Onward!

Orientation is officially over (not a moment too soon), and we have moved on to the "August schedule," which is comprised of RWI and a whole bunch of one-off lectures and events. After Labor Day, we will move to a regular fall schedule that includes RWI plus an elective (called RWII), a five-week Skills class, our Master's Project, and two plenary classes -- Critical Issues in Journalism and Journalism, the Law and Society. Meanwhile, the August schedule is designed to introduce us to the city, to our beats, and to the fundamentals of street reporting (in the reverse order, in my case).

Today's one-off lecture, given by Professor Andie Tucher, was a three-hour talk on the history of American journalism. Butt-numbing seat aside, it was a great crash course for someone like me, who is playing catch-up on the context front. She traced three centuries of developments and trends, focusing a great deal on four big stories of the 20th century -- World War II, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate -- and their influences on the journalism we know today.

I loved getting the big-picture perspective, augmented by the readings she'd given us: Nellie Bly's first exposé (on an insane asylum for women, published in 1887), Ernie Pyle reporting from a WWII battlefield in Italy, Relman Morin on the first day of integration at Central High School in Little Rock, and Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre. Tucher's talk was rich with examples, vivid stories, and props that included Ernie Pyle reimagined as a GI Joe doll and early examples of photojournalism from Life magazine. She also gave us the names of close to two dozen influential journalists from the distant and recent past -- a mini crash course in and of itself -- to add to our ever-growing recommended reading lists.

If that wasn't enough, today was also our first RWI news drill. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this (drill is not a confidence-inspiring word), but it turned out to have a very specific methodology: with Professor Padwe feeding us information piecemeal, we had to write three versions of a story, each longer than the last, based on what we knew at each juncture. We took notes by hand and then wrote the stories on our computers while he walked around the room, reading and editing over our shoulders -- the verbal equivalent of a red pencil. I'd never been edited in real time before -- it was slightly unnerving but quite effective.

We're going to have one of these drills every week, but this one was intended mainly for diagnostic purposes. I feel good about my peformance, based both on my own assessment and on Professor Padwe's comments. I think he was expecting, given my lack of experience, that I'd be facing a pretty steep learning curve in news writing. In fact, I actually found the whole exercise somewhat exhilarating. Working against a deadline was strangely liberating -- no time to agonize over every word. (OK, much less time.)

I'm looking forward to getting my marked-up stories back, either tomorrow or Monday, even though it may be a very humbling experience. One of the reasons people come to this school is for rigorous editing -- the kind that has all but disappeared from real-world newsrooms because of time and cost pressures. So I'm going to look at every edit as a return on my investment.

I'm not sure how I managed to become sleep-deprived after only two days of school (hmm, could it be the late-night blog entries? the hourlong commute each way?), but I am about to face-plant. Fortunately, the rest of the week will be less taxing -- just one lecture tomorrow and then the day off on Friday (where "off" translates to "spent reading from sunup to sundown").

Quotes of the day:

You're entering a profession with a real image problem. -- Andie Tucher

I'm big on getting people out of their mental ZIP codes. -- Sandy Padwe

You're going to have fun. That's the beauty of it. -- Sandy Padwe