I went back home to Buffalo, N.Y. last weekend. The brisk air, dead leaves and snow (!) reminded me that the holiday season will soon be here–along with the arduous task of having to decide what to tell people I want for Christmas. It’s such a first-world problem; crawling around the Internet, clicking and dragging things into wish lists and sharing them with family and friends. But somewhere between all the books and Blu-rays, JCrew’s winter looks and button-ups, I started thinking about a few things that I (and probably many other journalists) really want for Christmas.

1. A job
   With the bureau of labor statistics predicting a 6 percent industry-wide job loss by 2018 (about 4,400 jobs), and major newspapers across the country laying off and forcing pay cuts on its employers, a job is the No. 1 most requested Christmas gift for many journalists this year. It’s not all gloom, though. This year’s State of the News Media showed improvement for every medium but print, which is estimated to have suffered a 30 percent decline since 2000. With online ad revenue surpassing print revenue for the very first time, there’s reason to be optimistic about future jobs.
   
2. A way to make money online
   This one might have been solved already with the New York Times‘s decision to start charging access fees to regular viewers of its website, but I think you could find a lot of people to argue against that. This is even trickier since it has become something of an existential crisis. Why would readers want to pay for something they can already get for free? Why read a newspaper that may or may not be biased when you can get the news from someone you know shares your viewpoints? Someone, somewhere has to have the answers.
3. Good social network managing software
   Journalists finally figured out that they can use social networks to their advantage. Chatting and sharing hash tags with readers is a great way to get to know their thoughts and desires, and to find new and interesting stories. But between Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr and the dozens of other sites sure to spring up, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Someone give us a way to use all of these things at once in a non-cluttered, intuitive way, and I’m sure you’ll be rolling in so much cash that it’ll feel like Christmas every day.
4. Better technology
   OK, Siri is really cool, but let’s take it a step further. Give us fully integrated voice recognition software in every Mac. Open up the Siri API on the iPhone to let developers use it in their apps. Connect everything via the cloud. Imagine using an iPhone to record an interview, having Siri  transcribe it into text, and then asking her to push it to Word on your Mac so you can finish the story. Apple has the talent and money to make this all possible. At this point, it’s a question of “when?”
5. The return of drinking on the job
   Mad Men has reminded us it was once commonplace to throw back some scotch at lunch. Between the lack of jobs, bad business models and technology that demands attention at every second, a quick old fashioned as a mid-day pick me up sounds pretty nice, doesn’t it?
   

Romenesko tackled one of the bigger issues in Web journalism today–that newbies to the industry face unprecedented scrutiny as their stories are pushed and pulled across the Internet.

“[M]any journalists starting their career no longer have the luxury of making mistakes out of the spotlight because they go directly into the big leagues, usually working for online news sites.”

He highlighted Politico reporter Kendra Marr, who resigned last week after her editors found she had plagiarized at least seven different stories from various publications, including the New York Times and the Associated Press. In an editor’s note from Politico, they wrote:

“Material published in our pages borrowed from the work of others, without attribution, in ways which we cannot defend and will not tolerate”

Some examples of her apparent plagiarism from the New York Times, taken from a piece about the TSA:

NYT: Passengers currently pay a $2.50 security fee for each segment of a trip, up to a maximum of $10 for a round-trip ticket.
Politico: Airline passengers currently fork over a $2.50 security fee for each leg of a trip, up to a maximum of $10 for a round-trip airline ticket.

NYT: About $15 billion of the additional revenue collected over a decade would go toward deficit reduction.
Politico: …the White house intends to put about $15 billion of the additional security fee revenue collected over a decade toward paying off the national debt.

NYT: That oversight has mostly come from the Government Accountability Office, which has issued a string of reports critical of the Transportation Security Administration’s tendency to purchase equipment without first evaluating its effectiveness or conducting a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Politico: A string of critical reports from the Government Accountability Office has demonstrated its penchant for purchasing equipment without considering efficiency or a cost-benefit analysis.

Check Erik Wemple’s blog at the Washington Post for more.

I began my writing career in college at a publication that already had a decent online presence. Our articles were picked up by Google News, giving us significant readership throughout the country. We’d get press releases or take news stories from bigger local publications and give them to our staff writers as jumping off points for articles. More often than not, bits of them would make it into their stories. We’d chide them and tell them they were plagiarizing (many of them didn’t even know), and they’d beg for another chance. We usually gave it to them, but we didn’t have enough time or staff to check their every article in detail.

Doubtless, some articles with stolen information like Marr’s made it onto our website. It’s likely that many different people, perhaps some of them influential, read those articles. If one of them would have found similarities between our writers’ articles and a professional article, we would had to have sacked them, and they would probably have lost their young careers as a result. For this rookie mistake. For this lazy error.

Such is the nature of digital journalism. The green staff writer has every opportunity to receive as big a readership as the weathered columnist, mistakes and all. The only option is to learn, and learn young. Journalism schools and small publications must invest more time in teaching the intricacies of plagiarism, and the blogs and news aggregate websites that encourage writers to steal information from other publications to gain hits on their own pages must be shunned.

But Marr should have known better. She worked for the Washington Post for two years, for cripes sakes. She’s not exactly Jayson Blair, but plagiarism is plagiarism, and it has no place in the professional world of journalism.

Supermarkets are hives of interesting people and homes to some of America’s best stories. They are given attention only when refrigerators and cupboards run empty, ensuring that many of their most interesting aspects go unnoticed. They are a place where counterfeiters hone their skills, major health violations go unnoticed, and strawberries and bananas end their thousand-mile trips, only to wind up in rusted shopping cards and plastic bags. Nobody notices that the fruits have come from far-off Caribbean shorelines or that they have been injected with stabilizing chemicals to keep them alive during their travels, just like nobody notices the teenagers that make love in the break rooms or the man who uses the same tired joke on every cashier.

“Did you find everything today, sir?” the cashier will ask.

“Oh yes, a little bit too much!” he says without fail.

In some ways, supermarkets are the great equalizer that public education has turned out not to be. People of every race, color, creed, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status walk through the same automatic sliding doors and leave with identical cartons of milk and eggs. Everybody must deal with disinterested teenage cashiers and everybody must present his savings card at the registers to get the daily “deals.” No one has ever denied a black person or a homosexual of his or her right to pluck a loaf of bread from the top of aisle 12, and nobody ever will. In a supermarket, the only people not treated as equals are the employees, who are encouraged to put the customer’s needs before their own.

The most interesting people in the world come to supermarkets to stock their cupboards. Most of them are not looking for acknowledgement, and most of them do not receive it. Their stories are overlooked and under-told, and it is a shame.

An elderly woman is standing at the lottery counter. She is grandmother-sized; short and wide. She wears thick glasses that take up a little bit too much of her face, and her hair is white and permed. She’s one of those women who sets up an appointment at the local Fantastic Sams or Supercuts every four weeks, more to gab with the other old ladies than to actually get her hair done. She is also a regular customer at this supermarket. The service desk clerk asks her how she’s been.

“Not good,” she says grimly. “I just don’t see how I’m going to get by without my husband. We were together for 40 years and now I’m all alone.” The clerk already knows this story. He heard it three days before when she came to refresh her lottery ticket stash, and he will hear it again two days later. But he legitimately feels sorry for the woman, so he nods politely and apologizes as she continues.

“And now my nephew just died of a stroke, too. He’s been coming to my house and helping me with yard work and shopping and the things my husband used to do,” she says. “I just don’t see how I can keep up without them.”

She looks like she is going to cry, but she manages to pull things together to buy $48 worth of lottery tickets, mostly Take Five and three and four-digit numbers. The clerk hands her the tickets.

“What’s my damage?” she asks, before interrupting herself with a sudden realization. “Oh darn. I forgot to buy tickets for my husband. I’m not going to stop just because he’s gone.”

She produces another set of Take Five numbers from the depths of her purse and the clerk prints her several new tickets. They cost $12 more. She feigns surprise when he tells her the total, but it’s clear that she has more than enough in her wallet. She pays and the clerk begins to thank her.

“Have a nice…” he manages to say before she interrupts him.

“Oh, I have these too,” she says, pulling a wad of scratch-off tickets from her purse. The clerk feels dumb for forgetting. It’s the same old routine, every time. There are several other customers impatiently tapping their feet to some inaudible beat behind her. She notices.

“Go ahead and take care of them. I’ll get situated,” she says as she sorts through her pile of lottery tickets. She spends another 15 minutes at the counter talking to the clerk about her back problems and her sick sister Martha who lives alone in a ranch in Delaware.

She is lonely and needs someone to talk to. He finished the rest of his work early and was bored. It is a match made in heaven, playing out on the overly waxed floors of a second-rate grocery store.

The walls of this supermarket are privy to things that are much less beautiful, though infinitely sadder. A little girl pushes a cart into the building. She can barely see over the handle, and she heaves her weight forward to get the thing to move. An old woman follows behind, scrambling to keep up with the girl’s quick pace. It is a Tuesday, formerly senior discount day at this supermarket. The program has been defunct for nearly two decades, but the seniors continue to arrive in droves in search of prune juice, medication and hard candy for their grandchildren.

At first, the duo looks like every other grandmother and granddaughter shopping in the store. The grandmother wears a pink and purple paisley blouse—typical grandmother garb. She seems simultaneously annoyed at the little girl for moving so quickly, and enchanted by her energy and determination. The girl continues her march toward some unknown goal. The light-up shoes she wears over her black tights blink like crazy and her tiny, checkered skirt and purple coat glide behind her as she moves.

As the little girl gets closer, the cute grandmother/granddaughter shopping moment dissolves into a sad and macabre story for anyone willing to take the time to notice. Not many do. The little girl’s face, hidden behind her oversized glasses, is not quite a little girl’s face. It has the typical features—a cute button nose, oversized eyes, long eyelashes—but there are wrinkles and marks that give away the girl’s real age. She is somewhere between 40 and 50 years old and the old woman is not two generations away, but one. The old woman is her mother. The younger woman likely suffers from something called hypopituitarism, a rare disease that seems to lock its sufferers into childhood. But she will continue to be just another little girl to most.

Most aspects of supermarkets are much more universal, but no less interesting, like the 40-something mom who is returning bottles and cans with her two young sons. They all have matching blonde hair, though hers has a gray streak on each side, giving her a wise, all-knowing appearance—that mother-knows-best look. They finish stuffing sticky Mountain Dew bottles and dented Diet Pepsi cans into the machines and walk with much fanfare to the service desk to redeem their vouchers for cash.

“We can have some of the money since we helped, right?” the little one says to his mother, half-asking, half-telling.

“We’ll see,” she says, cementing her image.

She sets the vouchers on the countertop and the office clerk counts out the total on a calculator, opens the register with a ding and hands the woman a slew of $1 bills and change. The children gaze up at the mother expectedly.

“The whole thing came to $3.75,” she says. “So you can have… a quarter.”

She hands them each a coin as their little smiles slowly turn to frowns of disgust. A quarter used to mean something to little kids. A quarter used to mean excitement over a gumball, or a little sticky hand from the toy machine in front of the store, or at least a chance to try their luck at winning a stuffed Snoopy doll in the claw machine. These days, a quarter means next to nothing.

“Mooooooooooommmmmmm!” they both say simultaneously, moaning as the doors slide open and they run after her, tugging at her coat the whole time.

The rotten economy has evolved supermarket stories, bringing increased diversity and maturity to each clandestine tale. Older men and women have replaced many of the self-conscious adolescents who once stooped lazily over cash registers in hopes of earning enough cash to pay for gas and McDonalds.

A member of this new wave of old cashiers stands behind register four, her wrinkled hands slowly moving a carton of butter pecan-flavored Perry’s Ice Cream over the scanner. Her very clearly dyed blonde hair is cut short and spiky. The store’s uniform—a plain black polo—rests on her gaunt body like an opened parachute. The nametag clipped to the left side of her collar reveals that her name is Karen. She peers over her rectangular glasses as she finishes the order and tells the customer to have a nice day.

A pocket-sized girl with a tiny blonde bob scurries up behind the old woman and tugs on her shirttails, her chubby, baby-fat legs plodding against the ground as she moves. She looks identical to the little girl from the Welch’s Grape Juice commercial from the late ’90s, and she’s got a voice to match.

“Hi gwamma!” she says, almost squeaking.

“Oh, hi honey!” Karen says excitedly. Her face twists from the usual wry smile she wears at work into a sincere grin. She turns off the light above the register and scoops down and picks up the girl. “I’ve missed you so much,” she says.

The tiny girl squeals as her face lights up. It is another moment of beauty inside of a building meant only to distribute food. The two are locked in a bubble, a world away from the customers and employees noisily moving in the same mechanical motions around them. The flower dies as quickly as it bloomed.

“Grandma has to get back to work, but I’ll see you next weekend, OK honey?” she says, setting her down. The little girl nods her head in an exaggerated motion, which sends her bob flying up and down. She scurries back to her mom, who is standing at aisle two. The mom exchanges waves with Karen as she turns her light back on and calls a customer into her line.

Some of the other employees speculate about Karen’s decision to join the store’s staff at this point in her post-retirement life, and why older people apply for jobs there, in general.

“They’re lonely, bored, they need some money, their husbands are dead,” says Jesse, a 20-year-old stock clerk. “Who knows?”

A customer—middle-aged woman, dark hair, spotless white running shoes—meanders into an area near Jesse. He stops talking and helps the woman.

“Can I help you with anything?” he says.

“Is that real orange juice?” she says, pointing at the shelf at his heels. She takes a closer look. “Oh no, it’s pineapple.” She grabs a carton of low-pulp Tropicana and walks away.

Jesse shrugs and continues.

“The old people are a pain in the ass,” he says. “The managers want us to move fast and get customers through the lines, and they can’t even move fast enough. Granted, they’ll come in and work at any time and they don’t freak out when they have more than three people in their line. But they’re slow.”

A store manager with a “Kelly” nametag pushes an empty stock cart behind Jesse and stops. Kelly is one of the people that the younger employees refer to as “lifers.” It is a somewhat derogatory term meaning that she has been working there for some time, and she will probably be there for even longer. Kelly has been listening to the whole conversation.

“They’re usually very friendly with the customers and give good service and they’re available to work a lot of hours when the teenagers aren’t available,” she says, before walking away.

Karen walks by and pushes through the saloon-style doors on her way to the break room, which is tucked into the far back corner of the store. She retrieves a Tupperware container full of some sort of goulash mixture from her locker and sits down to eat. One of the younger employees sits down and asks her about her decision to work in a supermarket.

“I just wanted to do something part-time,” she says. “I wanted something not stressful. You don’t take this work home with you. It’s fun, I like the people I work with and the customers are pretty good.”

“Are you kidding?” the younger employee says, standing up. “I hate this place.”

“I did have one customer today ask me if the store was changing names,” Karen says. “I’ve been getting that a lot. Call the manager, I say. What do I know?”

Karen begins talking about her five grandchildren. Someone mentions the one that visited her earlier in the day. Karen smiles.

“One day, she came in and hid and squatted down so I couldn’t see her,” she says. “Then she jumped up and yelled ‘Hi, Grandma!’ ”

Her face lights up and the few people in the room suddenly become aware of the kind of magic that the store is capable of. Between those four corporate-financed brick walls, people come together and they bring their interesting lives with them. The employees in that room forget their paychecks and vacation hours and aches and pains, and come to some sort of understanding—that there is elegance in ugliness, enlightenment in suffering. Maybe life isn’t so bad after all. If we just stop to look and talk and interact with each other, maybe…

Suddenly, an announcement sounds over the store’s loudspeaker.

“Can we have all available associates up front please? All available associates up front? Thank you.”

With that, the moment is gone. It was as fleeting as it was beautiful.

In fact, sometimes the school can be downright hostile to the student publications on campus.

The front page of Feb. 9, 2000 edition of The Spectrum, UB’s independent student newspaper, is startlingly empty. A lone paragraph sits in the middle of the space that would typically feature a front page story. It reads:

2/8/00, 12: 00 a.m.
It’s production night and The Spectrum is just about ready to go.  Another five minutes would do the job.  But, there are no more “five minutes.”  The University Police have clearly stated they will arrest us for trespassing in the Student Union, even if we stay a moment after midnight — no exceptions. We would have liked to give you a front page.

An editorial on page four of the same issue describes the situation a little more thoroughly.

Last week, three members of The Spectrum staff were chased out of the Student Union like thieving jackrabbits fleeing a pack of hounds. A few days later, they received a summons to appear before the Student Wide Judiciary for trespassing and failing to comply with a university official’s request. This Sunday night, they were informed by University Police officers (several of whom showed up for the occasion) that if they were ever caught in the Union past midnight again, they would be arrested immediately.

The editorial explains that the university passed a zero-tolerance law for violators of the union’s building hours — a law that specifically cites campus publications should not be in the union past midnight.

More recently, the Department of English has been threatening to pull class credit for publication staff writers. Historically, Generation Magazine, Visions and The Spectrum writers have had the option to receive credit for writing a specific number of articles for each publication. The department counts the credit as “internship courses” and requires two of them for its own journalism certificate program.

But last summer, Cristanne Miller, the chair of the Department of English, decided that she wasn’t happy with the way the publications are set up — where students have a bare minimum of oversight and are graded by an adviser at the end of the semester (coincidentally, she wasn’t thrilled about this article written by a colleague of mine for The Spectrum during the prior semester). She requested $6,000 from each publication per semester to continue paying for the advisers.

Miller changed her tune slightly after the three publications worked together to fight the decision, mostly due to the fact that none could afford $6,000 per semester. After Stephen Marth from The Spectrum, Robert Pape, representing Visions and Generation and a handful of Spectrum staffers (including me), met with Vice President of Student Affairs Dennis Black, Miller reconsidered her fee.

The English Department is willing to go to an absolute minimum in its  request at this point, in order to prevent any further wrangling. You, the student publications, will need to provide a total of $4000 for spring semester. The English Department (David Schmid, Interim Chair and Wendy Belz, Administrative Assistant) will need to be assured by October 15 that this amount is forthcoming or there will be no credit-bearing courses for students journailsts in the spring.

But on Sept. 14, Jody Kleinberg Biehl, the chair of the journalism certificate, announced that Miller pulled the Oct. 15 deadline and said that she could push back the deadline “as late as we have to.” She then requested a handful of figures from each of the publications, even though they’re private companies and not affiliated with the school.

Ultimately, the department decided to continue funding for The Spectrum for the spring semester, but dropped support for Generation and Visions, even though none have agreed to pay.

Is the Department of English justified in their decision to only provide credit to publications that pay? Maybe.

The entire SUNY system is facing huge cuts. Out of a recent SUNY-wide $90 million budget cut, UB has been asked to cut $13 million. It’s probably easy for the College of Arts and Sciences, a college that overlooks several lucrative research-based programs, to cut money from the English program. It’s not like the Department of English is pulling in $172 million from local companies.

At the same time, it’s hard to trust the administration’s financial savvy when the chair of the department doesn’t even understand the budget cuts. Miller mistakenly believed that SUNY’s recent 90/10 split — where students were charged $310 more per semester, with 90 percent of it going to the state and 10 percent going to UB — meant that 90 percent of a student’s entire tuition contribution went to the state.

The tuition money students pay to attend UB goes 90% to Albany to pay for SUNY costs. UB receives only 10% of this tuition, including only 10% of the increase, and the English Department receives no increase to its budget because of this increase.  Again, instead, our budget has been cut by  more than 10%.

And it’s not unusual for a university to give class credit to student journalists, especially when it’s a requirement for the Department of English’s own Journalism Certificate Program.

The zero-tolerance trespassing policy and the class credit cuts are just two examples of the university being hostile to on-campus publications. In spite of these issues, UB’s student publications continue to flourish. The Spectrum has continued its tradition of providing in-depth coverage of local issues, Visions looks better than ever, and Generation is returning next semester with a brand new staff and layout (full disclosure: I’ll be EIC).

Despite the school’s complete lack of a journalism major, students could do a lot worse than UB if they’re looking to study journalism in college. In fact, the lack of a major could benefit students — I’ve been able to build my own major, focusing on the things I believe are important to journalism, rather than following a pre-set curriculum. Whether or not my major gets approved is another story.

Between the University Heights, UB 2020 and the Student Association’s mishaps, the school is a great place for students to cover a wide variety of interesting and scandalous stories.

I’d encourage any UB student interested in journalism to contact The Spectrum at spectrum-eic@buffalo.edu, Visions at visionseic@gmail.com or Generation at ubgeneration@gmail.com. Each offers a different experience, but you’ll walk away with a better understanding of journalism and the university as a whole.

Just don’t stay in the Student Union past midnight.

Could hyper local coverage of small towns like Gasport, N.Y. be journalism's savior?

I’ve recently been hearing that hyper local journalism is the future.

Media companies are finding it both expensive and inefficient to cover large swaths of land like they’ve been doing for the past half century, so they’re going to shift to covering small, partitioned areas. And while some say that it won’t last, hyper local journalism is already catching on.

The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is already doing it — they’re sending students to various NYC locales to report on the goings-on.

And companies like YNN Buffalo cater exclusively to small markets, sometimes sharing content with sister stations if the information is applicable to the viewers of the area.

The idea seemed interesting but it never really struck me as groundbreaking (after all, that is how journalism started) until I discovered this blog.

Bob Confer, a local businessman, conservative blogger, and Union Sun & Journal columnist, set up a Web site to aggregate news specifically about my small hometown of Gasport (population: 1,248).

Gasport is a town that never would have never been the brunt of a news publication in the past. But now, with the Web in full swing and with hyper local journalism making itself known, little towns like Gasport are becoming the focus of some very in-depth coverage.

While big companies like Reuters and the Associated Press will probably always remain relevant — people need to get the “big” news from somewhere — hyper local journalism seems poised to take the industry by storm.

Could it be the saving grace that the flailing industry has been searching for? Time will tell.

EDIT: I just found another blog for Lockport, N.Y., my former hometown and workplace. It’s interesting that everyday people run these things in an attempt to spread information in their communities. But where’s the Middleport blog?