I came, I saw, I coded.

Today word got around that I’ll be joining the news apps team at the Chicago Tribune when I finish my internship here at the Post. While I’m sad to be leaving my incredible colleagues here at the Post, I’m also completely excited for this new opportunity. I can’t wait. I also can’t believe it. I’ve followed the Tribune’s work for the better part of two years, and I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t fascinated by it. They do a little bit of everything, which is exactly the sort of team I want to be a part of.

Some of you know I was blessed and bewildered to be in a position where I had more than one job possibility. Certainly not ever the dilemma I thought I would have in journalism! Deciding what would be right for me was the toughest decision I’ve ever made. I do not say that lightly. But I was also fortunate to be surrounded by very wise friends and family. Here are synopses and paraphrases of some of the best pieces of advice — from serious to silly — I got from them:

From Adam:

Work at a good place around good people. That combination will open all sorts of opportunities regardless of the actual work you’re doing.

From Chris:

If you’re going to go somewhere with a harsh winter, get a damn good job so you can afford all the clothes you’ll need to buy.

From Derek:

Be willing to do whatever unglamorous work you have to do. Realize the future is more flexible than you think it will be.

From Mark:

If you’re having trouble making a decision, you haven’t gathered enough information yet.

From Michelle:

Be strong and ready to forge your own path.

From Trish:

Focus more on the people and work you’re attracted to than the location or the sexy (or unsexy) name.

(EDIT: Meant to include in my original draft that the above advice about working with awesome people is a large part of what made it so very difficult for me to choose. There were no bad potential coworkers!)

There were many, many others, and I am grateful for every one of them. I wouldn’t be in this position without the support and encouragement (and, sometimes, the disagreement) from everyone around me. I’m humbled by the people who have offered me everything from advice to the chance to screw up their websites (oops) to late-night chocolate to last-minute conference hotel rooms. From the time I first got pulled accidentally into the journalism world at The Collegian, the people around me have been the best part of every place, every project.

I’m going to need your support in the coming months, too. It’s going to be a wild ride.

PS: #BC9 and Leslie Thornton, a special thank-you for you. Thanks for giving me a chance to practice my razzle dazzle. <3, Sorceress

As I’ve been job hunting, I’ve been deluged with confusion over what a news app is, what a news apps team builds, how they integrate into the newsroom.

Oh, and what’s the difference between a tool and an app?

Do people who make tools for journalists to use still practice journalism?

I took some flack on Twitter for saying I didn’t want to be hired to build tools for journalists to use. I’m a journalist, I said. Hire me to do journalism.

I feel my statement has been incredibly misunderstood, partly due to Twitter’s character limit. I wrote and rewrote that tweet trying to fit in everything I wanted to say. So, hey, that’s what I have a blog for, right?

To compare what I said to a more familiar journalistic landscape, one with defined roles: Some reporters have really shitty grammar. Some have excellent grammar and may even be good at restructuring bad copy.

That does not mean that you should put the latter reporter on the copy desk. Chances are that he got into journalism to write his own stories, not to edit other people’s stories. He probably won’t be happy if he continually comes up with story ideas that he can’t pursue.

However, there are people who go into journalism to edit stories and are quite happy doing that. These people are just as invaluable to the end product as the ones who actually go out and get the story. But they operate in a distinctly different role.

Neither of these is right or wrong. They are merely different parts of the same journalism machine. We’ve all seen what happens when news outlets cut copyeditors and suffer from credibility problems.

Similarly, if you take someone who really wants to use technology to create new ways to provide valuable information and analysis to the public, and you hire that person to write threaded comment modules, you’ve got the shoe on the wrong foot.

In the process of providing the info/analysis/reporting mashup, you might just end up writing a threaded comment module (or creating a congressional database that is useful to reporters internally). In setting out with a goal of writing a threaded comment module, you are almost certainly not going to create journalism as a byproduct. This subtle but large difference is the heart of my beef with most journalism outlets hiring pro-jos today.

We need those comment modules. I’m not disputing that. At Cronkite, I worked with Retha Hill, who helped get the Washington Post online as Digital Ink. She told me about the late hours she pulled building pages by hand, and how much time it saved her when slideshow creation tools came along.

Those tools are incredibly important to what journalists do every day.

Their creation is not the same as, for example, brainstorming a new way to interface disaster relief agency databases with stories about the aftermath of the latest act of God.

We need people to build both of these things. Neither is inferior or superior. But they are not the same job, and a person more inclined to one may not be happy with the other.

Of course there will be mundane, inglorious coding. There’s probably going to be a lot of Twitter widget-writing and RSS feed-parsing. The difference is where the focus lies. If that’s what you emphasize when I ask you for examples of the sort of things I’d be working on, I’m going to have the same reaction a sportswriter would have if you pitched him with, “And you’ll get to write obits! It’ll be awesome!”

Before I ever had a journalism background, I had a geek background. I’ve been designing and building sites for longer than people now in high school have been alive (scary!). Journalism drew me in because it was something I believed in that seemed like it needed people like me. And now, having fought tooth and nail to earn the right to be called a journalist, I’m facing people who tell me I should be happy building site components.

If that were what I wanted to do, I’d be freelancing as a web dev from a hammock in Hawaii.

My journalism background should be necessary to my job, not a bonus. The way I’ve been trained to look at information and link it together should inform what I do on a daily basis. If you don’t want me to do that, hire a programmer. But don’t mock me for wanting to practice journalism with technology instead of focus on building widgets.

When I got involved with Longshot Magazine, I had no idea it would turn into anything even remotely resembling a big deal. I figured I’d show up, hack on some stuff with a bunch of other geeks, help build something cool, and go home. I never expected to be, as my friend/boss Adam tweeted, “the front-end queen of @longshotmag.” I never expected the site to make anything of a splash. I’m used to releasing stuff, showing it to family and friends, having them go, “I don’t know what you did, but that’s really cool!”

And then Awl did a writeup of the site’s nagwall. And MediaGazer picked up a blog post I wrote on the tools we’d used. And I got job offers, and praise I felt I didn’t deserve, and notice from people who shouldn’t know I exist.

Standing on the rooftop of Gawker Media with some of Longshot’s web team, watching the sun rise Sunday after a sleepless night of coding, I said, “I don’t even know how I got here. I’m just some kid from Fresno.” Adam responded, “We’re all just kids from somewhere.”

I was reminded of his comment today, when a friend of mine in Arizona State’s next graduate student cohort told me (partly tongue-in-cheek) that he hoped the entering class at Cronkite followed in my footsteps.

I feel like anyone can do what I’ve done, whatever that is. It feels very strange when people look up to me, or are impressed with me, because in my mind, I’m just doing what I’ve always done. And maybe there’s a lesson in that.

So, though it feels kind of strange giving it considering I’m still trying to find my first real job, some advice for those entering school behind me, and entering the workplace with me, and rediscovering themselves, and wondering how they can get where they want to be. This is my manifesto:

Do it.

Do it now. Do it every day. Love it. Live it.

Sacrifice for it.

Reach for it even if you don’t think you can get it. Knock on the doors you don’t think will open. Work your ass off. Innovate when it’s not called for, and run from those places that don’t appreciate innovation. Seek an environment where question-askers and boundary-pushers are welcomed.

Be genuinely humble.

Acknowledge the contributions of those around you. Surround yourself with amazing people, so that some of the awesomeness wears off on you. Avoid situations where you are the smartest person in the room. Find mentors. Welcome impostor syndrome. Find your people; the ones who understand what drives you.

Stay healthy mentally and physically.

Walk a lot. Do things that make you happy that are unrelated to your career: this is necessary even if it feels like a waste of time at first. Realize that your most creative thoughts come when you let your brain unfocus. Eat chocolate. Drink lots of water. Sleep. Stay up all night.

Let yourself get in over your head.

Seek opportunities that stretch you: speaking at conference lightning talks, volunteering for big projects. Don’t be afraid of them. Don’t let anyone know they scare you. Focus on the task at hand. Don’t look to far down the road; you can’t see anything anyway. Put one foot in front of the other. Be picky. Be a perfectionist. Never be satisfied with the job you’ve done, even when it’s finished. Go back and pick things apart to see what could be better next time.

Believe.

Believe in yourself. Believe in a higher power, fate, the universe, the fact that all things work together for good in the end. Stick it out. Slog through the shit. Do it with just as much attention and enthusiasm as the stuff you really love. Save mementos — screenshots, ticket stubs, hotel keycards, silly hand-scribbled bits of brainstorming — that remind you of the high points in your career. Look at them when you doubt. Remember where you came from. Take it with you wherever you go.

If you’re not passionate about it, leave it. If you are passionate about it, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.

Sunrise over Manhattan at Gawker Media, after a long night of coding and coffee.

Registration for ONA ’11 has just opened, and that means it must be time for me to write about my takeaways from ONA ’10.

Today I ran into AP videographer Yvonne Leow at a Phoenix coffee shop, and during a passionate conversation about the future of news, she asked me who my inspiration in journalism was. There was really only one possible answer: Jonathan Harris.

In a way, I couldn’t possibly have written this post any earlier, because for the past six months I’ve been internalizing ONA ’10, most importantly Harris’ keynote.

Harris is my hero. If you’re looking for inspiration, there is none better. (I unfortunately cannot find his ONA ’10 keynote video, but I’ve embedded an excellent video from 2008 in which he talks about storytelling platforms as a way to share our experiences. Hint: Avoid the omniscient narrator. The entire 20-minute video is available here.)

He is an artist, not a journalist, but he is a storyteller.

I pulled up his site to show Yvonne some of the things he had done (unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t seem to like his projects very much). She agreed that they were cool, but asked me what I thought journalism could possibly do with them.

And it’s a fair question. Harris’ projects tend toward the avant-garde, are often difficult to navigate and understand at first glance, and can be overwhelming. But that’s because, first of all, he’s an artist and being avant-garde is all right. And secondly, he’s handling huge amounts of information. His online dating visualization, “I Want You to Want Me,” comprises thousands, if not millions, of online dating profiles.

But I think Harris’ approach is one that news should experiment with. We’ve lost the “multi” in “multimedia,” too often content to settle for a video or a graphic. His projects are true multimedia, engaging multiple senses while imparting information.

For instance, Harris’ We Feel Fine project maps people’s feelings. You can filter them by age, type of feeling, gender, and even weather. Now imagine the Arizona Republic adapting that idea to show how Arizonans feel about immigration.

Much better than the normal method of embedding a Twitter widget pulling the #immigration hashtag, eh? In one glance, you could see how an entire state feels about a controversial topic. (Granted, this is just the online population. With an issue like immigration, where the immigrants themselves don’t usually have a significant public online presence, these results would be a bit skewed.)

Harris’ Whale Hunt (caution: graphic material, though it isn’t immediately visible on the page) is another example of a format news organizations could adapt. In this project, Harris took thousands of photos during nine days he spent with an Alaskan Inuit village who every year kills a whale to keep their ecosystem going. You can view the photos in one of several ways, but my favorite includes a “heartbeat” graph. Harris took photos at five-minute intervals, but took them faster during moments of adrenaline rushes. This allows you to see Harris’ emotions over the span of the week. You can click anywhere on the graph to see the corresponding photos. Predictably, the chart spikes when the whale is killed and butchered.

What if a similar idea had been applied to election night 2008? A reporter on scene could have worn a pulse monitor (or, if that makes some journalists squeamish about injecting themselves in the story — a topic for another blog post at another time — an attendee waiting for results), removing the subjectiveness of using rate-of-photography. Photos, video, and text bites could have been mapped to the heartbeat. The emotions associated with that night on both the winning and losing sides made up the story. This is just another way of emphasizing it.

Some of this sort of innovation emerges in journalism once in a while, like Amanda Cox’s New York Times “Olympic Musical” infographic. It maps Olympic results audibly, driving home the fractions of a second separating winners and losers.

A moment of reality: Yes, the technical threshold for these projects is very high. The time required to make them is great. These are not reasons to avoid pursuing them. We should instead ask how we can reshape news to have room and resources for creating them.

Like a filter in Photoshop, these graphics emphasize parts of reality and fade out others.

Also like a filter in Photoshop, news organizations seem to largely be terrified of interpreting the human experience in any but the most cut-and-dried way. Newsflash: You filter reality any time you select quotes or decide which story to cover. It is unavoidable, and we should stop pretending that we don’t do it. Becoming aware that we do it will allow us to represent reality more effectively, not less. These sorts of creative graphics give people a new take on subjects they are familiar with already, create empathy and understanding for communities totally unlike their own, and help them (and us) understand the true impact of events.

Isn’t that what journalistic storytelling is supposed to be?

I don’t normally engage in personal entries on this blog, but as this was somewhat topical, I decided to include it here.

I don’t remember the interview, the interviewee, or the story topic. All I remember is a passing comment:

“In a few years, I’ll look for your name in the Washington Post.”

It was three years ago, or possibly four. I was a journalism student at Fresno State, plugging away at a degree that baffled my parents, my friends and even sometimes myself. I despised reporting. The interviewing process made me incredibly uncomfortable. I was — am — an introvert. I enjoyed telling stories, but the process of gathering them has always been painful for me. I preferred videography and photography because I could hide behind the camera.

I remember laughing at the interviewee’s statement. Journalism students from Fresno State don’t end up at the Washington Post. I wrote the story and it ran in the Collegian. As multimedia editor, I posted it myself that night to the paper’s Website.

I spent the next couple of years playing with the online side of journalism, mostly in an editorial role. I got offered a job as Web editor at the Merced Sun-Star two semesters before I graduated.

“Keep in touch,” he said. I was on cloud nine because someone actually thought my self-taught skills worthy of employment.

Then I decided to go to grad school. I applied to Medill, UC Berkeley, Arizona State. Berkeley’s rejection letter came first. I was crushed.

When I got accepted to Medill, I couldn’t believe they had actually admitted me. I couldn’t believe I was good enough to get in. I also couldn’t believe how expensive it was.

I went to Arizona State instead. It was possibly the best decision I’ve ever made, but that’s another post.

I sent out internship applications the next summer to all sorts of places: everything from the New York Times to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to little dinky papers I’d never heard of.

The little dinky papers were interested.

Journalism students from Fresno State don’t end up at the Washington Post.

I spent the summer as Webmaster for ASU’s News21 program. I knew I’d gotten the job because I was a student at ASU. I doubted they would have hired me if I’d been a freelancer.

Facing graduation this May, I made a concerted effort to get out internship applications early this fall: New York Times, USA Today, Denver Post, Washington Post. I figured I had nothing to lose. I also figured there was no possibility of getting any of them, despite scoring some stellar recommendations. I planned to apply to my second- and third-tier choices over Christmas break.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

I got a call from the Post.

They wanted to interview me.

The Washington Post wanted to interview me.

Today, they offered me the internship.

Maybe there’s hope for a hometown Fresno girl after all.

Yeehaw.

I am lucky enough to be attending the Online News Association’s 2010 conference and nerdfest in Washington, D.C. this weekend. While I plan to update a couple of times during the conference, I thought I’d kick things off by sharing my early-morning, stuck-in-an-airport answers to a pre-conference questionnaire for which WordPress dev Andrew Nacin is soliciting responses.

1. What are the most significant new forms of news, journalism, and reporting that you see in the current Web landscape? Which ones are of potential long-term value for research, education, and cultural purposes and why?

Data journ. Once relegated to the nerds in the corner to parse and interpret, data’s becoming a powerful force in journalism thanks to tech. Really good database presentation allows the public to search and manipulate the data to answer questions on which the journalists may not have touched. The best offer additional information (read: reporting) that accompanies the data.

I’d also nominate data journ for the second question’s answer. Nothing reveals trends in culture like numbers do. You can’t argue with it (at least not if the journalist’s done his job right).

But for the most part, I don’t really think there are too many truly new forms of journalism. Rather, it’s the way old forms (writing, graphics, photos, video, audio) are put to task in light of new technology. From a storytelling perspective, I think very few news organizations make the most of interactive multimedia packages. (And I mean true multimedia packages, not text with video or a timeline.)

2. What trends do you see in community, hyperlocal, and citizen journalism that you anticipate will have significant impact in the near and mid–term (5-10 years)?

I think people are realizing that community news is the stuff that isn’t going away. I’ve always argued that if paywalls worked anywhere, it would be in your smallest communities – where else are you going to find the Boy Scout service projects and town rezoning laws? But that’s the stuff that community cares about.

At its heart, hyperlocal/community journalism is all about connecting people with things they care about. To do that, you have to know your audience in more than a demographic sense, and I think that’s what news forgot sometime in the past hundred years. Suddenly we’re seeing news orgs scramble to figure out how to engage with people. That’s something they should have been doing all along, and something that they’re going to have to do much better if they want to survive.

Citizen journalism doesn’t fit with hyperlocal/community to me. In fact, it seems like citizen journalism has faded somewhat as a “savior” for the industry. No one could ever really tell me why someone would donate his very limited free time to basically be told he can’t write. It always smacked of “hey, free labor!” to me.

3. Describe briefly how your consumption of news has changed in the past 5 years. As a rule, where to you turn to for news—local, national, international, and among professional colleagues?

A confession: I am not and never have been a regular news consumer. News consumption is something I’ve had to learn through my journalism education. Most of my news comes through my graduate assistantship, in which I have to write biweekly news quizzes for a class of brighteyed freshman journo students. Hopefully, once I finish my stint as a grad student, I’ll be able to keep up with it a bit more!