Getting on track

Some of the reasons I'm keeping this blog are to keep track of my progress as a young journalist, have a place to put my ideas and thoughts about my career and journalism and to track my goals.

It seems like I'm always working on something. If I'm not working for the paper, I'm working on learning new things and, well, just being a journalism nerd.

Sometimes, though, things can be overwhelming when it seems like I have a million different projects - both work and personal - going on.
I think it helps to create lists and spreadsheets to track my progress, but... that takes time, and time that I seldom have (yes, I actually do have a life outside of being a journalist and a nerd)!

Well, I seem to have found time to blog tonight, so I think I'll include a list of some of my goals here (just so I can get them down "on paper"). If anyone has any advice to offer, you should know by now how to reach me!

(These are in no particular order)

1. Learn and master Arcview - I've been learning and practicing it for about a month (off and on). Hopefully I'll produce my first project using Arcview later this month or in early November. The GIS specialist for the county I cover has been super helpful and has provided me with several free layers and shapefiles to play around with. I also have two really useful guides, one from IRE and one from ESRI, and a dozen or so tipsheets and some really helpful listserv archives - so hopefully I'll be in good shape.

2. Learn programming!!!!!!! My good friend Ryan picks on me because the other day I asked what a "footer link" is. I'm really not that unintelligent when it comes to the Internet and the World Wide Web, but sometimes it just takes me a little while to put it all together. There is so much to learn, and it has been hard for me trying to find a starting point. My co-workers have suggested just playing around with simple HTML first. Here's some other things I want to learn and mess around with:
a. Flash
b. Python
c. Django
d. MySQL
e. Perl
f. PHP

3. Revamp my statistics skills and knowledge. In college I took a few statistics courses. One was basic statistics, which I did horrible in. The second was a psychology course (I was also a pysch major) where we applied stats to psychology (basically putting basic stats into context). The third class was one where we applied statistics to psych experiments and created and tested our own experiment. I used SPSS, a statistical software that some journalists have found quite useful.
I used SPSS and was quite familiar with it. Sadly, it's the kind of software where you'll forget stuff if you don't use it after a while or practice regularly. I don't have an SPSS license anymore (the student license I had for those classes were only good for one year). So, that presents a little problem that I'll have to work out, but it will be worth it to recharge those skills and refresh my memory some. Oh, and can you believe that I was one of those journalists who swore off math!

4. Produce more multimedia and interactive projects. I really like multimedia. I love creating packages to go along with my projects for both the paper and online. The newspaper I work for gave me a digital camera that takes some really good video. We have a Final Cut Pro license. I took a couple of film classes in college where I used Final Cut Pro often. That was over a year ago, though, so I also need to refresh my memory there.

5. Create a wiki. Or two. Or a few.

6. Continue to advance my CAR and database skills.

7. Manage my time better so I can work on more investigative projects while doing daily work.

8. Help create and manage an interactive data center site for our newspaper.

9. Change this blog to a Wordpress site - or buy my own domain name and learn enough programming and coding to create my own site.

10. Put all this together into some dynamic investigative project.


I think I'm going to have to create a step-by-step plan for accomplishing some of the above goals. Advice is welcome - especially on where to start with some of those!
On that note, I think I'll go to bed now. It is late and I have a lot to do tomorrow!