Day 3: Hard at Work

HUGE day for me at the Register. The day started out slow at 10 am with updating my blog and reading the review online that Paul Hodgins wrote about the Royal Danish Ballet. When he came later in the morning he talked with me about why he wrote certain things and where he got his sources. I got a pretty good idea of how a review should be written and how to focus the review so it will be useful to a large range of readers, not just someone with a knowledge of dance.

Paul also mentioned that his wife is an editor for Orange Coast Magazine, and he gave me her name and number just in case I ever want to look into the magazine side of writing, which I will definitely have to look into.

Then I attended the 2 o'clock meeting, where editors discuss the weekend newspaper and looking forward to next week. What I really liked about the meetings is how they started off by asking the editors if there was anything especially good going on in their teams, and they took turns remarking on the creativity of specific writers or how well some staff members reacted to breaking news to write an article in time. It was really funny to see how that the title of this section in the notes was labeled "good stuff."

A few of the staff members had been asking me the same question: "Is this what you expected when you came to intern?" My answer within the past 2 days of hearing the question has become more solid, and I've decided that the work place is certainly what I imagined, but the similarities stop there. I expected that there would be more hustling and more crazy in general, and I expected to see a lot more communicating between different newspaper sections. Instead, everyone seems to be in their own world, getting the work done and sending the articles through the system as soon as they are ready. There is also more waiting around than I anticipated, but it would be different as a full-time writer because I discovered that there are breaking news articles, but there are also long term articles that are assigned way ahead of time and so they can be worked on whenever someone is waiting for a phone call to be returned. Since I had no long-term assignments the most I could do was check my e-mail again and read over more Register articles.

After the meeting I took some time to look at the blogs of other students with independent projects. Reading about all the different topics my classmates chose has given me a whole new perspective on how rewarding Spring at Sage already is, and the idea of pursuing anything we desire even just for a week is amazing.

With nothing else to do for the moment I sent another e-mail to the tour publicist of Glee Live! hoping to get an interview with one of the cast members tomorrow, since they don't have any concerts scheduled. I figured that in order to get a better idea of what to ask said cast member about, I should watch the Glee finale, so I passed the time watched the finale on my laptop. The 5 o'clock meeting finally rolled around and I walked back over to the meeting room. Not 15 minutes into the meeting my phone finally rings with the person I have been waiting to talk to: Lee Mallory.

As soon as I answered the phone I quietly left the room and began to converse with the poet that would enable me to write my first professional article. I talked with Professor Mallory for nearly two hours, from talking about the 20th anniversary of Poetry at Alta, his second performance poetry group, to his fear that communication will eventually be lost along the newest technology and that poetry is one thing that he believes will revive this communication. I also had Lee give me some contacts that will be useful for getting quotes on Lee and his poetry performances. Tonight I am beginning to organize my notes and put together a draft of a story that can be published online at the Register.

Hopefully I will be able to get at least this one article published but it would be amazing to have the tour publicist for Glee Live! get back to me tomorrow and give me the interview I need to write the concert preview. I told Jeff Miller today that the reporting world reminds me of my life at school: Some days there is absolutely nothing going on and it seems like I am wasting time but sometimes even the very next day life can get out of control with the work I suddenly have. I know that all this hard work will pay off in the end.