In the end, I figured, my place in this world is more reflective of reality anyway.

(Before I get to those truths, let me say this: I was really delighted to see that Piet Levy, another former Loyolan (also a former RedEye intern), had decided to join the class and speak. He’s an awesome writer whom I’d always really looked up to, so I was happy to hear that he’d been able to keep making his way. He introduced himself to students with the same brand of joy and quirkiness he possessed as a Loyola Phoenix editor years ago, so to know he hasn’t yet burnt out was nearly inexplicably comforting. If you don’t read his stuff, I hope you do so after reading this.)

So, here’s a little bit of what I had to say to the class (the stuff I remember, anyway):

• “Network your ass off.” For as tough as this industry can be, networking has always been really important. It’s just most important these days.
• “Share. Be nice. Don’t steal.” The new tenants of Web-based journalism.
• “Find a mentor. Make relationships and nurture them. And not in a fake way.” I might not know all there is to know about this profession, but I do know this: For every person who wants to learn, there’s somebody out there who wants to share what they know. In journalism, there are mentors aplenty.
• “Don’t give it up. If you love what you do, you shouldn’t have to.” Here’s hoping.

It was sort of shocking to see that only a few students used Twitter. Two had blogs. A handful read RedEye. It was not shocking, however, to see one student head of out the crowd and come up to shake hands and introduce herself to all of us. I smiled at her, and remembered how it felt to do that exact same thing a handful of years ago.

I hope she manages to find her grip and hold on tight.

WASHINGTON — Dissatisfied with last week’s move by the Federal Reserve to curb high overdraft fees to consumers, members of Congress stepped in Tuesday to tout legislation they think will provide further financial relief.

Different from the Fed’s new rule, which would ban banks from charging overdraft fees unless consumers enroll in overdraft protection programs, the Senate bill would limit the number of times a consumer could incur overdraft fees to once a month to a maximum of six times per year. The fees, which now can cost consumers upwards of $35 per each transaction putting an account in the red, would then also have to be proportional to the purchase.

The bill – its’ official name is the Fairness and Accountability in Receiving Overdraft Coverage Act — drew support from Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and co-sponsors on Capitol Hill. The bill, drafted by leaders of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs,would also prevent banks from re-sorting account purchases, so that transactions would be arranged in purchase order, not in price order.

That would mean no $140 fee for a small overdraft, which happened when Mario Livieri wrote a check overdrawing his account by $2.17. Livieri, a retired business owner from Connecticut, said being aware as a consumer is important, but “I also know you don’t get anywhere in the world of business by treating your customers unfairly.”

Financial regulators, Dodd said, have historically done little “while consumers were taken advantage of by these misleading and unfair overdraft programs.” Regulators have known about “outrageous, skyrocketing” fees for years, he added.

John P. Carey, chief administrative officer of Citigroup North America Consumer Banking, is wary of the bill, saying in his statement that one alternative for banks is to simply deny potential overdraws from happening, a practice he said is long-standing at Citibank. He added that overdraft services are a useful product for consumers, especially for check-writing consumers.

Dodd’s bill, in its current form, focuses mainly on ATM and debit card charges; a similar bill, introduced by Sen. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., late last month, includes checks.

“We suggest that if the bill is attempting to limit “continuous overdraft” fees for a single overdraft, the legislation be focused to specifically address that practice,” Carey said.

Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, called overdraft loans “dangerous, high-cost loans” that often impact consumers least able to cover the fees.

Dodd took the hearing as an opportunity to rally support around creation of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which could expedite changes proposed by the bill at a faster rate.

“This cries out for a different process,” Dodd said. “[CFPA] allows for an agency to watch out for what happens to the Mr. Livieris of this world.”

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., expressed skepticism that the bill in its current form would be a positive change for consumers.

“It’s an important topic and I’m sure there are abuses in this area,” Vitter said. “I’m very concerned, however, that, as Congress often does, we’re going to push the pendulum to the other extreme and create problems.”

Vitter added that the costs from a law severely restricting overdraft fees would shift costs from less responsible consumers to the entire class of consumers, “including those who act more responsibly.”

So, yeah, if you’re savvy, do it:

Sign up here.

First reaction? Crickets chirping. Not many of us have the device yet, so it might be a bit of a waiting game until friends and work collaborators get asked to log on. Luckily, there were a couple tech-savvy people floating around out there on my contacts list.

The awesome part about Google Wave? It’s like having a business meeting without having to track a string of emails. In my first attempt/tutorial, I used Wave to plan a friend’s trip from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Here’s what the Wave, named “Ian’s Visit to D.C.,” looked like:

A few important points:

• Notice the highlighted text at the top? Wave allows for real time edits. It’s just like a wiki or a shared document in that way.
• We created a map (not pictured) of important locations relevant to Ian’s visit: My house, Dulles airport, the Spy Museum, etc. Of course, both of us were able to add and edit each pinpointed location as needed.
• Those little illustrated avatars next to us are bots: One told us what the weather is like in Washington, and the other allowed for text to be converted into emoticons (smiley faces … yeah, not sure how useful this one is, but fun to tinker with just the same).
• At the bottom, you’re able to tag your Wave. Since our Wave is public, other users can search “tourism” and our little project can pop up.

Are you starting to see how collaboration works? Wave users, what are you loving/hating? I’ve heard that the Wave is still quite buggy — Ian said it crashed his browser earlier in the planning session — but I haven’t seen any problems quite yet. Comments appreciated! (Special thanks to Ian Monroe for the invite — as he would say, so meta!)

With Halloween coming up, here’s a horror story to start you off with: A recruiter at one of the most prominent newspapers in the country compared the current state of journalism to “making sausage” this week.

Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for personnel at The Washington Post, visited our newsroom and didn’t exactly sugarcoat the current state of the news business. (Just suffice it to say we didn’t file out of the conference room with a corner office on 15th.) It’s called content now, not stories, Perl said. Processing content rather than newsgathering and writing. It’s a new language he admits has taken some getting used to.

“It’s like the stages of grief,” Perl told us. “You have to make peace with that.”

Spooky, huh?

Into the void: A sampling of Medill student Web sites

 

This year, journalism schools across the country will be churning out tech-savvy reporters by the thousands as the media industry decides what to do with itself. Most of us have Web sites, and nearly all of us have Twitter. The question, then, is this: Will any of this stuff help us do a better job as journalists? Beyond that — can it help us get a job?

So, using non-traditional methods like Twitter and Gchat, we contacted people in journalism — starting with the guy who reads your resumes — to ask what works and what doesn’t when it comes to journalists engaging the web.

Will multimedia know-how make me an attractive candidate?

“The same things that would distinguish you in print are the same things that distinguish you on the Web,” Perl said.

* Perl said Post recruiters critique blog entries in the same way they would print clips. Bloggers: Is there an element of enterprise to your posts? How about basic background reporting? (No surprise here, but Perl pointed to Ezra Klein as a sterling example of someone who blogs with authority.)
* Be aware that what you’re going to tweet will get back to you, Perl warned. In other words, yes, you will be Googled.
* Clips, Perl said, are “where it’s at.” When asked if he’d take a journalist with a slew of multimedia skills or a highly-skilled reporter and writer, the latter will win out every time.
* Even if it is just “processing content,” Perl said, the best journalists still report and deliver facts. They just consider the web as another tool to get out their reporting.

Should all journalists use Twitter?

Nope, said Jay Rosen, a New York University faculty member, author and blogger with more than 27,000 followers on Twitter, many of them eager to see what he’ll say next about the state of the industry. Here’s what he wrote to us via Gchat:

” … I would definitely say not every journalist needs to be on Twitter …

I would say it stronger … don’t go on unless you know why you are on …

… rules like “you have to have a blog,” or you “have to be on social media” are promulgated by people who have not studied it well; they are a substitute for knowledge and learning …

and that is on the record …”

New media guru Jay Rosen gives his tips. Graphic via Creative Commons images

 

Beyond that, here’s a quick primer Rosen recommended journalists start with to get themselves up to speed with blogging and Twittering:

* Put a bio up that reflects your interests on your Twitter profile.
* Use the single URL they allow you to link to your blog or to a home page of yours with more information about you.
* If you don’t have one already, make a blog or homepage for yourself at a hosting site like True Slant.
* Then, depending on your area of interest, start following people who Tweet links and ideas about that interest so that you have what Rosen called a useful inflow.
* “It’s initially about what you are bringing in, not putting out.”

How do working journalists feel about engaging an audience through social media?

Hoping to engage the community, I also asked journalists who follow me on Twitter to let me know how they felt about using social media tactics on the job. Every response I got was positive. Here’s a sampling:

So there, from the mouths of experts, you have it.

As for me, I could just say that everything I need to know about branding myself as a journalist I learned in kindergarten: Be nice, share and learn from your peers. Then you just hope common sense kicks in naturally.

Katie Rogers, who is set to graduate from Medill in December, is from Elkhart, Ind., and holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Loyola University Chicago. Before coming to Medill, she was a staff reporter for The Elkhart Truth, her hometown paper. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Journal and McClatchy Newspapers. She wrote this opinion piece for Washington Reporting 2.0., an occasional column about the experience of reporting.

Matias Ramos, 23, blogs to help rally support for the newest incarnation of the DREAM Act (Photo: Katie Rogers/MNS)

WASHINGTON — As her fellow college graduates busy themselves with spamming every available inbox with resumes, 25-year-old Lizbeth Mateo keeps to the same Los Angeles coffee shop she’s worked in for the past five years.

A native of Mexico and an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Mateo earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Northridge last year. Though she said she’d like to find a job that would allow her to give back in some way to the low-income community she grew up in, Mateo’s immigration status has placed a cap on what she is able to achieve.

You could say she’s still waiting on a dream. “You’re not allowed to work where you grow up or have a job that’s related to your field,” Mateo said.

It’s been just over two years since the last version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act failed in the Senate. Re-introduced in both chambers of Congress in March, the most recent incarnation of the DREAM Act would provide for students like Mateo, people who want to earn a path toward legal U.S. residency over time.

To mobilize supporters, Mateo and others in her situation have taken to social media to spread their message. Using the Web to invite other savvy supporters into the fray, undocumented bloggers and tweeters across the country have formed a coalition called United We Dream. The group rolled out the countrywide “Back to School DREAM Act Day of Action” demonstration in September. Floridians alone hosted 13 demonstrations across the state last month, half of them in Miami.

Recent UCLA graduate and Washington resident Matias Ramos, 23, said undocumented people of his generation are becoming less afraid to speak out against what they see as injustices. On the web, as he is in person, Ramos is an unafraid activist, maintaining a blog on the topic and reaching out to his Twitter following to spread news.

Ramos and others hold hope that policy work on the DREAM Act will begin in earnest next year, either as part of more comprehensive immigration reform or as a standalone bill.

“I think a lot of us are coming together and say enough is enough,” said Ramos, a native of Argentina. “We’re ready to lead this debate and say ‘this is what the undocumented population is about and what it’s not.’”

Undocumented and born abroad, Mateo and Ramos both defeated steep odds for their degrees. As a group, Latinos historically trail their classmates of other races, according to Pew Hispanic Center data.

Being foreign-born just widens the gap.

Though not necessarily undocumented, only 29 percent of young, foreign-born Latinos interviewed in Pew’s 2009 National Survey of Latinos plan to pursue a bachelor’s degree. That’s compared with 60 percent of those who are native-born. After age 18, though, only one-fifth of foreign-born young adults surveyed remained enrolled in school, representing a presence half that of native-born enrollees.

Cinthya, an undocumented 22-year-old, hasn’t been able to find time to get her GED after nearly a decade in the U.S. Smuggled with her parents by coyotes, or human traffickers, from Honduras when she was a teen, Cinthya is in her third attempt at earning a GED since dropping out of high school at 17. Cinthya said she sees no way out of her two jobs, one at a cleaning service and the other at a restaurant.

Unlike Ramos or Mateo, Cinthya he sees no path to college.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, updates a “Corruption Chronicles” blog that tracks the progress of undocumented immigrants through higher education. He said that the DREAM Act threatens to draw in even more immigrants illegally than other reform bills offering amnesty.

“There are people who are waiting to get into this country because they’ve patiently abided the law,” Fitton said, “and those who cheat get these proposed benefits. Why would someone who is not a citizen be able to get resources that might otherwise be devoted to helping citizens?”

Qalim Cromer thinks there should be a better path. Cromer teaches a GED class at the Latin American Youth Center in Washington and works with first-generation and undocumented students.

He calls his work “plugging the dam,” not fixing the problem of helping the undocumented access higher education, but biding time until immigration reform moves forward.

If she thinks too long about her limitations, Cinthya panics. She doesn’t dream; instead, she tells of the deportation nightmares that plague her.

“What if this is all I can do?” she asks Cromer in perfect English. “This is the max I can move on without papers.”

By Katie Rogers, Medill News Service for Imperial Valley Press on 11/02/09

One place my stuff eventually goes to is dna13.com, a site that bills itself as “Real-time Reputation Management.” One blog I wrote for them recently was about Seth Godin’s potential “brand-hijacking” plan to start Brands in Public. It went up earlier this month and you can read the blog here.

Other links to dna13 blogs I’ve written:

• Wired Magazine’s Editor on the Challenges Internet Journalism is Posing to Traditional Press
• Whirlpool’s Response to Dooce: Customer Service via Twitter
• Whole Foods Boycott

WASHINGTON: Fighting for a single-payer health care plan, a band of Oregon-based doctors visited 26 cities in just more than three weeks. The final stop for the “Mad as Hell Doctors” was on Wednesday in Washington.

View this video also at McClatchydc.com

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It's not wrath, it's a consumer review. Creative Commons photo of Heather B. Armstrong via danderson/flickr.com

Heather B. Armstrong (alias: dooce at www.dooce.com) is a clever writer. I say this because she’s found a way to make marriage and motherhood interesting to a lot of people who usually still find themselves grossed out at the prospect of giving up martinis for maternity wear. But she leaves no stone unturned in writing about her day-to-day life — from rants about dog puke to tender posts about her daughters, somehow her life as a stay-at-home “mommyblogger” doesn’t seem as mundane as you’d expect. And with over 1 million Twitter followers (@dooce), Armstrong has earned herself one of those snazzy “verified account” tweet badges usually only reserved for celebrities. As you can imagine, she’s a Target/Kodak/family-friendly company’s dream.

But as blogger with a penchant for going too far, Armstrong proved this week that she doesn’t have a problem with going after a large, family-friendly company in a white-hot rage. Yesterday, Dooce’s new Whirlpool washing machine broke down. And because she just happens to be a mother to a newborn with a 1 million-strong fanbase, she tweeted all day long, instructing her followers not to buy from the company:

Eventually, both the Home Depot and Whirlpool got involved, trying to locate Armstrong either online or over the phone. A huge company asking Armstrong to “DM” them with her contact info so they can fix the situation, while comical, still makes you wonder just how much a complaint from someone with so many fans (countless of them being moms in the market for appliances, no doubt) can do to a business, even a huge one.

Was she bullying? No, not really. With 2008 sales clocking in around $19 billion, Whirlpool has an edge on market share in its industry. But can Armstrong impact their business through angry tweets? Maybe. She’s reaching hundreds of thousands of people with potential buying power in 140-characters or less with each tweet. Lots of moms with newborns who read dooce probably don’t have the luxury to buy a new washing machine, but if they did, they’d probably use Armstrong’s 140-character review of the company as a place to start their product search. And Armstrong is in a win-win situation, really; the point of blogging and tweeting is to voice your own opinion, and she’s one of the lucky few out there without any editor or boss to answer to. People read her because they like her, all-caps rants and all. She’s only got to worry about keeping advertisers on her web page (competitors like GE and Kenmore, are you drooling yet)? It’s just one more example of consumers having more of a voice than they did before.

The feud might be ending with Armstrong’s latest tweet:

Whirlpool, try an e-card.