I won!!!

My Verbal Blend project won first place in the Online Feature Reporting category for Region 1.

Now I compete with the first place winners in that category from the 11 other regions for national honors.

Unreal. I'm so excited :D

http://www.spj.org/news.asp?REF=1102#1102

Award-winning journalist?!

Updates about Business Insider soon enough, but for now I have great news regarding my Verbal Blend project for NewsHouse.

About a month or so ago, I entered my project in the Society of Professional Journalist's Mark of Excellence Awards for the online feature reporting category. I'm proud to say that my project is a (Region 1) finalist!! I'm so excited!

Hopefully I get picked to advance to the national competition, but for now I am just thrilled that this project and Verbal Blend has been recognized!

Lunch money & taxes.

These two posts have been the biggest hits so far:

Guess How Much Money You're Blowing Each Year By Not Packing Your Lunch

and

Here's The Catch To Walmart's Free Tax Preparation Service

Lots of heat! Well, not really. Just relative to what I've written so far.

First week.

I survived the first week! I took this weekend to organize / plan ahead because I was just kind of thrown into everything and didn't have the chance to take a step back and figure it all out. From the beginning, it was just go, go, go.

Life is funny. When I was at CNNMoney for the week this summer to fact check Best Places To Live, I remember I loved being in the newsroom. It was exciting and so different from the magazine setting. But I also remember thinking I could never work there, would never want to. I could never work for a site where I had to turnaround stories constantly, much less stories about business and personal finance. Too stressful, not my thing. Ha, right? But once you have to do it, you just do, and it's always been that way for me. I always surprise myself.

It's a great place to work. The people are young but extremely motivated and smart. It astounds me how hard everyone works to keep the site alive. It's a beast and it needs to be fed every five minutes. It's a constant hustle. It's encouraging and overwhelming but also inspiring.

I still don't know that this is the environment for me in the longrun, but I do know that I'm going to absorb as much as I can while I'm there. And I'm looking forward to the way the discipline will shape me as a writer. Hope it makes me better, quicker, sharper.

First day.

OK. I can't think of any other way to describe my first day except to say that I felt like I was thrown into an ocean and unable to come up for air until the end.

Haha, I know that sounds absolutely awful. It wasn't that awful. But kind of hard. What I'm trying to say is, it will take me a few days (hopefully just) to adjust to the pace.  I don't want to speak too soon and I don't want to doubt myself so early in the game. But that's all I shall say! I have to adjust.

I wrote two pieces. (I think I'm expected to write at least four per day.) And they suck. But it was my first day so, I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get better.

Retail Workers Still Get The Short End Of The Benefits Stick [STUDY]

STUDY: Consumers Turn To Home Health Care, Generic Drugs To Cut Rising Health Care Costs

Goodbye New York, for now.

I'm trying to determine the best way to recap about my experience. Because I know that after I start Business Insider tomorrow (!!!), I'll have little time. This will end up being disorganized rambling.

My last day was on Wednesday, the 11th. As tends to happen on all last days, I did little work. I went out to lunch with a friend, a fact checker at the mag who helped me land the internship (eternally grateful), and spent the rest finishing up a few things and saying goodbye to people. I first walked to the office of Chris Bonanos, a senior editor who I worked with briefly towards the end--first for research I conducted for Jerry Saltz's piece about Damien Hirst, and second for help I gave a writer whose work will appear in the next issue. (Aside: Must say Jerry Saltz is one of my favorite people who I've met at the magazine. He hardly ever came to the office but I met him briefly during Hirst research time. So friendly, so funny, so interesting. Easy to talk to! Not at all like I imagined him to be after watching a few episodes of Work of Art. He got excited when I told him I wanted to write about people. I don't know, he was great.). I hadn't spoken to Chris much and dropped by to tell him it was my last day and I wouldn't be able to help the second writer anymore. Then we talked about Hirst, since he edited it. And then of his book about Polaroid, slated to come out in the fall, which I'm really excited about. So great to talk to someone who is really passionate about what they do. I learned so much in just the 40 minutes I spent in his office. I do wish I got to talk to more of the people on staff in that way, find out more of who they were, their interests, how they came to New York. Many are young. Most are men (which genuinely surprised me considering my magazine program was probably 97% women).

I'll remember random things like John Homans (the editorial assistant and interns sat outside of his office) shouting "What the fuck!" every so often, or answering the phone with a "What the fuck is going on?" or, the other day, a "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" (I don't think he's French). Introduced myself to Adam Moss once and hardly talked to him after but he was friendly enough to smile every time I did see him. Which reminds me. I forgot to say goodbye to two people: David, research editor, and Ann, managing editor. Damn me. Two really friendly people. Oh, I forced myself to attend an ideas meeting one Tuesday. Love brainstorming sessions. Always fun to see how people bounce ideas off each other. How they react to those ideas. When you put a group of writers & editors in a room together, hilarious comments and situations always ensue. (Happened at Money too).

My major projects can sort of be divided by month. The first month I spent nearly all of my time working on the Global Urban design issue with the design editor. On my first day they had a meeting to discuss a new approach (issue was slated to come out mid October), so they let me join. And though my work consisted mostly of administrative tasks (researching firms and projects worldwide, creating lists, contacting architects and scheduling interviews), I interviewed one architect. Seems silly to point out now, but was bummed I didn't get credit for this piece because I conducted the interview and more or less wrote it. Still, I thought the issue turned out really great. That was September. In October, I spent nearly all of my time helping Steve Fishman with his Mark Kelly/Gabby Giffords story. Fishman latched on to me in the beginning because I was the only intern there my first day. He's a character. I'd stop by his cubicle every so often just to chat because he was always great to talk to. He's relentless and tenacious in his reporting, sometimes to the point of annoyance (one time he requested I track Gabby Giffords's mom by calling several hotels in an area where Gabby was receiving treatment. I hated that. And I never found her, though he did eventually). But he's an investigative reporter. November I spent most of it researching the reusable bags story. December was a slower month because of the holidays so it was filled with tasks I did during the in-betweens of the other months. Research. Transcribe interviews (did tons of those for the writers. Sometimes fun and interesting. Other times, not so much). We compiled the neighborhood news! Some time in September, a few days after Occupy Wall Street started in Zucotti Park, interns went down to hand out a few surveys. I wasn't impressed. Here, the results. And nice to see your work manifest itself in some other ways--like tracking down the congressional testimony that Frank Rich used for the annotations of his class warfare piece. Or spending a couple of hours at the library at CUNY John Jay school researching the origins of pepper spray and having a statistic you found be used for a gadget in the Intelligencer section. I liked who I worked with. I liked the other interns.

I hope I can make time to freelance or cover events or write store listings (another thing I did) because I don't want to lose the connection I have with the mag.

I know I'm forgetting stuff and might just come back to add every once in a while as I think of more. Overall, it was great. It looks great. I think I got the most that I possibly could out of it. So, I feel good.

I'm nervous about tomorrow at Business Insider because it will be so different than anything I've done before. I don't know if I can. I'm scared I'm not cut out for it. I've never worked for a website and had to plug out several posts daily. I don't write well under pressure. I don't do things well under pressure, period. But this will be so challenging and new and dammit, I just hope I'm good at it.

Party Reporting for New York

Shortly before I went on my interview for New York, I had contacted the assistant editor at Money, who I noticed on LinkedIn was a freelance reporter for New York. I wondered if she had been an intern? She hadn't, but she told me she used to party report, which meant she covered events in NYC for the "Party Lines" section of the mag, and the site. She put me in touch with Patti, the editor. Well, I found out I got the internship at about the same time the Party Lines editor got back to me about party reporting and I accepted my first assignment the night before my first day. I was covering two stores for Fashion's Night Out: Ferragamo, where a few models would attend, and Versace, where Drake would DJ for the night. Both on Fifth Avenue. I chose this pair because Drake was the one celebrity I knew from the list and thought it would be really cool to see him. Just before the event, Patti (my editor) confirmed I had an interview scheduled with Drake. Exciting! I was so nervous because  I had never covered events that way before. I arrived early and literally had to sit on the steps of a nearby church for 15 minutes to collect myself and mentally prepare. Turned out to be a great night. Ferragamo was interesting. Really beautiful, chic, well-off people socializing and sipping on champagne and whatnot. Haha, definitely felt out of place. But the publicist was so friendly and fantastic; he introduced me to all of the models/socialites I needed to speak to. I then left for Versace (across the street) for my interview with Drake. Waited about an hour. Sat down with him for five minutes. Thought I would get star struck and fuck up, but once I sat down I found it was easy to talk to him. Charming guy, haha. The best part though, was he gave me some great material that turned into a post. So, I got a post up on the site on my first day of my internship! Drake Admits to Sweater Obsession

Also great: I worked with Patti for the duration of my internship. I was the intern who helped her update the party calendar--so I checked the Party Lines e-mail account daily and worked with publicists to confirm events we'd send reporters to cover. You learn the patterns; who attends what in NYC, what kinds of events they attend, which events are most popular during certain times. I attended a few more, but it's mostly been more miss than hit. I did get a second post, though. In November, I attended the International Rescue Committee Freedom Awards where I had the opportunity to interview John Legend, Tom Brokaw, and Ann Curry. Brokaw gave me the material that led to a post. Tom Brokaw on the 'Work In Progress' Generation. It was so much fun! Tiny press line at the Waldorf Astoria, and it was cool--the person next to me was a Newhouse grad. The one thing I regretted was not staying for the actual event & dinner. This is really dumb, but essentially, I chickened out. I don't know. It was an awards dinner and I couldn't bring myself to walk in and sit for it at a table surrounded by people I didn't know. My stomach grumbled all the way home. This was before I knew I'd have a post so that kind of made up for it, but meh, need to push myself sometimes and conquer the timidness that still overcomes me!

I also attended the Broadway premiere of Stick Fly, which was awesome. I took a friend and we met Alicia Keys. We had third row seats! And the play was great. Seriously, must see. Scott Brown wrote a review of it in the mag that was pretty spot on. And then I attended the We Bought A Zoo premiere, which was the biggest event I've attended and, man, I don't think I can do it again. Huge premiere (Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, etc, directed by Cameron Crowe). Tons of journalists. Hectic. So hectic. Then, when the big stars finally reach you, they're being rushed by their publicists, and it becomes a battle between all of the journalists to ask questions. You get one, if any at all. It's exhausting. Not sure I'll do a big one like that any time soon. And for both events, I didn't get a quote that would lead to a spot on the Party Lines page or a post on the site--which is the point--so they were failures in that respect though both exciting, learning experiences.

A few things I've learned doing this that I can think of: a) New York is super, super influential and respected. A reporter at the IRC awards bowed when I told him I interned at the magazine. He wasn't entirely serious but he was impressed. (I've noticed this too when I call people to do interviews or research information). When you tell people you're from New York, they pay attention. They take care of you. So that's really nice. b) The entertainment journalism world is pretty small, and the people who do it (at least the ones I've met at the bigger events) are kind of the same and not my type. I won't describe but they kind of remind me of some people I went to school with haha. Which leads me to, c) I always ruled out entertainment journalism as something I'd do. I don't want to follow the lives of celebrities and so I never imagined or considered the opportunity to interview them on red carpets. Saw it as fluff. People or E! journalism. But I realized it... takes a certain skill to do it well. At least, in the context of New York, where, when Patti sends out reporters to cover events, she's not interested in the latest about the personal lives of these people. Or even formulaic answers about how great it was to work for whatever movie they're promoting. She wants quirky, interesting, funny answers to questions that are usually vaguely, sometimes never, related to the reason you're there. And it's hard! It's hard when you have a few seconds, maybe a minute of a celebrity's time to ask a question that will evoke a great answer. So I found myself wanting to be good at it. You want to get the right answer.

d) It's kind of funny that I've said on this blog at least two times now that I don't like event coverage, and yet I still find myself doing it. Haha, I don't know. It's good experience. I don't know how my life will be once I start Business Insider, how busy I'll be. Plus it's hard anyway because events are usually in the evenings and I live in the boondocks. But I'd like to continue doing it if I can. So we'll see.