Courtesy of Daniel Victor
Daniel Victor, is a 25 year old reporter for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot-News. He granted me an interview, so that I could gain perspective on how he became a journalist in a small town newspaper.
How did you become a reporter for the Patriot-News?
I had connections to the paper here and got a reporting internship after my sophomore year in college at Penn State. I continued to string for them while I was in school, then they offered me a job after I graduated.
You’re a reporter from a small town, Harrisburg – are there certain benifits to working within local news as opposed to the major media outlets in Philadelphia.
In some ways it’s a very different mindset. Here you can really get elbow-deep with hyperlocal news…when I covered the Hershey area, for example, I was attending every school board and township meeting, and you get to know a lot of the residents and newsmakers really well. A similar assignment at The Philadelphia Inquirer might force me to cover dozens of similarly sized schools, so I’d never get to know one nearly as well as I did here.
It was also easier for me to make a name for myself here. Remember the Amish shooting a few years back? That happened in our backyard, and I was one of the reporters sent to the scene. No way that happens if I’m on the bottom of the ladder at the New York Times. I’ve also gotten a lot of other great opportunities, like being the lead writer on the Obama campaign during the general election. It’s really a lot easier for a young reporter to prove what he or she can do when you work for a paper this size.
Is microblogging truly drinking dry the print journalism industry?
Nah. It’s just changing it, to those who are willing to see it. One of our sports reporters used CoverItLive to liveblog a recent high school football game, for example, and that’s not any different than using Twitter, really. I regularly use my Twitter account to both break news immediately, and also lead myself to new sources or story ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s just another way things are changing in how people get news. All that said, yeah, the print audience is shrinking but I’d attribute that more to the Internet at large and bigger generational issues, not microblogging specifically.
What exactly is beatblogging?
Beatblogging is when you have a reporter that covers a specific beat — maybe a geographical region, green issues, energy, transportation, whatever it is — and the reporter makes a blog the center of the beat. He or she would post all stories there, post smaller happenings that won’t make it into print, lead readers in conversation, seek new ideas — basically, it’s a one-stop visit for everything that happens on the beat. The advantage of it is that it both answers to how people want to consume their reporting online, and it also leverages your readers to help you produce better content for both online and print.
What mistakes do you see journalists fresh out of undergrad doing?
If your ultimate goal is to advance in journalism, you can’t limit yourself to the big cities. Yeah, you might not be personally happy being in a smaller town for a while, but you can also learn a lot and sharpen your skills by spending time at a smaller news organization or in a smaller city.
You also have to avoid the temptation of coming in with an attitude. You may have been really talented and the cream of the crop at your college, but even the best college writers have a lot to learn once they graduate. You have to accept that your editors can teach you a lot — even the bad ones — and accept that you’ll have a lot of bad assignments before you consistently get the good ones.
Why did you take an internship in Kansas as opposed to NY, Philly or DC?
I would have loved to get an internship at the Times, Inquirer or Post, but the competition for them was so fierce I just didn’t have a chance. I had a friend that had interned before at the Wichita Eagle, though, so I worked through that connection and got my internship there. It turned out to be the most valuable internship I had…being exposed to that totally new culture really opened my eyes to a lot of things I had never experienced or understood. (And Wichita is actually a fairly big city, by the way…roughly similar to Pittsburgh.)
What exactly inspires you to continue in journalism even though the outlook is pretty bleak?
I’d say the outlook for print journalism is bleak, but you can’t say that about journalism in general. In fact, I’m energized by the uncertainty…how awesome is it that you and I will be the ones to reinvent it all? We can be the ones to figure out the best ways to get readers their content, we can come up with the online business model journalism needs, we can pioneer new technologies, etc. I guess I like the challenge and excitement of not knowing what’s ahead. I’ve always been very passionate about the job, and I think at this point you need to be or that bleak outlook will get to you.
You can find Daniel Victor on his blog, on Twitter, and read his articles.
