How the New Media Frontier is like Learning to Ride a Bike: Notes from the College Journalism Conference in NYC

By Kevin Griffin

New York cannot be described in words, but here is my best shot: New York is like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. Once you’re there, you are not quite sure how you did it and you pray that it never ends.

And before you know it, the flight attendant is knocking you off your bike with a “Welcome to Milwaukee, and thanks for flying AirTran.”

Last month I experienced New York for the first time in my life. Me and two fellow sophomores, Marissa Evans and Alex Engler, spent three days of our fall break in NYC as part of The University of North Carolina’s “Getting Started in Business News,” college journalism conference. The conference selected 40 students nationwide through an application process, to participate in three days of newsroom tours, networking, roundtable discussions and formal job interviews. The conference showcased prominent business journalists and internship coordinators from various news outlets as well as journalism professors and students nationwide.

Now we just had to get there.

So with our years of combined experience learning to live and travel independently, Alex, Marissa and I were to leave Schroeder hall on the morning of Thursday October, 21, and by 6 pm that same day we were to end up at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism to check in to the conference.

We overcame a one hour “ground delay” in Milwaukee, an airport shuttle ride comparable to a NASCAR video game, roughly seven lucky guesses on what street we should turn on, a hotel that almost lost a reservation and a frantic rush to figure out what a metro pass was (a subway train ticket).

But we got there.

It didn’t take me long to realize that in New York, things are a lot different. Lights are brighter, buildings are bigger, people walk faster, and yes, they are much more rude, which somehow only adds to the city’s charm.