Better late than never, I suppose—here’s pictures from my second attempt at shooting baseball on April 19th. Click the photo below to see a 12-picture slideshow. Duke unexpectedly lost to UNC Greensboro 5-4 with the go-ahead run coming in the top of the ninth inning. All shots were taken with a Nikon D3 and a 300mm lens. As always, comments are appreciated.
Right fielder Anthony D'Alessandro avoids getting hit by a pitch in Duke's 5-4 loss to UNC Greensboro April 19, 2011 at Jack Coombs Field.
Now that 2010 is officially in the past, we can look forward to the year that is to come. This exercise can be particularly painful for those of us with impending May graduation dates (just typing those words made my blood run a little colder), but knowledge is power, and knowledge in this instance is CareerCast.com’s 200 best and worst jobs for 2011.
It’s no secret that traditional journalism jobs are considered career cancers to all but a few of us idealists. As this website puts it:
Some workers might find that their “dream job” actually ranks much further down the list – the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is especially true when it comes to employment.
To find Reporter (Newspaper), you have to click through several screens until you finally get to No. 188, right below jobs such as dairy farmer, sheet metal worker and garbage collector. Photojournalists only fare slightly better, coming in at No. 185, and Newscaster (broadcast journalist) lands at No. 128.
This poor ranking isn’t shocking to anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the constant bemoaning of the decline of the media. CareerCast says this about the jobs at the bottom of its list:
Jobs that fall into the bottom 20 out of all 200 surveyed professions tend to suffer from a combination of fatal flaws – low salaries, difficult working conditions, serious risk of injury or death, and poor employment prospects over the coming years.
That last reason—poor employment prospects—spells doom for journalism as a profession on this list. The other four core criteria are environment, income, stress and physical demands. Reporter scored 1106.250 in the environment category, which is below the more than 3,300 points the firefighter profession racked up for worst work environment. The midlevel income for reporters is computed at $34,000 (the lowest I saw was something like $18,000 for waiters and waitresses). Its stress level is fairly elevated at 44.750 for reasons such as deadlines, working in the public eye and competitiveness, but, in a slice of good news, the job scores very low on the physically demanding scale!
Like I said, nothing in this evaluation is unexpected. I already gave my vow of poverty my freshman year when I definitely decided on this career path. And I’m not exaggerating—with a salary of $30,000, it would take about seven years to just break even with what I paid to go to Duke. Money isn’t everything—right?
Maybe I'll have to live in a tent after graduation, but if that's the case, I will at least have some experience thanks to my time spent in Duke's famous Krzyzewskiville waiting to get into the annual Duke vs. UNC basketball game.
My foray into quasi-graduate level academia.
This semester, I took the capstone course for my policy journalism and media studies certificate with Professor Laura Roselle. For the class, I completed a formal research paper examining and comparing the coverage by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine and Sports Illustrated of the Duke lacrosse case in 2006 and the Virginia lacrosse tragedy in 2010.
I chose the first three months of each case as my time frame and looked at how each article was framed. Framing is a communication scholar’s term for the idea that the media makes aspects of an issue more salient (i.e. accessible) through different modes of presentation and therefore shifts people’s attitudes. I was interested in how the two cases were reported, so I didn’t include opinion columns or editorials. I looked for these five generic frames:
Now that the dust has officially settled on the Duke vs. Alabama football matchup of more than one week ago (this past weekend Alabama continued to exert its dominance over the rest of the college football world while Duke dropped its third straight game), I wanted to look back over my work leading up to and immediately following the most hyped game in Duke’s recent football history.
I had eagerly been awaiting my opportunity to cover the defending national champions and scheduled a sit down interview with Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe the week before the the Crimson Tide rolled into town in order to write a feature detailing his Alabama football days under legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. After the interview, I had enough material to turn my feature idea into a miniseries previewing the matchup, and spoke with Mal Moore, Alabama’s director of athletics, for the second part to add a more balanced perspective. Here’s the tangible results of my reporting:
Overkill for a game that was essentially over within the first 10 minutes of the opening quarter? Perhaps some would argue that. An example of the beat reporter I hope to be after graduation? Most definitely. Dutifully completing my senior at Duke and being a professional-level beat reporter for the paper has been a balancing act—feel free to watch as I can keep juggling both gigs.
My summer will officially end at 2:50 p.m. when I go to my first class of my last year in college. With the start of a new year comes a plethora of opportunities—you can anyone you want to be (why yes, I will take that flier to try out for your a cappella group and Bhangra dance troupe!). Fortunately, though, I know I want to be a journalist, and I have spent the past three summers working to ease the transition from student-journalist to professional, paid, real-person, real-job journalist (by the way, my resume and clips pages are all up to date with this summer’s activities).
While they don’t get paid and normally don’t get published by traditional media outlets during the year, student-journalists are still journalists. As Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center points out in his advise for journalism students blog post, the career of a student-journalist has already begun.
His other advice includes:
UPDATE: Samantha Liss, one of my newest followers on Twitter and recent Missouri journalism school graduate, tweeted a link to this article from a Buffalo newspaper, which tackles this issue from a debt load perspective. Is a journalism graduate program worth many years of student loan payments? The two men interviewed in the article say yes.
Recently, I heard a great analogy, one that you instantly commit to memory and will surely repeat a few times to others:
Journalism is like art. We need someone to pay us to do it, and we’ll create masterpieces.
I’ve made an entire life out of getting someone else to fund what I want to do (thanks Mom and Dad), but I’m sure that eventually I’ll be kicked out of my family’s financial nest and have to fly on my own. So maybe someday I’ll have to make a decision about paying for my own post-graduate school, like Leslie Minora wrote about in her blog post entitled Columbia Journalism School Is Worth Time and Money Even Though It Won’t Make You Rich; There, I Said It.
Minora paid a sticker price of $51,156 for her 10-month program at Columbia Journalism School. The school estimates a total cost of $75,206 when you add in living expenses (food, rent, utilities, travel, personal). If you are thinking monetarily, this was her return on her investment (her words, not mine):
I’m no stranger to a costly education. I will pay (correction: my parents will pay) $51,865 for my final year at Duke. And I, too, am going into journalism, regardless of the practicality of my decision or lack thereof. For a journalism student (and those funding one), money cannot be the main motivator. Instead, these have to be the type of returns used to measure your investment, courtesy of Minora:
Practical from a money standpoint? Nope. An infinitesimal beacon of hope that happiness transcends money? O yes. Keep fighting the good fight, Leslie, and maybe someday we can push our respective shopping carts full of our possessions together in Central Park and reminisce about the myriads of people we’ve talked to, places we’ve seen and events we’ve experienced.
My trip to Fez, Morocco, last November was also priceless. This would be the herd of sheep that almost ran us over on the outskirts of the town.
Duke Chronicle Photo by Maya Robinson
My first story as associate editor for Towerview, the monthly magazine published by Duke’s independent daily student newspaper, The Chronicle, hit the web July 1. It is a narrative feature on Duke’s incoming freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving. With no self-promotion from me, it has received 4,898 hits as of 11:45 p.m. and is the second-most popular story on dukechronicle.com. It has also received 35 “likes” via the Facebook Like button on the page, which is the metric I use to judge its popularity with the target demographic (see my post titled The Facebook Frenemy for more info on the Facebook Like button’s takeover of the web).
The reporting was challenging. It was my first assignment after I completed The Poynter Institute’s College Fellowship, so I was eager to put all of my new reporting tips and tricks to work. Unfortunately, I was in Dallas and St. Petersburg, Florida, while Kyrie and his father were in New Jersey, so all of my interviews were held over the phone. Not ideal. Also not ideal were the fact that my MacBook was in the store for repairs when I needed to write, and that I was on my own to find contact info for Kyrie and whoever else I wanted to talk to for the story. With a copious amount of research and a little luck, I was able to interview Kyrie, his father, Drederick, his high school basketball coach, Kevin Boyle, his AAU coach Sandy Pyonin, and a Duke basketball associate head coach, Chris Collins.
The first tool I used was whitepages.com. Remember that scene from All The President’s Men where the two reporters are pouring over phone books? Whitepages.com is the 21st century equivalent. I found one of the sources there (I won’t say who to protect that person’s privacy), and then he helped me find contact information for a few of the others.
