It's NPR all the time

The UNITY journalism convention is exhausting: thousands of people, dozens of seminars, hundreds of companies. John Kerry spoke to us this morning. It was disconcerting to see about half of the audience stand up and give him a brief standing ovation. Kerry looked pleased and a bit surprised. Hey guys, we're the Fourth Estate, not his cheering section.

To their credit: The folks who did stand up sat down quickly, as if they were abashed. The reporters who were covering Kerry for their papers or stations were off to the right, hunched over laptops and scribbling in notebooks. Kerry campaign staffers stood nearby and plied them with free coffee. Some of the reporters gratefully accepted the steaming cups of joe.

Maybe I'm being too much of a journalism ethics stickler, but reporters shouldn't accept anything -- even if it's as innocuous as a cup of hot coffee - from anyone they're covering. By the way, check out the UNITY link to read same-day stories and see photos by student reporters at the convention. The Washington Post has also written at least four stories on the UNITY convention or related to it over the past couple of days. A bit surreal to see reporters interviewing other reporters.

One cool thing: I participated in an all-day workshop at the National Public Radio headquarters for mid-career journalists that gave a blitzkrieg training on radio reporting. There were 12 of us - a combination of print and TV reporters and one online editor - and we learned how to write for radio (stick to short, declarative sentences), digitally cut "tape" for our "actualities" (quotes from sources), and then recorded our stories in one of the NPR studios.

We interviewed Michele Norris, co-host of "All Things Considered," wrote our stories within an hour, figured out which quotes of hers we wanted use and cut and copied them via CoolEdit software. We had an NPR news editor look over our story, then went upstairs into a dim, soundproof studio, put on headphones, and read our stories into a fancy-looking microphone as a producer and engineer looked on in the next room. It was a kick to sign off by saying, "For NPR News, I'm Bex ----."

The training producer, Jonathan Kern, is going to send us the finished audio stories on disk in the next few days. If I can somehow edit out my real name, I'll post the audio story on this blog. Whaddya say?!

We also learned what kind of recording equipment to use and a lot of radio terminology, such as SOC (Standard Out Cue), rollovers, mix minus, and fish job (a report that's already mixed when it's fed to NPR headquarters and doesn't have any "pick-ups" in it. The producer's job to prep it for broadcast is to cut off the "head" and "tail.")

This evening: I attended a special NPR reception for a handful of lucky convention-goers. I met "Talk of the Nation" host Neal Conan and several other NPR reporters and editors. I also saw a friend of mine, who is an NPR producer.

I mentioned that there were a handful of on-air/editorial job openings at NPR and wondered aloud whether I should apply for one of them. One reason why NPR held this radio journalism boot camp is to recruit more writing talent. A good number of NPR folks come from print journalism, like me. (In fact, one of my newspaper's former editors is now on the national desk at NPR.) She said to go for it. So I just might, as a lark.