IRE follow-up

It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t written about how the IRE conference went. I expect I’ll have to give a report to the editor-in-chief over at the Daily Press this week, so it’s probably a good idea to organize my thoughts here.

I was probably naive going into this (it was my first professional conference), but I was disappointed. There was a little bit about covering local elections — and I did learn some valuable things that I will put into practice during this election cycle — but the majority of the time was spent on statewide and national campaign coverage. This confuses me: Do we really need more coverage of the same Washington hijinks? Even Sacramento is pretty well-covered. But local politics? Not so much. And if the local papers — I saw reporters from Riverside and Ventura there — aren’t covering the local politicos, who is?

A more charitable reporter from the Daily Press suggested that a lot of this applies to local elections, but I must politely disagree: I’d used the resources they were talking about, and they absolutely don’t drill down to the local level.

Besides the (to me) somewhat off-point focus of the day, two of the three speakers (both from the same paper) seemed to think that the day was about talking about how much they rock. There were numerous stories that literally had nothing to take away from them, other than the alleged awesomeness of the speaker. (When you’re in a room of 100+ people, and fewer than seven are laughing at your jokes, you’re not funny, move on.) I saw people muttering about one of the reporters and ditching early because of her, in fact.

It was telling that, in a room full of journalists, only a handful of people asked questions all day. As Jenn will tell you, getting journalists to not ask questions is a real trick. But at the IRE panel, it seems like I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think there was much chance of getting anything worthwhile out of most of the speakers.

I’m hoping this was the exception, and not the rule, especially since I think the IRE magazine is so useful.

(USC is a spectacular campus, though.)

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