One of the things about this internship that can be frustrating is the amount of time we can spend on a story without any assurance that it will actually be picked up by someone. The easiest way to get a story picked up is to write it for one of the Scripps papers or someone else who requests it. My first story was picked up when I did the cost of living adjustment story for Trish Choate, the Washington correspondent for the Texas papers.
I know the other interns have been picked up in other Scripps papers or have been published on the Scripps Howard News Service (a national wire staffed by seasoned journalists, not just students. We’ve recently established a relationship with El Paso, Inc., a weekly in Texas, where the mother of one of the interns this semester is editor.
So after I spent a week harassing sources and gathering information about a dicennial process I really didn’t know much about, putting a story out on the wire without knowing if it would get picked up or not wasn’t incredibly satisfying.
The funny thing was, almost two weeks later, my editor told me El Paso, Inc. picked up my redistricting story. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the story online or gotten the paper clip yet.) El Paso, Inc. However, El Paso, Inc. wasn’t the only place that story was picked up.
USA Today, India Times and even Road Runner’s news aggregate linked to my story. Now, if people would just start linking to the Wire instead of Kansas City Infozine.
Blogger’s Note 11/15/2010: I got the clip from El Paso, Inc. today with my redistricting story in it. Score!
Blogger’s Note 11/15/2010: I got the clip from El Paso, Inc. today with my redistricting story in it. Score!
breathlessadventurer.com 