My Biggest Surprise is that Nothing Surprises Me Any More!
This might sound like a cop out, but as a
journalist, my number one job is to seek out and report the truth, and in the
interest in reporting the truth, I honestly have to say that the biggest
surprise of this experience is that nothing has surprised me.
Perhaps it is because I am neck-deep in
politics, and we have been barraged with one shocking statement after another
for the past year, and after all that drama, I seriously feel like nothing that
comes out of Washington, D.C. shocks me anymore. So if I have become
desensitized to the craziness in the nation’s capital, perhaps I have been
desensitized to being surprised by more mundane topics like things going on in
my internship.
So, I guess the best thing to do is to write
about things that I have done during this internship and see if anything jumps
out at me, or my audience, that might be a bit surprising. Early in the
semester, my supervisor, Author Kay Hardy Campbell, asked me to get her book A Caravan of Brides, listed on a bunch
of lists on Goodreads’ Listopia. Initially she gave me a predetermined list of
lists, but after including the book on those lists, I endeavored to find other
appropriate lists, and included the book on the new list of lists. I suppose I
was mildly surprised by the number of lists I could find that either Kay did
not see is directly applicable to her book, or which she was not aware of when
I started the project.
Another major project I worked on was coming
up with a list of contacts at newspapers where Kay can send a copy of her book
for possible book reviews. I was happy to make a number of contacts for future
reference, and I guess I should not have been surprised that a major
journalistic player like the Washington Post would play by a different set of
rules than the rest of the papers I have contacted. With the Post, if you want
to have a fighting chance to get your book reviewed, you need to get them a
copy of the book months before the
book comes out on the streets. When I contacted the Post in early February,
they were working on books scheduled for release in May and June, so that is
quite a bit earlier than I would have thought.
I have to admit that I was surprised at the
style the book editor at the Post, Ron Charles, uses in doing his reviews. He
does print reviews that are fairly conventional, but then there are his video
reviews, which are termed the “Totally Hip Book Reviews.” They are very
unconventional, shot on video, and very entertaining and humorous. He
integrates a sense of humor, sarcasm, seemingly unrelated political references,
and drama into about two-and-a-half minutes, and the thing is, they are fun!
That was probably the most surprising thing I
have learned so far in this internship, because I hate to admit that after
writing books since my teenage daughter was in diapers, I had never heard of
this man, or seen his video book reviews. It makes me wonder what else is going
on in the media about which I have absolutely no clue!
I would like to end this post by including a
link to one of Ron Charles’ Totally Hip Book Reviews, so you all can see what I
have discovered. Watch and enjoy!
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