My semester got off to a good start Wednesday, despite a power failure minutes
before my first class as a faculty member at the University of
Tennessee. We were using a high-tech computer lab classroom, of course.
Easy improvisation: "Online" guy or not, I want to get students to read newspapers for this "Intro to News Writing" class, so
the power failure was a perfect opportunity to point out the "portable, wireless, no
batteries required" advantages of the old-fashioned printed newspaper. Not only could we read the headlines
and stories, I took the precaution of rolling up an advertising section from the News Sentinel
to jam the door open -- to make sure there was no chance of the
security locks keeping us in the room if the power came back on.
(Just another way in which newspapers are a versatile medium.)
Fortunately, the classroom had sunrise-facing windows to provide wireless
illumination.
That reminds me of a line by a famous reporter of long ago, Richard Harding Davis, who wrote the following description of an idealistic young journalist's loyalties (emphasis added):
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because
he does not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his
time, his health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours,
and sometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only that men may have light by which to read it.
That story is 100 years old, so I can forgive the "he" and
"men" references. The description of such rare professional dedication
was already satire back then, for reasons Davis mentions later,
reasons that are even more true in this day of media conglomerates. Still,
I
hope we can
inspire something like that commitment in a new generation of reporters
-- online,
on the air, and off, professional or amateur -- but with the realization that the readers or audience, not "the paper," should be the focus of the dedication.
Back
to our sunlit classrooms in Knoxville... Despite the "wait" in its
name, WATE-TV, the local Channel 6, was first on the scene for a story
about the
mildly disrupted opening schoolday. Reporter Amelia Graham caught a few of us
for interviews on the way out of class
before we even got the lights on or the coffeemaker working. I didn't see the TV
broadcast and haven't invested in TIVO yet, but the Web version of the
story was still online 24 hours later... an advantage of "online
journalism," when the electricity works.
In the interview itself, I could not confirm the
"another squirrel in a transformer" rumor for Amelia, but did tell her
about my own class's experience:
- That I'm very impressed by the Tennessee students -- who were
almost all at the classroom door 15 minutes early for an 8 a.m. class
on the first day of school.
- And that I'm also impressed by my own lucky timing -- not only my
arriving 20 minutes early for my first early-morning class, but the fact that I wasn't two minutes
earlier.
If I had been, I might have spent the class period stuck in an
elevator. Instead, I took the no-batteries-required staircase, which is
healthier anyway.
As for the details on the self-destructive squirrel, I don't really expect a follow-up story in the Daily Beacon. (I didn't see an online version of its print story on Thursday morning, but it was there in the archive Friday.) Like the News-Sentinel,
the student paper appears to have relied on telephone interviews with
officials for the morning-after story. I was surprised not to see a few
students quoted about the effect on their first classes of the day. On
the other hand, after the lights come back on, there's not much
news in a two-hour power failure.
--updated 8/19 & 20 with additions & web links
11:03:34 AM 
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