MAPLE GROVE, Minn. — There was a point during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last night when the camera focused on an American flag behind him. It was the first time in about five years that I felt proud to see the stars and stripes.
For years, the American flag has stood for things I don’t stand for. Finally, with the results of this election, the Star-spangled Banner now represents hope, it represents promise, it represents progress. It’s time to move forward from the past eight years of corporatism and failed governance. It’s time for America to be the country it can and should be.
We can finally catch up to the rest of the world in dealing with climate change, human rights and peacekeeping. And now we have the opportunity not just to march with the progressive world, but to lead it — in a good way.
I’m joyful that a majority of Americans feel the same way I do. With the 2004 election, I lost faith in a lot of my fellow Americans for re-electing Bush. Finally, the country is starting to wake up and see what a bad position we are in, and see how we can best try to fix it.
As a journalist, I am supposed to remain outwardly neutral in politics. I realize this blog post may appear to overstep those bounds. But, to me, this election was not about politics or partisanship, but about progress. Few people can dispute that the Bush administration turned out to be a horrible choice for this country and the world. It was time for change, and it finally has come.
I consider myself neither a Republican nor a Democrat. But I do consider myself a supporter of progressiveness, social advancement and global responsibility. And, hence, I consider myself a supporter of Obama’s promises.
Thank you, American voters, for restoring my faith in this country.
Filed under: Events
MAPLE GROVE, Minn. — It’s Nov. 4. I haven’t gotten my free cup of coffee yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
Should be interesting to be in this swing state on Election Day. There’s probably a little more excitement and uncertainty here than in Washington. But, I have a hunch Minnesota will go with its traditional Democratic leaning.
I’ve already voted — about two weeks ago via the mail. (I believe that’s the only way to do it in Washington anymore, with a few exceptions.)
Anyway, here we go!
EDIT: By the way, this from The New York Times is the coolest thing ever.
Filed under: Adventure, Challenge, Events, Job Search, Journalism, News Industry, Sea Change
Well hey everybody. It’s been a month since I last posted. Part of that is because I’ve been busy at work, and part of it is because I’ve been lazy at blogging. Really lazy.
Obviously my big news is that I am on a list of 25-27 employees expected to be laid off by Oct. 24. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
The past month started out with some real promise. Steve Smith, former editor-in-chief of The Spokesman-Review, asked Brian Immel and me to kick off a big project. We were charged with taking the popular SportsLink blog and spinning it off into its own website, with the goal of making it profitable. That was going to be our job — I’d no longer be in the sports department.
The project got going slowly because Brian was busy working on the Spokesman’s yet-to-be-launched new website. So I continued my sports multimedia producer job. This included another new project, The Mike & Greg Show — a weekly video with two high-school sports reporters in which they make their game picks for the upcoming weekend. So far, we’ve done four episodes (1, 2, 3, 4).
Last Monday, Brian and I finally started having some good conversations on what we wanted to do with SportsLink. We wanted text-message updates, better play for videos, customizable home pages — we were even toying with the idea of making it a social networking site. (I know, it’s a dreaded term. There’s just no better one.)
Then came Wednesday, and everything came to a halt.
Layoffs. For me, out of the blue. I expected to get at least a little warning that layoffs might be coming. It was quite sudden — a morning e-mail announcing an all-staff meeting, rumors throughout the day, then the gauntlet came down.
Twenty-one union-covered newsroom employees were on the layoff list. Plus four to six managers. All said, 25 to 27 people gone from the newsroom. That’s about one-quarter of the staff. It’s devastating. Amid the turmoil, Steve also resigned. He had for months told people there wouldn’t be more layoffs under his watch. I’m glad he followed through.
The layoffs, as governed by an agreement between management and the union, must be done by inverse seniority. The majority of us on the list are 20-something journalists from all departments. Three of us are from sports. Wednesday night, a group of us gathered at Lisa’s and my place for some commiseration.
The next day, assistant managing editor Carla Savalli announced her resignation. And the exodus had started.
People have two weeks to submit voluntary resignations, which would help save the jobs of some of the people on the layoff list. I’m not holding out too much hope. And that gets me to, well, me.
When the news was announced, I didn’t know how to take it. I knew my name would be on that list; I’m the second-least-senior member of the sports staff. After Steve’s meeting, I immediately ducked out of the newsroom and headed home.
But now it’s sinking in. For the past few days, I’ve been working on getting my stuff together to send out job applications. Lisa graciously redesigned my résumé for me, I uploaded a few of my videos to Vimeo and I gathered together a bunch of print clips for my portfolio.
Really, I’ve started to see this as an exciting challenge, a chance to go somewhere else without feeling bad about leaving the Spokesman. I’m looking not just near my hometown Seattle, but elsewhere in the country. I’m not limiting myself to just print or just video, I’m broadening my scope. And, yes, that means broadening my scope past newspapers — though that’s where the majority of my searching has taken me.
I will soon make a new page for this website to function as a sort of video portfolio. And I may start putting up some print clips. But this means I may hide the blog for a little bit, to keep it out of the eyes of potential employers. I don’t think there’s anything that could hurt my chances here, but it’s not worth the risk. If I hide the blog, I’ll be sure to tell you all how to access it.
In the meantime, thanks to those of you who have called or texted me to check in. I’ll keep everyone posted.
A week or two ago, I meant to write an entry about how I felt a little left out of the rush to cover the Valley View Fire, a brush fire in Spokane Valley that destroyed 13 homes. Being in the sports department has a way of keeping you out of the news loop.
But Thursday was a different story. On our way out of the door to take Lisa to work, her grandpa called to say there was an entire building on fire downtown. Just in case, I grabbed my ready-to-go backpack and drove downtown.
The smoke was everywhere. A giant plume rushing skyward. Once I dropped off Lisa at the newsroom, she called and said that, as I expected, no one was over there doing video. I rushed over to the scene (admittedly, I took a detour home to put on real shoes, get a real shirt and grab a hat — I’d just rolled out of bed) and busted out my camera.
Several smoke-filled (plus chemicals!) hours of shooting later, here’s what I came up with:
It was nice to be back on news, if only for a day. I got the adrenaline rush. My hair, two days later, still has a hint of smoke smell to it. And even though I worked 14.5 hours that day (8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. — still had to cover an Indians game), I would have done it a thousand times over.
Filed under: Events
Well, that was cooler than I thought it would be.
Forty-thousand people lined up to run or walk through the Bloomsday course looks like way more than you’d think. At the start-finish line, Spokane’s Riverside Avenue was a sea of human bodies. This picture does it no justice.
I covered the elite women’s race for the S-R, riding in the bed of a pickup truck through the 7.46 mile (12K meter) course that winds around what is probably the hilliest part of Spokane. The top runners were mostly skinny, 90 lb. Kenyan women, which made interviewing slightly tougher.
If you subscribe to S-R.com, you can read my article here.
But the coolest thing about Bloomsday, I thought, was that as you meander down the race course, you pass at least a dozen garage bands just jamming along the side of the street. In driveways! On street corners! On those little islands in large intersections!
Anyway, for some reason I didn’t take a picture of any bands. But they were there.
And I had to take this picture on my drive back home to Pullman. It was such a nice day.
Filed under: Events
Lisa, Brian, Lonnie, Allison, Jenna, Melanie, Emily and 800 other students packed Beasley Coliseum on Saturday for the 11:30 a.m. graduation ceremony. Victor also graduated, but he did not walk.
It was a little eerie for Jacob (who visited this weekend) and me, since we were in the same place one year ago donning our own caps and gowns. And though it was hot at the top of Beasley, and though the ceremony got a bit boring, it was great seeing everyone on the big screen, finally receiving their much-deserved fake diplomas.
Filed under: Events
Saturday night, Lisa and I went to see rock-piano master Ben Folds at Beasley Coliseum. It was awesome, besides the fact he didn’t play an encore despite at least five minutes of cheering from the fans.
He played a lot of songs I didn’t know, which surprised me. I thought I knew his collection fairly extensively. But that means there are plenty more great Ben Folds songs I still must download.
LATE UPDATE: Added link
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I’m 23.
Woo!
After a delicious breakfast and an unexpected adventure to campus, I spent most of the afternoon working.
Woo.
Anyway, here’s what I finished — a video tour of the Martin Stadium renovation.
But now I’m done and have my birthday evening ahead of me. Lisa and I are going to go have a delicious (late) dinner at Swilly’s.
Woo!
I started out my news-consuming morning with this blog post on the NYT website, reading with interest what Virginia Tech is doing to move past the massacre that killed 33 students one year ago today.
Then I saw this picture …
… and it all flooded back.
One year ago today, I woke up at my last Pullman residence and checked the NYT website, like I did every morning. At that time, six students had died. Holy crap. Of course, a major news story.
When I got into the Evergreen newsroom and we flipped the TV to CNN, the death toll had risen. Throughout the day, that old TV updated us on what was easily the biggest such story since Sept. 11. Whenever we walked into the office, or simply past the TV, we couldn’t help but take a seat and solemnly watch another college campus go through hell.
We obsessively clicked refresh on the Collegiate Times‘ reserve website, after its main one overloaded from all the internet traffic. We watched our fellow student-journalists rise to the test, and we watched how much attention and respect the student newspaper received from the mass media.
At the Evergreen, Brian, Lisa and I worked together to coordinate our own coverage of the event. We had a certain responsibility, as the newspaper of a similar campus, to tell our readers what they needed to know. What happened in Blacksburg, Va.? How is WSU connected to Virginia Tech? The obligatory, “could this happen on our campus?”
Everyone in the newsroom came together — editors, writers, copy editors — to fashion our report on the incident. It was an editor-in-chief’s dream: Everyone was motivated. Everyone was helpful. Everyone was collaborative.
I just want to say thank you to everyone who helped us get through that day and put out an excellent newspaper. We really rose to the test.
————
UPDATE: Lisa’s comment inspired me to mention the next day’s paper, when we printed the Cougar head logo in Virginia Tech colors — maroon and orange. That conjured up some harsh criticism from the WSU administration.
For those of you who don’t know, the Evergreen got in trouble for “violating” the university’s fair use policy on its copyrighted logo. Apparently, it cannot be altered, such as changing the colors. Lisa got the bulk of the university’s heat, for some reason, and we had quite the discussion with Al Donnelly, our general manager, about our manipulating the logo.
From left: The WSU logo, the Virginia Tech logo, the logo used on a Facebook group in support of the victims, and a version of the WSU logo we printed in the Evergreen.
The original idea was to print a version of the logo used on the then-newly created Facebook group, but at some point down the line that idea turned into printing the altered WSU logo and the Virginia Tech logo separately. The altered WSU logo is what got us in a bit of trouble — although we really didn’t care.
Lisa vehemently defended the logo we printed, whereas I was willing to bend and say that, in retrospect, we could have used the regular WSU insignia in the way we used the logos (pictured below). If we had printed the Facebook group logo, I also would have vehemently defended our manipulating the colors.
Anyway, this is all a moot point now. Just thought I’d bring it up again, for some reason. Any thoughts, now that the floodgates have started leaking?
Filed under: Events
He was here. And I was there. Elton John performed at Beasley Coliseum. And I had tickets (to the second show Sunday).
Freakin’ Elton John!
It was awesome.
He played just about every song you could hope for. “Benny and the Jets.” “Tiny Dancer.” “Crocodile Rock.” “Saturday Night’s Alright.” “Daniel.” “Your Song.” I would have loved to have heard “I Want Love,” which I really like for some reason, but I didn’t expect him to play it.
Anyway, we were up on the second level kinda behind the stage. The picture above is the view.
