Example: Bad News Report

I know deadline pressure means some not-so-strong pieces have to run, but I wonder if anyone listened to this news item before airing it on the local NPR affiliate station WAMU this morning.

This follow-up to the apparent drowning of a 5-year-old child last Friday in a local pool where five lifeguards were on watch raises a legitimate question: how adept are teenage lifeguards.

The title, "Pool Safety Experts Weary of Teen Lifeguards," seems misleading considering the only people quoted are a lawyer and an anonymous pool attendee (more on that in a second).

The attorney calls pool drownings "almost an epidemic," but nowhere in the report does reporter Mana Rabiee include any numbers to back that up.

The part that really bothered me was Rabiee's awarding anonymity to her community member voice, a woman who regularly attends the pool and has expressed concern over the lifeguards' youth. First, Rabiee doesn't say why the woman, who makes a useless comment about how lifeguards appear to be high school kids, didn't want to be identified. Then, the kicker: the mystery pool-goer adds that she isn't "personally affected by it because I'm a good swimmer, but if I were a parent I might be concerned."

Is it too much to ask for the "man on the street" reaction to be a bit more applicable? It's hard to believe there wasn't one other person around who would a) speak on the record and b) say something at least mildly relevant. Had an editor shaved off that woman's 17 seconds of drivel, I would have wasted only a minute of my time listening to this report.

Fiction

An e-mail I just sent the co-owner of an area bookstore that closed a few months ago:

""The Camel Bookmobile" by Masha Hamilton was I think the only novel I bought from [the store]. Everything else has been nonfiction. As a child I devoured novels, mostly series' such as Cam Jansen, the Boxcar Children and Thursday Next. College courses on international politics and journalism consumed me and I increasingly read current affairs: Friedman, Zakaria, Pollan. The only fiction I recall reading in the last year or so has been John Grisham.

Exhausted by all the informative, educational reading, I longed for lighter fare. But for some reason I just couldn't find fiction that hooked me. The first book I bought at [the store] was Ruth Reichl's "Garlic and Sapphires." It was a lovely, enjoyable read and I thought, maybe I don't need fiction to fill my narrative void.

But I did. After reading the first few pages of "The Camel Bookseller" in the store, I decided to take a chance and buy it. A couple days ago, I started reading it. I tried to savor it by reading it a chapter or two at a time instead of the normal one afternoon feast that defines my reading habits. This evening I couldn't help it and finished the remaining three-fourths of the book while curled up in a blanket.

My journalism classes last year focused on feature and narrative writing, so I've had no drought of good prose. But drinking in this fiction, noticing its techniques, yet not thinking about anything but the story, was pure bliss. Better yet, the story made me think about our world in the same way the non-fiction did, only in a much more compelling and subtle manner.

So, for that, I want to say thank you. Thank you for reminding me how important it is to just bask in the pleasure of reading a book instead of always thinking that I have to learn something from reading. Obviously that inevitably happens, but sometimes all we need is an armchair adventure."

Lessons from Lou Grant

Yesterday a fellow intern and I compared how we followed Monday's Metro accident. She constantly checked the Twitter feeds of four D.C. blogs on her iPhone. I, after hearing the initial details, waited until about 9 p.m. to read all the lead stories on washingtonpost.com.

She wanted up-to-the minute bursts of information as they became available. I wanted a complete summary of the facts and eyewitness accounts packaged together and organized by the newspaper after the hubbub died down.

I am methodical, meticulous person and easily susceptible to information overload. As everyone tries to predict the industry's future, I'm increasingly intrigued by its past. Yesterday AJR posted my profile of Alan Mutter aka the Newsosaur. Listening to Mutter recount the glory days of newspapers, his voice full of enthusiasm and nostalgia, made me want to know about that business. After seeing a clip from the "Lou Grant" show on his blog and hearing him mention the newsroom drama in our interview, I decided to check it out.

I just watched the first episode on Hulu. I did get some good interview tips, reminding me that even if the newsrooms I work in look different, the basics will remain the same. But, ironically, a scene in the show did make it clearer to me the benefit of tearing down the walls between the press and the public.

Grant wants to run a story on a police sex scandal on the front page, but the paper's publisher, Mrs. Pynchon, doesn't like the story. Grant says something about it being his job to decide what's important and what's not. Pynchon responds that she's the publisher and if she doesn't like it, it doesn't run.

Hearing their back and forth made me appreciate that nowadays, we increasingly decide what's important. Then again, I'm the one who keeps saying she prefers the packaged version so that I don't have to sift through everything to make that decision in the first place.

Hmm. It seems the point I was trying to make wasn't so easily answerable after all. Great. I chalk it up to another symptom of this post-graduation-realizing-there-are-no-easy-answers-in-life-phase.

Creating a Web site

I'm trying to design a Web site and it is driving me crazy. I've spent the entire evening bouncing between Squarespace, Tumblr, Wordpress and Blogger trying to figure out which would be the best to host a personal Web site for my resume, clips, and possibly a revival of this blog. I've got a picture in my head of what I want, but the rudimentary Web design skills I learned in an online journalism class almost two years ago are not enough to make that picture a reality.

The cliche "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing," comes to mind. OK, maybe not dangerous, but not being able to create what I want is frustrating the hell out of me.

Anyone know any good basic Web tutorial resources?