Burt Herman sent the email to the SF Hacks/Hackers group, just as an FYI. Free food! Free drinks! Free networking! Prizes! And all you have to do is show up at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and rethink their website!

In other words, Stanford want us to work for them for free. :/

I thought about deleting the invite and refusing to go in protest. But as every good journalist would take into consideration, they did have free food. All weekend. And I heard the founder of IDEO would be there. So OK, they would be “paying” us in greasy pizza and high-level contacts, and who knows, it could be fun. I’ve been to a few hackathons before and found them all worthwhile. All right.

I went. I sucked.
It was AWESOME.

First, the background: The Stanford d.school is not a design degree program, and it has little to do with strictly visual design. It’s more of an interdisciplinary school to teach problem-solving, creativity and collaboration skills. (Fast Company did some great write-ups on it when it first opened.)

The challenge was to bring their system of problem-solving to the world so people can change said world. So the designers, programmers, business people and other eyewitnesses set out on the inaugural HACK.d hackathon.

In that 48 hours of little sleep and, uh, lower-than-average showering, here’s what I learned.

“Design” solves problems. And everyone solves problems.

To be clear, the design we are talking about has nothing to do with making things look pretty, though that can be a means to solve a problem. Design is problem-solving, period. Even in graphic design, you have a client that has the problem of looking unprofessional or communicating the wrong thing. Your job as a designer is to solve it.

The philosophy of the d.school was that everyone is creative but not everyone knows it. They just need a little extra guidance. So the d.school offers one specific five-step method of problem-solving, which I happen to like:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Or, to break it down with one example:

• Watch and interview someone
• Find out their biggest pain in the ass and define it clearly
• Come up with as many ideas as possible that would fix the problem
• Build one of them
• Try it out on the person
• Repeat as many steps as necessary.

It seems obvious, but there are some important points this process addresses. Such as:

Humans first.

That’s why the “empathy” stage is first. Many of us at the hackathon went through a 90-minute crash course called the Gift-Giving Project. We paired up and asked each other about the last gift we gave and what we would change about the entire gift-giving process, from remembering to buy a gift to purchasing to wrapping to giving to sending the thank-you card.

After the first interview, they had us interview a second time with a deeper emphasis on emotion (“The goal is to make the other person cry,” said the facilitator).

THAT is what was missing from many of these step-by-step plans to solve problems. That emotional connection. I heard a gripping story from a first-time dad, and he heard my story. And we actually listened to each other on a deeper level and worked that into our solutions.

This is why Steve Job’s designs work. They inspire a human-centered emotional reaction. Whatever you think of Jobs himself, you can’t deny the emotional connections he created through his products.

Sucking is a means to an end.

When you’re brainstorming ideas, it’s quantity over quality. I’ve known this for years and am comfortable with letting everyone offer whatever idea they have without shooting it down. It’s a different picture when I’m talking about my own ideas. I’m in self-editor mode even before I begin. The facilitator made a great point about “page vomit”: The idea is to use all your stupid, stupid ideas up, until you come across a not-so-stupid idea. Then don’t treat it as a series of failures that leads to an answer, but a road map you bring to your test user so they can tell you where to go.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. You are helping them find their own answer.

Workspaces do mean a lot.

The d.school is designed so that nearly every wall is a whiteboard, most of the furniture is on wheels, and a main workspace has adjustable walls. There are buckets of Post-its, Sharpies and Expo pens everywhere. But interestingly enough, I couldn’t find a regular pen and a pad of paper anywhere.

That’s because the workspace is designed purposefully to get people to share and collaborate. Your ideas are not precious, to be kept in your binder or entered into an Excel spreadsheet. They’re supposed to be messy and open. There’s not a lot of lecturing in the classes, so there’s no need for taking notes of some teacher’s PowerPoint slides. They call it a bias of action: Less talk, more walk.

Give people limits and they will find a way. Oh, they will find a way.

Yes, some people created amazing projects within 48 hours. That was the whole point of the weekend. But the idea of limitations and quick iterations was everywhere.

In the gift-giving exercise, I had 10 minutes to build a toy car out of a pile of kindergarten craft supplies. I chose Popsicle sticks, tape, magnets and pipe cleaners. In a way, the limitations were hugely helpful, because if your goal is to get good feedback on your prototype, the other person is more willing to criticize something that is crap than if they were presented with a polished prototype.

Become a kid again.

OK, so how many of you draped sheets between furniture and built tents in your living room? That’s kind of how I felt about the architecture of the place. The d.school bridges two buildings and uses the space between them brilliantly:

Outside

Inside

You can still see the exposed walls inside the (yes) well-insulated room. Genius.

And when was the last time you played with Popsicle sticks?

The school brings the concept of play to a university that desperately needs it. Because it’s interdisciplinary, it means that some of the world’s best doctors, scientists, engineers and lawyers at Stanford can all take classes in play.

David Kelley said in his opening remarks that people stopped calling themselves “creative” as far back as elementary school, and that was a shame. Now the school he helped found is putting creativity back to people who may need it the most.

Like, for example, me.

This post is the second of mine in the Carnival of Journalism. The first is here.

I had a media literacy course in community college. It was an elective. I liked it. It was cool. I don’t remember much from it, though.

I also had a critical thinking course at the same college. It was a requirement. I loved it. It changed my life. It wasn’t a “journalism” class, but it definitely focused a lot on the media. And it was more than cool.

I remember being asked to clip advertisements and identify the marketing tactics used to sway people into buying the product. I remember we were asked to memorize seven most common logical fallacies and apply them to different news articles we found.

Both assignments would have worked wonderfully in the media literacy course. But nope. Missed opportunity for the elective, but thank God students had to take the critical thinking course to transfer to a 4-year university.

We need more requirements like this, for everyone.

Media works best when the public is smart

When I read “Study: Many college students not learning to think critically,” I wish I were more surprised. This is not a j-school problem, it’s a school-school problem. And a painfully obvious one to boot.

So to address the root problems in this month’s Carnival of Journalism, we have to go deeper and wider than just the journosphere.

The Knight Foundation loves to use wording like “journalistic activity” and “information needs” to step away from thinking that only journalists can impart good information. I like that.

So to apply it to the role of the university, how about empowering departments who conduct original research to write for the public? Much of their work is inaccessible because of academic jargon or restrictive publications. If the school has a journalism program, what about a tighter and more in-depth partnership with them? And what if the journalism schools were able to broadcast this to a broader audience?

A scenario

Let’s invent an example. A university with a great biology department discovers an important find. A peer-review journal has published the study and it is passing the test.

To spread it to the community at large, the university PR department sends out a one-page press release describing the research. It’s not very in-depth, and frankly, the poor overworked PR department has other things to do.

If there were no journalism program at the university, an outside entity (such as the Knight Foundation!) could set up content-production training with the people in the biology department. It could give them tools to build their own website, seminars on how to write engaging blog posts, workshops on how to publish a database to the web.

But luckily for this fictional school, they do have a j-school and it has a special reporting class. (Yeah, yeah, I know I said let’s look outside the j-school, but let’s return to navel-gazing for a bit. Humor me.)

The class’ sole job is to maintain different online journalistic outlets — websites, blogs, newsletters, etc. The class maintains a handful of niche websites or blogs, and they keep the content coming every day. The niches could be on science, entertainment, politics, finances — whatever is an identified information need, whether it’s a local or a national niche. (The publications stay the same, no matter what semester.)

So the biology department’s press release lands on the instructor’s desk. She gives it to the student assigned to writing for the science blog that day (each student has to be well-rounded enough to rotate through all the blogs). They notify the established student media that they’re working on this article. They might do a short write-up, or they might wait until the student does something more in-depth on the science blog. They choose that route. The student then acts as the liaison with the science department into helping them translate this finding into English, obtaining some databases or spreadsheets, and posting it in an interactive way to the blog. If the science blog had a national audience niche, even better. The class could also set up a place on the site where the biology department themselves could upload and post articles. The student newspaper does a short write-up and references the science blog in a link or QR code from the article.

How is this different?

I view this kind of scenario as different from the current student media setup in that it encourages national audiences with very specific niches and consistent writers. How many good blogs do you know have gone dead because the person behind them got sick of doing it?

Research needs to be done in each community on what the information need is, however, not what the students want to blog about. That’s for their own blogging time (and it’s good journalism training to write for subjects you didn’t choose).

The flagship student media should represent a general-interest campus niche and should focus all of its efforts on that. But this class would allow students to identify information needs and focus on that regardless of campus relevance — or if there’s a deeper relevant topic on campus, it could fill that need where the established student media can’t devote the resources.

I will say, it IS similar to UC Berkeley’s Mission Local, but I’m imagining an undergraduate class writing for national audiences. I like to dream big.

Ideas more practical than that one

I’m full of too many ideas, and frankly, I need to wrap this up, so I’m going to toss out a few ideas of practical things that 1) don’t involve a brand new class and 2) is related to the Carnival of Journalism topic:

I originally was going to use this space to bitch and moan about how journalism schools should never lose sight of the basics, but I’m sure you all know that by now. I’d rather leave you with a sprinkling of ideas that you could turn into actual classroom exercises. Hope you do.

This post is the first of mine in the Carnival of Journalism. And this one is my second. Go forth and be a part as well!

I have written so much on the subject of journalism education, I wanted to make a condensed post of some of those ideas first before I jumped into a point-by-point response to the Carnival of Journalism’s questions.

In February 2009 a group of journalism students held a massive online chat to talk about how journalism education needed to be revamped. Here are the highlights. It’s a great read.

In August 2009, I had the good fortune of appearing on a panel at AEJMC with the likes of Dan Gillmor and Sandeep Junnarkar. Before the panel, I hosted a #collegejourn chat and asked participants what I should tell the room full of educators. Here are the key bullet points of what I gathered:

• It’s going to take much more than throwing social media classes into the curriculum to make real changes needed. Read Daniel Bachhuber’s thoughts on this.
• There’s a lesson plan in comparing ethics policies, legal quandaries and best practices of news organizations using social media. Less emphasis on teaching the tools, more on teaching principles.
• Students who know social media should become TAs or peer teachers, or help organize a bootcamp/BarCamp at school to teach both students and the professors about social media.
• But, professors, please still keep hammering fundamentals. Don’t get lost in the latest buzzword. Everything taught about social media should point straight back to the basics.

A few ideas I wrote about after the panel:

• Students want the ability to experiment and fail. There needs to be a grading system that allows for this.
• Educators and even some students feel queasy about marketing themselves. With all due respect, they need to get over it.
• Don’t teach social media tools, teach concepts behind them. Don’t teach Twitter, teach why Twitter.
• Too many students think someone’s going to fix the industry for them. Sorry. It’s all on the students now.
• From what I’ve heard of Arizona State’s program, it has a lot of things going for it. Gillmor sets up a Ning for each of his classes and has students write and correct Wikipedia entries. There’s also an entrepreneurial class, and (if I remember correctly) students edit each other’s work on live on WordPress.

But to be more on point with the topic of Carnival of Journalism — “the changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community” — I really want to focus on another idea altogether: going outside of j-school to get this done.

Watch for my follow-up post.

Due to circumstances ultimately beyond my control, I have landed an amazing job as a web producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley.

Before you chide me for being too humble, I believe that getting hired required four things:

1. Right time
2. Right place
3. Right skill set
4. Right connections

I did all I could for the last two, and the first two happened to fall into place.

I’ve been on the job for more than a month, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m working with an incredible crew, including past (and future) Pulitzer Prize winners. I work extensively on CIR’s biggest project, California Watch. For all of CIR’s sites, I’m posting stories, coordinating reporters and tech people, planning some redesigns and fixing bugs in the look and feel of the sites.

I have to make this post rather short, but here is more information from About.com and Wikipedia about what a web producer does. In three words, they rock it.

I’m biased.

New entries have been added to the AP Stylebook Online. As an online subscriber, you can receive these updates whenever the Associated Press makes them. Every time you log into AP Stylebook Online, you can easily find recent updates by clicking on “New Entries” or “Recent Changes” in the left navigation bar.

Editor’s Note: New entries on al-Shabab, foodborne, ground zero, NPR, Sudan, video recording and videotape have been added to the AP Stylebook Online.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

al-Shabab: The preferred spelling for the Somali militant group

foodborne (adj.)

ground zero

NPR: Acceptable in all references to National Public Radio. Producer and distributor of noncommercial news, talk and entertainment programming. Headquarters is in Washington, D.C.

Sudan: Use Sudan or Southern Sudan when referring to the governments. But it’s south Sudan and north Sudan when referring to locations.

video recording: Precise term for digital audio and visual recording. Digital has largely replaced videotaping.

videotape (n. and v.): Largely replaced by digital recording. The terms apply only if tape is used.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

“Ground zero” is the most interesting entry. [EDIT: It's not a new change. See tweet below.]  The addition must be in response to the erroneously named “Ground Zero Mosque” (see Poynter’s column on why that’s bad for journalism and good for SEO). But it’s still unclear whether the lowercase “ground zero” makes the term generic, not referring to the World Trade Center site specifically.

I have a tweet into AP Stylebook and will update this blog post if there is a response. Or maybe I should use old-fashioned e-mail. Or older-fashioned phone calls.

EDIT, 8/27/10, 4:30 p.m.:
Two responses from @apstylebook:

I’m still not quite satisfied. To me it just makes sense to capitalize Ground Zero in reference to the World Trade Center site, and the rest can be done dictionary-style.

But I can see Bob Collin’s argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are far more deserving of the capitalization. Still, in modern context, when people talk about Ground Zero, it’s generally assumed that it’s in reference to Sept. 11.

So what do you think? Is there another term out there that is comparable?

TBD.com, a much-hyped local news website in Washington, D.C., launched to the public this morning. Poynter, Newsonomics and Nieman Lab wrote lists on why it’s the news company to watch this year, and PaidContent has a great interview with Robert Allbritton, the guy in charge of TBD’s parent company. Mashable even has a nice writeup this morning, too.

Any time there is this much hype surrounding a product launch, someone is going to end up disappointed.

This time, it’s not me. I’m impressed with TBD so far, and I’m not easily impressed with news sites nowadays.

That’s a testament to how many cool little things are packed in this site. And from all accounts, it still doesn’t have nearly as many cool things that were planned for it, either.

Perhaps I haven’t run into many of the bugs that Erik Wemple spoke of in his letter from the editor. I have run into a few, which I list at the bottom of this post. But I love the ideas, the layout, the concept, the conversations, and I can’t wait until even more features are unveiled.

What I love:

• The main news pages have the number of updates in the last 72 hours in the left-hand rail (see the picture above). In the right rail I find all the news in the area of my community. And you can refine that list by category? Be still my heart!
• The headlines-from-everywhere idea. That’s hardly new, but I love the way it’s implemented here. They’ve pulled in content from a slew of different sources, from mainstream media outlets to blogs, and they geotagged them into locations, so they’re searchable by zipcode or neighborhood. And I love how every headline on the main pages has the source of the story in clear sight.
• Complete This Story. On a story about D.C. mayoral hopeful Vince Gray, there is a box you can fill out if you have more information on his campaign. Two birds, one stone: TBD gets better opportunities for reporting, and users get better opportunities to interact.
• I love the upfront traffic delays, using data from BeatTheTraffic.com. Public transit delays take data straight from WMATA. It works brilliantly for a major metro area whose transit data is publicly available.
• The “Long Story Short” box on each TBD story. It’s a Twitter-friendly headline you can tweet with one click. (See it in action on the left here.)
• Love the Foursquare partnership. It reminds me of a simple request I’ve seen in several newsrooms — “Hey, let’s put all our restaurant reviews on an interactive map” — yet is difficult to pull off because all the previous reviews aren’t in a data-structured form. Because TBD is built from the ground up in a purely digital format, it doesn’t have that problem.
• Love The Facts Machine (on Twitter at @TBDFactsMachine). It’s in the same vein as PolitiFact and the San Diego Fact Check. Though all reporters need to be checking facts, I think every news organization should have at least one full-time employee doing nothing but fact-checking the crap out of politicians’ claims.
• When I am logged in (with my Facebook account even), I can bookmark articles from within the site. Why haven’t more sites done this? Or have they been doing it and I’ve been blind?
• They have a reporter dedicated to lists, says Erik Wemple. That’s kinda… a little bit… awesome. (If you read my blog, you know I’m a sucker for lists and bullet points. You’re reading ‘em right now!)
• Comments. I love that reporters are actually responding to comments. I also like that the default sort is by highest ranked, but you can choose to have them listed in chronological order.
• Each Metro station has its own page. For example, the Rosslyn station page has live boarding statuses, a trip planner, even a widget that shows when someone is tweeting about the station (this morning’s tweet from a random person is warning me there is no air conditioning on a Blue line car. THAT. IS. GOOD. TO KNOW.)
• There’s a live chat all day today to answer questions. That’s “community engagement” right there.

What I don’t love:

• The relatively few hard-news reporters. Of the dozen reporters on staff, only four are doing “news” news — one fact-checker and three community reporters, according to the letter from the editor. I understand that entertainment and sports rake in the dough, but more news news, please!
• It’s still not clear how much vetting there will be of outside blogs. What if a blog posts an unfounded rumor and it gets aggregated, even featured? I know I spoke to Steve Buttry before about this, but now that I can see the site, I’m still unclear. (UPDATE: Not two minutes from posting this, I see that some of my concerns are addressed here.)
• The name. Sorry. It just doesn’t quite sum up how cool the site is. I know if other domains were available, the TBD folks would have snatched it up. Also, there is no immediate explanation on the site on what the heck the name means and how it was chosen. That’s question numero uno for most visitors.
• The Incidents page would be much better as a map.
• This ad. Don’t know if there’s any way to block BP from an ad network, but SRSLY LOOK INTO IT.
• Bugs. Yup, there are a few. I know the site had to launch before it was fully cooked because some tech-savvy people guessed the testing URLs correctly, so bugs are to be expected. I’m willing to bet the staff already knows about these ones I encountered. But I’ll write about them anyway in hopes it helps squash them:
  • Saved items. I could have sworn I saved more than two stories. Does it only register if it’s a TBD original? If so, what do the stars by the aggregated content do? And the star on the TBD story that IS in my queue is greyed out. Shouldn’t it be colored still?
  • Setting up locations. I was surprised that when I typed in the name Rosslyn, Va., TBD’s own home base, the name didn’t pop up under the list of suggested locations. And when I tried typing in three locations at a time, it didn’t seem to save.
  • If I mark a comment as a “Good point” on accident, I can’t undo.
  • The Facebook social plugin on this page seems to link to example.com. Or does it?
  • Minor quibble, but on my Chrome and Safari browsers, the “All Over Washington” tagline is hidden below the TBD logo on the home page. I think that’s just a CSS tweak.
• And the biggest thing I don’t like about TBD: That it’s not based in my community. Doesn’t do me much good to enter my real zip code, does it? :)

So that’s my official two cents (in a reference to their comments section). Overall I’m quite excited about the site and what it means for digital journalism as a whole, and I’m happy the site is finally out in the open for everyone to see.

And I bet you the staff is operating on about 15 minutes of sleep. I’ve experienced this when the SF Public Press launched its first print edition last month.

Note to friends at TBD: Do get some shut-eye. If the only flat, non-Red-Bulled surface in the newsroom is Jim Brady’s desk, well, I’m sure he’ll forgive you for your nap.

Oh, and congratulations.

ADDENDUM: Read the Knight Citizen News Network’s  great post, “Lessons Every News Site Can Learn from TBD’s Launch.” And also catch up on the excellent live chat archive at Poynter with some of TBD’s top dogs.

• find story ideas
• report stories
• build a relationship with readers
• promote stories or the newspaper and website itself.

Her textbook is geared toward student journalists who want to know everything there is to know about the student newspaper process.

So this is what I told her, and I’m sharing it with you now:

Finding news stories on Twitter

We used a site called Hootsuite.com to manage our Twitter and Facebook accounts. It does a million things we like: It lets several people co-manage accounts without having to sacrifice password security, we can schedule tweets and Facebook posts into the future, and we can set up searches and friends lists to easily sift through all the noise. There’s also analytics built in, which is a nice add.

We have a search set up in Hootsuite for anyone on Twitter who mentions SJSU. (You can also just use search.twitter.com.) That has proved invaluable in a handful of cases. We can be alerted to news stories posted by the mainstream media the second they appear, and we can take action.

We can also get specific leads for stories that no one else really sees. For example, I found one Twitterer in my SJSU search who mentioned a blind classmate in an orchestra class. I messaged her and got more details: Apparently the Braille technician on campus had moved on to another job, and the blind student wasn’t able to have the sheet music printed in Braille, so the orchestra had to be limited to pieces that were already available in Braille. It was an interesting story I don’t think I would have found any other way.

Using social media for reporting

Social media was extremely helpful for one of our biggest stories of the semester, but our big breaks in the process came from old-fashioned reporting.

Last March, a man named John Patrick Bedell brought a gun into the Pentagon and opened fire. No one at the Pentagon was seriously hurt, but the man was shot and killed in retaliation. We had heard he was a former SJSU student, so we worked all night to verify that fact.

Bedell was quite tech-savvy and had accounts on LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Amazon that mentioned SJSU and revealed more pieces of his character. We used that in our stories, but we didn’t have definitive verification until the school’s media relations officer came through. She had access to a student database we didn’t have, and she provided the student photo that matched the photo the FBI released.

We also wanted to find a student who knew the shooter, so we scoured Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and web bulletin boards. We came very close to finding students who would speak to the media, but they never came through. We used our newsroom Google group to e-mail the entire news staff, and it turned out that a friend of an editor knew someone who had a class with him. We eventually nailed the story.

My takeaway was this: You get better sources and better information with established connections. It’s tough to make cold calls, and they come through sometimes. It’s also tough to make cold connections on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We got the best results when we had pre-existing relationships with sources, or friends of sources. There’s an established trust, and that reinforces the need for journalists to make online connections through social media before those connections are needed. Start following Twitterers in the area, or be active on Facebook fan pages and other bulletin boards.

Building a relationship with readers

On our newspaper’s Facebook fan page, we made sure we asked questions of readers, at least one every day, about the issues of the day. We tried some different things with that. For example, if two columnists write opposing views on one subject, we asked the Facebook fans to “like” the article they agreed with the most.

Because of abuse and lack of moderation options, we had to shut down the ability for fans to post on our wall. At the time Facebook had no way for us to moderate wall comments. But our workaround was having an “Open-topic Friday” every Friday where people could post their rants, raves, events and news items in one thread. It’s actually a good idea to have those kinds of posts occasionally anyway, because some people won’t contribute to the community unless there’s a reason.

Another idea: Create a graphic of a scale of 1 to 10, and ask Facebook fans to tag themselves on the photo that best reflected their viewpoint. For example, if they were for tighter gun control, they would tag themselves near the 1, and if they were against, they’d place their tag near the 10. That way, their friends are notified that they are tagged in this photo, and they are automatically subscribed to the comment thread. It’s another way to make an issue of the day go viral.

Promoting stories

We actually slow-released our headlines on Twitter every fifteen minutes in the morning. It avoids the RSS dump most news feeds have when a site goes live. We used to post every story to the Facebook page but we wanted to avoid overload, so we picked a good representative of stories and released them throughout the day via Hootsuite. We’d post our three top headlines at 7 a.m., a discussion-generating question at 10 a.m., an opinion column at noon, a feature or entertainment story at 3 p.m. and a multimedia piece at 6 p.m.

[Note: Since I originally wrote this about a month ago, Facebook has revealed that 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. are the best times for reader engagement, according to a presentation the company gave at a Hacks/Hackers meetup. For more, read Poynter's article on the subject. There's also an interesting spike of activity after midnight, they said, something that I found true when I had to post something late and got surprisingly immediate comments. Then again, this is a college newspaper, and college students are notorious night owls. I would take advantage of that.]

If I had more time as the online editor, I would have submitted our stories to StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Delicious, with the proper tags attached. I’ve found StumbleUpon to be one of the top referral sources to my own website, and research shows that to be true on a wider scale. So don’t make the mistake I made, and find time to promote your site beyond Facebook and Twitter.

So what practices have you found that work for you? Do you have any specific examples?

Me at Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach, San Francisco

I’m leaving San Jose in two weekends, back home to Visalia. Whatever “home” means nowadays.

I have no idea what’s next, but I’m open to any possibility. I could up-sticks and move clear across country – I could use a bit of East Coast butt-kicking in my life. I could end up in the Middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and reconnect with that whole Real America contingent, as opposed to the Fake America I now live in.

But for now, I have to unlatch myself from my current Bay Area location. Which means I have to get my kicks in now in case some opportunity draws me far, far away.

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that San Francisco is no longer going to be in my backyard.

There is so much I wanted to do up here and never did: cheesy touristy crap like ride the cable cars, or sophisticated geeky things like sit in a café in North Beach and write my heart out.

The second item on the agenda is being fulfilled right now. Here I am at Vesuvio Cafe, on the second floor that overlooks City Lights Books. If it was good enough for Jack Kerouac and Francis Ford Coppola, it’s good enough for me.

Sign for Vesuvio Cafe, San Francisco

I felt like I’ve been applying to jobs left and right in the area, to no avail. So I’ve expanded my search nationwide. It’s no secret that it’s competitive up here. Look, I can throw down with the best of them, and I’m still hustling to find something in the web producer or social media arena. I have confidence I’ll land something great soon.

But this idea of saying goodbye to the Bay Area has consumed me at the moment. It’s ironic that the handful of job applications in my queue that could allow me to stay here permanently are being put on hold for this ridiculous, drawn-out, sappy farewell.

I feel like I’m in mourning. Or in panic mode.

When I was in Visalia, I would drive the three-and-a-half hours fairly often to be in San Francisco. When I moved to San Jose, I took advantage of BART and CalTrain connections constantly.

My admiration for this city is making me do strange things now, like spelunking in buildings I have no business entering, or paying far too much for ferry rides to Sausalito _{(OMG I’m on a boat!!1).}.

It also led me to the epicenter of San Francisco tourist traps: Hyde and Beach streets. But I was only happy to be trapped in such a beautiful panorama.

Behind me, Ghirardelli Square. In front of me, the cable car turnaround. To the left was the Golden Gate Bridge gently arching above blue bay waters. To the right, Buena Vista Café, where I met Sean Blanda not too long ago and sipped an Irish coffee while talking tech and journalism, an issue this Silicon Valley place helped create.

People give their life savings to be in this city. They travel halfway around the world to be here.

I’m here now, eyes wide open, phone camera at the ready, neck craned upward.

I’m here, San Francisco.

Not for long, but I’m here.

But now that j-school is officially behind me, I have a new perspective on that monstrous beast of an experience I just went through. And I’m also being asked for interviews about that perspective.

Dan Reimold called me up from Singapore a few months ago for an interview and just today posted the results. (Thanks, Dan, for making me sound smart!)

Alesa Commedore, an intern at Ourblook.com, did a video Skype interview last week that should appear on the site later on. I’ll let you all know when it’s posted.

And Rachele Kanigel, an instructor at San Francisco State, asked me some questions over e-mail to help update her textbook, The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. I have to say, I wish I knew this book existed before I was interviewed for it.

With her permission, I’m sharing my advice for student journalists at campus publications with you. (I’m only speaking of roles where I’ve had extensive experience — my apologies to the photography and videography students out there. For that, check out the excellent blogs from Mindy McAdams or Mark Luckie.)

I actually have another post waiting in the wings to expand on the role of online editors at student publications. Keep tuned in.

Designed by my sister Jo Anne.

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