Journal E-mail, Week One

My first week at the Orange County Register has been somewhat uneventful on the whole. Orientation at the paper happens only every other week, and I arrived either one week too early or too late, depending on one's perspective. This Monday I finally will get a badge and a computer password. In the meantime, I have been acting like a visitor every day.

I am working at the Anaheim bureau of the Register. It covers the cities of northern Orange County for the Register's weekly community newspapers as well as covering the education beat.

On Monday, I met the staff and did a little copy editing. The paper participates in the Cappies program in which high school students review high school plays. I cleaned up a couple of reviews, trying not to make it sound as if they had been written by someone professional. I spent the rest of the day researching items for the market report Medill requires us to do.

On Tuesday, I shadowed the editor of the Placentia News-Times and the Yorba Linda Star. I edited a teacher's column and a letter to the editor, and I learned about how they do layout for the community papers. I learned what a "filler" was, and I learned that papers don't all use QuarkXpress. The editor told me that the program the Register uses, CCI, is actually pretty commonplace. It's quite a bit more complex, with all kinds of proprietary formatting settings built in.

On Wednesday, I was assigned to the web editor. It was his deadline day, so he showed me how he updated the community newspaper sites with Dreamweaver. He also explained the structure of the main Register site and how to tell the difference between database-based pages and flat files while browsing the site. I spent the afternoon writing a five-page report on the navigational problems of the community news sites, with suggestions for improvement.

Thursday was my reporter-shadowing day. Eric Carpenter, the reporter covering Brea, La Habra and Fullerton, drove me around north county and introduced me to all the cities covered by my half of the newsroom. It was interesting, and I feel I got a good sense of what I'll be covering. I spent the evening then writing another report, this one on the qualities of a good reporter and story ideas. From that I received a story assignment: a feature on the cultural aspects of living near the active oil wells in Brea. It's kind of vague. I spent the night then going over my web site report of yesterday with the supervisor, Bill Diepenbrock. I think I was the second-to-last person to leave the building.

Friday I had some more copy editing to do: three community columns and a brief. Then one of the reporters, Heather McRea, invited me to go along with her on an interview. She is doing a feature on the Anderson Bat Company, a Placentia company that makes high-performance aluminum softball bats. I took notes on the interview and observed her style of questioning. It seems important to get lots of figures; the Register likes that.

The last event of the week was a meeting in which I was assigned to take on the school board meeting this Tuesday evening. It's a tight deadline - the meeting may last until 10:30 p.m. and the paper goes to bed at midnight. I also need to write another report on the web site for Tuesday or Wednesday. And Monday, of course, is orientation. It should be a busy week.