I returned this past week from more than a month of backpacking Europe with college buddy Sean Blanda. While there, he and I travel blogged and podcasted at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.
This week I am going to roll out some highlights and lessons learned, though Sean beat me to the latter.
One of those lessons, I’m afraid, will involve being hacked, as we were just that. (Check WDSTL, we may not have corrected by the time you read this).
On Nov. 9 2007, one year ago today, after founding and leading a student newspaper at the Franklin Learning Center for a school year and a half, I was asked to present and take part in a panel discussion on youth journalism at the Journalism Education Association conference held at the Marriot in Center City, Philadelphia Nov. 8-11.
The panel was called “Building Journalism Programs Outside the Curriculum.” See the program here [PDF].
Among others, I was proud to speak alongside Pulitzer-Prize winner Acel Moore, among the journalists I most respect, and Philadelphia Inquirer photographer Mike Levin.
I mostly focused on the challenges I faced, contrasted with the effect it had on the small stable of loyal participants I found.
It will be an event I will tell my children about. Given this country’s race history, it is undeniably important to elect our first Black president.
It helped that John McCain wasn’t running as John McCain. Growing up as a McCain fan and trained to support defensible nonpartisanship, I can report that I do believe Obama-Biden was the better choice for American progress than McCain-Palin. It became easy for me — even if it is uncomfortable to discuss political decisions as a journalist — to vote for Obama.
Similarly, unfairly, unjustly untruly or not, it seemed the media – particularly in Europe, from my experience – wanted Barack Obama in the office. That is perceived as a liberal bias in journalism but McCain made it easier with a Vice Presidential pick. Journalists should be wary of being perceived as being “for” a candidate.
Still, Obama confronts outlandish expectations for a new president. He has already been anointed as part of a great achievement of American freedom. As a supporter of the U.S. presidency, I hope he can do it. But he has to exceed the level of excitement around him that prompted one supporter to tell a CNN TV camera: “you hear about people seeing Ghandi and Martin Luther King…”
From Oct. 1 to Nov. 4, 2008, my friend Sean Blanda and I backpacked Europe. We chronicled our experience at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.
See our stops and some video below.
Perhaps more than any other profession, journalists live in moments, that hour’s story, that day’s deadline.
Zack Stalberg was made a legend for his Frank Rizzo moment. As a 2001 Philadelphia Weekly profile suggested:
Within two years the night rewrite kid is a City Hall reporter covering Frank Rizzo at a time when Rizzo was, as Stalberg recalls, “unstoppable … He was going to be governor and his image was untarnished and then–boom!” Boom, of course, was Stalberg himself, who persuaded the mayor to take a lie detector test to resolve a political dispute. Rizzo, as the whole city knows, failed the test in grand fashion, and Stalberg, as the whole city also knows, became someone who would make a name for himself. [Source]
