Blogging from Austin: Day 3

(Somewhere over the southeastern US-Continental Flight 2050)

The last day of the conference started actually the night before, as the ACP sponsored a newspaper “critique” and cereal eating session Friday night. So while various others went out to enjoy the Austin nightlife on 6th street, others were getting their newspapers opened and torn apart by experienced journalists.

I personally, tried to do a little of both. Around 10, Alyssa, the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and Murray, the features editor of the Loyola Marymount University newspaper went to explore the nightlife of Austin.

And what a crazy night it was. Even though it was the night before Halloween, people were already dressed up with various costumes, from the cop on Reno 911 to the Grim Reaper, to one girl who simply dressed up in all fatigues with a bag over her head. At least for our little group, we decided to hop into a local restaurant (one of the few that were actually not 21 and up) at first for some of the local fare. Fried dill pickles were the name of the game here, a delicacy that isn’t often found in the culinary circles of Williamsburg.

Afterwards, we decided to give the local bike-taxis a try. We managed to hail a cabby (I guess you can’t really call him a cabby if he’s not driving a car) and decided to travel the multi-block trip to the state capital building in style.

The capital building in Austin is also one of the biggest of any state capital building. And surprisingly, the gates were wide open to the grounds within. Alyssa and I were kind of hesitant to enter the grounds, especially as walking in front of a motion detector by accident had triggered a red light to shine on us just a couple minutes before. And it wasn’t until we saw a group of 9 just casually walk by the gate like nothing was the matter until we realized that the Texas capital building was itself a popular tourist park. I mean, how many state capitals can you name in the United States that let you walk up to its doors and play ding dong ditch? (Disclaimer: We did NOT actually do this, though I did knock on the door a couple times…no answer) I know for a fact the Virginia state capital is cordoned off with police constantly looking for a tour badge or a press pass.

After we had had enough of the local night scene (which by 11 was actually beginning to get quite scary…) we decided to head back to the hotel to attend the critiquing session. And after a thorough breaking down of our newspaper’s front page layouts, I decided to finally call it a night. The result, well, that’s only for the staff to know and for you to find out, but basically, we were told that the layout and content was generally good.

For the final day, I ended up starting my day off with some genuine tex-mex food (of course!) There’s a general rule around my family that the best ethnic food exists at the source, that the best Japanese food will be found in Japan with a Japanese person sitting behind the kitchen counter. In Austin, with tex-mex food, this was definitely the case. I had a quesadilla con chorizo and I gotta admit, I don’t know what they did with the salsa and the guacamole, but it tasted quite simply, amazing.

A view of the capital building in Austin, TX. The building is one of the largest capital buildings among the states.

Afterwards, we attended a couple conferences about how to find some genuine story ideas, and by 3:45, we were prepped, but at heart unwilling, to leave this great town. But of course, flights are flights, and it’s not like we can miss them, especially when the College is so kindly paying for our fare.

Austin truly is a great town. I can see why a friend of mine is currently on his 14th year living there and can’t get away. Austin truly is a college town. People there live, breathe, and honor the UT Longhorns, and the whole town, even the police, get crazy every time the football team has a game. It’s truly an entirely different environment from the small, quaint backwater of Williamsburg.

And perhaps the biggest thing I learned on this trip is that there’s no magical solution to improving the newspaper, and that as an old teacher of mine used to say, “I can make you do, I can’t make you go.” Every editor wishes he had stories in on-time, that all his writers would unquestionably cover articles and write them with a Woodward and Bernstein quality and attitude. Every editor wishes that his/her writers could follow journalistic style, and crunch out articles, like a newsroom on steroids.

But in reality, this is often not the case, and being with people with similar production issues as The Flat Hat really made me realize just how much my problems coincided with theirs. And you know, I also realized these problems weren’t going to ever disappear, and that the quality of a good editor, lies in not just how well you can handle these issues, but how well you can end up preparing your writers for the real world in the process. Perhaps that is what I, as a news editor, should aim for.