Heading to Ireland to cover religion

coveringreligion.org

As my Columbia classmates prepare for home, beaches and master’s project work during next week’s spring break, I will be getting on a plane tomorrow to Ireland. I’m going as part of a class of 16 students for Columbia’s “Covering Religion” course, a trip provided through the Scripps Howard Foundation.

The class has taken these trips over spring break for eight years now, led by professor Ari Goldman, former religion reporter for The New York Times. They have traveled to Israel, Russia, Indiana and now for the second year, Ireland.

Never has the class arrived in a new land the midst of such breaking news.

Blogging/reporting hyperlocally for The New York Times

While school is keeping me plenty busy reporting in New York City, one day a week I’m taking the train out to Millburn, N.J., for The New York Times.

I’m fortunate enough to be an intern on a new project the Times just launched called “The Local,” two hyperlocal blogs in Brooklyn and New Jersey. The Times has called the blogs “an experiment” in reporting local news by using a combination of Times staffers, interns and citizen journalists.

If it’s too good to be true

I knew it wouldn’t last.

In October, I blogged about a way to watch my favorite hockey team, the San Jose Sharks, while I was living in New York. Since then, I have taken full advantage of the capability whenever I had the chance, most often with adthe.net, the site with the highest quality video.

The streams helped me follow the Sharks during their best regualar season ever. But this week, my good fortune evaporated. On adthe.net, there were listings for everything from the Lakers game to darts to the Santa Clara vs. Gonzaga game (which I’m watching now).

But hockey? Nowhere to be found.

Newspapers and a daily prayer

One of the more unique features of The Indianapolis Star (unique for a Californian like me anyway) was the daily prayer in the newspaper. A tradition that went back decades, The Star had a one-sentence generic prayer on page 2 in each edition, written by a Presbyterian minister who was paid $20 a week.

The paper also features a bible quote in its flag: ” ‘Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’ II Cor. 3.17.”

Click to enlarge.

At the end of 2008, the newspaper decided to stop printing the page 2 prayer as it made other changes to the newspaper (folding Business into the A section, moving the TV listings, etc.). Cutting the prayer triggered a firestorm of reader protest, from upset readers who made the prayer part of a daily routine to others crying out at the undeniable evidence of liberal media bias.

Returning from break…

This blog has been on a bit of haitus since my winter break at school began, but I’m back at schoool so I’ll be back to the blog, too. Look for a couple of new posts in the days and weeks ahead about the second half of J-school, an interesting battle over a tiny bit of newsprint, and some personal news.

Let it snow, let it snow…

New York City had its first real snow of the season today, and for me, it was the first time it actually snowed outside my house.

While I’m sure by the end of winter I’ll be sick of the powdery white stuff, today I was just happy to walk around as the snow settled on the ground.  I’m not in San Jose anymore, that’s for certain.

Of course, the cold weather isn’t limited to the Northeast. In the Bay Area, snow is falling at 2,000 feet on Mt. Hamilton and on Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County. Not to mention, it’s snowing in New Orleans and Las Vegas.

No high school sports in San Jose district?

I saw this story out of the Merc today about the East Side Union High School superintendent’s plan for a budget cutting out all high school sports.

I think it’s unlikely to happen, and may be an attempt to drum up some outside funding for athletics, but it would certainly be quite a blow. This is my district — I went to Santa Teresa for high school — and the thought of not having sports seems like it would kill school morale, espeically at schools like Oak Grove, with a powerhouse football team.

Interestingly, this would have no effect on the sport I played in high school, roller hockey, because we weren’t an “official sport,” but a club. It was a pain when I was there — they refused to broadcast our games on the morning announcements — but it may turn out to be a good thing. I’ll certainly be following this story, and I wonder if more districts will be saying the same thing soon.

A positive development in the recession (except for me)

Photo: tholt.com

One of the things I was looking forward to when I came to New York this year was that I would stop paying for gas at $4 per gallon. Finally, I’d be freed from the $50 fill-ups, instead just burdened with one monthly fee for subways and buses.

Oops.

Sure enough, about as soon as I stopped driving in August gas prices started falling — and fast. Just in time for me to be part of the MTA system, where budget deficits have spurred talk of rate increases.

Spot.Us: Journalism and micro-loan financing

Last week Columbia hosted its “Changing Media Landscape” panel along with Hearst. It featured some top new media journalists, including: Sewell Chan, editor of The New York Times “City Room” blog; Slate’s chairman; a St. Louis Post-Dispatch designer behind the “Papercuts” newspaper layoff blog; a blogger from the multi-lingual European site Cafebabel.com; and then 26-year-old David Cohn, the founder of the new site “Spot.Us.”

Cohn, a one-time Columbia journalism student, won a $340,000 grant last year from the Knight News Challenge, which offers $5 million annually for help developing neighborhood and community news projects.

His Spot.Us project is an innovative site where readers support “community-funded journalism,” paying for enterprise stories they want to see reported.

Election tomorrow: Columbia covering NYC

In another self-promotion bit, the Journalism School is covering the election tomorrow at the site www.columbiajournalist.org/elections.

A good chunk of the school’s students are contributing to the site tomorrow, which features a video broadcast, radio broadcast and new media broadcast airing from 7 p.m. to midnight EST.

There are also six deadline print stories, with corresponding multimedia pieces, which will be up alongside the broadcasts and will be what’s on the page when the dust settles tomorrow night.

I’m working with another reporter for the print story on the presidential race from a New York angle. We file our first story for 7 p.m. deadline as a context and history sort of piece. Then we’ll watch the returns come in and file stories from the campaign election night parties, which are just three blocks apart in Midtown.

I’ll be at McCain NYC headquarters, which is an event put on by the Women’s National Republican Club and the New York Young Republicans.

Check it out: www.columbiajournalist.org/elections.