Publicado!

Well, I was doubting that I’d be able to write for a newspaper here, but my persistence paid off. After several weeks of shadowing a reporter at La Jornada de Morelos, a local edition of a national newspaper, the editor agreed to take volunteer work from me. I had originally thought it would be easy to publish articles if I was offering them for free. But that kind of thing is apparently more complicated here.
Anyway, today, my first article printed. (If that link doesn’t work, you try searching my name in the “buscar” box on the home page since I’m sure all the links will change tomorrow.)

It’s about the Tlaltenango Fair, an annual religious festival celebrating the legend of the apparition of the Virgin Mary almost 300 years ago. I will say, it was difficult to come up with a fresh angle on something that’s 300 years old. But I managed.

Hopefully, I will find more exciting things to write about in the coming weeks. It’s certainly been a good learning experience so far, both in terms of sharpening my Spanish and seeing the differences within the journalism world here. For example, in the U.S., an intern or a reporter who’s new to the area usually gets assigned stories from an editor at first, at least until s/he has enough bearings to generate her own ideas. Once that happens, the reporter would still talk through the story idea with her editor before pursuing it. Here, I was told to just write stories and send them in. No discussion, no editing together, no hand-holding of any sorts. I also noticed differences in the writing style. In the U.S., I’ve always been told to use “he said,” “she said,” etcetera after quotes, never, “he commented,” or added, or exclaimed or whatever. The idea is to let the emotion in the quote speak for itself, and to not distract from what the person is saying by adding the reporter’s opinion of how it was said. But here, the editors like to vary the vocabulary. They changed any words that were repeated, including “he said.” They also put punctuation outside of quotation marks, which I thought was strange because I’ve seen them inside in other Mexican publications. I guess that could be unique to certain publications.