Category: Internship Thoughts

Meeting a legend

One of the best parts of journalism is getting to attend awesome events, have great access and meet some pretty famous people. This was part of the attraction I had to journalism when I first developed an interest for the profession while in high school. In many ways, the awe factor of meeting and interviewing celebrities or famous athletes has worn off, but not completely.

Last weekend I had one of the most memorable interviews in my experience as a journalist. I got to have lunch with Pete Rose.

I’m a baseball fan. I always have been, and likely always will be, and Pete Rose is a baseball legend. Whether it’s the way he played the game, or getting kicked out of the game for betting on it, Rose is name is transcends the sport. When I’m trying to decide if an athlete is really famous, I usually think about if my mom recognizes the name. If she does, then he has a big name. My mom definitely knows Pete Rose.

Anyway, I’m working on a feature story about Rose that is going to run this week. Rose works in Vegas 15 days a month signing autographs at a local sports memorabilia shop, and I thought that made a good story. I set up an interview, thinking I would get 15 minutes in the back room. But when I arrived, Rose said he was about to go to lunch and asked if I would like to join and just do the interview over lunch.

Of course I did!

So we went to lunch for over an hour, and I had a great interview out of it. I had the kind of access journalists hope to get when they do a big feature article, and I loved it. At first, I was somewhat in awe of baseball’s hit king, but I quickly had to get into journalist mode and make sure to turn a good opportunity into a good interview, and then that into a good story. I found out that is easier said than done.

As great a time as I had at lunch doing the interview, the highlight for me came right before we sat down to eat. As we were standing at the entrance of Planet Hollywood Restaurant, people are just staring at Rose, asking to get pictures with him and coming by to shake his hand. For the first time during an interview, I really felt like I was talking with someone famous.

Then I felt someone tap me on the arm. I turned around to see a lady, who I assumed would ask, “Is that Pete Rose?”

But she looks at me and says, “are you Garrett from Gridiron Glory?” I couldn’t believe it. I was standing next to a baseball legend, and I got recognized for a high school football TV show in Athens, Ohio. Priceless.

They were vacationing in Vegas from the Athens area, and recognized me from Gridiron Glory. It was a great moment, filled with irony, and probably a story I’ll remember for the rest of my life!

That’s unfortunate

I learned today that the Columbus Dispatch laid off 45 employees. I guess they started informing people around 7 AM Tuesday morning about whether or not they were going to be around anymore.

I’ve interned at the Dispatch three times. Once as a “follow-around-the-reporter” intern during my senior year in high school. Then twice as a city desk intern during my long winter break. I’ve spent a lot of time at the Dispatch, and know a lot of people there, so it was sad to hear about the layoffs. Not sure who made it through the layoffs, but I’d definitely like to know who survived and what areas were hit the hardest.

Like I said in a previous post, times are definitely tough. As journalists, we need to find ways to give people content they want to read and watch. I love what I’m doing here at the Sun, and I’m learning about some ways to do just that.

As hard as it is to believe, my time here is getting close to winding down. I have just over two weeks left. But I’m going to be busy and make the most of that time.

The next two days I’m covering MLB spring training in town. Then we have the West Coast Conference tournament this weekend, high school soccer state championships and the Mountain West conference tournament. Then it’s March Madness, which is a big deal in Vegas. So in the Vegas sports scene, I’ll be busy.

I also have a couple of big projects that will be rolling out during that time, and I can’t wait to see how they look!

Have a plan… but write it in pencil

Tonight gave me another example in my career about the danger of going into a story with an exact plan. Sure, you want to have a plan, or an idea about what you want to do with a story when you go to cover an event. But not too much of a plan.

As a journalist, you have to be able to adapt and take in everything going on around you. When you go into a situation with an outline of your story already in your head, then things have a funny way of ruining that outline.

Tonight I had to cover two high school basketball games and write a story for both web and for print. Most of what I do is web based, but this story was going in print also. An editor told me which two teams were expected to win, and let me know what he was looking for with the story.

So I went into the game with a framework of the story already in place. But like I said, those kinds of things never really seem to work out like your expect. In the first game the team that was expected to lose, ended up winning. Surprise, surprise. So much for that story I already had in my head.

That changed everything. Then in the second game, I wanted to do a piece about about the losing team and the good season they had. But they just lost a close game, so the coaches and players weren’t too thrilled to talk about this wonderful season. Again, so much for that perfect outline.

In sports reporting, that always seems to be the case. If you want the outcome of the game to change suddenly, then start writing your story with a specific angle. Then something crazy will happen and your original story can get tossed out the window.

I remember a couple years ago covering a swim meet for the local newspaper, and I started to write up the story in my notebook. The meet looked to be pretty well in hand, and when you’re sitting inside at a swim meet for several hours, all you can really think about is what is finding a way to get out of there ASAP.

So I started writing up the story, and as the meet went on, the story I had drafted ended up being a complete waste. One team came from nowhere to surprise everyone and win the meet championship. My original story was scrapped and it was back to the drawing board for me.

Just like that swim meet, the basketball games tonight once again provided me with another example of why it is dangerous to go into a situation being overly prepared to take a story in a certain direction. Another good lesson to learn from an internship.

Competition

In many ways Las Vegas is a very interesting town. It’s a place built on tourism. A place where people come to spend money, party and basically behave badly. The motto for the town is “What happens in Vegas stay in Vegas,” and that should tell you everything about the mentality of people visiting here.

Another characteristic that makes Vegas a unique place is that it is a major city still with two competing daily newspapers. The Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Review-Journal are published on a daily basis and compete to provide better print content and better online coverage. Most cities only have one major daily newspaper, so coming to a place with two papers is something new for me.

With two newspapers in town, one of the main things I’ve noticed is how competition pushes you to continually provide good stories and deliver them in innovative ways. Unlike cities with just one newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun doesn’t have a monopoly on the news here in Vegas, and we’re in constant competition with the RJ. If people don’t feel like we provide accurate content or don’t have enough information, then they can just go to the RJ.

We have to provide the best, most complete coverage of people won’t read our newspaper or visit our website. It’s that simple.

I’ll speak from a sports coverage perspective, because that’s what I do. From the start, the RJ has a leg up on us because it has an agreement with Nevada High School Athletics that requires coaches of every sport to call in their scores to the RJ every night. We don’t have that kind of agreement, so we have to take a slightly different approach.

With the way things are right now, we’re not going to have every single score each night from boy’s basketball, girl’s basketball, soccer, volleyball, golf, etc. However, we can cover as many games as possible, and give those games great coverage.

For example, the high school basketball playoffs are going on right now, and we covered a big game the other day. Like many of our sports stories, we had an article, a video and a photo gallery. One of our reporters also had an awesome story about on of the kids getting a scholarship offer from UNLV…as a freshman. So that’s two stories, a video and photo gallery. The coverage we had was great and I had a good time putting together the video.

Now we don’t just cover events this way because we have a competitor here in Vegas. Knowing the people at the Sun, I think the Sun would cover events this way regardless, because that’s part of what we’re supposed to do as journalists. But having a competitor right there, trying to beat you on every story, can always give you a little extra incentive 🙂

Interesting Times

Most people wouldn’t say this is the most appealing time to go into journalism. Actually, very few people would probably say that. It’s no secret ad revenues are declining, circulation numbers are declining, the economy is in a recession, the sky is falling…..

It seems like most conversations about journalism start with something like, “How can we save newspapers? Is journalism dead? Is local TV over? Will we have newspapers is 10 years?” And the list goes on, and on and on…

Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal about the fate of local TV.

Here’s one from Time Magazine about how to save newspapers.

I’m not arguing that it’s tough. Everybody knows that. My nine-year brother knows that. Prospects for the news industry look bleak.

However, it’s pretty darn exciting. Times are tough, but that forces us to work harder. We’re forced to find better ways to deliver the news, to see what works and what doesn’t, and to figure what people want to see and read.

Maybe I’m just naive, or looking at the glass half-full, but I think this is one of the most exciting times to go into journalism. Maybe not the most promising for everybody in the business, but it is exciting. I’m tired of people saying, “you sure?,” when I tell them I’m going into journalism.

The media has never been more aware of viewer’s habits and interests, and we’re having conversations that would never take place if everything were golden. But since money is an issue, we (the media) are trying to innovate. We don’t have the luxury of just sticking with the same old system.

We have to go a completely new direction, and that is part of the reason I like interning at the Las Vegas Sun. I’m surrounded by people who are trying innovative things, and looking for ways to make our website better. Stuff may not always work out perfectly, but we’re taking a chance and trying to figure it out.

I like this aspect of being in the media today. Twenty years ago everything was more formulated. People wanted to become a newspaper writer, or a TV anchor, or a photographer. Today the lines have blurred. I just want to be a journalist. I want to tell stories, and I want to figure out cool ways to do so.

And with the ways things are today, I don’t really have another choice. 🙂