Heading to Ireland to cover religion

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

First Brooklyn published article

This week I had my first successfully freelanced article from New York publisehd in The Brooklyn Paper. It’s about neighbors complaints over school trash that sits outside on the sidewalk all day. At one point, the neighbors got so annoyed they tossed the trash back onto school grounds. Read the story here.

Interviewing Elmo

My teacher divvied out the items on the AP calendar, giving me the assignment to cover “Elmo Live.” The new holiday toy was being released today at the Times Square Toys “R” Us.
Now, I wasn’t initially thrilled about the event or its 9:30 a.m. start time, but that was all erased once I [...]

Making your own luck

When I tell people about the story I did on cocaine use at Santa Clara, they often ask how in the world I got that story.
I usually respond with one word:
“Luck.”
In some ways, that’s true. I was lucky I found a dealer willing to talk with me on the record so long he was anonymous. [...]

Spinspotter: Good idea, badly executed

Two weeks ago, my former Santa Clara journalism professor Barbara Kelley posted on her blog about a new tool called Spinspotter, www.spinspotter.com.
The tool works by giving you, the user, the power to mark with red highlights anything in news articles that looks like spin using “spinoculars.” You give the “biased” passages a rating from 1 [...]

NYU professor limiting blogging about class

I just happened upon this link on Romenekso that caught my eye, which was occurring at the other New York J-School, NYU.
The story is about a girl in a “Generation Y” class who blogs about the behind the times attitudes in her class.
Long story short, the professor gets upset that she is being criticized, [...]