100th Post: Beyond the Printing Press

When I started this blog in 2007, I was closing one chapter in my life and moving to San Francisco. A lot of stuff has happened since then, but one thing has been constant: I'm chasing my dream of becoming a journalist.

I'm not sure who is reading, if anybody, but according to Google analytics, I'm getting around 5 hits a day. To my friends and the occasional web surfer, thank you.

For End of the Dial I wrote the piece below about adapting to new technologies in order to succeed in journalism. I hope you'll be here for the next 100 posts!

Beyond the Printing Press

I truly love journalism. But, like most of us in the industry, I'm worried about the possibility of getting, and maintaining, a job. So, I've decided to get proactive.

I'm spending last semester at NYU picking up some new skills that might make me a bit more marketable to editors. I am studying how to make radio and video pieces with some of the best multimedia journalists this industry has to offer. It hasn't been easy.

See, when you're in the NYU print program, Reporting New York, you grab your notebook, a pen, maybe a camera, and run straight into whatever story you are covering. Sure, things go wrong all the time, but it is nothing compared to the equipment troubles I've been having recently.

Last weekend, I took an Edirol recorder and a shotgun microphone to the National Equality March. I interviewed people on the bus ride there, at the march, and recorded speeches at the foot of the capital. Then, I listened to my tape.

It turns out on that every bump I hit on the bus created a weird wobbly sound in my interviews. I monitored my recordings with headphones the whole time but I must have missed it. I hope that I can still create a piece out of it, but the possibility that a whole trip to the capital was wasted keeps me up at night.

Unlike my radio work, I've been successful at video. My first piece, "The New York Comic Shop," (shot on a Canon FS100) was praised by my professors and peers. I spent hours and hours filming and putting it together to create something I am proud of. But, when I started filming for my second project, all hell broke loose.

My ambition got the better of me and I decided to take a high-tech HD camera I was unfamiliar with to the Big Apple Comic Con. Everything imaginable went wrong: My headphones weren't working, I accidentally filmed in high quality so I instantly filled up all three of my memory cards, I couldn't figure out how to shut off the flash, and - to this day - have not figured out how to get the videos on my computer.

Sure, video problems might haunt me, but it is radio that will be the real challenge. Right now, I am spending, what seems like, my fortieth hour of work on a 90 second radio piece about Disney buying Marvel Comics.

I might be cursing Nikola Tesla for inventing radio, and Dean Olsher for being a perfectionist, but I’m determined to create a radio story so good that End of the Dial becomes the hottest source for radio on the web.

So, put some faith in me and stay tuned.