I marked the 100th day of President Trump being President Trump by going through my emails and reading the media coverage of what President Trump has and hasn’t done.
Confused yet? Try being a journalist right now. We’re supposed to break out of our bubbles, explore other bubbles, all while blowing up a big enough bubble for people to pay attention to us. If you’re out of breath, I am too. With a winter internship at KNBC under my belt, I have now worked in almost every sector of the media: print, digital, and broadcast. (Public radio, I’m looking at you. Kidding. Sort of.) I didn’t set out to become a journalist with a bucket list of places to work. I got involved in this because I wanted to find and tell the truth, to help others tell their stories. Gaining knowledge along the way of how different corners of the media work has only greater informed my eventual long-term job and made me more excited about the people working alongside me in this mission. A three-month internship in any arena doesn’t qualify you as an expert or teach you everything about the industry; heck, I barely learned enough about the content management system. It hasn’t made anything clearer about what anyone’s future as a journalist will be like or even what the next 100 days of a Trump administration will look like. We keep guessing, and someday we find the balance between taking him literally and taking him seriously, a point first made by Salena Zito reporting from the campaign trail in September. "When he makes claims like this [a statistic about unemployed black youth], the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, 'Now that’s interesting.'" It’s also a claim mentioned in Reuters’ “Newsgathering 3.0” report. Hitting on the news landscape of today for digital and legacy news organizations and various approaches to comprehensive information-gathering and storytelling, the report details a recommendation for what we as journalists should focus on: what information really matters, what’s really going on, and what it really means. Easier said than done. (I'll just leave this here.) In the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, I said I wanted to do things differently. As an intern in one of the top markets for broadcast news—not to mention a total newbie to the broadcast news world—I didn’t have a lot of sway in the way I operated at work. But I did have power in decision-making for my personal life. Previous posts on this blog have focused on unplugging and connecting with the people around me. I attempted to put these words to action in a couple ways: 1) significantly decreasing my own social media usage and output (or at least trying to) and 2) launching a hobby I’ve called the 140 Days Project, to document the shared wisdom of people I’ve been meeting across the U.S. and encourage myself to break out of my bubble. I announced the effort with this description: "140 Snapchat auto-deletions until there's a college diploma with my name on it. 140 24-hour-news cycles until President Donald Trump will have five months under his belt of putting "America First." 140 characters until we both overwrite on Twitter. Let's slow them down a bit. Follow along as I spend the next 140 days sharing some tidbits and tales from the people I meet along the way in California, Chicago, and places in between." It has since evolved to: “Can I ask you a random question? ... What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever had?” Those are the sentiments I’ve started with and carried on in more than 40 encounters with people from my time in LA for my internship to my drive back through three time zones to my hometown of Chicago, where I’m staying for the next few weeks until graduation. This project has allowed me a chance for person-to-person contact in a world where we just don’t have very much anymore, to learn about the individuals through their own words and in their home spaces as a traveler rather than a full-time journalist. It also allows me to stay in touch with some of the folks I’ve met along the way who choose to follow me on the Instagram where I post their words. It’s a small prick in my bubble, for sure, but sometimes it’s the small trickles that can later on create the biggest waterfall. And even if I stop reflexively opening my Instagram and Snapchat apps when I’m bored, it doesn’t mean they’re going away from everyone else's phones. As Tina Fey so eloquently described the unrelenting phenomenon of Photoshop (which, if you think about it, sort of democratized to become today’s Instagram platform) in her 2011 autobiography “Bossypants”: “Give it up. Retouching is here to stay. Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever de-industrialized. Which is why we’ll never turn back from Photoshop—and why the economic collapse of China is going to be the death of us all. Never mind that. Let’s keep being up in arms about this Photoshop business!” (You can tell I’ve had a lot of free time these past few weeks. But invigorating solutions for today's journalism woes are in the works. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's both the most exciting and the most terrifying time to be involved in the work that we do.
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