But if I had to start college again today, would I stick with the journalism school? That’s a tough call.

There have been a lot of benefits from being in the j-school. I was able to land an internship at the St. Petersburg Times after my sophomore year because of a special partnership between UNC’s journalism school and the newspaper. I wouldn’t have been able to get that gig any other way, and it was so vital to my development as a journalist.

The interviews lined up through the j-school also put me in touch with hiring editors at news organizations all over the country, including at The Charlotte Observer, where I ended up this past summer.

And classes by Ryan Thornburg, Chris Roush, Phil Meyer and Penny Muse Abernathy have been great.

But journalism schools are being publicly knocked for being behind the times in teaching students the skills they need in this era of change in media. It’s true, I’ve learned much more at The Daily Tar Heel, at my internships and on my own time than I have in class.

There are several majors I now see could have helped me out in a journalism career. Computer science. Business. Economics.

I’ve tried to take classes in those areas, but I discovered them too late in my school career to really build up any expertise.

I would have loved to have a degree in computer science and truly be a programmer. I’ve taught myself some Python on my own, which has already paid dividends. And a business or economics background could have helped me launch a career in business journalism or in news organization management.

I may be in the minority of the young journalists I talk to, but I wouldn’t abandon the journalism school if given another chance.

Yes, I would have taken different classes as I progressed through the curriculum. I probably would have minored in business or computer science.

But the benefits I’ve gotten from the journalism school, however flawed it may be, still made it an experience I wouldn’t give up.

So congrats, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Here’s to another 100 years.

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In the most recent installment of The Charlotte Observer’s intern seminars, we got to hear from Tommy Tomlinson, columnist extraordinaire. This one didn’t follow the “How to be a good intern” form. It was more a rambling advice session from one of the most respected men in Charlotte. Here’s what he had to say:

• If you feel like you suck, look at stories you wrote six months ago. You’ll see how much you’ve gotten better.
• Figure out what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. And find what you enjoy doing. But still confront your fears. Do stories on topics that intimidate you.
• Creative work is a pain in the ass. Anybody who says writing is easy is probably not doing anything worth reading.
• Appreciate and celebrate your successes. Then get back to work and find a way to do better.
• News is like a public utility, like water. People expect to be able to turn it on whenever they want and get what they need.
• Be funny when you can, and you’ll be more trusted on the serious stuff. Nobody likes hanging out with a guy who’s doom and gloom all the time.
• If you’re in college, don’t worry about your GPA. Get published. Nobody’s going to ask you about your grades.
• People have lives. You can have one too. Go to shows, plays, movies, lectures, etc.
• Don’t be afraid to ask really stupid questions. And don’t come back not perfectly understanding something.
• Nothing replaces shoeleather/going to the scene.
• Don’t sell yourself short by accepting a job you don’t really want because you don’t think anything else is available. Metaphor: Don’t park far away from the mall assuming there won’t be a closer spot.
• At the end of your internship, if your shoes aren’t scuffed up, you haven’t done enough.

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He’s spent time at a sports media company and Yahoo, so his experience is more eclectic than most journalists. His advice is applicable to all interns.

The presentation he gave is here, but the best parts weren’t on the slides.

• To be the best, there must be repeated sacrifice. But do something you love. It will show. You don’t want to look back in 20 years and wonder, “Why am I still here?”
• Invest in brute force learning. Don’t get caught asking questions you could look up on Google.
• Learn as much about the big picture and how things come together. If you’re a reporter, find out all the steps needed to put the whole newspaper together. You’ll have a better understanding of other people’s roles and how you can help them.
• Learn how to give your opinion respectfully, then give it. You can’t say “I told you so” if you never said anything.
• Treat everyone equally. Say hello to the janitor, security guard, metro editor and the publisher.

This concludes the second installment in The Charlotte Observer intern advice seminars.

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Here’s his main advice, in no particular order:

• Get something for your resume line. Likely it’s a set of good clips. But be sure you have that goal in mind, and work with editors. They want you to have a good experience.
• Work hard. Gunn said there’s a stigma on the current generation (as there has been on every generation since Socrates) that we feel we’re entitled to everything. You have to distinguish yourself as a bust-ass kind of person. Volunteer for the night shift. Volunteer for group projects. In general, take on as much work as you can possibly handle.
• Pitch an assignment every day. This not only shows initiative, but will keep you from doing crap “intern” assignments a lot of the time.
• Every story can be a front pager. No matter how many stories you pitch, you’re going to get assignments you’re not crazy about. But throw yourself into them. If it’s a silly event, find the good story. Make the extra calls it takes. Gunn told of a small cops brief he was assigned, but he got a hold of the people involved and turned it into a top-of-A1 strip.
• Always be working on something. Your editors just want you to be doing something, so you better not get caught with nothing to do. Researching stories, out finding them, etc. Have a list of stories you want to do, and when you get free time, work on them.
• Assume everyone knows more than you. Don’t be the hotshot intern who knows it all, even if you do honestly know more than half the folks in there. Approach every conversation with humility, and see what you can learn from them.
• Network. Find a mentor and have conversations with people who can help you when you’re looking for a job. The journalism industry is tight-knit, and while clips are important, “references are God,” Gunn said. I’ve invited the editor-in-chief to lunch every year, and that’s been great.
• Tell the truth. Don’t lie to get out of an assigment or if you’re late to work. Just explain yourself. Newsrooms are full of crazy people, so whatever you’re going through is not going to be a big deal.
• Be accurate. This applies to your stories. Be sure you get the details right, but also make your story tell the broader truth correctly.
• Read the paper. If you read the paper cover to cover, you’re going to be ahead of 95 percent of the newsroom. You’ll show you’re engaged in the paper and you’ll have the head start on story ideas for follow-ups.
• Do things you can tell stories about. What’s a summer without stories? Gunn told of a summer in St. Petersburg where he didn’t have a car. He rode his bike to work and to all assignments. He got made fun of, but what a story to tell interns decades later.

What do you think? What would you add?

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I got the opportunity yesterday to speak to a group of high school journalists at the North Carolina Scholastic Media Institute. Five years ago, I was there in the middle of Carroll Hall at the birth of my jouralism career, so it was quite an honor.

My job was to talk about using social media for reporting, and to provide some hope that journalism isn’t dying. And to not bore a group of high schoolers.

I began with a poll of the 300-odd teens. It ended up a little surprising.

How many of you are on Facebook? Nearly every hand went up, which was to be expected.

How many of you are on Twitter? Between 1/3 to 1/2 of the hands went up. More than I thought.

How many of you are on MySpace? About 85 percent of hands went up. I was surprised. I thought MySpace was so 2000-and-late.

So I began with the one story I have about using MySpace for reporting. It was two years ago, and I was interning at The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C. The details escape me, but I was writing about some 16- or 17-year-old who had been arrested. I looked up his MySpace and found a slate of wall posts from his friends lamenting his arrest. I messaged a few of them for sources in my story.

On to Facebook. My favorite story is when there was a shower peeper on the loose at UNC. We found out the guy’s name who was arrested, and I wanted to find some folks who could talk about him. By luck, his Facebook profile was open and even had his cell phone number. He didn’t answer….surprise. But I messaged the last few folks who had posted on his wall, and talked to most of them about what kind of person he was. None of them had heard he was arrested yet, so that was a shock to them. But I got some good quotes.

I also talked about how Facebook can be a good resource when looking for people in a particular class, major or what have you. Facebook groups are great for that!

Then, on to Twitter. This one is the hardest for even seasoned journos to wrap their heads around, but I thought the high school students understood what I was saying. I talked about how I’ve posed questions to find sources (and gotten great responses) and how I tweet the link to stories I write to drive more traffic to them.

I didn’t remember to mention it, but I should have also talked about live tweeting the arrests during the Virgil Goode speech at UNC and the bomb threat that cleared the heart of campus for a good six hours. We had info published hours before Alert Carolina.

For minute four of my five-minute allotment, I turned my attention to the future of journalism. I didn’t say anything earth-shattering, but they are words that bear repeating. Journalism isn’t dying, though the traditional daily metro newspaper is. I encouraged them to pursue journalism, but with the idea that your work can be published in any medium. (Brief aside, I mentioned that parents might be asking, “Why are you going into journalism? Why not major in something useful, like art history?” The kids didn’t get it, but the adults were cracking up.)

Minute five was a warning, one that I recalled from my days as a high school newspaper editor. Most of the staffers I worked with wanted to do all their interviews by e-mail, sending questions and getting answers delivered. That tendency carries over to freshmen coming in to The Daily Tar Heel. I told them to never use technology as a crutch, but only as a tool to find people. I do all my interviews face-to-face of by phone, I carry a leather briefcase and take all my notes by hand.

So yeah, nothing I said broke new ground. But I felt like the newest crop of journalists should be sure to hear it.

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I’ve stated on Twitter that I want to help other journalists learn to program. This post continues that mission by addressing the only real problem I’d faced so far in Django: getting my database imported into your Django project.

This is what you need to do when you get to Chapter 5 of the Django Book. At this point, you’ve set up your database, and it encourages you to enter data manually. But what if you already have a database all set up?

First, make sure it’s in CSV format. You can stick it in Google Spreadsheets, which offers a CSV export option. Or you could download certain plugins that make Excel files into CSV.

Then save the following script as “dataimporter.py” into your projects folder.

import sys
from django.core.management import setup_environ
sys.path.append(LOCATION OF YOUR DJANGO PROJECTS, EX: 'C:\django')
from mysite import settings
setup_environ(settings)

MODEL_NAME.objects.get_or_create(MY_FIRST_COLUMN=COLUMN_ONE_TITLE, MY_SECOND_COLUMN=COLUMN_TWO_TITLE)

That’s it! Just run it from the command prompt (in your Django folder) as “python dataimporter.py.” Then you can go to the admin page and see everything. Let me know if you have any questions.

And special thanks to Matt Waite for help in developing this script.

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At about 3 p.m. today, the most read story at dailytarheel.com was “Gray-Little named new provost,” a story written Feb. 9, 2006 by my friend Colin Campbell. Why in the world would that be so popular in 2009?

In four words: Gray-Little becomes Kansas chancellor.

The news broke on Twitter at about 2 p.m. that Provost Bernadette Gray-Little was going to be named the new chancellor at KU. This means that people came to our Web site looking for the news and couldn’t find it. So they searched. And that story is indeed the closest match.

This coming year at the DTH, we are going to make sure this doesn’t happen. 

Our newsroom, like many others around the country both professional and collegiate, has historically been focused on the print edition. Our reporters were on top of the story. We were planning on getting the information as quickly as we could. We just didn’t do as well as we could have at getting the information where you could find it.

This is unacceptable. We need to have the news you want, when you want it. We’ve done well on this before, particularly with the bomb threat that evacuated central campus this spring. We had the information up several hours before Alert Carolina did.

But we want to be the first place you turn when you hear that something’s going on. Getting whatever information we have on breaking news online as quickly as we can is the most important part of that. 

One way we can easily do this is to get more readers to our Twitter feed. We can get information posted there a lot quicker than we can do anything else. But we know that the first instinct of our readers is to go to our home page. Right now, it’s still mired in the edition mindset. We’re going to blow that up. The home page will be an ever-changing place reflecting your needs and wants at any given time.

Today showed that we still have a ways to go. But we will get there.

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I wanted to build a database of restaurants in Chapel Hill, with their addresses and phone numbers. I found this site, which has all the info in a pretty well-organized way. But I didn’t want to copy and paste everything in. I work more than full-time.

So I decided I’d learn how to use a screen scraper.

Here’s how you do it:

First, be sure you have two different Web browsers available. I use Chrome (primary browser) and Firefox.

There are plenty of scrapers out there, but the easiest one I’ve found is Screen Scraper (Correct me if I’m wrong on the ease scale). Download it.

Go through Tutorial 1 to get yourself set up. You don’t necessarily have to do the “Hello World” exercise, but it doesn’t hurt.

Don’t deviate, except to go to the site you want to scrape instead of their test site.

The biggest step is building the extractor pattern you want. Their example is very simple, but it’s easy to adapt. Read the documentation if you want to know more about how it works. But basically you use variable names within ~@ and @~ syntax.

For example, here’s how the HTML code looked like after scraping:

<tr>

<td width=”313″ style=”font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><a href=”http://www.tandoorindian.com”><b>Tandoor Indian Restaurant<br />

</b></a> 1301 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC</td>

<td width=”103″ style=”font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>919-967-6622</td>

</tr>

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Today I had the pleasure of watching a livestream of St. Petersburg Times news technologist Matt Waite speaking at the 2009 Poynter College Fellowship. Many thanks to Greg Linch for making it accessible! You can see Linch’s Cover it Live of the talk now and video of the speech in the next few days.

I got the opportunity to meet and talk to Waite last summer while an intern at the Times, and got my feet wet in Python. But I had never had the chance to see him give a talk. It was definitely not a disappointment.

Here are some of his insights:

• His mantra is “demos, not memos.” Basically, this means quit talking about wanting to do something and do it. His first true database journalism project was Politifact, which won a Pulitzer. Ideas are plentiful, he says. Execution is the hard part.
• When buliding a database application, think hard about the base unit of what you’re dealing with, whether that is a location, a picture, or what have you. “The meter is the thing. the rest of it is wrapping around that.”
• The best way to learn is by doing. “I’ve never been afraid to just try something. This is journalism. Nobody’s going to die.”

He ended the speech by comparing his role in the state of traditional news organizations as being one of the 300 Spartans (yes, as in the movie) about to face the onslought of the Persian army. “I don’t know anything else but to fight,” he said. He will continue to build web applications.

I’m starting to learn how to build apps, and I took a lot from the talk. I’ve tweeted recently complaining about the lack of good resources for journalists getting started in programming and Django. That’s going to stop. Demos, not memos. I’m going to stop whining and get something built.

I’ll likely never win a Pulitzer, but I want to be Matt Waite.

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