Over the past two weeks, 24 budding journalists pounded the pavement across New Orleans, searching for ledes, sources and that juicy, undiscovered story. After long nights of producing copy, captions and performing painstaking editing with Photoshop and Avid, we’ve constructed a mosaic of information on New Orleans. Here are our closing thoughts.
Bourbon Street, with its bars, restaurants and clubs, is known as one of the most popular places to hang out in the Big Easy. Found on this lively venue are many street vendors and musicians who provide entertainment, often for a few fleeting moments before the crowds move on and they’re forgotten.
Vivid language is constantly at odds with word counts and breaking news urgency at the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. And as a magazine-bred reporter, cutting copy feels like a prison shank — quick and dirty.
“It was really hard my first semester. Really hard,” said Larry Williams eating his breakfast in the Dillard University cafeteria. People didn’t talk to him, he said. They looked at him strangely.
I woke up at 4:30 a.m., fell asleep in the shower and somehow managed to throw clothes on my body by 5:07 a.m.
Driving down Highway 1 and seeing all the seafood businesses that the Gulf oil spill could affect really saddened me.
I knew this institute would give me the opportunity to do things I’d never done before, but I must have glanced over the “aerial acrobatics” clause in the paperwork.
The only bird I can name off the top of my head is a pigeon. In my defense, I am from New York City where most wildlife is viewed from a safe distance in one of our zoos. So when some sort of animal that isn’t someone’s pet gets too close to me, I get suspicious of its intentions and a “freak-out” is imminent.
On Thursday, a Greenpeace boat with seven journalists aboard traveled along the Gulf Coast and stopped at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then they saw it: The oil spill causing one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s history. Sadly, there was not enough space for me on the boat.
I had a really bad day today. A series of mistakes caused me to lose out on an important story. I’m still replaying the events in my mind, thinking about what I should have done differently. But I learned from this experience and want to share some tips with new and young journalists.
