SPJ award, Florida Leader mention, AOL

I have some good news to share: I won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists in the category of editorial writing. Also, the FLorida Leader, a magazine that each year takes a look at Florida’s college newspapers, had some nice things to say about my section. (Not to mention the weird AOL-thing)

(more details inside)
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Kerry and Edwards, two Johns come to St. Petersburg

It all happened Wednesday night and it was the most fun, chaos and excitement I have seen on the campaign trails yet. in my humble opinion, this campaign has begun to run on full steam.
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BBC’s Frank Gardner attacked

This hit surprisingly close to home: The BBC reports their correspondent Frank Gardner, along with a cameramen who sadly did not survive the incident, was shot at in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and is now in intensive care. link

I’ve been following Gardner’s coverage over the last several years, so it was the first time that a journalist was attacked that I actually knew. Scary world out there. Being a member of the press does not seem to protect you from anything anymore, it actually seems to make you a target. (Don’t worry, Mom, I have no intention to go to Saudi Arabia in the near future.)

detention of UK journalist coming to the U.S.

This article in The Guardian scared the shit out of me: link

It’s the first hand account of a UK journalist who was flying to Los Angeles to do some interviews for an article she was writing for the British paper The Guardian. Because she did not have a journalist visa (!) she was detained, strip searched, and held for hours in a prison cell before being send back to London.

This article had me alternate between fuming over the civic injustice of what was being done to this member of the press, to being scared out of my wits. This is “the land of the free?” How can we say this with a straight face if we detain people from our strongest ally because they are reporters? Or detain reporters, period? What would we say if Britain did this to our journalists?

I am absolutely speechless.

A day full of Kerry

Senator John Kerry made a visit to our campus today. You may have heard of him? I covered the event for our paper and “somehow” found my way into the press people that travel with him. When Kerry was taking questions, I took the chance and asked him a question live on CNN (I didn’t find out it was live until after the fact).

Here is a clip of me stammering out a question to Senator Kerry: file in .wav form

Hey, it’s a start! Maybe next time I can add a “Thank you, Mr President,” to it at the end. I did get the last question after all.

And yes, the image above is indeed his autograph. Long story short: I was standing near the ropes to find out where the Q&A for the press would be when he came around signing people’s stuff. He mistook my reporters notepad that I was holding for a request. And who am I to turn him down, right?

SPJ award

Well the verdict is in… I won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists. I am at their yearly regional convention in Ft. Lauderdale for the weekend and placed third in their editorial writing category.

What kind of bummed me out is that I looked at the other entries and didn’t really like them that much. But I guess I am not exactly objective. After all, if I didn’t think I should write my edits the way I do, I wouldn’t. But hey, nice to get some sort of recognition. Even if I am not sure how serious to take the whole thing.

Kucinich photo and sound files

As the opinion column I wrote this week (link) showed, I had the chance not only to attend a guest lecture Congressman Dennis Kucinich gave here at USF, but also to ask him some questions afterwards. He may not have a shot at winning the presidency but he is a competing presidential candidate and I got to talk to him. Pretty cool. (photo and sound files inside)
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best of procrastination 2003

Tonight I finally gathered the columns I had been meaning to pick for about a month, cut them out, pasted them on letter sized sheets of paper and dropped them off at the post office to enter for a $1,000 scholarship in a competition. Naturally not everything went smoothly…
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Puzzle

Some people in the newsroom played Hang Man earlier today and left us a puzzle. So we left them one too. (photo of puzzle inside)
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Quite a day after all

I just talked to ABC news anchor Peter Jennings after he gave a lecture on campus and am writing a column on deadline for tonight. Not a bad day for a day that I was originally going to take off. More about this later…

New York Times

This really made my day: Two of my editorials were picked up by The New York Times Web site.

The first one was the one about Britney Spears’ freaky stalker suing her for not allowing him to stalk her. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here. (Or on the ‘real’ paper’s Web site here)

The other one (which I had forgotten to post to this page but added a few minutes ago here) can be found here on the NY Times site and is about a dictionary including the term “McJob” in their next edition. Naturally McDonald’s didn’t like that too much.

I think I earned myself a beer. Excuse me while I have a cold one.

Cheap Drugs

I hate the approach most public service announcements take. Most of them do not bother with explaining how and why smoking, drugs, etc are bad for you, they just go for shock value.

Last night, while working on a graphic for our paper (I now fill in as graphic artist on Friday’s), I was looking for clip art and found some really bad drug related stuff. So I whipped up this poster…
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Breaking News

Rob Brannon has a girlfriend. (And yes, this is an in-joke)

Breaking news, breaking things

I was writing a column on why we need a “no calling list” blocking telemarketer calls to those that do not wish to get them tonight and people kept interrupting me. That’s just the nature of the newsroom though, and I did not think much about it. It did, however, mean that it took me about 2 1/2 hours to finish the column.

After I was done I thought “better check if I have this one fact right” and put “telemarketer do not call list” into Google. A lot of sites popped up but the thing that luckily caught my eye was Google’s news service and a story that had been posted 20 minutes before.

The “do not call list” which had been road-blocked, was out of a sudden in effect. That of course mean that I had to rewrite the whole column.

greek or greek?

Last week our editor in chief wrote a pretty in-depth story about a gay fraternity on campus. It was a pretty good story, but nevertheless had us cracking jokes about him all week, as both our two last male editors in chief came out during their term.

The headline for his story was unintentionally funny though as his parents quickly pointed out when he went home over the weekend.

The stories title “should gays go greek?” was not meant to have any sexual connotation, but apprently “going greek” is a somewhat outdated term for “having anal sex.”

Naturally, he will never hear the end of this one.

Student Government bias in impeachment remains a concern

The current Student Government impeachment hearings have to be free of bias to ensure students at the University of South Florida are fairly represented.
Editorial
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Best fill ad ever

When newspapers have room to spare they usually have some ads on hold that they can stick in there called “fill ads.” They usually feature some good cause or non profit organization’s message and are run free of charge.

Since I had some room in my section tonight this fill ad made a debut in the paper. (image inside)
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And hell freezes over…

AP, via The St Pete Times has this quote by George W. Bush:

“We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11″ attacks.

What’s next? Are they going to admit there are probably no WMDs? Well, one can dream…

update: Rumsfeld said similar things Tuesday. link

new category

I’ve decided to start this new category on my page to use it to talk about stuff that happens on my job. I figured errors or anecdotes from an opinion editor struggling to (and failing as of late) bring a section out on deadline every night, as well as tips about writing columns and editorials, will be useful to some people out there. I wish I had known some of this stuff before I started, that’s for sure.