Meet your guest speaker…

A couple of weeks ago, my old college journalism professor, David Wheeler, (I say old, but I was sitting in his classroom nine months ago) called me up and asked me to speak to his newsgathering class at Asbury. Imagine that. Me, eight months on the job, talking to a group of students at my alma mater about being a journalist. It’s like David sat down and thought, “Who’s the least experienced person I can find to come give my students arbitrary bits of advice?” When I pointed that out to him, he smiled, closed his eyes and shook his head in a very David Wheeler sort of way and told me that he wanted his students to get excited about going into the business, and who better to try to communicate that excitement than someone who was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with the whole experience?

So that left me with the task of trying to figure out what in the world I could tell a class of 20 journalism students that I’ve learned in less than a year on the job. I decided that I have everything in common with these guys, the same education, knowledge of AP style, writing skills, drive — everything. The one thing that I have that is unique to the classroom experience — stories. I have so many stories that I could tell about this job, about the people I’ve met and the things I’ve seen and topics I’ve written about. So that is what I could bring to the table — I would just tell stories, hopefully enough to revive that feeling of, man, this is something I really want to do. Trust me, that feeling dissipates somewhere in the second or third year of journalism school when you are writing your thousandth story that isn’t going to be published, and you know it will just come back to you almost completely illegible, smeared with the red ink that makes it look like your story, which you have put so much time and thought into, has been stabbed over and over by Norman Bates.

I decided to arrange my stories in some sort of logical fashion. The question that I get asked most frequently when I tell people about my job is “How do you come up with your stories?” I came up with six different ways that I get story ideas and tried to give an interesting example of a story that I had written that corresponded with each. I compiled all of this into a neat and sophisticated PowerPoint presentation, sure to keep the listeners eager and engaged.

When I walked into the 3:30 class, I quickly realized that I knew about half of the students from when I went to school there. I always get a little nervous when I speak in front of people, but it’s usually nothing overwhelming. However, knowing that I was supposed to be speaking on an authoritative basis to a room full of students that I worked with at the campus newspaper and goofed off with in the dorms made me pretty apprehensive about the whole thing. Then, when I tried to plug my computer into the room’s projector, the dongle that apparently works for David’s MacBook Pro is not compatible with my MacBook Regular, so the visual part of the presentation was out.

So basically, I rambled for about 30 minutes and showed some pictures that I managed to get onto David’s computer. I calmed down some about 10 minutes into the presentation, and it was fairly smooth sailing from there. A few students had pretty good questions, and I left without ruining the career paths of any future journalists. All said and done, I realized how much I have actually learned since being in on the job in the real world. I wrote in a post last week about how I thought journalism is about the stories and the people, not about the scandal and death and destruction that the industry has become notorious for. Thinking about what I have done over these eight months hammered down that point for me.

For any of you who are interested, here are the six ways that I come up with my story ideas from week to week and links to the examples of those stories that I talked about in class.

1 — News Tips — Our phones ring off the hook five days a week. A majority of those calls are from people who want to tell us about their 6-year-old daughter who won a ballet competition and wants us to write a story about it. Some people just want to vent about their neighbors who park their trucks on the street, and they can’t get through. Other people just want to tell us that we are stupid for the stories we write. But every once in a while, someone gives me a gem of a tip about a legitimate story. Back in March, we got a call from a tipster saying that a local horse farm was being raided by animal control. I went out there at the time she told us it was happening, and sure enough, 74 horses were seized by county officials. Those types of calls are few and far between, but they can be life-savers, especially during slow weeks.

2 — Local officials — The Jessamine Journal has a great relationship with nearly every official in the county. I can’t take any credit for that; it was that way before I got here. Nonetheless, most of them feel like they can trust us with information and that we will not burn them by publishing something early or something we were supposed to keep secret. Since they know the inner workings of the community, they are valuable commodities to us as a news group. If you have read The Journal or this blog over the last year, you no doubt remember The Elvis Photo. As the story goes, it was first tipped by Mike Rupard, the Jessamine County fire chief. The most famous story to come out of Nicholasville came from the mouth of a public official.

3 — Public Relations — PR gets a bad rap in journalism classes, and things don’t cool off at all once you are in the newsroom. But there are some good PR people out there, and Nancy (we’ll leave her name there so it doesn’t sound like I’m pimping her firm) is one of the better ones I’ve encountered. She told me a story one of the first weeks I was here about a girl who was originally from Nicholasville but now lives in a hospital in Rockcastle County after a car wreck that left her a paraplegic and a severe bout with pneumonia that left her living off of a respirator. The kids that live at this hospital get out very rarely, but for Kari’s 16th birthday, she wanted to go shopping at Fayette Mall in Lexington. Nancy wasn’t sure how I would handle the story or if I even wanted it, but she wanted to throw it out there. I ended up spending the day with Kari, and it became my favorite story I have ever written.

4 — The police scanner — Following the police scanner is the worst part of my job. The contraption is on 24/7, and it sits right above my desk. I despise the thing. It is how we hear about wrecks, fires, deaths, police chases, bank robberies, etc. Being the new guy, I have been designated as the wreck reporter, meaning if I hear of a 1046 (injury accident), I go out with my camera and reflective vest to snap pictures of the incident. I did get lucky in the first six months of working here, though, in that there were no fatalities in Jessamine County. That all changed one week in June, when three people were killed in five days. That was my worst week on the job.

5 — Public meetings — A necessity when covering the government, which is a huge chunk of journalism, public meetings give us probably 50 percent of our stories. I cover the city of Wilmore and both planning and zoning commissions every time that they meet. Stories from these range from the mundane to the mildly interesting. When submitting stories for awards, though, usually I stay away from these.

6 — Keep your eyes open — This is really a no-brainer, but just noticing little things around you is a great way to get story ideas. Especially living in Wilmore, if I see anything slightly out of the ordinary, my gears start to crank, wondering if I can write about it. The first time I saw Danny Hogue’s beetle/bike driving around downtown Wilmore, I knew that I wanted to write about it. That turned into not only a pretty good feature, but an all-around fun day for me.

For those of you who made it this far (I’m at 1,500 words now by WordPress’s county — making it my longest post ever), you must really be interested in what I do. Thanks again to everybody who reads — I hope this gives even more of an insight into my world.