Back on track

After one week researching for a story, just last Friday morning, at 11:30 a.m., I realized what can be a good angle for that. It felt like a really waste of time, and I'm feeling really stupid. They are giving me all the time I need to get this done, but even working hard I couldn't manage to find out the story until hours ago.

And now that I found the right angle, I practically have to start all over again. I hate when this happens. At least, is a good angle for a over covered subject - recycling. I went to a recycling plant twice and it was something. The photographer that went there with me is leaving the newspaper, so his last assignment was, literally, garbage. Heh.
For this story I drowned myself at the Nexis Lexis database, as well as in the Inquirer's doc center. Reading dozens of stories everyday, I figured some patterns in newswriting and chose some to avoid when I'm back home. But some differences are not about journalism - they are about the American culture. Friday's newspapers have cover stories about Obama having a beer with the black Harvard scholar who was arrested trying to enter his house and with the cop who did it. The whole thing is really odd to me. The proportion that it took amazes me. I understand the touchy issues involved, racism and politics, but to me the whole thing was complete rubbish (a word choice according to the story I'm researching).
Not that Brazilian press don't waste time with bullshit -- our president, Lula, is a specialist on nonsense declarations, all of them reported by the press. But there is a general feeling there that this is all politics, and usually people give politicians some slack. It's different here; the whole beer thing were taking really seriously.

Last week, I had lunch with Vernon and we talked about some things to do in my last 2 months. I'll spend some time in other Inquirer bureaus, like Harrisburg (Pennsylvania's capital), South Jersey, City Hall. I'll also try to shadow a reporter in a baseball game, because it's impossible for me to understand the game, not to mention cover it. But the craft of sports covering here is really important to me to know, so it would be great. Let's see if this work out. I probably will have less bylines than in the beginning, but, at least for me, the program was never about bylines. It's the learning.

My training plan is still changing. For some, this would be a downturn, but I see it as an accomplishment. I don't mind not to have training in multimedia, as long as I understand how the guys over here work with multimedia possibilities. I've had tons of story ideas for my newspaper so far, most of them impossible to put in practice at the Inquirer, and the talks and examples I'm seeing here are helping me a great deal with that. My main goal, to learn how to tell stories better and to understand how the newspapers are dealing with these transition times, is being met really well.