Today, I spent the morning at the News & Observer office in Downtown Raleigh. Despite initially having trouble finding the entrance to the building, I managed to arrive a few minutes early. Once there, I met Susan Spring the Director of Newsroom Operations.  I spoke to Susan for a little while before she gave me a tour of the Newsroom. She explained to me the basic layout of the floor and points of interest. They have a large screen on one of the walls that shows statistics from their website. She then showed me their research library, which houses a log of almost all the N&O papers over printed and other resources for the reporters to access for research. Then we met up with a group of 3 new hires and interns from McClatchy Co., their parent company. I walked around with them for a while as they were also taking a tour of the office. We also were able to sit in on the morning news meeting where all the reporters and other employees come together and plan out when their stories are going to be put up on the N&O website as well as whether they will contain video or not.

Once the meeting was over I met with one of their newer hires (she started Monday), Presley. She was hired specifically to work on a newer project of theirs called Collegetown. From what I gather, it is going to be used as a news outlet for the four major school in the Triangle: Duke, UNC, NC State, and Central. She was very determined to find new and interesting ways to get out the news out to people so that college students would be actively engaged in the content produced by the Collegetown site. She mentioned that they were planning on working with students who attend the college for articles since they would actually be there.

After speaking with Presley for a while I met two of the guys who handle photo and video editing. I had a lovely conversation with them about media and how people interact with videos. We talked about how videos are presented, what goes into them, as well as how&when people view them. We also spoke about video games a little bit, and how they have affected the media.

Lastly, I spoke with an investigative journalist, Daniel Kane, who was not a fan of his job title. He is a strong believer that all journalists no matter what they work on or where, they should all be investigating and asking “Why”. Daniel was the one who broke the story about the “Paper Class” scandal at UNC. He said it stared out as a different story but evolved when he found the discrepancies in the grade books. He thinks journalism is a good way to bring attention to things that are broken so that they might get changed.

Overall, visiting the N&O was a lot more exciting than I originally thought it was going to be. I found the varying opinions on the direction of the paper news to be very interesting, as well as the amount of both new and old technologies present at all the desks. I also got a t-shirt! AND A COOL PEN!

-CJ