Electric Fishwrap has moved

I don’t think I’m a great judge of my own writing. Any writer can appreciate this I am sure. You’re trying your best, you spend lots of time on a story and then you have someone else read it and they find things wrong with it.

So this isn’t a top 3 best stories of the year. It’s the top 3 stories where I had the most fun reporting them. I’ll provide links to the stories so you can read them if you like.

3. B-E students see Chehalis devastation firsthand

To anyone who knows me, this is a no-brainer. I love writing about the weather. I really like getting out of the office and I love creating audio companion pieces. See my previous post for more commentary.

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Here’s the link to a story I wrote about the Burlington-Edison High School leadership club that went to visit the flood damage in Chehalis for themselves. I really had fun writing this. The audio I really had to throw together fast because only one person at the company currently has the ability to convert files from one format to another (that will soon change).

First off it’s always great to go and see the students doing stuff instead of phone interviews. I’ve always believed you get more out of seeing things in the classrooms and observing.

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I’ve been incredibly busy. Shopping for various family members, working ~8 hours a day, trying to fit an hour in the gym every day, and spending time with Eric really cuts into my blogging time. Eric’s on break now, so that means he’s home all the time for a while until he goes back to grad school. Considering normally I only see him about 3 hours during the week (while he’s awake anyway) this is a bit more important than blogging occasionally.

I’ll have another post Saturday about my recent trip to Chehalis though. Chehalis and surrounding areas were devastated by a huge flood after 14 inches of rain and a massive log jam. It was really incredible seeing all of the damage. Hard to describe and I’m sure I’ll have a time of it today when I write the story for Saturday’s paper.

I want to have a regular blog at my paper on my beat within a year. So when the Western Washington SPJ chapter had a training on how to blog, I jumped at the chance.

Sounds silly right? You just write stuff down, tell everyone what you think and post something insubstantial every day right?

No, not at all. Geoff Baker, who writes the Mariners Blog for the Seattle Times, and David Postman, who writes Postman on Politics for the Times, said blogging actually takes up a large part of their day.

Postman, the paper’s chief political reporter, said he almost exclusively writes for the blog and occasionally editors will pull something from the blog and put it in the paper with a header of “Exerpts from the blog.” Blogs are not opinion, at least blogs from newspapers should not be, he said.

“I bring the standards of the paper to the blog, not lower my standard to what is out there,” (I cannot remember which one of them said this, my notes are unclear, but I think either one of them could have said it because they had the same message).

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Everyone knows hindsight is 20-20, and I will try my hand at it for my life.

Ideally I would have learned about multimedia sooner, but I don’t think any of the papers online were even doing it in 1995, when I started college. I am certain that nobody at the college level was even thinking of multimedia as a force to tell stories.

But knowing what I know today, I would have taken the following classes:

• Television broadcasting
• Radio broadcasting
• Web development

I would have done what I could to learn about Flash development. The program was created in 1996, a year after I started at Colorado State University.

But technology has changed a lot since I was in college. Here is what students of today need to learn to be reputable — and hireable — journalists.

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