Week 2: Frustration

The word of the day on Tuesday was frustration. If there were a word stronger than frustration, I would use it, but for now frustration will have to do. I was overwhelmed before I walked into my Newsy.com shift on Tuesday, because I’m taking Intermediate Writing for my print concentration, which is turning out to be more difficult and time consuming than I initially thought. I walked in with what I thought was a great idea and many sources for the story I wanted to write. My pitch idea was about the journalist in Sudan who was arrested for wearing pants. Newsy had not done a story on it yet, and I knew it was something that would be a “Newsy” story.

I walked in confident and ready to finally succeed at Newsy. My idea got the okay. I was pretty proud of the final product, and I was sure it was a “Newsy” story, unlike the ones I produced last week. It had a lot of video sources, which Newsy likes, and a lot of layers so I was very hopeful.

I turned in a first draft and made those changes and then turned in a second draft. And then history repeated itself. I was told it was not a “Newsy” story. I remained calm but grilled the graduate student who was in charge of us about what exactly qualified as a “Newsy” story. Apparently, my stories had to have more controversy and be less about the actual news, but more about the controversy surrounding it. I was supposed to use information from just blogs, columns and editorials.

Knowing what was expected of me, I remained hopeful that the story I wrote on Thursday would be closer to being published.

Thursday was also discouraging. Me and my fellow convergence editing students were supposed to “shadow” a fellow, which is all well and good, but I had written three scripts. Failed scripts, but still scripts nevertheless, so I didn't see the point in shadowing someone else.

So we just sat in pretty much silence and observed her edit a script and then write a new one that didn’t get finished because her first priority of editing took so long. We helped her find video and text sources for her story idea about the new Hubble telescope photos that had just been released. I had spent over an hour Thursday morning and Wednesday night researching story pitches, which no one asked for at Newsy. But the Hubble story was interesting, however, I still just don’t understand—this story is not at all controversial. Who would say anything controversial about telescope pictures? We got a lot of different angles to the story, but no controversy, which seems to be what Newsy wants. I'm pretty sure the story never got published. Who knows what happened to it. So that is what I did on Thursday.