News Sentinel field trip

Our class took a field trip to the Knoxville News Sentinel, Knoxville's newspaper. It was nice. The building was a lot more modern and sleek than I anticipated. When I think of newspaper headquarters I always think of old brick buildings that aren't terribly attractive. The inside was just as impressive as the outside.

It was sort of disappointing. I wanted a newsroom like the one Alex Knox and Vicki Vale worked in in Batman, with everyone everywhere and phones ringing all over the place. I guess I was expecting to walk into something more chaotic. Wrong city, I guess.

The employees were real nice. They were young and really into what they do. The boss of the group (I'm afraid to write this for fear of perhaps losing an internship spot,) was such a bore. Really super nice, but I don't think I could work for someone so mundane. That really has nothing to do with the trip, but I had to get it off my chest.

The work the online team puts out is real nice. The News Sentinel website is clean and user-friendly. It's not as busy as other newspaper sites I regularly visit, but, again, not a whole lot of things to juggle on a website when you live in Knoxville.

The site is just as interactive as the Post and New York Times, offering forums for readers to comment, but they don't have anything like CNN's I-Report, where readers can contribute their own material.

Compared to local newspaper websites, the News Sentinel's site is much nicer than Nashville's Tennessean. That site makes me so dizzy that I just quit visiting it.

I stayed to tour the building and got to see the printing press. WOW! I had no idea a printing press was such a show! Robots moving ginormous rolls of paper around, seven stories worth of equipment. I could go on, but I have no idea how to describe all the gadgets I saw on the tour. I felt like I was in a NASA control room.