The tour of The Arizona Republic was just amazing today. I've never been to a newsroom before and I had such a different picture in my mind. Like Jeremy Zona said as we were walking through, I pictured them more like the newsrooms in "All the President's Men" and the "Superman" movies. Lots of noise and movement, desks crowded together rather than cubicles, people running around and talking loudly. Yes, The AZ Republic was busy but it didn't have that chaotic feel. Maybe it was a relatively slow news day, or maybe Hollywood plays it up a bit.
I enjoyed the tour so much that I will definitely look into taking my students to tour one of the local papers in my area. We've got both a college nearby and city papers to the east and west of us, surely one of them would like to have us.
One interesting thing I noticed was the difference between the newspaper reporters' desks and the TV reporters' desks.
(Newspaper -papers stacked everywhere)
(TV - very few papers in sight)
Sitting in on the editors' meeting was mind-boggling. They have so much going on and so much to keep track of. I have enough trouble staying on top of the handful of stories we have going in our 12-page paper that prints every six weeks. When I asked if they had a life I was serious. It sounds like though the demands are tough, the rewards are worth it.
Emily Miller
Arlington High School
Arlington, Texas
Great post, Emily. I take my students on a field trip every year in April. They look forward to it all year. I try to change it up a little each year, so that the students who stick around for Newspaper II and III don't have to do the same trip every year.
ReplyDeleteI try to hit two spots every year. That way we eat up the entire day. (The students want to miss and ENTIRE school day, not just half.) We've visited the Austin American-Statesman, The Daily Texan (the student newspaper for the University of Texas), our local ABC affiliate, and the Harry Ransom Center (at UT). The Ransom Center houses the Woodward and Bernstein papers, Tim O'Brien's papers (a novelist who lives in Austin, teaches at Texas State University, and worked on the Watergate stories at the Post), as well as those of many writers, artists, and performers.
I also enjoyed today's field trip. An added bonus is that I got to interview a source for my enterprise story. Hurray!