Interactions with Republic Media employees

I really enjoyed our visit to Republic Media yesterday, particularly the budget meeting that we had the chance to watch.  As someone who doesn't have any experience as a professional journalist, I found it absolutely inspiring to watch the communication that happened between the different specialized branches of the organization.  In my classroom, my students often show up to their newspaper planning meetings completely unprepared or having given their ideas only a few minutes of thoughts, so it was wonderful to see how much depth and thought had gone into the meeting at Republic Media.

One of the most surprising aspects of the meeting was a relatively casual comment made by one of the news editors.  She mentioned in passing that Nelson Mandela's obituary was ready for print, just in case he happens to die today.  In the back of my head, of course I know that newspapers prepare for this type of tragedy, but the conversation still took me by surprise.

Today during lunch, I took a minute to ask our group's mentor (Jennifer McClellan) about this, since she is a food writer for the Republic.  I was even more surprised by her response.  She said that all the writers for the Republic are required to write obituaries for high profile local citizens regularly (and often for people who aren't even sick).  The obits then get stored in a file so that they are available just in case something happens.

This totally blows me away.  It makes sense, but still...Jennifer said it is an incredibly awkward thing to do, to call someone's family member and say to them, "Hypothetically, if your husband was dying, what would you say about him?"

As a journalism teacher who tells her students that obits are something you generally write as a beginning journalist, I'm excited to be able to tell them that I was wrong - it's a requirement for almost everyone.