I'm on leave this week from work and have been trying to fill my time with more than just catching up on the television shows I haven't watched over the last seven weeks.

As part of this I am taking several of the News University courses offered by Poynter. Earlier tonight I completed Beat Basics and Beyond, which I found extremely useful. In fact, I was so impressed by the course that I tried to track down the e-mail address of its creator Steve Buttry. I'm still working on a direct e-mail address for him (and if anyone knows it, I'd love the chance to tell him I appreciated the course.) Nonetheless, my search led my to his Web site where I stumbled upon a map he has made of all the places he has worked. It was very full and it made me want to do a similar project. Keeping in mind that I graduated a few months ago, I made this Google map of where I've worked. What a neat concept. I want to keep adding to this map over time. Any suggestions for what else I could include? I'm thinking about adding journalism conferences and press trips.

One of my favorite things to do is report on a story no one else does. I was sitting in the Missouri Senate today listening to the debate when I keyed in on an interesting discussion between two Senators about only naming highways after dead people because they can't do anything that might embarrass the state in the future. This made me think of the Mark McGwire Highway that runs along a stretch of I-70 outside St. Louis. Without directly referencing him and with very little debate the Senate was voting to change the highway to the Mark Twain Highway.

The editors liked my first line and my brief was sent out on the national wire and the national sports wire. What a great feeling. The story was picked up on ESPN.com. I never expected as a political reporter that I would end up on ESPN. The editor said it was my lede that sold the story.

Here are a few lines from the article and a link to the ESPN site.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The Missouri Senate wants to take away Mark McGwire's highway.

A stretch of Interstate 70 in St. Louis was designated the Mark McGwire Highway in 1999, one year after the Cardinals slugger hit a then-record 70 home runs.

The link to the brief can be found here.

When Journalists Blog: How It Changes What They Do
This survey looks at how blogging has changed journalism. It was put forth by Paul Bradshaw 'a senior lecturer in online journalism and magazines at Birmingham City University’s School of Media in the United Kingdom. He is also the publisher of Online Journalism Blog and a contributor to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.'
 
I find the survey's results about cutting out the middle man particularly interesting. I see sourcing changing daily and I am a fan of using Twitter as a way to cull information from my readers. As in all things journalists can't just rely on blogs, etc to develop sources but it does help. The survey also talked about more stories having 'legs' and reporters being able to return to posts to make corrections and advance the story.

I also found it interesting that a third of respondents only began blogging within the last year. It will be interesting to see the challenges blogging will face within the next few years.

Blogging tips
I am a huge fan of University of Florida Prof. Mindy McAdams. I love the work she does with teaching multimedia.She has put together this slide show about blogging for journalists. If you fall into the one-third of journalists who have recently begun blogging this is useful information for getting started.

Kate Nash has a great column about how bloggers have led her to do her job better. Nash, then a political reporter with the Albuquerque Tribune, wrote this back in 2006. She is now a government reporter with the Santa Fe New Mexican and has her own blog, Green Chile Chatter.

The folks over at The Awl have taken Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers for six major papers and made an interesting graph showing circulation rates since 1990. The New York post has returned to it's 1990 numbers while the Los Angeles Times has seen a rapid decline. I was working for the Times during some of the major layoffs. Soon after I left the national bureau faced several hard cuts and lost many dedicated, hard working and talented reporters.

I enjoy using Google Reader, but once in awhile it gets out of control and I need to play catch up. So, here are some of the posts I've been saving on my Reader.

• Paper Cuts
  Shows a searchable map of newspapers that have stopped producing a print edition between 2007 and 2009. I was devastated by the loss of my hometown paper the Rocky Mountain News so this site hit home for me.
  
• A day in the life of NYTimes.com
  This is a video of site traffic at the NYTimes on the day Michael Jackson died. There is something mesmerizing about the videos. I wonder how many news sites have done an analysis of exactly when readers are likely to hit the site and then used that to determine when to release stories. My campus paper used to have the 12:01 site. I always wondered about the reasoning behind that.
  
• I have my own list of journalism blogs I love, but it is nothing compared to the list produced by Journalistics.
  
• Best of 2009
  Columbia Journalism Review's best stories of 2009
  
• Tracking FOI Requests
  I love working with Freedom of Information issues. This gives some good ways to keep track of the requests you send out. The first comment is something I had never heard of and look forward to using.
  
  

These are the posts I've been holding onto. What were some of your favorite journalism related things this year?

 

Sorry for the lapse in blog posts. I graduated on Dec. 18 and took some time off to be with my family. (I'm lucky to have a job, e-mail me if you want to know where)

Being in school kept me too poor and busy to see a lot of movies. I finally saw 2012 tonight (I guess I should say spoiler alert, but the movie came to theaters so long ago that I struggled to find a showing). I should probably start this post off by saying I love disaster movies, the worse the better. 2012 fit the bill perfectly. California broke off and slid into the ocean, Africa was the only continent left and the last line of the movie was about bed wetting. So, what does this have to do with journalism? Through out the whole film people were looking to broadcast news to help them understand what was happening. Most of the time the TV station only stopped covering the crisis when it was wiped out.

The film made me think of a lot of things.
--I hope the end of the world doesn't happen soon, but if it does I want to cover it.
--While we may fear that people don't care about the news anymore the public still turns to us in times of crisis.

Just a tad bit of food for thought courtesy of Hollywood. By the way, I still liked the Godzilla movies better.

Ah, the holiday season. Beside the first day of bill prefiling and my birthday, it is my favorite time of the year. This post doesn't deal with the future of journalism in any way. I'm getting work clothes this year, but get your favorite journalist a kitchy present!

Here are my favorite journalism related gifts found online. Yup, I'm that geek.

• Shirts for the designer or developer in your life
• A full range of journalism related gear
• Cool journalism stuff from Zazzle
  

Today I wanted to post a letter to a former student written by Prof. Phill Brooks, one of my mentors. Phill is the director of the Missouri School of Journalism's state government reporting program and he is also the statehouse correspondent for 1120/KMOX. His letter compares the struggle of the journalism profession to religions. I think he addresses a few issues that our profession needs to resolve. Enjoy.
--Sarah

Much of this ongoing discussion about the economic challenges facing journalism has struck me as missing a fundamental distinction between the concepts of profession and of industry.

These discussions about the future of journalism usually are framed within the context of the financial problems and technological issues facing the communications industry.

 Journalism, however, is not an industry.  Our profession transcends market, technology and even medium.  Instead, our profession is defined by a commitment to inform society about the issues of importance.  It is a service to society that has existed throughout much of recorded human history, pursued from many different venues (what we might, today, call industries).  

 If the current industries upon which journalism now functions are failing, then our profession (once again) needs to move elsewhere.  Our primary objective should not be survival of those industries.  We have a quite different calling that is independent of any particular industry, medium or technology.

There is a fascinating parallel for me between the current outside pressures on journalism and the pressures that were faced by some of the world’s greatest belief systems in their formative years.

When early Christians faced persecution during their early years, they did not seek ways to accommodate or to adjust to outside pressures.  They did not negotiate with outsiders who did not respect their beliefs.  Rather, they went underground (sometimes literally) and, among themselves, developed a stronger, collective sense of commitment, meaning, purpose and dedication.

A religious analogy to journalism is more appropriate than it might seem.  Among those of us who have devoted our lives to this profession, we often talk about journalism in religious terms. 

My school's founding dean, Walter Williams, defined journalism with a "creed" in which he repeatedly used the word "believe." A later dean of our school, Jim Atwater, termed his relationship to journalism as a "calling."  

A former associate dean of my school and one of our profession’s leading ethics philosophers, Ed Lambeth, based an entire book on the concept of "commitment" in journalism.  And, among ourselves in the profession, we sometimes refer to "the faith" when talking with each other about our standards and our sense of purpose.

Like early Christians, like early Muslims, like early followers of Buddha and like those of the Jewish faith – we journalists now find our "beliefs," our standards and our practices under question. 

These great religions and philosophies of the world evolved and strengthened during their periods of adversity.  Maybe our profession too could use our period of adversity as an opportunity to define a profession that has meaning through the ages.

Let the institutions of business and communications struggle with how profit-making media companies can maintain their profits, how their industries can better entertain the next generation or how the telecom industries can make bigger profits with their new technologies.

We in the profession of journalism have a different purpose.  And, for the next generation of those who feel this calling to our profession, we need to clearly define what makes our profession different from an industry.
 Prof. Phill Brooks
Director, State Government Reporting Program Missouri Digital News  Missouri School of Journalism
Statehouse Correspondent, KMOX