaper reporter is not quite as glamorous as it's portrayed in the movies and television. This is especially the case when reporting for a small, super local publication such as The Skyline View. Being a non-professional student reporter also has several drawbacks, which I shall enumerate in the following paragraphs


Working a story that takes you off campus can be especially difficult as non-professional reporter. I have a hotel job eight hours a day, four days a week in addition to all my classes, which already leaves not very much time to do extensive reporting. I simply don't have the time or resources to drive all over the Bay Area to meet sources. Even with sources that are closer to Skyline College, often it's hard to find meeting times that work for both their schedule and mine.

Finding sources that are willing to talk to you can sometimes be a challenge too working for a small publication. I imagine that larger papers with much more prestige would pique the interest of potential sources a lot more than a small time student reporter from The Skyline View, which has a limited readership.


This said, small time reporters should in no way be discouraged from pursuing sources that are famous public figures. When I was working a story about Justin Christian of the San Francisco Giants, I was not optimistic at all about getting an interview with him, but after a couple weeks of pestering I was able to get it done. 


If anything, working for a small publication requires just a little extra perseverance I guess.   

Front page stuff

The Skyline College semester is drawing to a close, and The Skyline View just put out its final issue of the semester last week. That is my preface to today’s post.

Sometimes news issues crop up at the last moment. In fact, that is the very nature of most news. Professional news outlets are always ready to deal with breaking news because they have the resources, the talent and the experience to do so. Bi-weekly publications such as The Skyline View are not as accustomed to breaking news situations and thus sometimes have trouble with breaking news coverage.

But The Skyline View’s most recent issue illustrates a successful sort-of-last-minute change. Two days before production, everything was going pretty smoothly for the opinions section (which I am the editor of). I had my pieces all squared away and all had agreed the editorial would be about the new Stop Online Piracy Act. But then the newsroom got a call from the SF City College paper, The Guardian, about a new organization called the Student Success Task Force.

Without getting into too much detail, the writers at The Guardian felt that the task force posed a threat to California community colleges and had an idea for a front-page editorial challenging the task force and some of its recommendations.

Many at The Skyline View were of the same opinion and felt that the issue could warrant a front page editorial. Thankfully, my classmate Nina was kind enough to take all the information on the new task force and write a pretty powerful editorial piece.

While I didn’t disagree with my colleagues on the issue itself, I will admit that I did have reservations about running a front-page editorial. I realized though, that since the editorial is technically under my purview, I might have a chance to do layout for the front page. And with the news editor’s permission that’s what I did.

Layout is probably the aspect of actual newspaper production that I find most interesting. I am curious as to what sort of design makes a newspaper look professional. And for the Skyline View’s latest issue, I made a few adjustments in an attempt to give the paper a cleaner more professional looking design. This is, of course, only my own opinion and the tweaks I made could still use some refinement, but overall I am proud of the stylistic changes I made to the front page.