Take Home Message

So, it's that time of year. The first time home. I know exactly how it's going to go.

Going home will be cool for the first couple of days. My family will love me. There'll be hugs, Christmas five days into it and lots and lots of homemade food. Awesome.

And then in that space between the end of the holidays and the time we go back, some cold Saturday morning in January, my Dad will sit down with me on the couch and drop a seemingly innocuous question into the silent room.

"So, what did you learn in your first semester?"

Now, just like any test question, you'll do fine with this if you have an answer ready to roll, like you've thought about it for a while and could sum it up three sentences or less. Old man just wants to know if the tuition dollars are returning on investment.

The problem is that I probably can't do it in three sentences or less. I've learned a lot this semester about journalism, convergence, writing and just being a reporter in society in general.

I learned a lot about convergence journalism through my FIG class. I've learned that technology is hurtling like an asteroid at the sleepy planet that is conventional, Cronkhite/Hearst/Woodward and Bernstein journalism. We're feeling the pebbles raining down as it descends on us through the job layoffs at your local broadsheets and the sudden popping up of news Web sites as the only viable media in a number of markets, but its going to rock our world very shortly here. There will be a day in our lives when newspapers will be as obsolete as typewriters, I now believe.

That said, I'm currently working for a hard copy newspaper, although it has an online version, the increasingly common escape pod. The lessons I've learned on the job there are ones you'll learn regardless of your medium and they are essential. For space, I'll sum it up like this: call everyone as early in the morning as possible, expect that they will take all day to get back to you with comment, be willing to ask stupid questions to verify basic, essential information and be the most friendly, flexible guy in the room. After a couple dozen issues with the Maneater, I can tell you that you have to do these things or the story won't happen. And then someone above you will be mad. When you do them and do them every time, you can pull off stories people need and then other folks are happy. The Maneater, like any paper, is a lot better place when people are happy.

So, the take home message: work hard in FIG, get on the Maneater ASAP and work hard there and make notes for every assignment you do about what you could've done better.

I think that's a pretty good answer for that day on the couch.