Toluu

JESSICA DaSILVA

Live blogging the presidential debate for NYTimes.comSeptember 26

Just a quick update for anyone stopping by tonight.

Almost 20 college newspaper editors and I will be live blogging tonight’s presidential debate for The New York Times’ political blog The Caucus.

Enjoy!

From intern to editorSeptember 12

Busy does not even describe my schedule the past few weeks.

After I was selected as editor, I immediately started putting together my staff and working on issues for the Alligator. Now the end of my internship and the beginning of my editorship seem blended together in my memory.

Still, I’ll try and give an overview of the lessons I learned in Tampa and the lessons I’m learning in Gainesville.

The Tampa Tribune

I can’t really say I’m a better writer than I was at the beginning of the summer, but I still learned so much (and so much more than just the blog post experience).

During the summer, I learned different methods of interviewing sources from the experienced beat reporters who sat around me. I also got some of the best journalism advice during my last days.

I’m just going to list my favorite advice here:

• “Learn to work for yourself and not for anyone else. If you don’t, you’ll drive yourself crazy.” -Emily Seawell, online producer/copy editor
• “You need to read more Hemingway; you need to learn to say things without saying them. You’re writing too much and trying too hard.” -Copy editor from the CND (this was the best writing advice I’ve gotten in about a year).
• “Get used to bad editors. For every 10 editors you have, you’ll be lucky to get one good one.” -Metro desk reporter

Pre-semester jittersAugust 10

For the past few weeks, I’d been applying, researching and preparing to run for editor in chief of The Independent Florida Alligator, which is billed as the nation’s largest student-run newspaper.

As of Aug. 1, I have the job. I’ve been looking forward to this since I started at the Alligator, and I’m surprisingly feeling a lot of mixed emotions now that I’ve got it.

When I started, I knew I would stick around out of loyalty to the paper and hoped to one day head the organization. However, as I started getting more involved with online journalism, the burning desire to take over grew from frustration with editors who ignored or looked down on our Web site from their high horse.

Some past editors saw the site as nothing more than a way to archive print stories and occasionally scoop The Gainesville Sun. As a student at a college newspaper, I can see the potential for our Web site to take risks and do some truly great journalism – with less bureaucratic oversight than a traditional news organization.

And knowing the types of people we’ve had on our online staff (i.e. Brett Roegiers and Megan Taylor), there’s no reason we shouldn’t be producing consistently stellar online content.

One concern I have i

LoudounExtra doesn’t make hyperlocal a “flop”July 15

In my last two posts, I had a couple of comments critiquing my praise of “hyperlocal news” coming to The Tampa Tribune and asking me what I thought about LoudounExtra.com.

The comments said Rob Curley’s Loudoun project was nothing new and insinuated that it was a failed project, which seemed based on a headline from the Wall Street Journal.

Based on the actual article, I don’t think LoudounExtra is really presented as a failed project. It seems to be fairly shown as a hyperlocal project that just wasn’t as good as it could have been because of a few key elements overlooked by Curley.

In Curley’s blog post about the article, he mentions that Russell Adams, the reporter, was concerned about the headline. As we all know, sometimes headlines don’t reflect the story as well as they could. Adams and Curley both agree on this point - Loudoun was not a “flop,” but

Comment Wars: A New HopeJuly 7

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post heard ’round the world about changes at The Tampa Tribune. The reactions I received in the comments were more than simply mixed. In the days since I posted it, I’ve carefully thought about the chain of events that ensued and prepared a response. My only hope is that it leads to new understanding and meaningful discussion.

So without further delay, here are the lessons I learned from this experience:

1. Specify

I should have specified in my post that I was not praising the fact that Janet Coats laid off 10 employees, but that she approached the layoffs with a plan. For those who misinterpreted my words, I offer my sincerest apologies. I could never praise someone for putting 50 employees in situations that would jeopardize their ability to pay mortgages and buy groceries, but I realize that’s not a choice that was in Janet’s hands.

The way I see it, Janet could have called a meeting to tell everyone she laid off 10 people and left it at that - a meeting that I’m sure has gone on in newsrooms around the country - but she didn’t. She held a meeting to say she didn’t want to lay off her employees, but that she had to… and that she had a plan.

Whether this plan will work, she’s still doing something a