Washington: According to Meghin

The Start of my Washington Bucket List!

Okay. I’ve got some pretty ridiculous things that I’m constantly thinking of for my bucket list. Here’s a list, because lists are awesome.

• Go to the Newseum. I’ve been wanting to go for a very long time now. I’m gonna make this happen this summer.
• Go to the National Zoo. BABY OTTERS. Need I say more? Well, and panda bears too.
• Go to Georgetown Cupcake. So technically, I’ve been eating these cupcakes forever, but I want to go to the actual location. My parents were nice enough to pick up a bunch yesterday, which greeted me after my orientation.
• Take pictures with as many statues in ridiculous poses as possible. I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. I got the idea from my brother for this one.
• Take a picture with the Australian Embassy’s statue. It’s got a kangaroo on it. It’s adorable.
• Take a picture by the Korean Embassy. This one’s for Kohl. Maybe I’ll do it in the “Token Asian Tourist Pose.” I can get away with doing that. Hunter can let me borrow one of his cameras, I’m part Asian, and there are Hawaiian shirts that my family has somewhere in the house.

Orientation: Part One.

Today I had my WTOP orientation. That was probably the most interesting orientation I’ve ever had. When I first arrived, I looked very clueless. Luckily, one of the sports guys was willing to help me out, and when he asked what school I go to, I was pleasantly surprised with his answer. “Oh, there’s a lot of Penn Staters here. They’re really nice people.” A few hours later, when I was taking my tour of the newsroom, another staffer said, “Penn State? We get like 20,000 of those each year here!” as he laughed.

I also met nine other interns (it would’ve been ten, but one of the girls was out sick) and out of those people, I am the only Penn Stater. Two are from Howard University, two are from Mount Saint Mary’s, one is from Wisconsin, one is from Duke, and the rest are from U of Maryland. They were all really nice kids. I also met several of the news directors, staff members, and my supervisor. The fact that the office has a really chill vibe to it really made me happy, even if the station leans more towards the conservative side. And that they aren’t too fond of the Phillies.

Of course, what made me even happier was that instead of having Fox News on in the office (like they do at Central Command HQ…that drove me insane when I visited my dad there!) they have soap operas, CNN, and even the Kardashians on the TVs. And they write online stories about otters. How cool is that?

I also learned that the format of the station is not a format that I really expected to see in radio. From what I had learned in my Comm 360 class in the Fall, many news radio stations were stuffy, boring, and didn’t want to somehow engage the listeners. WTOP puts all of their on-air bits in a conversational format, one that gets the attention of the listeners, and keeps them hooked for a while. And doesn’t put them to sleep. It’s a welcome change from that class. Plus, if I do well in radio, I can excel in television, which is what I really want to go into.

I got my hours for when I’ll be working, as well as confirmation that I will be putting some of my video skills to good use. On the one and only Mac that the station has with Final Cut Pro on it. I’ll be working Wednesdays through Saturdays from 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. I’ll also be helping out with the “Best Of…” segments, where various businesses are featured, as voted on by the public. I’ll be filming interviews with the businesses and patrons of the businesses for the WTOP website. I think that is pretty cool, and that I’ll (hopefully) have some more things to add to my resume.

Of course, when the supervisor left all the interns alone to get to know each other, one of the questions (and then some) that I was expecting to receive came up: “Where were you the night of the riots? Did you see what happened? Were you actually downtown? Did people go to class the next day? What’s the campus like now?”

I pretty much blew all the kids away in the room when I said I slept through all of the riots. I slept through JoePa’s firing. I slept through the van being tipped over. I slept through everything. And I went to class the next day, even though the atmosphere was very…quiet. That week (as I’ve stated so many times in the past) was just so stressful that I couldn’t handle it all. Of course, when I mentioned that I write for Onward State, nobody said anything about how it was the organization that had that slight mishap with the death of JoePa a day early, but rather how Devon was killed by a dog on April Fool’s Day. That lightened up the atmosphere a bit. Especially when I mentioned that it was a small breed of dog, because the girl that brought it up couldn’t think of it.

All in all, I’m really excited to start work on Wednesday, even if it means that I need to slowly become a morning person. I didn’t really see a Starbucks in the immediate area of the office, but I’m sure that there’s places to get coffee around there.

It’s May 5! Do you know what that means? This blog is going to get much more active, and I will start chronicling my life as a WTOP intern :D

Also, I’ll be collaborating on a “DC Bucket List” with my friend Paige. As soon as we have that finished, I’ll put it here :)

A Lesson in Ethics, Part Two.

Once again Onward State, the “news organization” that I write for, has been caught in another ethical dilemma. This time, it was over an April Fool’s joke, where the former Managing Editor was killed off.

And once again, I learned YET ANOTHER lesson on what not to do.

For starters, I will say that I was in on the “joke” that Devon was going to jokingly be killed off. How he was killed? A dog. While walking to Qdoba. The dog that was the “Editor-in-Chief” of the Collegian…just for April Fool’s Day.

In this case, the article itself was funny, and this is coming from somebody that doesn’t joke about death. I mean, it was a freak accident. However, the way it was executed, through the tweets, was eerily similar to the JoePa incident back in January. And that was not funny whatsoever.

Had I not been in on the joke, and had I actually received the texts from OS to my phone, if I had seen one that said that Devon was actually dead, I would have freaked out. I was traveling back to Pennsylvania on Sunday, and if I glanced at my phone to see a new tweet, and saw that, I would actually be concerned.

The way it was executed…I don’t think it was done the right way. At the same time, the level of communication that went out between the staff members who really wanted the post published, as well as the rest of the staff, was pretty much at zero. I think that communication would have really been key here, just so that this “disaster” could have been avoided. The tweets were something that really angered people the most, because the tone was just THAT serious. It also didn’t help that the site crashed, which prevented people from actually seeing what was posted on the site.

This is the second BIG “oopsie” for Onward State, and despite it, I still stick by the moniker, accidents happen. I still stand by the organization, because OS is still a legitimate news source, or at least I think so. It’s almost like a gem in the rough. You have to search for the actual news. The site got its start by being snarky and alternative, and the April Fool’s thing is definitely something that the site is known for. However, this DID go too far.

…but on the bright side it has helped me learn a whole lot more about the world of ethics, and that online journalism is something that is pretty dangerous.

Internship!

I just got the word today that I will be interning at WTOP News Radio this summer. I am incredibly excited to start my internship there!

An Important Timeline.

I know I briefly mentioned in my intro post what I went through to get into the program. Here’s a timeline of events.

• Saturday, November 5, 2011: All hell breaks loose with the scandal.

• Monday, November 7, 2011: OS has an emergency meeting to figure out what to do with what was going on with the scandal, on top of a regular meeting.

• Tuesday, November 8, 2011: I had my interview for the program. When I entered the office, the coordinator mentions something about JoePa being fired, and how the NY Times was reporting it. Since it was about 11 am, this was news to me. He and I sat and talked for a little about my thoughts on the case, and how I saw it, through the eyes of a journalist. Later that day, I ended up working with one of the OS girls about the reactions of the community. That night, after my Invisible Children meeting, I ended up spending some time at Old Main, with the group of people supporting Paterno. Because my phone was dying, I made the decision to go home around 10. Then I learned there was a “mini-riot” that wasn’t even enough to be deemed a riot.
• Wednesday, November 9, 2011: The calm before the storm. Rumors were high about what was going to happen. I remember sitting in my Comm 360 (Radio Reporting) class in the morning, while my professor turned Fox News on so we could watch the press conference for the game that week…that would inevitably get cancelled. Later that night, rumors were even higher about Paterno and Graham Spanier, and all of the news organizations on campus were scrambling around trying to figure out what exactly would happen. This was four days into the big media rush. Four days into it, and I was physically and mentally overwhelmed with everything. This was my first foray into the journalism world, especially with one about a HUGE story. Because I was so exhausted, I ended up feeling sick. It was because of that that I had decided to go to bed at exactly 10 p.m., knowing that I was going to miss all of the events that were to follow. That was the night the students rioted like it was their job, because beloved Coach Joe was fired via a phone call. Oh, and Spanier stepped down.
• Thursday, November 10, 2011: I woke up at around 11:30 in the morning, saw multiple texts on my phone, including, “Are you okay?” “What is going on at your campus?” “I hope you stayed away from the riots!” I had no idea what had happened in the previous night, so I looked at Facebook and saw many statuses about the big riot, and Joe being gone. I called my mom, and said, “What happened last night?” I honestly had no idea that JoePa was fired after 10 p.m. that night, nor that a bunch of students decided to destroy public property and flip a news van.

That’s pretty much the big timeline of the scandal for me, and it is something that is going to stick with me forever.

I also feel that it is important to post this here, only because as I grow older, and as I go on through the world of journalism and careers, I might get asked, “Where were you on the night of the riots?” “What are your thoughts about the riots?” and so on and so forth.

I’d post my views on the students who rioted here, but I feel that is something unprofessional to do. However, I will say that I am proud to be a Penn State student, no matter what, mainly because of THON (um, $10.68 million dollars raised for the Four Diamonds Fund is FANTASTIC!), The Blue Out Movement (of which I wrote about for Onward State here), and the candlelight vigil held for victims of child abuse. Those events showed a more positive side to Penn State students, and showed that not everybody wants to riot for no (or a bad) reason, and that the students aren’t directly linked to the scandal here.

Ethics.

Before I even go to Washington, I’m taking one very important lesson with me that I learned tonight.

That lesson is with ethics.

I started my ethics class last week, and the professor brought up something very interesting.

“To tweet or not to tweet.”

That lesson was to show how fast news can spread, good or bad. It also taught me that not attributing properly is also something unethical.

To put the story into perspective, I’m an Onward State staff member, so I witnessed firsthand what was going on.

At around six, I noticed on the site we all use to communicate that JoePa’s status had gotten worse, and that a question was brought up as to what to do. I didn’t imagine how it would possibly escalate from there.

Hours later, one of the other staffers said that several of the football players started tweeting out “RIP Coach” statuses and the like, but to hold off on tweeting/facebooking/posting anything about JoePa’s death until he could get official confirmation. There was a huge miscommunication, and what ended up happening was one small tweet coming out of it all stating that JoePa had died.

One small tweet led to an uproar across the planet (as described in this link), which then led to another ethical problem.

CBS Sports had reported at 9 this evening that JoePa had died…without giving proper attribution to the initial OS report that ended up being wrong. They ended up getting called out on that, and Jay and Scott Paterno took to Twitter to tell the world that their dad was still alive, and not dead, as initially reported, and that they were hurt by what had been reported.

This then led to the managing editor of OS to resign, and he did so in a way that I admire. I might not have seen eye to eye with him on certain things, but I will say that what he did took a huge amount of courage, and a huge amount of being able to admit to the world that he made the mistake in saying that everything should be published. THAT is being an ethical journalist.

Being able to admit when you’re wrong is something incredibly hard to do, especially in journalism. In fact, when speaking of ethics, it’s also hard to really keep tabs on what is wrong and what is right in reporting. Some of the staffers wanted to wait and get more confirmation, to make sure that the initial report wasn’t wrong. Some of the staffers took to their Twitters to discuss their feelings about what had happened.

I just sat by my computer in shock, awe, and confusion.

This is definitely a lesson I will never forget, and it made me realize that it is best to double, triple, and quadruple check sources before sending out something big like that. In fact, it’s better to get the news out with everybody else, and have all the facts than be the first organization to post something, have everybody go off of that, only to find out that the information was wrong.

In fact, this is something very important to have learned before going off to DC, just because you never know when/if an employer is going to have to ask you to do something unethical, despite you having a funky feeling that you should make sure that you have all the facts before reporting something.

Explore! (part one.)

So why is this program something special to me? Well, believe it or not, but I’ve always wanted to work in a large city or metropolitan area. I used to live in Lebanon, a small town outside of Hershey in Pennsylvania. I lived there for eleven years. As a military kid, that’s something really rare. Before that, I lived in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was a town much larger than Lebanon.

However, now I live in Fredericksburg, Virginia, when I’m not in Happy Valley. My dad commutes to work every day in DC, and believe it or not, despite the fact I live in Virginia now, there’s still a lot of things I want to do in DC. Or at least try to do when I’m not interning.

• See the Giant Pandas at the National Zoo. I’ve never been to the National Zoo before. They have Giant Pandas. I LOVE PANDAS. I also love places with free admission. But most importantly, this summer, hopefully I’ll get to see these beautiful creatures :)
  

• Go to the Newseum! Forever and a day ago, when I was a freshman at Penn State, my mother went to Georgetown Cupcakes. The day she went, a.) they were filming for the show! and b.) she met one of the head people at the museum. To this day, she still has that man’s business card, because she explained to him that I wanted to major in broadcast journalism. As a freshman, I couldn’t officially declare my major. But that’s a small story. I’ve always wanted to go to this museum. I mean, it’s a museum about NEWS! Hello, I LOVE that.
  

tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Good question TumblrBot.

There’s lots of places I want to visit on this wonderful planet. There’s so many that I just haven’t mapped it all out yet.

An Introduction

My name’s Meghin. I’m currently a junior studying Broadcast Journalism at Penn State - University Park. I started my Penn State journey at the Harrisburg campus, which is where I first learned about the Washington Program.

When I was just a little froshie, one of the deans in the College of Communications gave a speech about the programs offered through Penn State as we got older. One of those programs was the Washington Program. When I heard about that program, I dreamed of getting into it. I just knew I had to be a part of this prestigious program. In fact, this is the program that really caught my interest as a Penn State student.

Before I really get into what really started my journey to get into this program, perhaps I should say a little more about myself.

Like I said, I’m Meghin, a junior, and a Broadcast Journalism major. I’m also minoring in English, because I love reading, correcting people’s grammar, and everything in between! Despite the fact that I’m a journalism major, you’ll notice that I use the Oxford comma. A lot. Which is something frowned upon in the journalism community. I’m also a huge music fan, and I really enjoy writing about music as well. I also enjoy burritos, cupcakes, cooking, tacky jewelry, fashion, art museums, and taking photos.

I also write for Onward State, which is a student-run news blog at Penn State. It’s pretty fun, and it gives me a chance to do something else that I love, which is blogging. I figure that blogging will be great to help me chronicle my journey leading up to the summer months when I start interning in Washington!

Back to the broadcast business though. All my life people told me that they could see me on TV. I was jokingly called “the next Oprah.” However, I didn’t want to have a talk show of my own, as I was more interested in the news. I mean, I started reading at the tender age of three-and-a-half when I just picked up a newspaper and started to read it! As I grew older, I ended up helping out with the morning announcements both at my middle school and high school. That’s where I fell in love with the idea that I could be a news anchor.

I ended up changing my mind.

My junior year at Penn State helped me realize that I don’t want to sit behind a desk and read the news. It helped me realize that I wanted to go out and report on what was happening in the world around us. For some unknown reason, I’ve always been more interested in what’s going on in other countries besides America, so I decided that because of that, I wanted to be an international reporter, as opposed to an anchor.

It was also in my junior year that I applied to the program. I put together my resume, sent in my two reference letters from professors at PSH, and waited. This process started back in October for me. On Halloween, I got the email saying that I had an interview for the program! My interview was on November 8, during an incredibly stressful week, both emotionally and physically. I don’t think that needs any more explanation.

Then I waited and waited. Just before Thanksgiving break I found out I was on the waiting list for the program. The program coordinator said that I would find out if I actually got into the program right before the winter holidays. This caused me to wait some more, and me, being the pessimist that I sometimes have been known to be, thought I didn’t get into the program at first, just because I didn’t hear back! Maybe I should’ve paid more attention to the saying, “No news is good news.”

It was on December 21 that I got the email saying I was in the program! I screamed so loud that my mom thought the house was on fire. I was just really excited, and still am as I type all this out!

So that brings me here. Working in Washington DC will actually help me out (hopefully) with my goal of becoming an international reporter. In fact, I’m looking forward to starting an internship somewhere in DC to start me out in the world of broadcast journalism!

This is just the start of my journey, which should be pretty exciting!