10 years ago: My first week in real online journalism
I made $8 an hour at Washingtonpost.com. This was June 1999, when news orgs could afford to pay interns and drive purple stretch SUVs. I worked there in Nation and World sections and somehow looked even younger than I do now. The office was in foreign and far away Rosslyn.
My apartment, where my badge turned up in a junk drawer last week, now looks out on Rosslyn and the old Post.com building. The people I sat with in those offices, they've either disappeared or become friends I follow on Twitter. (Almost to a person, it's either one or the other.)
And the e-mails from that first week at work are still around…
Day one: "After orientation, I spent the day with two guys updating the site's front page and top news index. A thunderstorm rolled thru around 5 and we lost all our network connections so I went home around 5:30. The site never went down, but it now looks like they just got back the ability to edit it. So I had fun. One of the editors bought me lunch and everyone there seems pretty nice."
Was caught in another rainstorm on the way home and liked it.
Day two: "I've got my jury duty tomorrow which will be a nice break from work. Today I sat and watched. Watched other people do stuff, watched the monitor, watched my sandwich as it went into my mouth during lunch. I checked the wires for two hours but no news worth putting on the site's Nation digest came along. So I did nothing. Oh well. It didn't really feel too boring when I'm sure it really was."
I also wrote two paragraphs about Indonesia's Abdurrahman Wahid. The two paragraphs are still on the Internet. Thank you, wp-srv.
Later that week, I was thrilled to update photo cutlines and write quiz questions for nations Lithuania through Peru. The next week, I helped with Live Online and made it to Thailand on quizzes. Ten years ago this week, "We had a fire drill mid-afternoon so that was kind of exciting."
It was an inauspicious start.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:59 AM
How far you have come… (all the way up the street!)
June 24th, 2009 at 8:00 AM
PS — It's good to see that someone buying you lunch has always made you happy.
And this is my favorite line:
"It didn't really feel too boring when I'm sure it really was."
More, more nearly-19-year -old Patrick, please!
June 24th, 2009 at 8:16 AM
Too cute, Cooper. You've come a long way, indeed. An aside: I find it odd that it seems everyone I know has been called for jury duty and I've never, ever been. I didn't realize 19-year-olds got picked for JD!
June 24th, 2009 at 8:59 AM
They paid interns?! Oh the good days…
June 24th, 2009 at 10:51 AM
The next summer at Post.com was $10/hour, and I think both summers included MetroChek. Then the bust came, and online news interns would never be paid for anything ever again.
With the free lunch, the guy's name was Tim, and the place was the cafeteria-type predecessor to the cafeteria-type place above the underground Safeway on Wilson. Something that will surprise no one: It's possible I went there every lunch that summer. It's hazy, but I don't think Cafe Asia or even the Domino's opened until the next summer.
On jury duty, I think it's all about living in DC. You get called there almost as often as legally possible. I've probably been called six or seven times to different courts in the past decade (including two different levels this winter), but thanks to college/work/etc out of state, have only had to go twice. Meanwhile, you've got NoVa folks like my old boss here at USAT. He's lived in the region since 1983ish and got his first call ever within the last year.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:52 AM
So you're a newbie to NoVa?
June 24th, 2009 at 11:05 AM
Also, on 19-year-old Patrick, there's a rerun from 17-year-old Patrick ("The Woman with the Big Hair" story aka how I failed my driving test) that's been waiting in draft mode here a few weeks. I'm hesitant to let him onto the blog.
With NoVa, moved there from Silver Spring in May '05 — finally googling what a glebe was — and had grown up in DC proper. So, Virginia isn't as much "the land on the other side of the river where I get lost" as much as it used to be, but still.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:27 PM
So jealous that you still have your intern card. Despite tears and pleading, USAT security guys pried mine from my clenched fists when I came back to work election night and they realized I still had my summer ID.
Also, bring back 17-year-old Patrick. And keep going a few years more…well, maybe not.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:13 PM
Strangely, June 1999 was when I went to work for CNN.com. I was incredibly proud. It took my boss about two months to completely snuff that out of me.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:36 PM
Hey Patrick, sorry to pop the balloon of those two paragraphs after 10 years, but Wahid was known as Gus Dur not Gus Dar.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:00 AM
I fully accept responsibility on Wahid. But now there's the true test of a CMS. Ten years later, can the system allow the edit?
Melissa, we'll see how far back we can go in the archives with this kid… Could be dangerous.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:48 AM
[...] about the story in a long time, but it was the first real, hard, in-progress narrative demand that initial summer on the Web. Initially meeting the question, how did you take a horrible story, put it into a box and template [...]