Reporting 1

The Google Image Search results for "reporter" and "journalism" weren't so good, so I just ramped up the Chevy.

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook may have noticed that over the past seven weeks or so my status has periodically indicated some level of dissatisfaction with the journalism class I’m currently taking, Reporting 1. Some of you have called me out for being an obnoxious whiner; I always thought everyone had sort of accepted this, seeing as I’ve got a blog upon which I obnoxiously whine on a regular basis. Calling a blogger out for bitching too much is like calling Batman out for having an ostentatious car – it sort of comes with the territory.

To give you an idea, though, of why I bitch about Reporting 1, let me tell you about Monday morning:

I’d had a really great weekend. There hadn’t been a home football game, so I was able to sleep in to my heart’s content, and in spite of the Ducks’ poor performance at Stanford on Saturday my friends and I were still able to pick ourselves up and throw on hell of a party that night. The following day I ate a nutritious breakfast and spent several hours playing video games (hence Sunday’s late update). I went to class Monday with a spring in my step, feeling optimistic about the week ahead.

When I arrived, our professor assembled us around a table and said, “Sometimes in the newsroom, a disaster strikes and you’ve got to drop everything you’re doing to report on it, which is what we’ll be doing today. In a few minutes we’ll be having a simulated press conference in which several faculty members posing as public health officials will inform you about a hypothetical swine flu outbreak that has overwhelmed area hospitals at the same time as a freak windstorm. After the press conference you’ll have an hour to assemble the facts into a story.”

It was 9:00 AM.

It was 9:00 AM on Monday, some of my classmates were probably still drunk, and we’d been dropped headfirst into an episode of 24. I guess this is just one of those situations where learning how to do a certain job is a lot less glamorous than the job itself. When George Clooney was on ER I’m pretty sure there was never an episode where had to sponge up some homeless guy’s diarrhea, and All The President’s Men didn’t have a scene where Woodward and Bernstein have to cover a fake apocalypse.

Reporting 1 has always been very good at forcing me to confront my mortality head on. For the first two weeks of the term, we spent the bulk of our class time reading press releases from the Oregon State Police about fatal car accidents and then using the raw information to write newsbriefs, which we would then share with the class like excessively bland, rigidly structured beat poetry.

Warren Jenkins, age 56, of Springfield
was
pronounced dead on Sunday afternoon when the
Pontiac
Firebird
he was driving ran off the road near mile post 118.
He was ejected from the vehicle.
Jenkins was not wearing…
HIS SEEEEAAAATBEEELLLLT!

There’s nothing quite like getting up early on a Monday and promptly being handed a terse list of everybody who died in a car crash while you were partying over the weekend. It makes you feel kind of irresponsible for having any joy in your life at all when there are half a dozen families across the state all grieving and making with the funeral arrangements. It also makes you never want to drive again for fear that your inevitable death will become fodder for a bunch of sleepy journalism students.

Shortly after that came obituary training, where we learned how to take the necessary information off of death reports from funeral homes and put it into a brief, drab, and spectacularly uninteresting block of text that will probably only be read by family members and other journalism majors looking for a good template on which to base their obituaries.

The reasoning behind learning how to write obituaries and traffic accident reports is that pretty much anyone who goes to work for a newspaper will at first be the newsroom’s bitch, relegated to the worst available duties. This is true of most jobs - it’s just not as readily apparent in the minimum wage world because no matter how long you’ve been working at Mike’s Drive In you still have to clean a bathroom at the end of every day.

Now, of course Reporting 1 has to be like this, both in order to weed out the pussies and because the whole reason I’m even going to college is ostensibly to learn how to do journalism. Reporting 1 is teaching valuable journalistic skills, but it just so happens that learning valuable things isn’t always fun. In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman wasn’t having fun when she spent several months getting her ass handed to her on a daily basis by the cruel master samurai Pei Mei, but if you’ve so much as seen a trailer for the movie you know that she makes it through her training and goes on to establish the world’s first hotel for dogs.

That might not be right. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.

I’m sticking with Reporting 1 because I don’t want to get weeded out like the aforementioned pussies, but I’m still enough of a pussy to make a point of bitching whenever school interrupts the cycle of video games and pornography that is my life. I guess that’s a part of who I am – I enjoy finding new and innovative ways to bitch about things (hence, again, the blog). If I quit doing it, I wouldn’t be staying true to myself.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure “stay true to yourself” was the moral of Kill Bill.

Truman Capps has to go to bed now so that he can wake up in seven and a half hours for the NONSTOP MISERY FIESTA that is Reporting 1.