ASNE Institute: June 7

Tuesday

Today is a field trip day, our first of the Institute. After a jog and a morning setting up interviews for my article for the newspaper (I've settled on blogging as the topic), we will load onto a bus and make our way to San Francisco to see the Associated Press SF Bureau at work. Visiting the AP strikes me as a great chance to see real journalism at its best, so I'm really looking forward to it.

First though, the jog. I'm a little sore from yesterday's adventure, but a few minutes of extra stretching time helps loosen my legs. I head the opposite direction this time, away from the campus and toward the bay. On my map, I see a pedestrian bridge about three miles away from campus; I figure a six miler is about the right distance and the bridge gives me a solid goal, so off I go. My process is to map out the route and try to remember the street names. This trip was as follows: Durant to Shattuck, Shattuck to Addison, Addison to Bonar, Bonar to Allston, Allston to the bridge, pause on bridge, celebrate, reverse path.

It is another perfect day, 70 degrees and sunny, with a light breeze drifting off the bay. The uphill slope on the return is nowhere near what I did yesterday, and I feel pretty strong.

After I shower and head up to campus, we have breakfast and begin work on our articles. I hop online and look up blogging sites to see which Berkeley bloggers have a solid regular following. I settle on three and launch off emails to set up interviews. The rest of the time, I check email and read family blogs to get my family fix. Everyone has to get their fix somehow here at Berkeley.

We eat a quick lunch and load the charter bus toward the city. I sit next to Bill Nevins, an Albuquerque teacher famed for being fired from his last High School job as an indirect result of leading a very public student poetry slam that slammed the military. Good conversation. The bus ride takes about 30 minutes and we arrive at the AP. Marcia Parker, the Berkeley professor who arranged this Institute, also arranged this visit to the AP. Her husband has won a couple of Pulitzer prizes and now works at the Associated Press.

We head up to the seventh floor to the AP newsroom. It's a lot smaller than I expected. The only newsrooms I have ever seen are in superhero movies (Superman and Spiderman specifically) and the AP was a lot smaller. Allow me to describe it: We walked in the door and see an open floor with about 20 desks. The reporters are mostly young--between 30 and 40--and are crouched over their computers and talking on their phones. Three televisions mounted to the ceilings are playing three separate 24 hour news stations. To my left is a conference room that seats about 20 people and to my right is a break room.

We are welcomed by John Raizz(sp), the managing editor of the bureau. We are led to the outdoor balcony where he points out some SF landmarks and explains briefly what happens at the AP. Here's what I learn:

• The AP is a non-profit group funded by the participating newspapers.
• The AP was formed when a bunch of newspapers decided they couldn't afford to cover stories in faraway places, and agreed to share news stories and information
• The AP has many bureaus, but their NY bureau is the HQ
• The SF AP bureau picks up stories from around its region and then pushes them to the national desk in NY if story is big enough to be on national news.
• The AP does its own reporting (called enterprise reporting), but also picks up stories from member newspapers and rewrites them for conciseness and then leaves off the byline

The meeting at the AP is really interesting. The single women in the group swoon over a thirty-something reporter who talks to us about covering the Scott Peterson trial. He's apparently pretty dreamy.

My favorite part of the visit is when the biotech reporter speaks to us about his specialty (which includes cloning, stem-cell research, etc.) I observe that while most of this bureau is openly left-leaning, they are also professionals and take great aims to be objective in their reporting. I chat with a couple of the reporters and the news editor individually about their impression of blogs to help get the traditional journalism angle on blogging. I collect a couple of interesting insights and wander around the newsroom a little bit. It's funny, but they don't seem much different from Discover Card employees, huddled over their computers and tethered to their headsets. On the other hand, they're not pitching crappy credit card insurance to potential interviewees.

We finish about an hour late (5:30) and head over to Delancey Street restaurant. The restaurant is run entirely by halfway house-type inmates, preparing to eventually enter the workplace. We are packed into the room and service is slow, but I use the time to make conversation with Don Bott and Angie Watkins, a fellow attendee from Louisiana.

The plan after dinner is to go pub crawling from a rented trolley (more like an open-air bus), but since dinner has lasted so long, we only have about a half-hour to cruise the city in the trolley. I sit on the outside bench of the trolley and listen to a J-School employee tell us about the city. We see Fisherman's Wharf by night and I think about the black v-neck sweater back in my hotel room. We head over to a pub and I sit in the warmer part of the trolley with Linda Lowry (another member of the church) and a couple of other non-drinkers. After a few minutes, the pub crawlers come out and half load back on the trolley, the other half head to a nearby saloon. The night is done.

It takes about 40 minutes to get back to the hotel by BART and on foot, and it's late. Tomorrow is the normal schedule, but I'll forego the morning jog.