My second class today was “Finding Your Voice in Journalism.” I hardly knew what to expect. In fact, i didn’t even really know where the class was; when i arrived at its original location down on 32nd and Market i saw that it had been reassigned to a classroom over half a mile away! The remarkable part wasn’t getting to the class, though, but my instructor Clark DeLeon. Clark used to write for both Philly daily papers, and for the past five years he wrote a regular column for America Online where he had his own keyword. What impressed me more than his digital cred was that while he wrote for the Philly Inquirer he wrote a daily column, once a day, every day. Writing a daily column is so much more intimidating than doing daily reporting… there are no facts and stories to hunt down so much as there are facets of yourself that you can put on display through the subjects you select.
I always say that i want to write a column in a weekly magazine or newspaper like the one that Liz Spikol writes for the Weekly, and even that is intimidating. She at least has an entire week, during which should could conceivably write and erase her column multiple times before settling down on a final version. Clark had no such luxury — he had to come out of a weekend with five fresh ideas and get them all written before the deadline. That takes some balls.
I haven’t got the slightest idea about what he’s going to teach me about my voice, other than he told us to write a short piece about something that makes us really angry. I think i have found a bit of a voice through this, but blogging isn’t quite the same thing as doing daily writing for the major newspaper in one of the big five metro markets in America, is it?