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)
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Continue reading about SPJ award, Florida Leader mention, AOL
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.
Continue reading about Kerry and Edwards, two Johns come to St. Petersburg
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 [...]
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 [...]
Continue reading about detention of UK journalist coming to the U.S.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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…
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)
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…
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 [...]
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 [...]
Rob Brannon has a girlfriend. (And yes, this is an in-joke)
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
Continue reading about Student Government bias in impeachment remains a concern
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 [...]
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
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, [...]
