Kick It Up A Notch!

6.6.06 Article


Good day ladies and gents, I hope everyone is having a great start to the hurricane season. I am enjoying my first week here at USATODAY.com and am already starting to see what a converging newsroom looks like.
Here at USATODAY -which by the way is pretty much the coolest building ever, I need to take pics and show everyone- the print and .com sides joined forces about a month ago and are now both located on the second floor of the USATODAY building. That brings me to the link above.
Yesterday, my second day here, I was approached by Laura Petrecca, a reporter for the Money section on the print side. She needed help with a story she was working on about marketing ploys being used by Hollywood and others for 6.6.06. So, I made a few calls -one to the Church of Satan which was probably the creepiest phone call I have ever made as a journalist- and did some research into the topic and wrote up a report and sent it to her. If you look at both of today's print and online editions you will see Laura's article -with a contribution line from yours truly. I also helped build an infographic about a Toyota recall that occurred yesterday that can be seen in the Money secion on USATODAY.com.
In other convergence related news, I edited audio from U.S. World Cup players we will use for a .com Flash project due out next week.
Now to the fun stuff. On Saturday, I played tourist and walked around to all of the D.C. Memorials which was fun except for all of the bikers who were there for Memorial Day. I then ate at this place called Ciora (need to check the spelling on that) which was like the East Coast version of Panera. The interesting part of this visit to Ciora though was as I was sitting at my table enjoying my Turkey Bacon Pannini I noticed a family of four sitting at a table across the aisle. Remember the scene in “Old School” where Luke Wilson is in the airport riding down the escalator and sees the dad scolding his kid and hitting him upside the head? Well, this Dad was recreating that scene. He was scolding his son for some unknown reason and then knocked him on the head. The Mom then got mad at the Dad and they started having one of those great we’ve been married too long and I’m sick of you you’re sick of me why are we even on a family vacation kind of fights. It was great! It made all those great fond family vacation memories come rushing back.
On Monday (i.e. Memorial Day), I had a BBQ with the family I am living with and some of their friends which included Jodie Allen, a former reporter for the Washington Post and US News and World Report. Allen now works for the Pew Polling Research Center, which was neat because she told me all about this political research the center has done on college-aged persons and their attitudes to news and politics -which not surprisingly is apathetic.
Overall, Washington D.C. is great except for the traffic. To get to work I have a 15 mile drive, which correlates into an hour of being in the car. But, I get to pass Langley – home of the CIA- every day which gives me dreams of one day becoming a CIA agent and saving the world from terrorists who want to steal deadly nerve gas and release it on U.S. soil.
OK, enough of watching "24". Hope everyone is enjoying their summers and I look forward to speaking with all of you. Good day and stay righteous.