My trip to New York City was LEGEN…wait for it…

Six days in the Big Apple and my body is a little worse for the wear, but I’m still ticking. The week that passed was truly awesome in a lot of ways. Allow me to spin you a yarn.

Prologue

The whole reason I found myself in Manhattan was a class that I took (and aced) during the spring semester. The class, Business & Economics Reporting, includes a field trip to New York to visit real newsrooms, especially those that focus on, you guessed it, business reporting.

After moving out of my apartment, I embarked on a road trip back to the east coast in my trusty Rav 4. I made a few stops along the way.

The first night, I spent with friend and colleague Alison Matas, who is spending her summer as an intern at the Charleston (WV) Gazette. Check out some of her work here.

We took in the West Virginia nightlife, of lack thereof, and I have to say, Charleston is actually a nice little town. It’s quite beautiful along the Kanawha River.

The next morning, I departed and got lunch with my sister in Morgantown before settling down for the evening with my friend Kenny (read: Cartman) at his house in Northern Virginia.

Then, it was time to go to NYC.

Reason for the trip

Let’s begin by talking about the places that we visited. They are in the order we visited them:

• Business Insider
• American Banker
• NASDAQ
• Fox Business
• Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones
• Fortune Magazine
• Business Wire
• Good Morning America
• Bloomberg News
• CNN Money
• New York Stock Exchange
• Museum of American Finance
• Standard and Poors
• Huffington Post (which I missed, but more on that later)
• New York Times

It was a full slate to say the least. I could do a separate blog post on each of the places we visited, so if you’d like to know more about any specific site I visited, drop a comment and I’ll respond.

Perhaps the coolest experience I had was seeing just how many Mizzou alums were in each of the newsrooms. It really reinforces the idea of the Mizzou Mafia.

Handcuffed to a desk in NYC

NYC is seen as the capital of American Journalism, so I can’t say that I wouldn’t want to work there in the future. It seems that I’ve been given my chance.

When an executive editor says that he’d “like to handcuff you to a desk right now,” I have to imagine that I’m doing something right.

So what am I to do? I like to finish what I start, so I did not want to drop out of graduate school just two semesters away from completion. So I got creative.

I went to a meeting with an editor while my cohort visited the Huffington Post. I convinced the editor to let me do a remote internship in the fall where I show them what I’ve got. If I impress, they’ll let me do my professional project there. If I take it and continue to impress, there’s like a desk to which I can be handcuffed.

This would be a great situation anywhere, but the fact that it is at CNN Money is just top-notch in my book. I’ll get to do a little data reporting and some news apps creation, which is exactly what I want to do.

It was an exciting development and made the trip well worth it.

A grand finale

The last thing I did in New York was to see the Book of Mormon on Broadway. Unfortunately, I was unable to take any photos as that is against Broadway protocol, so to speak.

However, I can tell you that it was worth every penny (and I spent a lot of them) and more. It deserved all nine Tonys it won in 2011 and many more it did not win.

The show was funny from beginning to end and I really didn’t want it to come to a close. They say that all good things must come to an end, and while the show did, thankfully, the show should enjoy an enduring run on Broadway.

It had typical South Park humor, which was to be expected, and it was done to perfection. Sure, it can be very inappropriate at times, but it all worked and contributed to what was an absolutely phenomenal plot line.

I purchased the script after the show, so if anybody wants to give it a read-through, let me know. It’s a great read.

Postscript

While my adventures were over, the weirdness that is New York certainly was not. Sitting in JFK airport, waiting for my flight to DC, I was hit in the face by a rogue pigeon that the TSA must have let passed.

It was an odd ending, but I can’t complain. It was pretty awesome.

Oh, and before I forget…DARY.

May 26, 2012 | Business Journalism, Travel
No Comments »

A six-hour drive and soccer match (Go Muckrakers!) later and I am back in my beautiful apartment in Missouri.

It was a long few days at the SABEW Conference in Indianapolis, but it was so worth it.

Let me just share a few things I think I took away from this conference that I think is important to know for journalists:

Bring business cards. This, in particular, is the main thing I wish I would have done. It’s the best way to network at conferences and while I received many business cards that I intend to use, I wish I had been able to reciprocate.

Don’t always hang with those you know. Many people will not approach large groups if they think that the group is good just talking among themselves. Walking around by yourself gives more people a good excuse to walk up and talk. It worked for me.

Don’t ask questions in panels if you can’t elaborate. Some people like to ask questions to bring attention to themselves. Sometimes it works and the person looks smart. But when a panelist asks you to elaborate and you cannot, it just looks bad. Don’t ask questions for the sake of asking questions.

If someone from a news agency invites you out to dinner or drinks, do it. It’s very easy to be tired at the end of a long day of sitting in panels. But when a potential employer wants to get to know you better, it’s a good thing. I’m still convinced it’s how I got my summer internship from the NICAR Conference a few weeks back.

Take notes. There are a lot of interesting things that come up in panels. Some can become story ideas. Some can become ideas to improve your news outlet. Either way, if you’re going to be there, you might as well listen.

That’s all I got for now. It’s time for me to get back to school work and finish this week strong before Spring Break.

Mar 18, 2012 | Business Journalism, Conferences
No Comments »

I am le tired.

Day Two at the SABEW conference has been a very busy one. Panels started up bright and early at 7:15 a.m. and I stayed until about 4.

I sat in on sessions that included the governor of Indiana, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the vice president for marketing at Ford.

1. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels doesn’t want to run for national office. Many Republicans have been calling on Daniels to put his name in the hat and run for president. He’s said time and time again that he does not want this. So what about vice president? Another adamant no.

Daniels was a very genuine-seeming man and a lot of his economic views are grounded in strong fact. I cannot speak to his other views, but I could see why so many people wanted him to enter the race. He also believes in journalism which is nice to see in a politician. He called journalism a “proud calling” and said that it’s as important as ever.

2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does good work. As a government entity, I would have expected their website to be relatively vapid of information. However, there are a lot of great statistics on the site. Unemployment data is what most people know them for, but their location quotient calculator is a hidden gem.

A location quotient is a fairly unknown, but very important, tool for financial journalists. It is the calculation of how strong certain industries are in various areas of the country. With this tool, when someone claims that an area of the country needs a certain type of jobs, journalists can use this tool to see if this claim is well-founded.

3. There are a ton of resources online for personal finance. For students there are a few great sites that deal with student loans and student loan debt. The National Center for Education Statistics is an organization within the U.S. Department of Education thats primary focus is collecting and analyzing this data.

There are plenty of other sites, including a few journalism ones, that help people to focus on their personal finance in other areas. Kiplinger Personal Finance has a tool for calculating retirement living expenses. Yahoo! Finance shows how much money you can save by cutting small expenses. Bankrate.com allows you to compare housing, taxes and cost of living in various cities. The list goes on and on.

4. China’s auto industry is booming. The Chinese auto industry has surged pass the United States and it’s not going to look back. The Chinese market is a fascinating one in that about 50 percent of the cars sold within China are brands unknown to Americans. The reason many Americans don’t know these brands is that they couldn’t pass the rigorous safety standards in the U.S. and so they remain in China and other countries.

China is also exporting cars to places it never had before. China currently has about 10 percent of the market in Chile. In Brazil, it’s three percent and expanding quickly. In north Africa, the cars are starting to pop up. It’s a fascinating development that not many really saw coming.

5. Wire services are starting to offer business-related information graphics to many of their customers. Both the Associated Press and Thomson Reuters are starting to offer more and more of these graphics along with their stories. Business journalism has started to go the way of the graphic, since it makes complicated business concepts easier to understand.

I got to talking with people who are working for both and the advancement is exciting. Business Journalism used to be pages upon pages of stock listings, and so I believe that moves like this one are a positive for the industry. The more we can communicate finance to the general public, the better the economy can get.

I’m quite exhausted from today and I’m thinking a nap is in order. One more day left and then it’s back to the real world.

As I bid adieu, I’d like to offer up Spendster, an awesome site that helps encourage smarter purchasing.

Mar 16, 2012 | Business Journalism, Conferences
No Comments »

One thing I love about the University of Missouri School of Journalism is that it provides me with opportunities to get out of the state on a regular basis.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy living in Missouri. I just enjoy the ability to get the most out of my time in graduate school.

Anyway, for the second time in three weeks, I am at a conference. Three weeks ago, I was working the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in St. Louis. This weekend, I’m in Indianapolis at the conference for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, also known as SABEW.

It’s been a long day, but it’s been fun and relatively educational. Since this is a three-day conference, I think I’ll do a post each day with the five biggest things I learned each day. However, not all will be entirely journalism related.

So here goes:

1. Google is doing its best to help make journalists’ lives easier. For starters, I still don’t love their search. Because it can’t search behind paywalls or those random verifiers on some sites that make you spell words to verify your humanity, it doesn’t find everything.

However, things like Google Trends, Google Public Data and Google Insights are providing analytical data that journalists don’t have to piece together themselves. Better yet, with most things on their site being embeddable, journalists can use these tools on their sites without asking for permission.

2. Good business journalists are in high demand, because business jargon might as well be its own language. If you sat in on a speech by the Security and Exchange Commission chair, Mary Schapiro, as I did, you’d easily get lost if you weren’t an economist. If a journalist cannot understand the subject matter, he or she will never be able to communicate it to a broader audience.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great business journalists at this conference. On the contrary. Many of the journalists here are very good at what they do and very knowledgeable about the world of business. But this is just a small sample size.

3. Indianapolis is much smaller than I expected. I was expecting a hustling and bustling city. It does not seem that way from my vantage point. The city is very compact and even during busy hours the traffic isn’t terrible.

That being said, there’s a lot to like about this city. Monument Circle is gorgeous. The State House is just as pretty. The food is good. It’s very walkable. I can’t say that I would be averse to living here in the future, although I still think my likeliest destination is a major city by the coast.

4. The National Endowment for Financial Education is doing a lot to help students prepare themselves to be financially responsible. I was lucky enough to be one of the few invited to speak at a breakfast for the organization this morning, mostly involving my experiences with personal finance. Apparently I did a good job.

In the near future, I will be publishing a few blogs for the organization, about my own unique personal finance situation. As part of their College Connect program, I will share my experiences with college students across the country on what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to personal finance. The organization does good work, and I am excited to help them out.

5. The Indiana Pacers are in good hands. Tonight, I got the opportunity to hear Jim Morris, the Pacers’ president, speak. He’s a great speaker and very insightful. He knows a lot about basketball and is very passionate about bringing great basketball back to the state of Indiana.

I did not realize that the man was a former Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. He’s a smart man, and very community oriented, and I was proud to shake his hand and chat him up a bit after his speech was done.

That’s it for today. Looking forward to a full day tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Mar 15, 2012 | Business Journalism, Conferences
No Comments »