CSotD: A brief interlude of live blogging
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From your imagination to God's ears, Edison Lee.
The workshops are over and I'll be flying home tomorrow, and I'm hoping for some screw-ups. Meanwhile, today is a day for R&R with the boss, which sounds terrible but is in fact quite pleasant.
We've known each other since we met on a professional listserv (ask your grandparents) and then in person at a convention in I think about 1998 or so and quickly established one of those "good god did you see this?" email relationships that are so necessary in professional life.
It was pure happenstance that, shortly after I had yet another horse shot out from under me in 2009 when the paper I was editing folded, the editor of her weekly kid-written feature decided to move on, but it saved me from asking people if they wanted the Value Meal or just the sandwich.
So when I go out to Denver twice a year for workshops, I stay at her house and eat at her table (her husband being a better cook than you'll find at most restaurants) and it becomes a nice, sociable vacation with friends, punctuated by two grueling days of setting up sign-in tables and putting out snacks and spending six or eight hours on stage explaining journalism to middle school kids.
The first day is a "day camp" for the first 50 kids 8-to-14 whose parents sign them up. So, on Friday, that somewhat random crew heard from a Denver Post beat reporter and a two-time Pultizer Prize winning Post photographer, plus me, before we sent them out in groups to cover stories.
If you want to see what raw-but-interested kids can do with an hour or so in the field and another hour or so in the computer lab, go here, start with the firefighting story and work your way down.
Not bad for working on a tight deadline with about four hours of training and no idea ahead of time of what you were going to be asked to report on.
The next day is a workshop for the select group that write for the weekly publication, and we've got some young superstars in that crew. The biggest challenge we face in training them is to teach them to write in their voice and not in the voice they think we want them to write in (which is what they've learned to do in school).
And the biggest challenge they face, in turn, is be taken as serious reporters in the field and not as cute little kids. For the most part, things get on the beam after the first couple of well-framed non-kid-level questions establish their cred.
On the very rare occasions it doesn't, well, they're too young to know who this guy is, but they do know that I've got their backs.
The publication itself is behind a pay wall as part of the Post content, but you can see some "best-of" here, a page we use for training, and here's an example of the raw copy they turn in, and if you've seen raw copy from the pro's in this business, you'll know why I love working with these little guys.
Are their parents helping? They drive them places and sometimes do the photography, but I work separately with parents to try to establish the difference between a copy editor and a ghostwriter.
The good news is, I can tell when the parents are stepping over the line, because the result sounds like what adults think kids sound like. The stuff that might make you wonder if a 10-year-old wrote it is on a level no parent would dare present as their kid's work. (See above raw copy link)
As that reporter's mother put it to me, "She'll go up to her room and work on her story, and then she brings it down and says 'What do you think?' and we say (shifting to a slight tone between bewilderment and intimidation), 'Um, good.'"
Anyway, getting back to Edison Lee, it's important to me that the flight out go smoothly, because things are tight enough without that.
But, on the way back? Hey, screw it up and pack'em in — Please! I'll volunteer to be bumped in exchange for a free ticket to go see some of my own kids.
Heck, once the workshops are over, I become an entrant in the competition depicted in this Bizarro from 2007:
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