Electric Fishwrap has moved

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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Yesterday I went to speak at a high school journalism class at Sedro-Woolley High School. First off I really hate public speaking but I also like spreading what I know and helping when I can. So when the journalism teacher there, Bridget Heffele, asked me to come in, I felt I had to. I don’t know many people in every district so I figure it’s good to get in some face time when I can.

I introduced myself and gave a bit of my background, and then I asked how many of them read a daily newspaper, either online or in print.

Nothing. Not a one. One girl asked if MSNBC.com counted. I revised my question and asked if any of them read news sources. Only about five in a class of 15, and four of them read MSNBC.com (for story ideas for their paper) to the BBC (one student seemed to want a world perspective).

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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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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.