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 2002.12.01 EPISODE 11, in which I suspect you need someone to hide from
o this is December, hairless. It's not quite so cold as I'd thought it would be but, you know, it's still damn cold. I expect Madison's below freezing for the rest of the year, so I'm basically wearing a hat even to just move the car to the other side of the street. Thursday and Friday of this week we were off for Thanksgiving but before that it was time to sign up for spring classes. I grabbed two journalism classes quickly -- Mass Media Practice and the Internet and Democracy were almost full by the time I got to it -- and had three poli. sci. classes to pick one from: Political Psychology, Empirical Methods of Political Inquiry and the American Party System. I talked with Katherine Walsh, the poli. psych. professor, and she confirmed what I'd assumed about the class and gave me a syllabus from the last time she taught it. The party system guy, on the other hand, wasn't around during his office hours and political inquiry guy didn't respond to e-mail. So, bada bing, Political Psychology. I was kind of leaning that way anyhow; the class will be looking at political decision-making processes, which is one of my major interests. But Mass Media Practice is what has me looking forward to spring. The class is being taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum and will focus on magazine writing. We'll be pitching work to both local and national publications; I've already got a couple ideas percolating for the latter, at least one of which would get me a travel budget. Apparently most of the people who take this class have no professional writing experience, so I'll be starting a leg up. Well, an extra leg beyond just being better than everybody else, that is. The Internet and Democracy seminar should be interesting; it'll be my first opportunity to see the department's research-heads interacting with actual journalism, rather than just talking about it as a study example or a relational tangent to social networking. I suspect it'll be a little silly but the Internet is still an outrageously uncharted area where it comes to on-line journalism and the 'net's effect on political action. It could be functionally silly but intrinsically interesting. Meanwhile, I conducted my latest social network interview on Wednesday morning. It was with the director of the Centers For Prevention and Intervention, which -- shocks! -- works to stem drug use. It was an thought-provoking interview but when you're not quite halfway into what should be a 45-minute interview, don't go off on a 20-minute tangent that has nothing to do with the question being asked of you. Seriously. I understand that people are completely in the dark about the realities of drugs and alcohol, I agree with the political statements you're making but for crying out loud, would you just tell me with which organizations you share resources? Honestly, this guy went on for so long I'm considering trying to rearrange the entire social network study into a collection of qualitative case studies just so that block of my time won't have been wasted. Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
