(No wonder America is so fat — people don’t even get up from their desk chairs to heat up a processed meal!)

You do this all day. You watch the hours tick by before deadline. Is this story going to come through today?

Around 4, you finally get a call back. And then another. And then half the people you called that day call you back.

By deadline at 5, you’ve heard from all your sources and pieced together a half-decent story. It all worked out.

It’s like clockwork but somehow I find myself just as nervous each day that everything will fall through. And sometimes it does – but usually it all falls heavily together at the end of the day and I can walk out of the office with some feeling of long-awaited accomplishment.

But it’s only 3:30, so let’s hope I haven’t spoken too soon for today’s fate.

I started my summer internship with the Asheville Citizen-Times this morning. The copy editing intern and I met our boss at the reception desk, and as soon as we got on the elevator to head up to get our parking passes he introduced us to journalism with this message:

“The HR desk is really busy because we’re firing 11 people from our news staff today. Welcome to journalism!”

Here we go…

In other day-recap-news – I was sent out to walk around downtown and get a bunch of quotes for a story on a search for the best town in America. This is what I hate most about journalism: going out into crowds (or not crowds) and asking random people to talk to you. It doesn’t happen all that often in journalism, but when it does it always makes me squeamish. BUT it was successful, the story was completed (finally after many, many hours of work), and even though my boss turned to me and said he would like to leave and asked if I could finish the story soon around 5:30 when I was aiming to stick around until 6 to get my hours in, he said it was a nice story and that he’d see me tomorrow.

So I’ve been invited back for a second day. I am free labor for this newspaper after all. I still can’t really grasp how to do today all over again, but there’s nothing to do but just do it.

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser (the main forces behind the movie) are investigative journalists. And they took on this monstrous project (among their other monstrous journalistic endeavors), and I have found myself utterly inspired by Food, Inc. This isn’t normal inspiration though – it is an inspiration that has slowly crawled out of the disgust Food, Inc. made me feel. Disgust, shame, sadness, devastation. And somehow I have found a hint of inspiration in it all. A desire to be better, to do better, to try harder to be better to this world I love so dearly.

So I’ve been thinking about it daily, often for long periods each day. I’ve been thumbing through Pollan’s Food Rules and waiting eagerly to start Omnivore’s Dilemma. It has paralleled perfectly with my geography class – Issues in the Developing World – for which I read several chapters in my textbook all about how the world farm was developed. As I discover more and more about the food industry and where everything we eat comes from, my desire to change the way the system works continues to grow. Even if it’s just in my own life in small ways.

I think this is really one of the most important aspects of my desire to be a journalist. I really believe (maybe it’s overly-stoic optimism) that if people just knew about things like this, they would be so much better equipped to affect change in their own lives and societies. We can’t force it down their throats (I certainly don’t want that, so why on earth would others?) but we can provide accurate, unbiased, comprehensive information for people to make informed choices. And this is so, so, so necessary. I can’t believe people even talk about journalism dying. Few things are more necessary to a well-functioning democracy than good journalism. Now we just have to find a way to fund newspaper companies..

The Winterfest article I’m writing is about the Polar Plunge – an annual event in Blowing Rock in which 30-50 people jump into an ice-cold (and often ice-covered) lake for charity. Many of them wear costumes, and believe it or not, many of them come back year after year to jump into this freezing lake in the middle of winter all over again.

So I called Tracy Brown, the emcee of the event. Tracy has a deep, booming voice – one that made me think immediately of COURSE he’s the emcee! It was a short conversation and I’m calling him back tomorrow to do an actual interview, but what I’m trying to say in all of this is that he seemed genuinely appreciative that I had called. And that’s a huge, important feeling, especially as a young journalist who is already apprehensive about almost everything.

I am human, and I adore feeling appreciated. I love to feel needed, or like I play an irreplaceable role. I know that I am a unique individual because we all are, but I don’t often feel that I am irreplaceable. So it’s nice to feel that the work you are doing is necessary and appreciated. Especially when it’s hard work that threatens to knock you down over and over again. I’ve shed more than a few tears because of deadlines, insensitive editors, and people refusing to call me back. But I guess that’s all part of building a skin tough enough to be a journalist.

I approach every interview and phone call as knowledgeable as I can be, but fully aware that whoever I am calling or interviewing is doing me (and the public) a great favor by answering my questions. I can’t describe how nice it is for these people to make me feel like I’m the one doing the favor to them. Maybe I shouldn’t confine this feeling to “small town” journalism, but I definitely felt it in my internship this summer. I think that’s part of what I loved so much about the internship. I remember trying to write in this blog once about how much I was coming to love community journalism, but I could never get the words quite right.

But really – I guess it’s not nearly as important to find the words for why I love writing as it is to be able to find the words so I can keep writing.

It was no secret that social media contributed to (or maybe caused) Barack Obama’s presidential victory. An article on Read Write Web shows the power of Obama’s social media presence versus that of John McCain. After Obama swept the social media scene, Senator Scott Brown used similar tactics to win his seat. According to Talking Points Memo, Brown used 10% of his campaign funds on online outreach, compared to Obama who used 4% of his campaign funds for the same purpose. The article said that Rob Willington, the man in charge of Brown’s online presence, “knew from the start that Internet strategy would be crucial to his candidate’s chances.” Peter Leyden’s 2007 interview explained that blogs first emerged in more progressive areas and served the “culture” of the Democratic Party in that everyone has a voice and can express their separate opinions. Scott Brown’s domination of social media in his campaign shows that despite liberal beginnings, use of social media now plays a large role across party lines.

Social media are vital parts of political campaigns today. My father, Billy Kennedy, is learning the importance of social media in his campaign fundraising efforts. Kennedy has a Twitter account, a Facebook group, a Facebook page and a Web site. Each of these media are updated regularly with news and campaign happenings. Kennedy has been featured on blogs such as Down With Tyranny, Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. He has done several live blogging sessions as well. Kennedy believes that these blogs have brought him financial and social support, especially from people outside of the 5th district. Kennedy estimated that about 25% of the funds he has raised so far was through online donations. Whether people donated online because it was easiest or because of social media attention is unclear. Regardless, this reinforces that the Internet is already a vital part of campaign fundraising.

Roy Carter, Virginia Foxx’s 2008 opponent, said that the presence of social media has definitely changed since he ran for Foxx’s seat. “Twitter wasn’t real popular then but it’s gotten popular since,” said Carter. “We did a lot with Facebook and emails though.” Carter said he, like Kennedy, received a lot of local and national blog coverage in addition to “old media” (newspaper, radio and television) coverage. Carter estimated that he got half of his campaign contributions online and that donations came from 20 different states because of a Democracy for America fundraiser.

Carter also explained that North Carolina’s 5th district is a unique area. “To reach the older voters and the farmers [of the 5th district],” said Carter, “You’ve got to be face-to-face with them. But you still need the online presence to reach the younger generation. You definitely have to have both here.”

Kennedy noted this as well. “I think it’s easier to reach out to people with new media, but many others in our district don’t even have computers,” said Kennedy.

Virginia Foxx and Richard Burr were unavailable for interviews in the short notice of this assignment.

Although the social media presence is becoming increasingly important, face-to-face interaction will always be the most important thing in political campaigns. “I think social media will become more important but that ‘personal touch’ is still necessary,” said Pam Blume, chairman of the Watauga County Republican Party.

New media are breaking boundaries and reinventing politics. Kennedy believes new media increase transparency in politics. New media reach far and wide; readers and writers of blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts are people of all ages now. The Internet is no longer just the world of the youth. However, many areas in America still lag behind in the technology necessary to make use of social media. In these areas, new media are not as effective for political campaigns. The bottom line is that although social media are playing increasingly large roles in campaigns, old media and face-to-face interactions still play an equal or greater role in politics in many American towns.

Some background on Boone:

Boone is a small mountain town in the northwestern corner of North Carolina. Watauga, the county Boone is located in, has a population of just over 40,000 and is 96.5% white. Boone is a town that fluctuates throughout the year. Because it is home to Appalachian State University, the population swells and deflates as students come and go. Boone is a town in which everywhere you go, you can expect to see at least one person you know or recognize.

In terms of media, Boone has three main newspapers: The High Country Press, The Mountain Times, and The Watauga Democrat.

The High Country Press is a weekly community journalism publication.  It has a Web site on which it posts most print stories, a Twitter account and a Facebook page that are all updated regularly.

The Mountain Times is another weekly publication.  It does not have a Twitter account or a Facebook page but does have a Web site on which most of its print stories are published.

The Watauga Democrat is Boone’s most frequently published newspaper. Print editions are published on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The Watauga Democrat has a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Web site. The Democrat’s Twitter and Web site are updated frequently but the Facebook page does not appear to have any recent updates.  One major fault of the Democrat’s Web site is that they have recently stopped posting the full print stories online.  Usually part of each story is posted with a line at the bottom saying, “For more in-depth coverage, see the latest print edition of the Watauga Democrat, available at hundreds of locations across the High Country.”

I’m fairly sure that the Watauga Democrat made this change to keep people subscribing to the paper. Since newspaper circulation has declined across the country, the Watauga Democrat is probably in a similar bind economically. However, I don’t think that this was a good solution. By not posting stories online, the Watauga Democrat is making it even harder for citizens to become informed.

The discussion of the future of journalism always circles back to this: how will newspapers continue to support themselves when readers get most of their news now for free?

To solve this problem, The New York Times will soon start charging readers who want to read more than a certain number of articles online each month. UK newspapers will also start charging for online content. I believe that this solution will have negative consequences. Like the Watauga Democrat only posting part of each story online, this change will make news even more difficult for citizens to get.

This profit dilemma is hurting our citizens and our newspapers. I hope that as people become more aware of the issues between newspaper revenue and informed citizens, more work will be put toward solving this problem. The US government bailed out car companies, so why not newspapers? Would this solve the problem? This is an issue I hope to stay up-to-date on and follow as changes are made.

Even without seeing official studies conducted, I witness this every day.  I consider myself in the middle of the uninformed-informed spectrum of our generation.  I don’t keep up with news as regularly as I should, but I really enjoy being informed and I make a conscious effort to educate myself about current events.  Some days I don’t pick up a newspaper or look at a news Web site at all.  In my group of friends, a few of them keep up-to-date on as many current events as possible, a few of them have general knowledge about some current events, and most of them know very little about current events.  What I usually hear from friends when talking about political happenings is, “Oh yeah, I saw something about that on Facebook.”  I am guilty of this same statement when I don’t do my job to become an informed citizen.

So it is “old news” to most people that today’s youth don’t know about or care about news, especially state and local political news.  But where do we go from here as aspiring journalists?  Many of our friends won’t pick up a newspaper and they definitely won’t pay for it.  Even when Professor Towns asks us “what’s new?” in class, there is not much input.  Shouldn’t “informed” citizens be able to spout off several current events on the spot?  Shouldn’t we be the most informed citizens around since we are the ones who hope to inform others?

Who (or what) is responsible for this apathy among young people today?  Is it the fault of the youth, of the media, of a lack of education?

Ideally, people should feel a personal responsibility to become informed citizens.  In a perfect world, everyone would have general knowledge of international, national, state, and local happenings.  This general knowledge is necessary primarily when people must decide which candidate they believe will best represent them and their beliefs.  However, this is not how the world works.  Even if people are born with a desire to become informed citizens, it certainly doesn’t stick with most of them through their lives.  As journalists, we can’t expect citizens to have a great awakening in which they decide to follow news and current events closely.

On a personal level, apathy does not come from a fault in media.  When I want to educate myself on current events in the world or on local/state political news I can do so in just a few clicks on the Internet.  Just by picking up a daily newspaper I can become much more informed.  Some days I just choose not to do these things.  But in terms of a solution, I believe the media can answer the question.

The question I’m trying to answer in this whole post is how to fix this problem.  Resorting to the pessimistic and cynical part of myself, I don’t believe there is one solution that will solve the problem and fully revive “good” citizenship.  It is very difficult to change someone’s mind and equally difficult to try to instill passion in him/her for something he/she doesn’t care about at all.  That being said, I think it is the role of journalists to try every possible solution to the problem and hope that something works.  And if nothing works, then we have to keep trying.

Primarily, media need to put more weight on state and local political news.  Our content analysis project showed that many newspapers around the state give very little space to state and local political news.  If the media provided more news of this type, young people may be more likely to read it simply because it would take up more space online/in print.  It would be more difficult to avoid.  Additionally, if newspapers put more emphasis on local/state political news, readers may trust their judgment and begin to see this news as equally important to other news.

In addition to giving state and local politics more coverage in newspapers, media need to focus on making state and local political news understandable to everyone.  I often find myself confused by language and phrasing that is used when discussing governmental news.  Political news could also be “spiced up” by using the suspenseful style often used in sports and crime stories.  Although these other steps could be helpful, I think the first step to increasing the youth’s interest in state and local political news must be taken by newspapers themselves.

A change in content provided by media sources is the first step of a very long process.  I believe it is possible to restore “good” citizenship but that it will be a long, hard, and gradual process.  The change must first come from the journalists today who have great influence in creating informed communities.

Even without seeing official studies conducted, I witness this every day.  I consider myself in the middle of the uninformed-informed spectrum of our generation.  I don’t keep up with news as regularly as I should, but I really enjoy being informed and I make a conscious effort to educate myself about current events to an extent.  However, some days I don’t pick up a newspaper or look at a news Web site at all.  In my group of friends, a few of them keep up-to-date on as many current events as possible, a few of them have general knowledge about some current events, but most of them know very little about current events.  What I usually hear from them when talking about political happenings is, “Oh yeah, I saw something about that on Facebook.”  I am guilty of this same statement when I don’t do my job to become an informed citizen.

So it is “old news” to most people that today’s youth don’t know about or care about news, especially state and local political news.  But where do we go from here as aspiring journalists?  Many of our friends won’t pick up a newspaper and they definitely won’t pay for it.  Even when Professor Towns asks us “what’s new?” in class, there is not much input.  Shouldn’t “informed” citizens be able to spout off several current events on the spot?  Shouldn’t we be the most informed citizens around since we are the ones who hope to inform others?

Who (or what) is responsible for this apathy among young people today?  Is it the fault of the youth, of the media, of a lack of education?  Why is state and local political news uninteresting to many young people?

Ideally, people should feel a personal responsibility to become an informed citizen.  In a perfect world, everyone would have general knowledge of international, national, state, and local happenings.  This general knowledge is necessary primarily when people must decide which candidate they believe will be represent them and their beliefs.  However, this is not how the world works.  Even if people are born with a desire to become informed citizens, it certainly doesn’t stick with most of them through their lives.

On a personal level, apathy does not come from a fault in media.  When I want to educate myself on current events in the world or on local/state political news I can do so in just a few clicks on the Internet.  Just by picking up a daily newspaper I can become much more informed.  Some days I just choose not to do these things.

The question I’m trying to answer in this whole blog post is how to fix this problem.  Resorting to the pessimistic and cynical part of myself, I don’t believe there is one solution that will solve the problem and fully revive “good” citizenship.  It is very difficult to change someone’s mind and equally difficult to try to instill passion in him/her for something he/she doesn’t care about at all.  That being said, I think it is the role of journalists to try every possible solution to the problem and hope that something works.  And if nothing works, then we have to keep trying.

Primarily, media need to put more weight on state and local political news.  Our content analysis project showed that many newspapers around the state give very little space to state and local political news.  If the media provided more news of this type, young people may be more likely to read it simply because it would take up more space online/in print.  It would be more difficult to avoid.  Additionally, if newspapers put more emphasis on local/state political news, readers may trust their judgment and begin to see this news as equally important to other news.

In addition to giving state and local politics more coverage in newspapers, media need to focus on making state and local political news understandable to everyone.  I often find myself confused by language and phrasing that is used when discussing governmental news.  Political news could also be “spiced up” by using the suspenseful style often used in sports and crime stories.  Although these other steps could be helpful, I think the first step to increasing the youth’s interest in state and local political news must be taken by newspapers themselves.

(This blog is in response to the March 24th blog assignment but posted late.  My blog assignment for this week will be published tomorrow night.)

As newspaper companies try to figure out ways to regain their previous prosperity and vast readership, it is necessary to analyze what kind of news they actually provide for citizens.  Our Citizens and Media class conducted a two-week content analysis of six North Carolina newspapers: the Winston-Salem Journal, the Greensboro News & Record, the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Wilmington Star-News and the Fayetteville Observer.  We counted the number of local, state, and national political/government news stories and compared these figures to the total number of stories in each issue.

Out of 84 newspaper editions overall, we found only 6.4% of the stories were about local politics/government, 5.1% were about state politics/government, and 10.8% were about national politics/government.  27.1% of the stories were about sports and 50.6% of the stories were placed in the “other” category.  The “other” category contained quality of life articles, local, state, and national events, crime, etc. The story breakdowns for each newspaper were similar (click image to enlarge).

Among all of the newspapers, only 22.3% of the stories had anything to do with politics (local/state/national).  Political and governmental news filled a smaller portion of the newspapers with sports making up 27.1% of the stories.  Isn’t this a little odd seeing as sports events have a much smaller impact on our lives than political/governmental news?

This analysis shows the weight newspapers put on each of these categories.  Local and state political/governmental news makes up 11.5% of the stories whereas national political/governmental news makes up 10.8% alone.  It is impossible to tell if the focus on national news over local/state news is because of newspapers’ larger coverage of it or because citizens really do care more about national politics than local politics.  This is mirrored by statistics showing that there is lower voter turnout in years when the presidential race (the most famous political role in the US) is not being contested.  Although the president is believed to be the most powerful political figure, local politicians (Congressmen, mayor, town council, school board, etc.) make decisions that directly and immediately affect citizens.  Fayetteville mayor Tony Chavonne said in a recent interview, “There’s a lot of interest in what’s going on around the world but at the end of the day you want to make sure you’re in a community where things are provided by the local government.  But people take it for granted unless something doesn’t work.”

I think that everyone knows that local government is important and will have both large and small effects on the lives of people within a community.  However, local and state news usually does not carry the excitement factor that national news does.  The health care reform debate, the war in Iraq, and the earthquake in Haiti are all “exciting” and stories about these subjects have many readers.  It seems that people would rather read a story about something gripping and huge that has little impact on their lives directly than about smaller, less exciting news that could actually change things in their daily lives.

So what do we do?  Newspapers don’t publish local and state political/governmental news and citizens probably won’t read it anyway.  Is this a problem that needs to be solved?  Is this a problem that can be solved?  New media (community blogs and discussion board particularly) are beginning to address this problem by providing citizens with local news on easy-to-navigate Web sites.  Citizens tune into these Web sites to find out about local happenings.

Our final project in Citizens and Media is to create a new form of media to get political news to people in our chosen communities.  As we develop ideas, we will return to the lack of local/state news in newspapers today and try to address this in our new media models.

Facebook also informed me of the deaths of Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays; Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate election; the earthquake in Haiti; results/tragedies/surprising happenings in the 2010 olympics; and legal issues with gay marriage laws.  I have learned through social media of local concerts, campus events and speakers like Elaine Marshall, and current campus happenings like the power outage in the south campus dorms last week.  On Facebook I got campaign information from Barack Obama and other politicians in 2008.  My father is running for Congress in November and uses Facebook extensively for campaign organizing, event planning, and news spreading.  Most people learn of his campaign events through Facebook.  Until recently, he didn’t receive much media coverage and social media were the most informative sources of news.

Social media have provided me with information about local and national happenings quickly and accurately for the most part.  Occasionally rumors go around the Facebook community through status updates, groups, and fan pages that are not true, but generally the information I receive from social media is accurate.  Although the news I get from Facebook is mostly accurate, I still distrust news from social media more than news from reputable print, television, or Internet news providers.  Each time I learned news from Facebook, I checked to see if it was true from a reputable source.  Sometimes local/campus events are so small that they receive relatively no media coverage, leaving citizens with no way of finding out about them except through social media.  The national news I receive from social media is only the most shocking news.  There was a lot more talk of Kanye than of Obama’s state of the union address.

But how do we decide which news sources to trust?

Trust in news sources comes from reputation, long-term accuracy, complete coverage of stories, expedient publication and non-partisanship.  I am more likely to trust news from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal than from smaller, more obscure newspapers or blogs/social media.  There are some people I trust entirely for word-of-mouth news (for example: my father – a religious watcher of The News Hour and reader of The NYT; my grandmother – also a religious reader of The NYT; and a couple of my very-politically-in-tune friends).  It is difficult to decide who to trust and as humans I believe we often make our choices and stick to them, regardless.  This is dangerous but a difficult habit to break.