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LAS VEGAS--James Swierzbin spent Saturday morning opening boxes and stuffing registration bags in the Conrad Room of the Las Vegas Hilton, alongside a couple of his classmates from Emerson College in Boston. Lindsey Erin Blumell, a senior at Brigham Young University, manned the Voting Booth Tuesday, helping RTNDA members cast their ballots for the contested Board of Director positions. Swierzbin and Blumell are part of a crew of more than two dozen student volunteers who spent the week helping RTNDA staff prepare for RTNDA@NAB-in return for registration to sessions that will help prepare them for careers in broadcasting. For these aspiring journalists, the trade off has paid off. Within the unadorned walls of Conference Room 6-7 on Sunday, The Poynter Institute's Al Tompkins engaged new professionals and students like Blumell during the six-hour Jump Start Your Journalism session. "Al Tompkins was wonderful-he's one of the best," Blumell says. The first few hours of the session Tompkins dedicated to discussing how to write an effective story, she says, including how to find the interesting angle and uncover the truth. He then touched on tips for drawing in the audience with natural sound, doing effective stand ups, using the Internet for research and, ultimately, getting hired. Tompkins' teaching style really made an impression. "Different people touch you in different ways, and what he said struck a chord," she says. "It wasn't all new information, but the way he presented it, everything just clicked. It's like a light bulb went on." For Swierzbin, it was the Managing Gen-Y session with Dennis Kendall from The Coaching Company that stood out the most. "That was the best event so far, I thought," he says. "There is such a disconnect between people my age and people who are, say, over 40. Their management style is based on what they saw coming up, and that's changed a lot. … I wish more [managers] had attended." As a member of that generation, Swierzbin was curious how Kendall would profile his contemporaries, and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of personal discourse-not just statistics-session participants offered. It also occurred to Swierzbin that Kendall seems to have done a fair amount of research to try to understand the young professionals on their way to newsrooms nationwide. "I'm glad there's someone out there who gets me," Swierzbin says. "He really got to the salient points of what makes us tick, and that impressed me quite a bit." The Big Picture Both students say they are walking away from RTNDA@NAB with a better appreciation for the industry and where it's headed. For instance, Swierzbin thought the election Super Session hosted by Chris Matthews was revealing; he was surprised with the way panelists from each medium tried to understand each others' roles. "I felt like the mainstream journalists wanted to be more like bloggers with their flexibility, and the bloggers wanted to be more like the mainstream with their credibility," he says. "I thought there would be more frustration from both sides, that the mainstream would look at all the Internet stuff and think, 'Oh God, now I have to do a blog,' and the bloggers would look at the traditional journalists and think, 'Oh God, now I have to have legitimate sourcing.' … But it seemed like they wanted to be more like each other." Blumell had the chance to briefly meet and chat with Paul White Award recipient Christiane Amanpour on Monday, after she accepted the honor from RTNDA. The CNN international correspondent's remarks perfectly captured the state of foreign reporting, says Blumell, a native Canadian who lived in Croatia after two years of college. "I loved that she said there is a point to journalism and to international journalism," she says. "Coming here (to a U.S. university) I can see there's a lack of knowledge about the rest of the world available to Americans, which is alarming considering the influence the U.S. has worldwide. And if they're not getting it in schools, then it's up to the international journalists like Christiane." In general, both Swierzbin and Blumell say their experience in Las Vegas has been positive. "There's a feeling of camaraderie or kinship that everyone seems to have," Swierzbin says. "This is an industry that can grind you down and beat you up but the people you meet here still love what they do. Everyone-from Christiane Amanpour to the news directors interviewing me for a job after college-everyone still wants to create the best product they can." Even the sessions that highlighted some of the challenges facing electronic journalists were motivating, Blumell adds. "I am very impressed," she says. "This has been a great learning ground." -- Stefani Blair |
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