One Mid-Autumn festival afternoon

The time keeper

Voici mon 1er audio slideshow réalisé à New York.
Résultat plus que modeste... (Ceux réalisés à Shanghai sont visibles sur ma page Viméo):



The last 15 minutes from Hélène Franchineau on Vimeo.
Every morning, Johnny Votta Jr. takes care of the NYU students around Washington Square Park. He makes sure no one gets run over by a cab and yells the time remaining before class. His morning hobby has earned him some sort of celebrity status.

Yankee vs. Red Sox

Love it! We are in a very competitive school, which fosters creativity and excellence, so when the Dean of Academic Affairs, Bill Grueskin, does not know what to do with a spare ticket to a baseball game... He organizes a twitter/haiku competition for the students.

Read below the email we all received in the evening: 

Dear students,

I have two extra tickets for J School students for the Yankee-Red Sox game scheduled at 4 pm on Saturday, Sept. 25. And rather than have a boring raffle to give them out, we decided to have a contest.

To embrace old and new media, we will give one ticket to the student who authors the best tweet about the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry, and one ticket to the student who can do the best haiku about the rivalry. The winning entries will be original, passionate and historically accurate.

(...)

Your tweet must be 140 characters or less. Your haiku must be three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.

To enter, send your Tweet to (XXX)  and/or your Haiku to (XXX). Only current J School students (part- or full-time, MS, MA or PhD) can enter. Deadline is 10 am on Monday, Sept. 13.

You can enter each contest only once (thus, each student can send in one Haiku and/or one Tweet.) 

(...)

Each contest will have one winner and two runners-up. If a winner can’t go, the ticket goes to the next runner-up in that category.

Winning and runner-up entries will be announced via the J School list serve. All decisions are final, and arbitrary.

(...)

Good luck!

So now, wait...who are the Red Sox?

Boot camp

Wow, time flies...I thought my latest post was about one week ago, turns out it is a lot older...
I am still doing the "technical training" at the J school: audio and photo training. It is frankly nothing new for me, as I have been doing the same at Sciences Po. Except Final Cut Pro, because I had been using Avid Newscutter instead (which, I think, is better! But maybe my opinion will change during the course of the year).
So basically, I was a little bored in class, but I really hope that will change. The school is so expensive I can not afford to be bored.

For my audio profile I interviewed a resident E.R. physician, a lovely girl who agreed to talk to me during her break. She was so nice. She was the first person I talked to after we had been given the assignment, so I got lucky. She was coming out of Saint Luke's hospital and going to get a cup of iced coffee. I want to post my radio on the blog, but it is terrible....

Then for my audio postcard, I went to Spin on a Friday night and found out that it is a great place: a bar, good music with a DJ, a ping pong practice with tables that you can rent (it's a bit on the pricey side unfortunately), and every Friday night, the "Dirty Dozen" competition with the best players of the country (and abroad too since there were some French players that night, woohoo!). It was a lot of fun, I could talk to the players, and there was one funny guy, Kazuyuki Yokoyama, who can not help but strip down to his underwear to entertain the crowd.
Oh, and Susan Sarandon is one of the business partners, and she was there with her friends that night. Sweet.

The importance of accuracy and the bathroom

Friday, 25th September, our group of students from the Missou's Washington program (7 overall) and other journalism students also enrolled in other Washington programs met at the National Press Building (I'll have to write about this awesome place) to listen to Donna Leinwand, USA Today reporter and current President of the National Press Club.

She had a strong impact on me. A positive one. She first of all arrived late and laughing about it (yes! you can arrive late and no! that is not a big deal), but most important, she talked about her job. She started off as a simple reporter at the Miami Herald, then moved to Washington to work at the Knight Ridder Washington bureau. Then Gannett News service offered her a job, and now she is at USA Today since 2000.
She covers crime, justice, disasters and terrorism. Such a wide and exciting spectrum led her to cover hurricanes (Katrina, 2005 for example), bombings (London 2005), wars (Iraq)...Hello Donna, can I get your job when you retire?
From her hour-long speech, here are the main points that I thought were of importance:
- always check your facts, numbers and quotes. From my (small) experience, this seems to be more important in the US than say, in France (at least for the quotes);
- advices for foreign correspondents: when you see a bathroom, use it. A variant: when people give you some food, eat it (because you never know when is the next time you will have the opportunity to eat). Always have a stock of batteries with you just in case. Do not underestimate the power of beauty parlours to get gossips and words from the locals...it can make a good feature for example.
- she talked about the evolution of our job. How is it going to be affected by the internet and technology? "Technology changes the way people gather their news, not journalism in itself."
- about the rising importance of bloggers and the fact that people consider them sometimes as real journalists: trusted bloggers let us know what is happening in places where we can not be. For example, no media will have a correspondent in, say, Chad. This is why we rely on camera phones, Youtube, bloggers etc, to get some of our news. However: they are not professional news gatherers and will never be. We have to draw a line. They can not tell the difference between fact and opinion and most of the times it is poorly written.
- about the young journalists (us!) who are on the job market: we have two advantages (oh really? I did not know that...I'll have tell my Pole Emploi adviser!): we are cheap (is this an advantage?) and available: we do not have families or mortgage to support, we can go anywhere and work from 7 am to midnight.

Last but not least, she gave, from her own experience, three pieces of advice on how to beat the competition:
- read the papers;
- pitch many stories to your editor;
- get to the office early;
- cut on the happy hours...Only on Fridays!

Thank you Donna Leinwand!

Photo Flickr (Steffe).

Newsroom trivia

Ainsi va la vie dans la newroom.
Ce matin un oiseau s'est bruyamment emplafonné dans une des baies vitrées de la newsroom, avant de glisser lentement le long de la vitre. Marrant.
Hier un journaliste (d'un certain âge et en béquilles) est tombé dans les escaliers et a été transporté en ambulance. Moins marrant.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidall/ / CC BY-SA 2.0