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.

Better safe than sued

If you follow my blog, you may or may not recall that I am currently the opinions editor and a writer for the Skyline College publication, The Skyline View. Being on the paper staff is really amazing. My time on staff has had no shortage of fun and frustration, but it is also the best learning experience for the aspiring journalist.

One thing that we learned about first hand at the Skyline View was plagiarism. Most of us know that plagiarism is wrong and can result in dire consequences, but sometimes avoiding plagiarism is a lot easier said than done.

When writing a news story, a reporter has to obtain sources. These sources can be first-hand interviews, speeches or written statements, or they can be other newspapers. There’s nothing wrong with getting some of your information from other papers, but you have to be especially careful using content that’s already been published as one of your sources.

First, you should cross reference the info in the publication with as many other sources as you can to make sure the information has merit. Second and most importantly, you need to make sure—beyond a doubt—that you do not inadvertently plagiarize the publication.

It can be really easy to read a piece of information, and then when the time comes to write your own piece, use the information in almost exactly the same words.

The frustrating thing about plagiarism is that intent is pretty much irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether or not you meant to do it. It’s still been done. So the only safeguard against plagiarism is constant vigilance. Writers should check and double check their work against any written sources they use. And if you’re ever in doubt about whether or not a sentence verges on plagiarism, put it in quote. Better to be safe than very, very sorry.

Tebow Time

Here’s a surprise: Today we’re talking football. I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to football, I’m just an average fan. I follow the local San Francisco 49ers. I know the names Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady. But use the abbreviation “D.B.” in conversation and I’ll probably snicker, because it brings a non-football related, rather inappropriate term to mind.

But today let’s ignore the fact that I’m not 100 percent sure what I’m talking about, because even if you’re not a football fan, there’s one story in the NFL that’s hard to ignore. Tim Tebow started his season with the Denver Broncos as the third string QB, and five games into the season the Broncos were in the AFC West basement. But after being brought in as the starter, Tebow has four wins out of his last five games and the Broncos are back in the mix for the AFC West title.

The amazing thing about Tim Tebow is not that he has made the Broncos a winner, but rather the spark that his persona has brought the team. Sporting news has really picked up on what is being called “Tebow Nation”, and made him the biggest story in the NFL.

What sets Tebow apart from other QB’s is partly his style of play. Writers criticize his style of play (as well they should) because Tebow plays the option far too often. But, the thing is, the “Tebow rush” has been working. It’s been winning games. For how much longer it will win games remains to be seen.

Analysts and writers love to criticize Tim Tebow, but without him they would have nothing to write about. And that’s because Tebow brings a breath of fresh air to the NFL, as well as one heck of an underdog story.

I left my heart in Sacramento

It’s really a shame that it’s taken me so long to get back on my blog, because there are so many cool news-related things that have been going on lately in my life. (My Thanksgiving was fine, by the way. Thank you for asking.)

A couple weeks ago on Saturday Nov. 12, I went to the Journalism Association of Community Colleges Nor-Cal Convention with most of the staff of The Skyline View newspaper. I was hesitant to go at first, mostly because I was not keen on waking up at 4:30 in the morning to spend my whole Saturday in Sacramento. But I have to say that all things considered, it was a really great experience.

I got to carpool up to Sac State with a few of my buddies (our friend Diana was kind enough to provide transportation), hear a key-note address from a reporter who works for the Sacramento Bee, attended several workshops, and even took home an award for myself.

I received a certificate for honorable mention in opinions writing, which I was particularly proud of (especially since I don’t have very strong opinions to begin with).

By far the best workshop I attended was given by sports writer Bill Bradley who founded the website SacStateSports.com. He touched briefly on how to create your own sports site before opening up the floor to questions, at which point I went into sponge mode trying to absorb everything he was saying. If there’s one thing I remember most from the workshop, it’s that one needs to capture the drama of the sport in their writing. If you can hone in on, and highlight, the dramatic aspect of a given sporting event, you’ll garner many more readers than you ever would with straight game coverage. I probably figured that out subconsciously a long time ago, but I’d never heard it said until I attended Mr. Bradley’s workshop.

So, the JACC Nor-Cal Con. was a big hit as far as I’m concerned. I learned a heap of stuff, got into the competitive spirit, but probably best of all I got the chance to spend an awesome day in the company of many people on The Skyline View paper staff who I now consider to be my friends.

Holding PG&E's feet to their own fire

News writing and reporting is not simply about consolidating and then regurgitating personal accounts of important events. Good reporting often times involves research and investigation in order to “call out” or shine a light on injustice. You could write an investigative piece about inequality of pay, expose a congressperson for corruption, or even a company for its negligent business practices.

It’s been a little over a year since the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) explosion that killed eight people and set a San Bruno neighborhood ablaze occurred. Since that time, there has been serious investigation into what caused the explosion and if there was any negligence on the part of the PG&E, who have not exactly been forthcoming with information that might incriminate them.

What’s amazing is that over a year later the Public Utilities Commission is still uncovering new evidence proving how guilty PG&E really is. Just yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a front-page piece citing evidence that PG&E installed a “salvaged or junked transmission pipe” back in the 1940s and ‘50s. According to the article, some of the pipes they used weren’t even any good 70 years ago and probably haven’t gotten any better from 70 years of being buried in the dirt.

I understand that public utilities companies are businesses and provide services that should be paid for. But it’s inexcusable to jeopardize public safety in order to increase profit margin. This PG&E disaster is a perfect example of why government oversight is so important in certain situations. Government may waste a lot of taxpayer money and get a lot of things wrong, but it can rarely be said that American government does not act with the best of intentions for its people. 

Moammar is no more

It’s all over the news right now and will no doubt make front-page headlines tomorrow morning. Former Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was captured and killed today by Libyan rebels. That’s great for the Libyan people, and as a person of Middle Eastern descent, I’m happy to see one less dictator besmirching the reputations of good Arabs everywhere. But as an American, my feelings are a little mixed. Donald Trump is going to have to find someone else to rent out his front lawn at his Long Island home. And who’s going to entertain the TV audience with crazy rants at the UN Summit meetings?

Now that I got those two jokes out of the way, I’ll get on with my post. (Been saving that last one for a while now)

I read the Associated Press article detailing the death of Moammar Gadhafi. And when I say “detail”, man they really went into detail. I suppose if there were ever a case for a news story going into specifics about the grisly death of a human being, this would be it. Moammar Gadhafi probably just barely qualifies as a human, which in turn qualifies him for a story like the Associated Press wrote.

That said, I was pretty shocked when reading the story. I’m not sure if I was shocked at the amount of gory detail that AP decided to include, or the absolutely ruthless lack of mercy with which the rebels treated Gadhafi (not that he deserved any).

The story was not an obituary by any means, but instead a blow-by-blow account of how Gadhafi was killed after rebels discovered him hiding in a drainage pipe. According to the story, they didn’t keep him alive for long, but it was long enough to parade him about town on the hood of a truck before shooting him to death and dragging his bloody carcass through the streets. I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the gist of the story.

Does the story go too far? It’s shocking for sure, but I think AP just about got it right. Gahdafi was a terrible person, probably as close to evil as any human can get and his actions in life were probably deserving of his horrible and undignified death as well as the “no holds barred” AP story his death received.   

Hey, next time the UN is in town, if Donald Trump wants to make a little extra income by leasing his lawn to a crazy foreign dictator, he can always get in touch with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

OK. Now I’m done.

The Handshake heard 'round the world

It's amazing how media and news outlets can turn a seemingly benign event into a national controversy; or at least a National Football League controversy. I think we all know to what I am referring. It is, of course, the handshake that took place after the San Francisco 49ers victory over the Detroit Lions this past Sunday.

For those who are not aware of the incident, there was a minor altercation between the two head coaches after the game. After the 49ers victory, Jim Harbaugh, in his exuberance, gave Lions coach Jim Schwartz what appeared to be a hard handshake and a firm slap on the back. This was enough to provoke Schwartz, who proceeded to chase Harbaugh toward the exit tunnel and give him a decent shove from behind. What ensued was a war of words between the two coaches as players and other staff tried to separate the two. The whole thing culminated in a face-off of sorts in which most of the players were involved. The stare-down cooled off after a minute and the Lions proceeded to exit the field.

Naturally reporters, news writers, and other members of the media had a field day during the post-game press conference, mining both coaches for reactions and possible significance behind the incident. Were Harbaugh’s actions rude? Did he in fact use some sort of profanity? Did Schwartz just overreact? Or was “the handshake” in retaliation to a previous action on the part of Schwartz?

Whatever the case, I find it kind of amusing how the press turns a minor incident into a national story. The incident is all over the ESPN highlight reels. Sports talk radio is using it to fill hours upon hours of air time, and it’s still on the front page of the Chronicle’s sporting green two days after the fact with headlines such as “Jim Harbaugh says he’ll work on his handshakes”.

I think the bottom line is that papers and broadcasters will pick up any topic if they think it’ll garner listeners and readers. Such is definitely the case here. This whole handshake business is silliness, but sometimes readers want to read a bit of silliness.

The Final Frontier

There aren’t an overabundance of moments when I feel proud to be an American, but I can’t help but feel patriotic when either attending a baseball game or watching a Space Shuttle launch.

Few government programs have captured the imagination of the American public like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA has been responsible for some of the greatest American and human accomplishments. In 1962 NASA put the first American into space (Alan Shepard) and less a decade later, they put a man on the moon per a bull-headed mandate by John F. Kennedy.

News anchors and reporters such as Walter Cronkite played a significant role in making the space program and the moon landing a national event. Great reporting can make an historical event more significant and more real to the public.

I should think that I would have liked to report on the early days of the space program. The potential for the exploration of space seemed almost limitless back then. The early space program was almost like an epic saga of American adventure, ingenuity and sheer determination. And at pinnacle are the six moon landings before the Apollo program was finally scrapped in 1972.   

Now in 2011 the American space program has lost much of its public appeal and much of its public funding. The space shuttle has been retired and with next to no budget (thanks, Obama) NASA has no plans to develop a new spaceship. I know that space exploration is expensive, but I do not believe it can be argued that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money. It’s true that NASA is no Federation Star Fleet (it has yet to find new life or new civilizations) but its existence allows people to look up at the night sky and dream of a future where humans may one day settle in the far reaches of the galaxy (like Star Wars).

The NPR website has an awesome tribute to the Space Shuttle program as well as some speculation into the future of humans in space. 

Shea's afternoon with Silvera is gold

A few weeks ago I interviewed Justin Christian who just finished up the season with the San Francisco Giants. He’s not a very widely know player being that he has played minor league baseball most of his career. So it makes sense that he would be interviewed by a minor league reporter such as myself.

Anyway my article on Justin Christian finally went in the Skyline View this week and I’m pretty pleased with the profile. Justin gave me a lot of great stuff to work with as well as Skyline coaches John Quintell and Dino Nomicos.

I’m still relatively new at putting together newspaper articles, so I just did the best I could do and, as I said before, was pretty pleased with the result. That is, until I read another sports profile today in SF Chronicle’s sporting green.

John Shea is a sports writer for the SF Chronicle and he put out a doozy in today’s paper. Interestingly enough, his profile was on a minor celebrity as well.

There probably aren’t very many people who remember the Major League Baseball career of Charlie Silvera (I’d never even heard of the guy). He is not very well known for his personal achievements in baseball, but more for the fact that he played backup for Yogi Berra on the New York Yankees and alongside players like Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle.

Old people are full of great stories, and their homes are littered with great old artifacts. Old people who played on a Yankee team with Dimaggio and Mantle should probably be donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Already, Charlie Silvera’s life is ripe with material for a great profile, and that’s where much of the interest is. But the reporter John Shea uses a great technique to gain deeper insight into Charlie Silvera’s life, and most importantly in this article, his personality. Shea spends an entire afternoon with Silvera, watching the ball game on TV. And the result is that the reader feels as if he were spending an afternoon with Charlie Silvera. As I was reading the profile I did almost feel like I met the man and that his stories were being told to only me.

This is the result of great writing and reporting by John Shea who really knows how to spin a yarn into whatever shape he wishes. The player I interviewed for The Skyline View (Justin Christian) didn't play alongside Dimaggio or Mantle, but if I had the article to write over again, I might have liked to write it in the fashion of John Shea's article in the Chronicle today.

Netflix has been sending more mixed messages than DVDs

For readers who are unfamiliar with the Netflix platform, I’ll cover it really quickly. Netflix started as a mail order DVD rental service, which people were able to sign up for via online monthly subscription. Sometime later Netflix began offering its subscribers high quality video streaming for movies and television shows at no extra cost.

But just a couple months ago Netflix announced that it would start charging separately for DVD by mail and online video streaming. This really did not sit well with consumers, causing thousands of members (including this one) to cancel their Netflix accounts.

A few weeks after that Netflix announced the new direction the company was taking. The new plan was to completely separate DVDs from streaming. The Netflix.com website was now dedicated to online streaming and the company started a completely new site (Quikster.com) requiring a separate membership for its DVD service. Many people found this either super confusing or super annoying (I sit in the latter camp).

On the front page of today’s SF Chronicle was the latest in this whole Netflix fubar.

Apparently the company and its CEO have done a complete 180 after public outcry over this new plan. The company is nixing the whole plan, cancelling the new Qwikster.com website and keeping both DVD and streaming under one account at Netflix.com. The company’s official position is apologetic and they’ve been on the defensive for months now, first apologizing for the fee increases and now again for proposing the separation of services.

And the result is a weak looking company that can’t make up its mind. Meanwhile investors are getting skittish and Netflix shares are taking a huge hit. According to the SF Chronicle Netflix went from an all time high of $304.69 per share in July, to $111.30 on Monday.

The thing that surprises me most is how Netflix did not see this coming. A company of that size must have done an extensive amount of market research before trying a change like this. It would be interesting to see the findings and find out what happened here. There had to have been fears of public dissatisfaction.

I actually kind of feel bad for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who really looks like a fool because of all this. Netflix had a pretty successful formula, and this all could have been avoided by not messing with it. But in the end Netflix probably made the right decision for everybody by keeping DVDs and streaming under the same roof. You know what they say: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  

Hockey's popularity in America ranges from luke warm to ice cold

Hockey season started back up just last week and my beloved San Jose Sharks had a pretty convincing win in their season opener beating the Phoenix Coyotes 6-3. I love ice hockey and I love the NHL. I think they’ve really done a great job promoting the brand in the last few years and they recently signed a huge deal with NBC which gives NBC stations exclusive rights to broadcast the Stanley Cup Playoffs through the year 2020. I could go on and on about how much I like hockey, but I’ll stop there and start complaining instead, about how little coverage the NHL gets in major news publications.

It’s not really a secret that America is not really a hockey nation. Canada, Russia, and Nordic nations are places where hockey is really engrained into the culture. But here in America, ice hockey plays second fiddle to football, baseball, and basketball (so fourth fiddle then, I guess). Because of this, hockey hardly gets any coverage in the major news outlets.

The San Jose Sharks are a great team and have done extremely well their last few seasons. But even when they go deep into the playoffs, they usually never garner front page of the sports section, which is usually relegated to the Giants whose season, by that time, is barely underway. And during the regular season you can forget about it. The sporting green is dominated by football, local or otherwise. Usually the Chronicle will include short game recaps on the Sharks and a tiny box with scores from around the league.

I understand the Chronicle’s position fully. It doesn’t make sense to give hockey the same amount of news real estate when it has half the popularity of baseball. Newspaper is a mass medium and the Chronicle is a big market. Newspapers are also more general interest publications and don’t have the luxury of catering to everyone’s interests.

I know inside that it’s nothing personal, but it’s hard not to feel discriminated against when you’re a minority (hockey fan).

Steve Jobs: Not the man that iThought

I’ve never really paid a great deal of attention to obituaries before taking the news writing class that I’m currently enrolled in, or maybe I just didn’t know it. I’ve always thought of obituaries as short pieces that are sort of confined to their own section of the paper, but the recent death of Steve Jobs has made me see that if the prominence of a person is great enough, their death can warrant an obit several pages long and can, in some cases, be considered front page material.

This was the case with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs of course. As a contemporary popular American icon Steve Jobs was, and still is, second to almost no one. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that news of his death should get top billing. He was front page in the SF Chronicle on Thursday morning and no doubt several other local and international publications did the same.

What got my attention the most though was not the fact that he made front page news, but rather the content in the Chronicle’s piece on Steve Jobs. When I think of the late co-founder of Apple Corp., I don’t necessarily think of someone whose career was mired in controversy or dishonesty, and as far as big-time CEO’s go, his record is practically blemish free. I think a lot of people (especially Apple enthusiasts) view Jobs as some sort of demigod. But the Chronicle obit definitely highlights many of Jobs’ personal shortcomings, making him look as human as any other man.

An afternoon with Giants

Well, it’s been a busy couple of days. Recently I’ve been working on getting an interview with Justin Christian of the San Francisco Giants. I realized that getting interviews with even minor celebrities isn’t easy when you're writing for a small publication like the Skyline View. I started by direct messaging the person that manages the Giant’s Twitter feed. He directed me to Matt, one of the Giants' Media Relations guys. I was in contact with Matt for several days. He assured me that I would get (what I figured would be) a telephone interview with Justin Christian, but did not specify when.

After about a week had gone by and still no interview, I told Matt that I would be attending the Giants game the following day (I bought tickets earlier in the week) and suggested the possibility of doing the interview in person. Matt spoke to Justin and much to my surprise, I received an email saying that Justin would like to do the interview in person! I was to receive my press credentials the following day at the Giants executive office. Needless to say, this interview was shaping up to be more exciting than I imagined.

The following day I picked up my credentials as specified, without any fuss, and before I knew it I was standing just outside the Giants' clubhouse. I did my best to look unimpressed as I saw many of my favorite ball players walk right past me. After about twenty minutes I met up with Matt (media relations guy). I followed him down a flight of stairs, seemingly further and further into the bowels of the stadium. And then all of a sudden we emerged in the Giant’s dugout. Matt instructed me to wait while he went to inform Justin of my arrival. So I sat…in the Giants dugout.

There were several other reporters, photographers, and media people there. I eaves dropped as sideline reporter Amy Gutierrez was interviewing Giants outfielder Andres Torres for a video blog and even listened in on a small press conference with Giants field manager Bruce Bochy.

Justin Christian came out before long and couldn’t have been a nicer guy or a more accommodating interviewee. I knew that the team needed to take batting practice soon so I ran through my questions without too much delay. He gave me everything I needed for my story and more.

Long story short, this was such a great experience.  It was not only a rush to be sitting next to my favorite ball players, but it was also very illuminating for me as a budding journalist. I got to observe and even speak to some professionals in the field of journalism and some really big names in Bay Area media. I don’t really believe in jinxes, so I’m going to go ahead and say that if this turns out to be the pinnacle of my career in journalism, I would have absolutely zero complaints.  

iPad may be a lesser evil

Finally, my inaugural Journalism 120 Blog post comes after much anticipation, haha.

It’s very unfortunate—true, but unfortunate—that print journalism is dying. Newspapers and magazines are great media for news and entertainment, and I try to support print publications any way I can. I currently subscribe to the SF Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Electronic Gaming Monthly. I wish I had the monetary means and the time to subscribe to more publications. Papers and magazines are such a great part of American history and have done so much to shape our culture and our country. It’s saddening to think that in a couple decades they may not exist anymore (leastwise not in an unadulterated form).

As great as the Internet has been making human life easier and in some ways richer, it has inevitably led to a great amount of apathy in several forms. Internet retailers were cute when they stared up at the turn of the century, but are now out of control and killing many retailers that are important to the local economy. The very same is happening with print journalism. The convenience of online news and entertainment is becoming too much for print publications to successfully combat. But the biggest issue is that people do not want to pay for things they can get elsewhere for free. This puts magazines, newspapers, and the journalists who write for them, in a tough spot.

There are few things I enjoy more than having an evening to sit down with a magazine and reading an interesting personal profile on a star baseball player or an interview with a big game developer. This is the sort of journalism I love, and there are less and less opportunities for journalists to do this type of reporting for magazines and other print publications.

In my journalism 110 class there was brief mention of a new idea to increase revenue for magazines and papers that I actually liked. As much as I detest the iPad, e-readers, and other tablet devices, I would detest them less if they were the saving grace of newspapers and magazines. The new idea involves creating digital publications that are exclusively for tablet devices. While this is not quite as good as buying print issues, anything that makes people spend MONEY (emphasis on “money) on journalistic content is a good thing and should be encouraged.