Electric Fishwrap

Read the study here. This pretty much sums up my experience:

Reporters who cover education believe overwhelmingly that the beat requires specialized knowledge. Yet 39 percent of education reporters surveyed in February 2008 by the Hechinger Institute say they’ve received no such training …

When I arrived at the SVH in September 2007, I had no idea what SIP, AYP, ELL or IEP stood for, let alone what they really meant. But I learned (School Improvement Plan, Adequate Yearly Progress, English Language Learners and Individualized Education Program).  My training consisted of meeting with people and using Google. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Hey, I’m a resourceful person, I can find things out.

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Monday, my paper published the longest story I’ve ever written. It was longer than the 30th anniversary piece on Colorado’s most deadly natural disaster, the Big Thompson flood, and longer still than the longest piece I’ve ever written about a woman with West Nile paralysis. I followed her around for five months to treatments and therapy, on several occasions I drove to her house an hour away from the newsroom and attended church with her and her family.

The story I wrote about the upcoming Anacortes School Bond stands at about 67 inches. Initially the story was in the 90+ inch category, but my two editors brought it within reason. And while the story is not filled with emotion and drama as the other two are, the story serves one of the most important roles of a journalist: the government watchdog.

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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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So far I’m enjoying education reporting. But by far the hardest part is not dealing with picky parents or paranoid officials. No. The hardest part is the kids.

Of course, children are notoriously hard to interview. Younger children tend to clam up or just answer “yes,” “no” or shrug their shoulders to questions. But the hard part, for me, is who I don’t interview. Whenever I go on assignment many of the kids are excited that a reporter is in their midst. Some of them are shy (which is the hard to interview part) but a few come up to me and ask to be interviewed. Or, worse yet, I have a teacher or official who asks me to interview 10 students individually.

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Here in Washington State, there was a ballot issue called 4204. Simply put, school district levy elections (to pay for operations and property maintenance) would pass with a simple majority (50 percent + 1) instead of a super majority (60 percent). In the past few years, many Washington school districts have had their levy elections pass the simple majority test but fall short of 60 percent.

On Election Day, results were tabulated across the state, and it appeared that 4204 was going down (roughly 48 percent to 52 percent). But a last-minute get-out-the-vote surge, continuing at this moment, seems to bring the election into the “too close to call” range (see the Secretary of State’s Web page for 4204). As you can see, only 2,620 votes separate the schools from a win here.

With more than 178,000 votes left to count, 58,000 of them in King County (where there’s a 50-percent approval rating) it doesn’t take a statistician to see where this is going.

Yes, Election Day is like the Super Bowl for journalists (well, except sports journalists). I’ve always loved the excitement of it. But here in Washington the results can trickle in until several days after Election Day, because you’re only required to have your ballot postmarked by then.