The students still have to vote to pass it, but I think it stands a very good chance. We’re on the ballot with a number of other student organizations that are in trouble financially, and will hopefully be receiving $3 out of a $12.75 quarterly fee to support the Daily Bruin and other media on campus.

Anyway, the obvious conflict of the student newspaper being on the ballot to receive money in the student elections has been a tough hump for me to get over. The Bruin has decided not to endorse any student government candidates this year as one means of making sure we can stay as independent as possible. We’ve also, obviously, committed ourselves to fair coverage of any criticism of the referendum, etc. I’m interested to see how it all goes… and the future of my department depends on it.

Update:

Daily Bruin story on the fee and Student Media: http://www.dailybruin.com/stories/2009/apr/22/student-media-seeks-aid/

Anyway, if you want to learn please don’t be intimidated – it honestly took me a couple of hours. Now, I’m going to move on to CSS basics. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What conceivable security risk could have been in a portrait? UCLA has its own co-generation power plant. It’s part of what helps the university to reduce its carbon footprint because it recycles water to generate some of the energy we use every day on campus. It’s a good thing to have when the university has launched a marketing blitz about their green efforts, and it’s a very visible building in the area: anyone in Westwood can see huge plumes of steam bellowing out of it on any given night. In fact I was told about the plant on my first visit to UCLA, as a senior in high school, from an administrator giving a talk to an incoming group of students. We took the portrait from the roof of a building next to the power plant, and in the background the plant was clearly visible.

That was the problem. The plant was visible. Apparently UCLA doesn’t allow anyone to publish pictures of power plant equipment (including the outside of the building), because if someone were to attack the university it would be an obvious target. Never mind that all buildings in the area have been updated to the latest seismic standards, and part of that process was including thick firewalls to protect buildings adjacent to the plant in case something went horribly wrong. And never mind that the plant is clearly visible to all members of the public who happen to walk by.

The university demanded we remove the photo from our website because the angle we took the photo from couldn’t necessarily be accessed by a casual member of the public that wasn’t being escorted by our new Sustainability Coordinator. They didn’t provide me with a specific reason for removing that photo, for instance they didn’t actually confirm there was equipment in the photo that could compromise the plant if tampered with. They simply said that they have never allowed photos of the plant to be published for “security reasons,” it had been a long standing policy, and we should have been aware of it.

I have no way of knowing if the precise angle of the portrait we took could have compromised the university, and it’s not like I have the resources to determine the legitimacy of the claim myself. Under the circumstances I think I was obligated to simply take the information I was given by the administrator at face value. I certainly would have appreciated it if he would have taken the time to actually give me comprehensive answers to my questions, or some hint that this was a grave matter. But the approach was firm but casual. It didn’t seem terribly urgent, only when I said I would have to think about it did he get worried. If he had done a better job of convincing me I certainly wouldn’t have written this post.

So, I pose the following questions to the journalistic public: Did I do the right thing? Would you have done the same thing? Any general advice on dealing with administrators? Do you know something about pictures of the outside of power plants I don’t?

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Before starting this entry I did a quick google blog search on #Journchat. All of the entries were positive. I also searched “I hate #Journchat” and “#Journchat sucks.” Nothing. I guess for this post I won’t be linking to anyone with a concurrent opinion. Anyway, moving on.

I’ve followed a few #Journchat conversations on Twitter, and Monday night I even briefly participated in the most recent one. I was excited at first. So many journalists on Twitter! It was cool, and the conversation proved to be thought provoking and engaging.

Special things can happen when a lot of smart people get together for the first time, in a new and emerging medium, to discuss topics of relevance and interest. There were a lot of voices in the mix – journalists, bloggers, and PR people. I’ve never really cared to speak to PR people, but hey I don’t mind so much if they’re one of many voices in a conversation. It’s not like they don’t have relevant opinions.

Then #Journchat evolved into something else. The PR people were probing the journalists for better ways to market to them, and the journalists inevitably got mad at the PR people. Let’s face it: journalists and PR pros don’t generally like each other. We call it selling out, and I think for good reason. But I don’t want to get into that. The conversation was about PR, not blogging and journalism and PR. Just PR. I don’t care to observe that conversation (let alone participate).

#Journchat, as it turns out, was started by someone in PR. So why, then, is it called #Journchat? Perhaps to lure in unsuspecting journalists so they can help a PR machine and get badgered with more press releases? Who cares. From now on I will not be participating in #Journchat.

But that’s not the end of the story. There’s a new Twitter hash called #collegejourn which markets itself as a “Tweet Chat By and Between the College Journalism Community.” Sounds great, no? It’s sponsored by CoPress and The Campus Buzz. I would call CoPress one of the preeminent and most forward thinking collegiate media organizations out there. They’re a smart, fantastic group of people and I love working with them.

But I am very afraid #Collegejourn will face the same fate as #Journchat because of the involvement of The Campus Buzz. The Buzz is a PR organization, focused on marketing press releases to college journalists. They screen the releases so that hugely irrelevant ones don’t make it through, but they are a PR company. #Collegejourn was their idea. They made the Twitter account, the Facebook and the website, and they will help set the agenda. So here’s my question: why are they so interested in helping the college media community work together to have a conversation and overcome mutual obstacles?

I’ll guess at the answer. Maybe so that they can meet more college editors so they can send more of us more crappy press releases about things we will never cover. Maybe so that they can sell their database of college editors to clients. Maybe so they can warm college editors to the idea of paying more attention to PR people. Who knows, and who cares.

I hope a group of smart and forward thinking college journalists can come together and participate in the first #Collegejourn conversation this Sunday from 5-8 pm pacific. I hope we can drown out the people who show up who are not college journalists, or who are not there to be a constructive presence. I would prefer to see no PR representatives. But to be honest, this entire operation looks and smells like a big marketing push for The Campus Buzz, and if it turns out that way I will refuse to participate just like I now refuse to participate in #Journchat.

Follow me on Twitter @anthonyjpesce

Also, check out a string of interesting comments on the Copress blog about competition in college media. I threw in my $.02 and so should you (the podcast is also interesting): http://www.copress.org/2008/12/this-week-in-copress-albert-sun-and-developing-34stcom/

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First things first, I will be starting an internship next quarter at the Los Angeles Times doing blogging, comment moderation, and other new media things. I’m extremely excited to get started, to learn, to meet people, and do everything that comes along with a professional internship. I’ve also decided to wait a year to apply to grad school. I made the decision for two main reasons: I think I’ll be a more competitive applicant in a year, and it looks like I need to evaluate my options.

It turns out Henry Jenkins, the founder of the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT and a media luminary, is leaving MIT at the end of this year and moving to USC. I was going to apply to MIT basically to work with him, now it looks like the whole department is in jeopardy. Oh well. So now I’m thinking about USC. I spoke there last week at a conference for high school journalists, and while I was in the building I decided to talk to someone from their admissions office. She really sold me on the school, so I’m going to have to give it some serious thought. I’m also really starting to notice some of the work Berkeley is doing in new media, and I think studying there could be really beneficial too.

But overall, when I think about grad school, I’m stuck in a bit of a conundrum. One of the big reasons I wanted to apply to MIT was because it wasn’t a professional degree program. It’s for serious academics doing applied research about media to make the world a better place. That’s ultimately what I want to be doing, and almost everything they have going on there is fascinating and related to journalism and media. I think if I went to a program like that I would be a better journalist and better equipped to deal with the changing media landscape and the changing newspaper industry.

Then there are the professional programs, the traditional j-schools, where you get some heavily academic courses but it’s almost structured like a new media lab. You learn video, photo, editing, HTML, CSS, the fundamentals of reporting, etc. Well, I already know all of that. Do I really need a degree that says so? My HTML and CSS could use a lot of polishing, and I’m not making professional documentaries off of my MacBook Pro and FlipCam, but I basically have all of those skills. I’m also very familiar with social media, blogging, and every “new” way to tell a story out there. I’m sure I could learn a thing or two, but doing it in the real world, while making real contacts, earning real money, and generating real clips seems like a better choice. Anyway, I’m sure you can tell I have a lot to think about before the next round of applications.

The second thing I have to say tonight is that next quarter I will be doing academic research at UCLA related to my Knight Foundation project, Populous. I will be working with a professor to study how news is, and can be, distributed in a social network and writing a thesis on the topic. It should prove to be very interesting (to me, at least) and I think the work I do next quarter on Populous will help the thesis and the thesis will help shape some of the finer details of how the network we build will be structured. Hopefully in a month or two I can start to turn this blog into a sounding board for some of the ideas I’ll be working on as part of that paper.

That’s all for now. Follow me on twitter @anthonyjpesce.

I also couldn’t vote provisionally, because they only count the ballot if you vote in the county you were registered. In short, I’ve been disenfranchised and it doesn’t feel nice. There are a variety of reasons I like to vote absentee, but the most important is that I sat on my school board while in high school and those elections are still important to me. I also consider my Sacramento address my permanent address. But whatever. I still got to vote in the primary.

Is there some sort of complaint I can file? A letter I can write, expressing my anger and frustration? I mean honestly people, this election decided whether or not I can get married in this state and I wasn’t able to vote.

I went to an interesting presentation from the lead photographer from the Lawrence Journal World, Mike Yoder, who talked generally about the necessity for participatory news. He spoke about some of the multimedia projects he’s been working on, the importance of quality audio, and the importance of receiving feedback and news from community sources. You can see a snippet of his talk on this YouTube video. For me he was one of the highlights, as well as the two keynotes so far — one I wrote about on PBS Idea Lab, and the other was my editor for Idea Lab Mark Glaser who is awesome.

Generally though, I’ve found many things at this conference a waste of my time. The networking has been good, and a few of the sessions have been useful, but the majority of the sessions (like 80%) I could have taught myself. I don’t really want to hear from other students unless it’s an open, roundtable discussion. If someone is going to teach me how to do something I would like to hear it from a professional, or at least from another editor of a college daily.

I’ve also found that a lot of people here are preaching multimedia and social media tools, but relatively few of the papers here are using those tools. So with all of the preaching, where is the practical knowledge? Where is the workshop on how to use a camera? Edit video? Where is the workshop that demonstrates the power of social media in breaking news and building a brand on campus? Where do we learn CSS and HTML? Where do we learn the damn skills we need people?

To be fair there were a few workshops that covered these topics, but not in the comprehensive fashion I would prefer, and most of them required the foresight to register and pay extra in advance to attend them. Most of the Adobe ones were useless because no one showed up to teach them. So a big group of students, some of whom I spoke to during a technology roundtable discussion, came to this conference and realized what they need to be learning — only to realize they couldn’t get into those sessions. Poor planning, I think.

I’m also not hearing or seeing any comprehensive effort to try to address these deficiencies. Many, many students have no idea what multimedia is or how to use it, let alone update their own websites. And the funniest part of all of this is that the professionals here, and generally in the journalism blogosphere, think we’re the future. If we’re supposed to be teaching all the old people about multimedia, who’s going to teach us! Seriously, people, I think that’s probably the biggest elephant in the room at this conference and it’s very frustrating.

Follow me on Twitter @anthonyjpesce

I’m excited about the prospect of embracing a new and emerging technology, but I’m also concerned I’m going to adopt it and never use it again. I guess we’ll have to see, and I suppose I was guaranteed to never use it as long as I kept not adopting it. So here we go.

If you want to follow me on Twitter you can @anthonyjpesce.

As News Editor, and now as Editor in Chief, I’ve had to battle an institutional attitude that we’re a professional news organization. I think a lot of really great work comes out of that perspective, but it can also be harmful. The Bruin is a student publication, covering UCLA students and the UCLA campus, and that’s how we need to structure our coverage of everything – including national elections. The thing I keep telling my staff, over and over again, is that “we’re not the LA Times!”

For example, instead of running the typical meaningless red state/blue state national map we’re either going to run a map of Southern California and the LA area, or of all the counties in California. It’s more interesting for our readers to see how their home county voted than how New York or Florida voted. We’re also going to only run a 6-8 inch container on the front page about the winner of the presidential race. We’re going into this assuming everyone is going to wake up Wednesday morning already knowing who the winner is, and already having watched CNN or read the LA Times – why do they need to read 30 inches on it again?

But we can’t assume our readers are going to know which of the California propositions and local measures passed or didn’t pass. So right on the front page, instead of running analysis of the presidential election which no one will read, we’re going to run a big graphic of all of the propositions and measures. A lot of our coverage is actually going to be graphic based. For example, we’re also going to be doing exit polling at all of the polling locations UCLA students would be voting at, and we’ll be running as much of that information as we can fit on the front page.

We’re also going to run a photo essay of all of the different viewing parties happening on campus, in the dorms, frats, apartments, etc. and a “speaks out” box with reaction quotes from students. Along with that we’re also going to be running a feature about the viewing parties, but the emphasis will be on the visual impact of all of the different students who were watching from different locations.

In the interest of meeting deadline and having a human interest/feature as part of our next-day coverage we’ll also be profiling two people who are extremely invested in one or more of the propositions passing or not passing. We’ll follow these people for the next week or two before the election and prep the stories for election night, when we’ll only have to make a call or two once we find out which props pass. No matter which way each of the props go we’ll still have a fascinating story about people on campus whose lives are impacted by the decision.

Let me know what you think!