JN216: Week 8 Media Blog

Topic 1: DH Field Trip
1. Something very surprising I learned from the trip to the DH was how few of the employees were actually reporters, editors, and photographers. There seemed to be as many people working in advertising and printing. Obviously if you include delivery workers, there are far more employees on the production side. Seeing that really drove home just how competitive the journalism world is. Most of the reporters seemed like they had been there for a while, meaning there's a low turnover rate in addition to there not being many jobs in the first place.

2. I had no idea that newspapers still used antiquated presses like at the DH, or that newspapers were printed at the building. I figured the papers would be sent out to be produced in a separate facility with a highly-digitized process. Walking back there and seeing the plates, press and rolls of paper really caught me off-guard. I also found out that I really like how ink smells.


Topic 2: Lessons from Edna
1. The most important lesson is that there's no point in waiting until you get opportunities, make the opportunities. Ignore the pecking order (for the most part), and get your stories. Edna Buchanan's first reporting jobs came when she had very little experience in journalism and she seized the opportunities she had and made the ones she didn't. She kept persisting and trusting her ability to write and be a reporter. She was the first on the scene, she found her own leads, she just flat-out made it happen.

2. In action, not waiting is a mindset, to be fearless and ambitious. In my life, this would be like having Mark Witherspoon from ISU tell me he's going to get me working with the Iowa State Daily right when I get to Ames, which terrified me. However, it's important to remember that I'm where I am for a reason and telling myself that I can't accomplish something has never made me better at it, so it's a waste of time. Then part two is getting to Ames and being tireless in my efforts to refine my writing/reporting and building contacts and learning my beat. If an opportunity doesn't work out, I have to keep working until I find one that does.

3. My favorite part of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" was Buchanan describing her interactions with police. There was really just a wealth of information and I have a feeling my beat will include dealing with police at times, whether it's protests, politics, or crime, there's police involved in some way. The fact that she distinguished between good cops and bad cops was a pretty interesting example to me. I always had this view as someone who had been harassed by a lot of police and helped by several along the way. She still afforded each police officer their humanity in recognizing that a cop who may save a kid one night, may shoot an unarmed person in the back the next night. I really just assumed that the average journalist was treated very well by police and unquestionably viewed police as heroes. Edna had very mixed interactions but still typically got the stories she needed and seemed to recognize the differences between good cops and bad cops and right and wrong regardless of if someone was wearing a badge.

"No better human being exists than a good cop and no worse creature than a bad one.
The truth is, the good cop and the bad cop are often the same cop, at different moments, on different days, with different people." (Pg. 131)