Week #11- Fact Checks, Events, and Maps (a lot of maps)
Posted by: Bethany on: March 7, 2009
This week seemed like it was the first week in awhile where I was able to work my full eight hours since three day weekends and funerals have gotten in the way of my Mondays. Although there wasn’t very much for me to do. The April fact checks for Diablo have been pushed through since printing will be happening soon. There were a couple fact checks for the Napa Sonoma magazine, where I ended up leaving a lot of messages for a few wineries. One of them never got back to me, so I hope that worked itself out.
Most of my job for the week involved pouring over two maps and making sure they matched up as closely as possible. I hated the job, but it definitely wasted plenty of time. In the Napa Sonoma Magazine, they have two maps of Napa Valley and Sonoma County (Valley?) with a whole slew of wineries. Apparently, wineries have complained that the locations on our maps are incorrect. So they had interns get an up to date map and compare winery by winery to make sure they’re in the right place (or relatively so). And there are A LOT of wineries on BOTH maps. I also found that I was a lot more anal retentive about the location of the wineries than some of the other interns because there were a few I went back and corrected. Although I didn’t bother going through all of them. There was just way too many.
Also the frustrating thing was that the maps didn’t have the SAME wineries on both of them. The magazine map had different wineries than the up to date map and vice versa. For the magazine map wineries, I would have to google every single one and google map the location roughly. And there were quite a few of them. It was a very boring task and very, very tedious. But it made time go by really fast. On Monday, I finished the Sonoma County map, much to Ethan’s delight, and on Wednesday, I worked for a good 2 hours on the Napa Valley map and wasn’t even close to being done. The Napa Valley Map is online, which was the map I using to correct our maps. It gives you an idea of how many wineries are on these things. It’s insane.
Along with the map, my time on Wednesday was spent dealing with 10 community calender postings. No wonder they gave the calender postings job to the interns, because it is a pain. Another tedious, time consuming task. It took me a good 45 minutes to post up 8 different events for the calender. Although seeing what’s happening around the Bay is cool because there is SO much to do. It’s impossible to go to every single event. And as I read them I always think how awesome that would be to go see, but then I remember I have no time and no money.
I also worked on a blog about a really awesome rummage sale. I’m almost tempted go. It was weird because I haven’t written a blog in awhile, and I’ve actually been personally struggling with my writing lately. Especially in light that one of the other interns from St. Mary’s (who I’m actually taking a class with right now) pretty much rocks at writing blogs with personality. I was actually really proud of the one I wrote (partly because I wrote it within 15 minutes) because for once I felt like it had the “Diablo Voice” and also didn’t sound horrible. My editor posted it just how I wrote it (considering he’s been editing my past few blogs). I’m beginning to think maybe I shouldn’t go into editing or writing right away. It’s still something I eventually want to do, but we’ll see. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in the upcoming months.
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March 15, 2009 at 1:52 am
Wow Bethany! Your writing is taking the fast-track to amazing. Comparing your blog articles on the magazine website at the beginning to the most recent one (with no meddling editorial fingers present), I was astounded at the growth and voice. The pictures of the Berkeley center photo shoot are stunning – what light and shadow can do to those hardwood floors! Reading your blog entries is always a treat. Also, I am going to use the term “sidezoomer” sometime this week. That word is good enough to go into the dictionary.