By Robbie Netz
It’s your special perfect day and a thunderstorm starts to move in, causing all the banners, balloons, the perfect hair, etc. to become distorted.
After this treacherous day do you pack your bags and give up?
No! Just because your perfect day failed doesn’t mean you have to give up.
At least that’s not what founder of USA Today Al Neuharth did.
“Everyone needs to have one big failure before reaching 40,” Neuharth said later in his book, “Confessions of an S.O.B.”
After the failure of his first newspaper, SoDak Sports in South Dakota, people thought he was crazy for trying to produce a nationwide newspaper, known today as USA Today. Working against the tide, Neuharth founded the first news interactive museum in Washington, D.C., known as the Newseum.
In 1999 the freedomforum created a journalism scholarship honoring Neuharth known as the Free Spirit Scholarship; this scholarship chose the top two journalists, one male and one female, from all 50 states and D.C. to spend a week in the nation’s capital to enhance their journalism skills and hope to be crowned the top male/female high school journalist in the nation.
Once the students were chosen, each received $1,000 paid toward their college of choice, and the top two students received $10,000.
After arriving in Washington, D.C., Saturday, March 14, each student was given a room key and an itinerary explaining what they would be doing for the entire week. Around 4 p.m., I chose to go to the newly refurnished American History Museum, where I saw educational exhibits from President Nixon’s beat-up file cabinet to the first ladies’ dresses and even Kermit the Frog!
In the evening, students gathered in the hotel lobby to discuss our plans for the week and get to know each other a little better. Our main discussion was “what is a free spirit?” Is it someone who’s not afraid to stand on a chair and scream “I AM A FREE SPIRIT” or someone who is “sesquipedalian,” meaning given to or characterized by the use of long words?
Wake-up call hit at 6 a.m., and all the free spirits were exhausted, yet excited about their first day. After breakfast, we all lined up in numerical order to receive our important press passes to get into NBC studios to see a taping of “Meet the Press” with David Gregory. On the show were chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers Dr. Christina Romer and the House Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor. Both were asked some difficult questions, which taught us that in journalism you must be aggressive.
After NBC studio, it was time for a monument tour of D.C.! Our first stop was the Iwo Jima memorial, where we learned that the memorial is actually a posed picture! The photographer did not like his original war photograph so he decided to pose a different one. After discussing the picture we learned that the number one rule of journalism is to always tell the truth.
A new day began with a lecture at the Newseum with Betty Bayé, a journalist for the Courier- Journal. Bayé gave us some great tips on how to make it through college and what it takes to be a reporter.
“Journalism is a job worth making sacrifices for,” she said. “I didn’t start out doing this. I started as an actress, but once I found out 10,000 girls were trying out for only three parts I decided I needed to get real job. And all the stars you see out today did not start yesterday. Just like in journalism you work hard. I first started out at a paper that had a circulation of 12,000. I made less than I did as a secretary. I loved it. I learned so much from it.”
Tuesday we had multiple sessions with different people telling us about all the kinds of journalism. Carol Knopes, director of Education Programs, Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, taught us some of the tools of the trade in journalism: Be fair, accurate and clear. Knopes gave us different life situations and showed us how to report on them, how to get out of an anonymous source and misrepresentation.
The Free Spirits were given tours of USA Today and more tours of the capital. During the USA Today tour we had a session with the editors where they reassured us that newspapers are not dying and that there will be future jobs for us.
As the week went on many new friendships were made and everyone was sad to leave because it was an incredible trip. Throughout my time in D.C. I learned many new things from different ways to tell a person’s story to how to get through security checks at the Library of Congress.
The trip has taught me many new tutorials for life, but the one I will always remember was free spirits don’t sit in the back of the line and wait. They make themselves noticeable to move to the front of the line.
