Black humor, worry and the swine flu
Journalism is known as a field rife with black humor. To an extent it is to be expected from a group of people who routinely surround themselves with some of society’s worst happenings. Please don’t think any less of us for it.
With the swine flu outbreak starting Sunday, only two people in the office were really struck by it: myself and Assistant News Editor Jay Balagna. The editorial board considered writing an editorial encouraging people to be cautious but not hysterical about it. It was struck down because many members of the board felt not enough people knew of the flew. There were a few jokes tossed around, we admit.
As time passed and the flu came closer to home, people started to sober up a bit. Here’s a mildly edited e-mail conversation from the Sagebrush staff via e-mail. I took out a few tangential comments and deleted the quotes from original e-mails.
All Texas high schools have canceled their after-school activities and athletics because 11 cases have been confirmed in Texas and more than 53,000 students have stopped going to school in fear of the flu. So… how is this thing acquired? Is it air-borne? Is there anything realistically I can do to protect myself? If I were to explain this whole thing to another person, how would I do it in layman’s terms? I’m scared guys… real scared ;(
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Thank you,
Juan López
Assistant Sports Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
702.883.0228 (cell)
775.682.6568 (office)
jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com
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Thank you,
Juan López
Assistant Sports Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
702.883.0228 (cell)
775.682.6568 (office)
jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com
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Hmmm a few people get sick from swine flu and, unfortunately, some die. Yet, hundreds of people around the world die from the regular flu every year. But swine flu does happen to healthy people. Guess no one really gives a crapabout babies and old people. I know I don’t.
Way to go Robyn…
-Jay, I’d help, but I am going to be secluded from all of mankind this week in an effort to try and remain healthy. I’m too important to the revolution to be prancing around like everything’s OK.
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Thank you,
Juan López
Assistant Sports Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
702.883.0228 (cell)
775.682.6568 (office)
jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com
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Emily Stott
Design Editor
University of Nevada, Reno
775-846-0314 (C)
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Thank you,
Juan López
Assistant Sports Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
702.883.0228 (cell)
775.682.6568 (office)
jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com
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http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2007/10/29/zombies-a-guide-to-surviving-a-zombie-attack/
Julian Rhodes
Arts & Entertainment Editor
The Nevada Sagebrush
Cell: 702.743.1401
julianrhodes@nevadasagebrush.com
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Emily- While you may not personally be worried about this and can make the legitimate argument that others should feel the same, we need to worry about it in a geopolitical sense. The response to what is increasingly showing itself as the next pandemic by our political leaders offers us valuable insight into how prepared they are to work together peacefully to overcome serious crises. While the coverage of it now is centered around the virus and its march around the globe, the post-infection coverage will be arguably more important.
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Assistant News Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
University of Nevada, Reno
Cell: 775.304.9924
Office: 775.682.6587
jbalagna@nevadasagebrush.com
www.nevadasagebrush.com
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Emily Stott
Design Editor
University of Nevada, Reno
775-846-0314 (C)
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Julian Rhodes
Arts & Entertainment Editor
The Nevada Sagebrush
Cell: 702.743.1401
julianrhodes@nevadasagebrush.com
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Thank you,
Jessica Fryman
702.378.5010 (cell)
775.682.6588 (office)
jfryman@nevadasagebrush.com
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We have to cover all of our bases people. We should make up a list on next-in-line stuff. Swine flu or not, this paper will survive!!
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Thank you,
Juan López
Assistant Sports Editor, The Nevada Sagebrush
702.883.0228 (cell)
775.682.6568 (office)
jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com
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Nick Coltrain
Editor in chief, The Nevada Sagebrush
University of Nevada, Reno
775.784.6969 (office)
editor@nevadasagebrush.com
www.nevadasagebrush.com
This e-mail message and its attachments are intended only for the personal use of the recipient(s) named above. If you are not an intended recipient, you may not review, copy or distribute this message. If you have received this communication in error, please notify The Nevada Sagebrush (editor@nevadasagebrush.com) immediately by e-mail and delete the original message.
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Hey Jay, I was checking out the Swine Flu wiki today and, while it isn’t the best source for information, I did see something interesting. Some states have tons of “suspected cases” while not having ANY confirmed cases. Kinda sounds like a story to me on how badly people are freaking out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak_in_the_United_States
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090429/NEWS/90429017
http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=2&a=396763ll
Maps and journalism
There must be a law of the internet somewhere that dictates that if a person promises more frequent updates, then they must stop updating all together.
So, apologies for the drought.
But now that the school year is running down and most of the major deadline-specific projects have passed at the ‘brush, we are trying to get back to accomplishing some of the more expected things we’ve kicked around for years. In this case, I’m talking calendar.
We have toyed around with Google Calendars for a bit and plan to launch it next week.
If you have an event you want to submit, e-mail it to calendar@nevadasagebrush.com and we’ll get it up there.
The police blotter presented via Google Maps is something we’ve been doing for a while now also, except now it’s on the front page.
Thought it may be ambitious for only a few more weeks left of school, we plan to have a yearlong trend map to go along with the normal weekly map. The yearlong map would illustrate the groupings of various crimes – blue tabs equal MIPCs, red tabs equal assault, etc.
Jay Balagna, one of the assistant news editors, also kicked around the thought of just building off one map each month and compiling that for the blotter. We would change the logos up so that green, for example, represents crimes from within the last week and yellow are the oldest crimes.
It’s not quite Oakland Crime Spotting, but it’s a start. And since I’ve been on a Google Maps kick lately, here’s a blog showcasing some great uses of Google Maps in journalism (because as someone I can’t identify said, “80 percent of all journalism has a geographic factor to it.” Once we realize the power of Google Maps, that might jump to about 19 percent or so.)
Other than that, let me know if you feel particularly strongly on any of those thoughts and we’ll see what we can do.
We win Pacemaker award and get cocky!
Clockwise: Editor in chief Nick Coltrain holds our Pacemaker Award, Public Editor Michael Higdon holds his Infographics Design of the Year Award, multimedia producer Casey Durkin holds our Pacemaker Finalist Award and News Editor Jessica Fryman holds our Online Pacemaker Finalist Award.
We have reason to be pretentious for the next 48 hours. This is how it starts:
So we didn’t include Bob Barr
We just published our bi-annual election edition, or, our attempt at comprehensive and simplified coverage of most everything you will see on your polling screen.
Our goal for the issue was to give students a quick-n-dirty run down of some of the larger issues on the ballot as well as giving broad-stroke views of some races that are more important to the university and to us as Americans.
But I want to emphasize that the section wasn’t meant as an end-all-be-all election guide. Because every person has different values, an end-all-be-all election guide just isn’t possible. By necessity and for accessibility, news organizations can never replace individual gumption in learning about the issues and the candidates.
I’ll use Bob Barr, the libertarian candidate for president, for example. We didn’t have the space or the time to write up a condensed version of his views for the newspaper. In fact, we had to cut a few issues from Sen. John McCain’s and Sen. Barack Obama’s sections.
That’s not to say Barr is a less valid candidate than either major party nominee. Hell, he could be a better candidate in your mind – that’s not for me to influence. But the limits of our time and space stopped us from including him.
So take our voting guide as a starting point or as a last minute reference guide. But it won’t make up for your personal pursuit of information about the candidates, no matter our efforts.
Otherwise, thank you for reading it. I hope it proved useful and beneficial to at least some of you.
P.S. We also made sure to put the condensed information on the dink, or the two middle pages, for maximum portability. Hope that helps too.
Keeping the rock rolling
So, it’s been a while since we’ve posted here folks. We are approaching our tenth issue for the year and it has certainly taken a toll on the staff. Hell, we haven’t had the time or the energy to post on this thing since before issue 1.
The mid-term doldrums for the Sagebrush has happened every year that I’ve been here. We are exhausted from the grind of newspapering and midterms rear, or have reared, their ugly heads. No rest for the wicked, as they say.
But on the plus side, the Sagebrush has also kind of fallen into place for the year. Everyone in a new position (most of us) is realizing what the grind requires and adjusting accordingly. We have gotten over, or like to think we have gotten over, the learning curve of putting this beast out every week while keeping the Web site as up-to-date as possible.
The trouble with that is that we need to avoid falling into the rut of just getting the beast out every Tuesday and avoid throwing things on the Web just so we can say it is up-to-date. I know that we won’t let that happen (our collective pride as a staff is simply too great) but it is always a fear nonetheless.
So I ask all of you out there to keep us in check — we write for you afterall. If you ever suspect us of slipping, or if we ever don’t put out the quality of content you deserve, let us know. We have comments and forums for publicly ridiculing our performance (and simply discussing things going on, of course). Every staffer has an e-mail address they can be reached at for more private conversations with the staff.
So bear with us, and do as we do — use the issue number as a countdown to our next break. By my count, it is only seven more issues after Tuesday until we can all take a well deserved break.
Oh, the life of an intern
I guess it’s about time I contribute to this blog, especially as my first summer internship is coming to a close.
I’ve spent my summer working at the Home News, seven different community newspapers in the Las Vegas area. When I first got the job, I was petrified. The recruiter told me I would hopefully get three bylines by the end of the summer.
Thankfully, that’s been anything but the case. The first week or so, I wrote a couple stories, but my days were mostly filled of the dreaded intern-tasks: briefs, obits, more briefs, births, more obits, filing, changing ink, archives and even coffee, once.
I quickly learned that the faster I got through the intern-tasks, the more stories they gave me. The mind-numbing work made me realize how much I love to report and write. I take every story I can get my hands on.
I’ve written a lot of great features that include things like a woman who turned 103 years old, kids with cancer, churches, children in foster care, exceptional volunteers, competitive eating couple ranked top ten in the world and the list goes on. I’ve also written some news stories about various community happenings.
I’d post links, but the Home News doesn’t have a Web site. (I know, they’re working on it.)
It’s been a change working for such a local paper, but I’ve come to appreciate it. The readers are dedicated and more interactive than I expected. People call to talk about stories I write and I even received a thank-you note in the mail.
All in all, I’ve received some great feedback from the editors, which gives me hope for my future goals. I’m constantly worried if I’ll be able to make it in this field and this internship has given me more confidence.
So far, I’m enjoying the opportunity to do what I love most while working along side and learning from some professionals.
12-hour days.
They’re bound to happen in this field and for me, that day was last Sunday.
It all began Friday afternoon, when a senior editor asked me to come into his office and told me I was doing a good job. That conversation ended with me agreeing to watch the government gather wild horses out in the middle of the desert on a Sunday. I’d be going out with Clay, the photo intern, come back to do a daily story, and then spend some time the next week working on a bigger enterprise story with Frank Mullen, a senior reporter here at the RGJ.
I hung out with Frank to get the background on the story while he smoked a cigarette, and then I tracked down Clay to tell him to meet me at the office at 5:30 a.m. so we can drive out to a place about 100 miles outside of Reno. I’m also told that The New York Times, the USA Today and NPR are going to be there, because it’s turned into a national story.
Cut to Sunday. I ignored my alarm clock, and finally opened my eyes around 5:20 a.m. I freaked out for about a minute, then hopped out of bed, quickly got dressed and proceeded to break a billion traffic laws to get to the office.
I found Clay calmly sitting at his computer, waiting for me. We nominated his car for the drive out because it gets better gas mileage, and then drove away into the sunrise, eating blueberry Poptarts for breakfast.
The drive seemed endless. We stopped for Wadsworth for five minutes, where I bought coffee, and then continued on through Nixon and past Pyramid Lake (though we didn’t notice it the first time), a Snoopy Rock and several small animals (I thought they were emus, but he thinks they were rabbits).
Two hours and lots of empty road later, we finally find where we’re supposed to meet everyone. Everyone meaning several of the Bureau of Land Management’s communications department, reporters from The New York Times and NPR, a photographer from the Nevada Appeal/Associated Press and a few people from the local TV stations. The USA Today didn’t show up after all.
To get to the site where they would catch the horses, we had to go offroading in our cars (cars that were made for city roads). Trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve driven through the desert in a Ford Taurus.
Eventually, we made it to the corral, which really was in the middle of nowhere. You were surrounded by dirt, mountains and brush, and besides the noise we were making, you couldn’t hear anything.
As part of a precaution, the journalists were herded into a horse trailer. That lasted all of five minutes when we all decided that sitting in a horse trailer wouldn’t give anyone a decent shot, and wandered outside.
It was a long wait. I had time to wander around, check out the cowboys, learn about Judas horses and talk about porn stars with The NY Times reporter and AP/Nevada Appeal photog (no joke) before there was even a hint that the horses were coming. But once we got the mile warning, we all went into our designated spots to watch them run in.
They looked like tiny dots coming towards us at first, followed by a big orb. The closer they got, the better you could make out shapes - four adult horses and one colt, sprinting forward as a helicopter followed close by. The Judas horse - a horse trained by humans to lead the wild horses into the corral - was let out, and he joined the tiny herd. But as they entered the gate, one broke away, running the other direction as if it knew what would happen. She stood about a mile away later, looking on into the coral and probably wondering why no one had followed her.
They banged against the gates at first, though they didn’t make any other noises besides that. I can’t help but wonder what could have been going on in their minds. Imagine you’d been free to run your entire life, and then you suddenly were stuck in a small space and there wasn’t anything you couldn’t do about it.
Once they’d calmed down a bit, we were allowed to go outside and observe them from a closer distance.
They were beautiful - one dark brown stallion, two bay mares and one dark brown colt. They weren’t groomed like domesticated horses, but there was something so powerful, so natural about them.
And so the morning went, much like that. The cowboys ended up only catching one other small herd, another four horses. They eventually stopped around noon because the sun was begin to beat down on us. It’d reached the point where all I could think was how smart cowboys were for owning their hats.
We traveled back to where our cars were parked, and soon after, were on our way back towards Reno. We (Clay, the AP photographer and myself) invited the NPR people to lunch with us in Fernley, but they ended up heading out for an interview. So onto Fernley we went, where we talked about why we were in journalism, risk-taking, etc.
Another hour later, and I was sitting at my desk in the office, probably smelling absolutely awful and writing away to get the next day’s CP done. As I finished the story, I glanced at the clock and realized I’d been working for 12 hours straight.
It’s true, all I wanted to do at that point was shower and then go to sleep. But as I lied in bed later that night, I realized that I wouldn’t trade it for anything. These sort of experiences make you realize just how small you really are compared to the rest of the world. They expose you to nature, to something you weren’t really aware of before. At least, that’s what it did for me.
So bring on those 12-hour days. Even if you have to live off of coffee and energy drinks and Poptarts, even if you have to get up while the sun’s rising, even if you spend hours and hours driving…they create the kinds of memories that you know you’ll recount to someone a lot younger than you someday, and make you laugh and go, “Man, I can’t believe that I saw that. Wow.”
No room for uncertainty
Hello all,
This is Ricardo, former assistant design editor at The Sagebrush—the best assistant design editor ever (arguably).
This summer I’ve been interning at The News Journal, alongside my future boss Nick Coltrain, next year’s editor-in-chief. We’ve both been working for the Metro section with desks right next to each other! Talk about Nevada pride.
Anyway, this internship has been grueling for so many different reasons. Some days I have so many things to do: stories to write, people to call and interview, events to cover, research, returning calls, and making deadline. Some days I have absolutely nothing to do—albeit, those days are less frequent. On those days all I want to do is crawl into bed and cry and change careers.
I question whether I really want to be a journalist, and it doesn’t take long for me to find my answer. There are very few people who can really say they garner satisfaction from their job. I’m lucky enough to be one of those. The positive feedback I’ve gotten on several of my stories is the reason I plan to stay in this business.
Let me explain: The world as we know it is fucked—excuse my language, but I’m trying to make a point. We’re facing problems with global warming, skyrocketing oil, food and living costs. People are foreclosing on their mortgages, etc. Sometimes I have to stop myself from reading headlines because I like to stay positive. That said, the stories I’ve written on regular people in this community working to make a difference in someone else’s life are truly inspiring. One woman decided to organize an event to have people donate their hair to make wigs for cancer patients. An equestrian center has begun offering therapeutic riding for disabled war veterans living in the VA nursing home. These are little things that would otherwise go unnoticed, but by writing a story about it and bringing some attention to their causes, people phone in and make contributions.
Frankly, I wish I could do what these people do, and be just as selfless and devoted to a cause, but I’m devoted to the First Amendment and writing. Being a journalist is simply helping out in my own way and still pursuing my interests.
With less than a month left here in Delaware, I’m really beginning to feel some pressure. I’ve written some good stuff, averaging five stories a week, but I need something meaty.
I need a project, and I think I’m on to something. Coverage of gay issues here in Delaware have been skimpy, and I’m hoping to churn out a really good project involving couples who have gone to California to get married, the criminal penalties they could face for entering a prohibited marriage outside the state, and other civil rights issues The First State is behind on.
So who did I contact to get some information? Why the ACLU of Delaware, of course!
The executive director of the chapter here knows a couple that is planning to get married in California, but she has to ask if they would be ok with being featured in the story. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping they say yes because if that falls through, I’m going to have to find something else.
Wish me luck.
Photos and other updates from Indy
WALL-E has got to be the best movie ever! At least this year. I loved it and I want to see it again. I hear Hancock was crappy though so I’m hestitant to spend the money.
In the last week, I’ve done a lot of random things, like visited Wyandotte Caves:
Played on a playground with Kyle and Ana, two people I interned with in Louisville last year:
And had lunch with my old mentor from Louisville.
I worked on some pages for the naked issue but those haven’t been published yet, don’t worry there’s asses and I’ll show y’all.
Fourth of july was interesting. Parking garage roof fireworks:
And hang out with the Pulliams:
Tomorrow I start the late shift - 5pm - 1:30am - for three works working on Metro/State and A1 design. Hopefully I’ll get good stories and have some stuff to post.
I also finished work on The Nevada Sagebrush forums which I’m extremely excited about. The forums will allow me to do my job as Public Editor without a lot of trouble. I can give students moderator abilities for specific forums so they can be in charge of Movies or their own club forums if they want. There’s a ton of beta add ons I can install to make the forums better but right now I think they’re pretty solid.
Alas, I will begin reading Atlas Shrugged today after 5 years of mentally preparing for the task of diving into Ayn Rand’s best and most epic book (So I hear). It’s more than 1000 pages of pure selfishness.
Why being a journalist rocks
While on assignment a bit ago, I had a repeat-epiphany as to why this job is awesome. I spent the lunch hour listening to live jazz and talking to some really cool Delawareans about it.
I then wrote it up and got paid for it (Take THAT engineering majors) and all without losing my lunch break.
Later that week, another intern was sent out to cover the same event. And he rapped it (watch the video on the right side). How many other jobs let you pull that kind of crap?
Of course, there’s all the other reason’s being a journalist is awesome but I’m not sure if I could put into words non-journalists could understand. I’m not trying to be condescending, just inarticulate.
And here’s a couple of details for the “So that’s Delaware” file: they actually have “We sell it on eBay!” stores here. So it wasn’t just a cheap “40-year-old Virgin” gag.
And ever notice the state slogans on signs when you enter a new state? Like Maryland’s “Please enjoy the Chesapeake Bay!” sign. Except our nations great first state’s “now entering” slogan is “Home of tax-free shopping!” Delaware rocks.