John on Deadline

Holy mackerel. I opened my paper this morning to see my scowling face staring back at me. (Click on image to get a clearer view.)

Yes, this promotional ad for the Indy Star appeared on page A11. It was a bit strange to be sitting at my breakfast table, drinking coffee, turning the pages, and then see my tough-guy look, along with a photo of Tim Evans, who looked a lot nicer.

But after I finished with my double-take, I read the ad closely. It was about our investigative coverage of the Indiana State Fair tragedy last summer.

I have to say, that was a huge story. And we covered the hell out of it.

The accident was horrific. On a blustery night at the main grandstands, the massive stage rigging collapsed in high winds and fell forward onto the crowd. Seven people died. Dozens more were badly hurt.

I was part of the investigative team at The Star, under the direction of Alvie Lindsay, that tried to figured out what happened and why.

But even before we did that, our breaking news team was all over the story. The collapse happened late in the evening, right on our deadline. We had little time to get fancy: just get the facts and images. Fortunately, we had a reporter and photographer on the scene, covering the concert. They saw the rigging topple over, and captured it for the next day’s paper.

Bobby King, one of our best writers, was called into the office to write the story from the phoned-in reports. He was working on tight deadline but crafted a wonderful story.

The next day, Sunday, investigative reporter Tim Evans came in and began digging into the story. His story for Monday appeared under the headline: Could collapse have been prevented? It began:

It’s a troubling question in the midst of tragedy but one that state officials must now try to answer: Was there something that could have been done to avoid the deadly catastrophe that took place Saturday at the Indiana State Fair?

On Sunday, various state agencies began the sobering task of trying to explain just how five people were killed and 45 others were injured when an overhead stage rigging came crashing down on people waiting for the start of a Sugarland concert.

Other reporters also began writing mini profiles of the victims, covering the post-accident press conferences and interviewing witnesses.

Here is what our Monday package looked like:

On Monday, Heather and I were pulled into the story. We teamed up with Tim and made it our mission to dig deep.

Our job was to find out everything we could about the stage rigging: what kind of material was used, who designed it, who erected it, who inspected it and anything interesting we could find out about any of those people.

After spending a few hours bothering every state official we could find, and interviewing all kinds of experts, we came up with a surprising finding. The rigging had never been inspected, due to an odd state law that exempts rigging and scaffolding from building inspections.

Our story began:

If you’re wondering which Indiana agency regulates the massive stage rigging at the State Fairgrounds, the answer is apparently none of them.

If you’re wondering how often the structures are inspected by the government, the answer is apparently never.

The Indiana Department of Homeland Security, which inspects buildings, elevators and amusement park rides, does not regulate outdoor stages and did not inspect the stage at the Indiana State Fair before heavy winds toppled the heavy structure onto a crowd Saturday night.

Here’s part of the package, which began on the bottom of page A1:

On Tuesday, we pushed forward in another direction. We wanted to know what exactly happened on the night of the disaster, and why.

For days, state officials had been blaming the accident and high winds on “a freak act of God.”

We decided to do a tick-tock story. When was the weather alert sounded? When did officials begin evacuating people? When did the stage rigging collapse?

We found the officials had delayed for precious minutes:

Emergency responders nationwide know what a National Weather Service warning means: Take cover. Immediately.

But that wasn’t the message Indiana State Fair officials delivered to concertgoers when they received that warning — the most serious alarm the National Weather Service can sound — at 8:39 p.m. Saturday. Instead, fair officials waited six minutes and then told 12,000 Sugarland fans a very different message: The show would go on.

Here’s how the package looked:

While our investigative coverage was running, other reporters from around the newsroom — metro, features and sports — were chasing their own angles for daily and the weekend. The Star, I am proud to say, “flooded the zone” and gave readers days and weeks of meaty information.

Here is one of my favorite human-interest stories from the week, written by summer intern Alex Campbell:

For our investigation team, we needed to push the story the story forward again. Tim, Heather and I spent a few days look around the country to see whether other state fairs had better safety procedures, and how many had temporary outdoor stages like Indiana had.

We discovered the numerous other states had tougher regulations on outdoor stages. Several state fairs had permanent outdoor stages to avoid the possibility of a disaster.

This is how our story began:

The Beatles played on an open-air, temporary stage at the Indiana State Fair in 1964.

So did Diana Ross and the Supremes (1968), New Kids on the Block (1989), Garth Brooks (1992) and hundreds of other acts over the years.

But now, some officials are beginning to wonder whether the decades-old era of a temporary stage at the State Fair should end.

In the wake of the Aug. 13 disaster at the fairgrounds, where high winds toppled the stage rigging, crushing fans waiting to hear the country duo Sugarland, some say it might be time to consider following the lead of Iowa, Illinois and other states that have permanent outdoor stages.

And here is how the package looked:

Our investigation continued stories over many weeks, and involved open-record requests, digging through documents, doing interviews and much general reporting.

All in all, we found that emergency plans were inadequate, communications were slipshod, the construction was below standard and oversight by the state fair commission was a joke.

When two official teams of investigators, hired by the state, gave their report months later, that’s exactly what they found too. Here’s the Star’s coverage of that:

Last month, we were recognized for our coverage with a first-place statewide award for investigative reporting by the Society of Professional Journalists.

We won other awards for fair coverage too, including first place for breaking news and first place for feature reporting.

And today, we had a nice house ad, right in our own paper. (Remember that scowling photo of me at the top?)

Heather Gillers

I’m just sorry to say that Heather Gillers wasn’t mentioned in that ad. A few months ago, she left The Star to take a job as an investigative reporter with the Chicago Tribune. I guess we don’t mention people who don’t work here any more in our ads.

So Heather, here you go. This award has your name on it too.

Congrats to all the Indiana journalists who took home awards tonight from the Society of Professional Journalists banquet — especially my colleagues on the Indy Star investigation and enterprise team — Tim Evans, Bobby King, Scott Elliott, Alex Campbell and Heather Gillers, along with editor Alvie Lindsay.

I won four awards:

* First Amendment Award for extensive use of open-records laws to expose inappropriate dealings betweeen Indiana utility regulators and Duke Energy Corp. executives.

* First Place, investigative reporting (three-person team, with Tim Evans and Heather Gillers) for exposing widespread problems at the Indiana State Fair following a structural collapse that killed seven people.

* Second Place, investigative reporting, for exposing conflicts of interest between Duke Energy and state regulators.

* Third Place, non-deadline reporting, for coverage of Indianapolis Power & Light Co.’s exploding manholes.

Thanks to my editors, Greg Weaver, Alvie Lindsay and Steve Berta. And of course, thanks to the SPJ judges and board members.

******

* Kara Kenney of WRTV Channel 6, who was named Indiana Journalist of the Year for overall body of work. Speaking as last year’s winner, enjoy the ride, Kara, and congrats!

* Danielle Paquette of Indiana University and Alberto Pimienta of Ball State University, co-winners of the Indiana Student Journalist of the Year award. You have great careers ahead of you.

For a complete list of the SPJ awards, see here: http://spjcontest.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/SPJ-Indiana-2011Contest_Winners1.pdf

I’ve attended my share of journalism conferences over the years. After a while, the formats get predictable: panel discussions, a lunchtime speaker, Q&A with big-name journalists, lots of PowerPoint and maybe a hands-on computer session.

But the SABEW conference in Indy last weekend was a first, at least for me.

We got a Broadway showtune.

We saw this entertaining and educational video on Saturday during during a session on how to make complex stories understandable.

The session was presented by Jake Bernstein, a finance reporter at ProPublica, who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (along with colleague Jesse Eisinger) last year for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices.

Jake Bernstein of ProPublica

Bernstein talked about the challenge of taking an extremely complex topic and making it interesting to everyday readers.

Yes, his subject was about as complex as they come. He and Eisinger examined thousands of documents concerning toxic mortgage-based instruments, especially those sold by a hedge fund called Magnestar. The material was dense and sometimes overwhelming, Bernstein, admitted.

But they managed to boil it down to an understandable level.

One way was to team with radio’s This American Life and Planet Money. Together, they explained the whole issue in an engaging way, narrative way. One part was to create a Broadway showtune modeled after “The Producers” that boiled down the whole issue into two minutes of toe-tapping fun.

The video went viral on YouTube and drew tens of thousands of extra readers to the ProPublica series, Bernstein said.

“We just need to be very creative about how we get these stories out,” he said.

Here are some other tips that Bernstein served up to journalists at the SABEW session:

* Don’t be afraid to go back to your sources a dozen times if necessary to make sure you understand the material.

* Declare war on jargon. Be ruthless with your own copy. Write in definitions.

* The more complex the idea, the sharper and slower your prose needs to be.

* Start writing early and be prepared to do lots of rewriting. He said he didn’t get a clear focus on his own series until he had done several drafts.

With the Super Bowl about to hit Indianapolis, here’s a huge question: Is the city ready to shuttle 150,000 or so out-of-towners between hotels, restaurants, the stadium and other hotspots?

This will be the acid test on Indy’s third-rate transit system. The city has no rail, a terrible bus system, a balkanized cab system and a sprawling metro area.

If we can’t ferry all these people around, thousands of people could leave town with a bad taste in their mouth. The city could suffer a huge blow in its efforts to land major conventions and events.

When you think about it, transit just might be the Achilles heel of Indy, and the city’s ability to host mega-events.

So I tackled the issue on two fronts in a recent package of front-page stories.

First, I did a deep examination of the city’s transit system, looking at how many cabs per 10,000 people we have (answer: about 3.9) and comparing that to other big cities. I talked about the long debate this city has had in whether to expand bus service and build a rail system.

Then I talked to key players to find out how they planned to fill in the gaps to meet the huge demand in rental cars, limos and cab service. I also attended a session of the city’s “Super Service Training” — a 90-minute program which was combination pep talk and battle plan to let all cabbies know about road closings and transportation options.

For this part of the story, fellow Indy Star reporter and I also talked to former Super Bowl planning folks in Florida and Texas to see how they handled the craziness. I ordered photos, maps and graphics of Indy’s transit plan.

You can read that part of the story here.

Second, I spent a whole lot of time riding cabs.

The idea was to write a first-person story about how easy it is to catch a cab in Indy. I did it every possible way: hailing cabs on the corner, walking to hotel cab stands, dialing a cab for a ride from a restaurant, ordering a cab a day in advance to pick me up at home, etc.

I found out that it’s almost impossible to hail a cab from a street corner, and that unless you want to ride to the airport or downtown, lots of cab drivers have no idea how to get anywhere else.

You can read that story here.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a deep, narrative feature story.

But after sitting through a 70-minute workshop on Saturday led by Pulitzer-winning feature writer Tom French, I’m inspired to give it another whack.

French is a journalism prof at Indiana University who specializes in long feature stories.

He perfected his craft at the St. Petersburg Times, where he spent more than 20 years and won a Pulitzer for a long, gripping tale on the horrendous murder of three women whose bodies were found in Tampa Bay.

French gave firsthand tips to a crowd of more than 100 people attending his workshop at the Hoosier State Press Association.

I sat in the front row and took notes as fast as I could.

Here are some of the highlights.

* The single hardest thing journalists do is come up with good story ideas. Too many journalists tend to settle for average, boring, predictable stories: something tried and true, familiar, sometimes hackneyed. These kinds of ideas, even if executed perfectly, result only in an average results.

* On the other hand, a surprising, original, offbeat idea ”is like gold,” French said. Even if you execute it only so-so, it will often yield a pretty good story.

* Therefore, writers need to be much more rigorous at the beginning of the process, at the idea stage, discarding mediocre ideas and trying harder to generate good ideas.

* A topic is not a feature story, he said. It’s only the beginning of a story. You have to zoom in. “The economy is not a story I would read. A guy out of work for two years is a story I would read.”

* When you discuss the story with other people, does it put them to sleep, or give them a jolt? Good ideas crackle with electricity.

* Good themes are survival, greed, redemption, success, failure, effort, hope, change. Within those themes, find the blood, sweat and tears, the real people who will bring the stories alive.

* Ask yourself: What’s at stake here? And who has the most at stake here? Get to the heart of the issue. Find the people with the most on the line. Then tell that story.

* When telling the story, think about the “ladder of abstraction,” and use it often. The ladder of abstraction is a concept that drives great story telling. The bottom of the “ladder” represents tangible things and events, such as “I am sitting at a computer, updating my blog and drinking a warm Coke.”  As you go up a ladder, you move from specifics to more general things. You move from blogging to communicating, to sharing ideas, to working on your career, to trying to survive in the tough world of journalism, etc. All of those rungs add shading to the story.

* Go for action, not people commenting about action. That means you need to describe the actual event as it happens, or reconstruct it afterward, not just have talking heads blathering about it.

* To do this, think like a photographer who is always trying to line up the right shot. Where will the action be? What is the picture? What is the story? Be there, and get it.

* Don’t go into a story with your mind mind up. Go in with a question you want to answer. Then bust your ass chasing that question.

Here’s a video I found of Tom offering advice to feature writers. It’s well worth the watching.

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Of course, Tom French did more than just throw out a bunch of advice and bullet points. He illustrated each point with four or five examples, some from his own reporting, some from his students’ work, some from the wide world of journalism.

He was a masterful story-teller. As far as I could tell, he had everyone’s full attention. You can see why he was leading that session. And why he has won a Pulitzer for feature writing.

But I could saw another side of Tom, too, over the weekend.

The evening before the seminar, I shared a table at a restaurant with him, along with three other journalists and my wife. We were part of a larger group of about 25 people, all seated at adjoining tables. The purpose of the get-together was to relax and socialize, because in the morning, all of us would be presenting or moderating at the conference. (I presented a session on watchdog journalism.)

After spending two hours on Friday evening having dinner and schmoozing with Tom, I could immediately sense why he was a top-notch feature journalist.

He was fun to listen to, but he actually spent more time listening than talking. He spent more time complimenting and questioning others about their stories than talking about his stories. He drew people in. He got people to talk. He had a way of putting people at ease and sharing information.

If you spend enough time listening to people, and getting them to open up, like Tom did, you are bound to hear some great stories. You are bound to get people to trust you. You are bound to do great journalism.

Thanks for the lessons, Tom — both at dinner and at the conference.

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My own little session on Saturday went well, I think.

I spent 25 minutes talking about how I chased and exposed the Duke Energy scandal over many months, using thousands of public records. I used PowerPoint to show some of the documents and a few the stories I wrote.

My co-presenter, Kristy Deer of the Greenfield Daily Reporter, then told how she exposed a hoax at her local school district, which was fudging  graduation statistics. About 60 people attended our session.

Meanwhile, in the next room, Tom French was leading another session on feature writing.

I wish I could have been in both rooms at once.

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Getting to the bottom of a story can result in a mountain of paper. Today, I tried to figure out just how much.

Over the  past year,  I’ve filed nearly two dozen open-records requests with government agencies to find out what was  going on at Duke Energy’s Edwardsport power plant, one of the most expensive and troubled capital projects in Indiana history.

Every few weeks, one government office or another calls me and says I can pick up more records.

After a while, here’s what the stack of paper looks like.

I would guess there are more than 5,000 sheets of paper here.  I stacked up all the paper today while cleaning up my desk on a slow day after Thanksgiving. It has to be at least four feet high.

I have read every sheet of paper in this stack at least three times — and some of them more than a dozen times. It takes a lot of reading to figure out what it all means, and how everything connects. I racked up a lot of migraine headaches and ink-stained fingers. And a lot of heart-pounding eureka moments.

Just for fun, here are some of my original requests and response cover letters.

And here are some of the stories I have written from all that paperwork.

Moral of the story: Paper is a reporter’s best friend. And worst enemy.

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Want to spend a few hours hitting golf balls with Congressman Mike Pence, a GOP candidate for Indiana governor?

No problem. For $2,500, you can shoot 18 holes with Pence at the Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia. And while there, you can rub shoulders with Larry Mize, a former Masters champion, the fundraiser’s headline celebrity.

Or maybe you’d rather bend the ear of  Andre Carson, a Democratic congressman from Indianapolis. For $500 (or $1,000 for a PAC or $2,500 for a co-host designation), you can attend a luncheon at Johnny’s Half Shell restaurant in Washington.

Where there’s a politician, a party is never far behind.

And it’s interesting to see who’s throwing the party, and where the money is going.

To do so, just check out Party Time, an online clearinghouse that shows which politicians are raising money or any given day.

I learned about this website at a recent IRE conference from James Grimaldi, Washington Post investigative reporter and all-around good guy.

Here’s how to find the juicy stuff. Just go to the “Party Finder” feature on the home page and search by beneficiary, host, venue name, entertainment type and names of other lawmakers mentioned.

In many cases, you can see the actual printed invitations. Just make sure to scroll down on the website’s various pages to view them. The invitations are collected by lobbyists, who share with the Sunlight Foundation.

And as you will see, there’s a party for every taste.

Want to check out the first round of the U.S. Open from courtside with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat of New York)? That’ll cost you $5,000.

If you’re in the mood for goose hunting, write a check for between $1,000 and $5,000 to a PAC that supports Congressman Collin Peterson (Democrat of Minnesota).

Or maybe you’re interested in railroad-themed lunch with Senator Bob Corker (Republican of Tennessee), sponsored by a Who’s Who of railroad lobbyists. Just write a check for $1,000.

If you’re hankering for some Nebraska prime beef and a vineyards tour, hand over $2,500 to the Big Red PAC, proud supporter of Congressman Lee Terry (Republican of Nebraska).

I know what you’re thinking: Maybe you’re up for a party, and you’re afraid no politician is throwing a bash? Well think again.

“From the early hours of the morning until late in the evening, politicians are partying,” the Party Time website proclaims. “Sunlight’s PARTY TIME can help you find out who is partying, where and when.”

Indeed.

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Ain’t it funny how Facebook is suddenly OK in newsrooms? Hey, it’s even better than just OK; it’s our golden path to the future.

Or so we are now told.

Oh, how quickly things change. Not that long ago, if an editor saw you surfing FB during work hours, you could expect a frown, and maybe a “don’t get on Facebook during company time” lecture.

Now, we’re told to embrace FB as our future.

Newsrooms leaders now say FB will direct traffic to our web site. It will help build our brand. It is a great tool for crowd-sourcing and engaging with readers.

It doesn’t get more official than this: Earlier today, I attended a meeting, run by our online department, in which FB was held up as a cornerstone of our digital strategy. We were  encouraged to build “fan pages” on FB and to learn from other journalists who have mastered it to increase their voice.

Exhibit A was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He has 221,094 followers on his his FB page and more than 1.1 million Twitter followers. (I’m sure it helps to have two Pulitzers and a regular column in the world’s most influential newspaper.)

And I agree. I’ve been using it for nearly three years, just about every day, both for work and pleasure. I have more than 300 FB friends and am constantly looking for more, without compromising my privacy.

Every week, I see news value of FB. It was on Facebook that I first saw news of Osama bin Laden’s death. It was on Facebook I first learned of Congressman Anthony Weiner’s personal problems. It was on Facebook that I first learned that Gov. Mitch Daniels was not running for president.

And last week on vacation, it was on FB that I first learned of a new round of layoffs at work, more than 700 miles away.

Facebook isn’t just for fun anymore. It’s a news tool that I should be using all day long.

Thanks for finally realizing it, bosses.

By the way, I created a FB page.  Check it out.

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Taking stock

Today is June 30. That means the year is half over. So what have I accomplished so far in 2011?

This kind of question is always dangerous to ask, because the answer usually something like this: “Not nearly enough, you slacker.”

But I decided to measure my progress anyway. I looked at our online library and racked my brain. Here’s what I found.

* I wrote 49 stories for the paper (including 16 for the front page). That’s a bit lower than this time last year, when I wrote 53 stories (but only 12 for the front page). Still, the stories this year were meatier and took more digging and story-telling, I think.

* I didn’t get beat on any significant stories. That’s important.

* I continued to break stories on Duke Energy’s too-cozy relationship with state regulators, including my longest story of the year so far: a full-page treatment  looking at whether the utility exercised undue influence.

* I attended two journalism conferences and was a featured speaker at one of them.

* I got a job offer from another paper in a bigger market (Chicago), which I turned down.

* I won a few awards (always fun), including Indiana Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists and a First Amendment award from Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors.

* I interviewed Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. I met and got to know another Washington Post Pulitzer winner, James Grimaldi.

* I survived another round of layoffs — probably the biggest accomplishment of all.

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So long beach — and beach reading

My vacation ended too soon. It was fun spending a week with the family in Destin, Florida.

In my last posting, I listed the books I brought with me, and wondered which I would get around to reading.

Here is the answer. I read bits and pieces of all of them. But the most interesting was Susan Rosenberg’s account of her two decades in prison for her work as an armed social radical during the 1970s and 80s. I just about finished that book.

The dullest was the story of Google. Or maybe I just didn’t have any inclination to read a business book while the surf was crashing outside my window.

In addition to reading books, I spent the week jumping into waves with my boys, snorkling, taking a boat ride or two, sightseeing, and just enjoying a lazy week.

Now back to work for the second half of the year. Time’s a-wasting!

Summer is upon us, so that means one thing: a week at the beach with some lazy reading.

Of course, my idea of lazy reading might be different than yours.

You be the judge. Here’s a list of the books I lugged yesterday to Destin, Florida.

The Baseball UNcyclopedia: A highly opinionated, myth-busting guide to the great American game, by Michael Kun and Howard Bloom.

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, by Chris Hedges.

The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know is Wrong, by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson.

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg.

An American Radical: Political Prisoner in my own Country, by Susan Rosenberg.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives, by Steven Levy.

Hmmm, now that I’ve typed this out, it looks a bit on the heavy side. I might have to walk to town, find a bookstore and lighten it up with some Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum.

Well, the waves are calling. I’ll have to put the books aside for an hour or two. Check back at the end of the week for an update on which of these books (if any) I’ve cracked open.

Every few days, we get a call in our newsroom from someone who wants to shadow a reporter.

The person wants to see first-hand what our glorious jobs are really like: racing out to crime scenes, hitting the rounds at City Hall, or possibly taking in an NFL practice session.

We’ve all been there, so we do our best to oblige, and let them see the unvarnished life of a journalist.

But there’s an easier way.

Just check out the website StuffJournalistsLike.com, a smart-mouth, often dead-on font of tips and inside information.

Spend 20 or 30 minutes cruising this website, and you will just feel the grimy newsroom, see the mountains of unread press releases, smell the burning coffee.

You can experience our thrill-a-minute jobs for yourself — how we sit around for hours waiting for the callback that will make or break our stories, about the strange guy in the sports department who wears a hockey jersey to work and knows every prep athlete in a five-county from the last 30 years, about the constant threat of layoffs and furloughs and pay cuts.

And why we do it, despite it all.

Just check out the website for yourself. Here are a few tasty morsels:

On messy newsrooms: “While most (newsrooms) are equipped with filing drawers, journalists seldom use them because doing so would require opening and shutting them and because most filing drawers in newsrooms are full of papers and notes left by reporters from the last decade.”

On the local gadfly:  “He’s the one fanning the flames behind every scandal, uproar and complaint. And if you’re a journalist, he has you on his speed dial. … It’s also highly likely that the local gadfly has recently filed a UFO report.”

On a journalist’s car: Journalists live and sleep in their cars. It’s not surprising to find more than two dozen business cards, a month’s worth of newspapers, press passes from three hairstyles ago, agendas from last year and at least 15 pens.”

On press releases: “Occasionally a journalist will get a press release that is just too good to pass up. These press releases are usually for events that offer free food.”

On journalistic shorthand: “Journalists can sometimes get so carried away with their shorthand that they can’t read it later. On occasion a journalist will mull over some random squiggle asking what the hell is that.”

On working holidays: “If it’s a holiday that requires a parade, it’s a sure thing the journalist is covering it. After, it’s back to the desk to try to punch out an anecdotal lede about a four-year-old’s first time at a parade — so as not to re-write the previous year’s anecdotal lede about an 80-year-old woman who has never missed said parade.”

On corrections: “Nothing can ruin a journalist’s day more than seeing a glaring error in print; right there on every doorstep, kitchen table, work desk, newsstand, bathroom stall and outhouse. It’s those days journalists are glad newspaper readership is down.”

On quoting the publisher for a story: “The interview is short and relatively painless. It’s not so much back and forth as it is the boss saying ‘write this in the article.’ The then trembling journalist goes back to his or her desk and punches out the article justifying why the newspaper is downsizing.”

On sarcasm: “Sarcasm is how journalists express themselves. Without sarcasm, a journalist would simply be left to express raw emotion, which would be about as pleasant as having a conversation with a blogger.”

On interns:  ”Interns are essentially used as mops to wipe up the day’s dullest news.”

I’m not saying I agree with all of these observations. But enough of them ring true enough to make me squirm or howl or shake my head.

And yes, there is the occasional bright spot that makes it all worthwhile: BREAKING NEWS. And sometimes THE BIG STORY. Or even better, THE EXCLUSIVE. And of course BYLINES and AWARDS and FREE FOOD. Make sure to check those out too.

StuffJournalistsLike.com is written by two young guys who have obviously spent a few years in understaffed, badly managed newsrooms. They are Christopher Jordan Ortiz and David Young.

You just know that anyone who shadowed these reporters for a few hours would go screaming for the nearest exit.

Either that or learn the system so well that they will figure out how to weasel their way into the New York Times by 30 and pull down a Pulitzer by 35.

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