Bill Conlin: A Lifetime in Sports. And a Story For Every Day.

JUST STUMBLED ACROSS this video tribute (above) to Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin, a Temple grad who was honored with a Lew Klein Award last week.

Conlin is an icon in Philadelphia sports. There's no ethical question here. But listen to the dude. There's great stuff in these videos.

Marc Zumoff: "When You're an Intern, You're in The Farm System."

MARC ZUMOFF WAS not the most popular kid in high school when he was growing up in Northeast Philadelphia. He was heavy and socially awkward.

"I wasn't really that dynamic," Zumoff said.

That lasted into his time while a student here at Temple.

Now, however, he gets paid to talk about basketball as the voice of the Philadelphia 76ers. He's one of around 30 professional basketball play-by-play announcers in the country. He gets front row seats, flies first class, stays in the best hotels and eats at high-end restaurants ... as his job.

His message to you?

"If you have similar aspirations," he said, "go for it."

What do you need to do to reach your dreams? Here's Zumoff's advice:

• Believe in yourself.
• Start reaching for your dreams now. "Have a personal mission statement," Zumoff said. "Everything you do should lead to that goal."
• Join associations and make friends. It doesn't matter how good you are if you can't get your foot in the door. You need to know people.
• Do an internship. "It's a great way to make contacts," he said.
• While interning, be a model citizen. Dress appropriately. Be polite. Take the initiative and do the work required of you with a smile, and do it before you're asked to do it.
• Your bosses are watching. Interns get promoted. "Two of my former interns are now my bosses," Zumoff said. "When you're an intern, you're in the farm system."

• Talk to people doing what you want to do. Ask them how they reached their position.
• Try writing letters. You want to stand out.
• Make the connections when making connections. Who do you know in common? And ask folks who they can connect you to.
• Build a network of positive people who can help you in your career.
• Kiss asses? "Yes," Zumoff said. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

Here are a few other things he mentioned:

• If he talks about the NBA lockout, he, the team or his company could be fined.
• Eric Snow did not fall asleep on air.
• Charles Barkley was everything a professional basketball superstar was not supposed to be - relatively small and sort of heavy. But he was awesome.
• Same for Allen Iverson. "He did what he did and he shouldn't have," Zumoff said, referring to Iverson's talents despite his relatively diminutive size. "He lived and played with reckless abandon."

• While attending Temple, Zumoff drove heavy equipment trucks at a scrap iron/ steel yard.
• He spent his first five years after college in radio news.

What stood out for you?

Can A Reporter Have An Opinion?

CAN YOU ROOT for a cause and report on it at the same time?

That's the situation that Philadelphia Daily News reporter/ editor/ blogger Will Bunch finds himself. He has reported on the Occupy movement while at the same time, he serves as a fellow at a left leaning think tank. He's been tweeting his support for the Occupiers.

Is there anything wrong with that?

“I think my editors are really proud to have someone writing with a point of view," Bunch told FoxNews.com. "The Daily News is fairly unusual, we’re not that big on boundaries. The new editor, Larry Platt, encourages us to be more opinionated."

The newspaper has defended Bunch's actions. The paper's ombudsman, the conscience of the paper, wrote:

Bunch identifies himself as having "a progressive point of view." His writing for the Daily News, as well as his books and his work for Media Matters, confirms this. As a reader, I know where Bunch is coming from, just as I know where Sean Hannity is coming from. That's good enough for me.

The ombudsman is supposed to look at the paper's actions from an objective perspective. He answered my initial question in his column on Monday:

Can a reporter have opinions, strong ones, and still be credible on hard news? I believe that's possible, and know that Bunch knows the difference.

Do you agree?

Do you think the ombudsman would have taken Bunch's side if the politics were reversed?

Steve Esack: "Any Assignment I Do, I Do to The Best of My Ability."

STEVE ESACK HOLDS a grudge.

The Northeast Philly native went to the Community College of Philadelphia before transferring to Temple (c/o '96). He took a reporting job at a weekly newspaper in the 'burbs before landing a gig at the Philadelphia Daily News.

As a desk clerk.

He answered phones and delivered mail.

But he wanted to be a writer. When he approached the executive editor of the newspaper, the editor told Steve, "You won't get anywhere because you went to CCP and Temple. You're not an Ivy Leaguer."

That just pissed him off.

He did a two-year stint at the Inquirer as a suburban correspondent and then went to the Allentown Morning Call, where he is now the education reporter.

In 2010, Steve won the Ernie Pyle Award for a 5-part feature series about a high school football team and their new coach.

Here are a few things that stood out for me from his visit to class:

• If you have any fears about approaching people and asking them questions, get over that now. If you want to be a journalist, you have to be able to socialize and make connections with people.
• "This business has always been about people," he said. "And it will always be about people."
• His father was a police office and his mother ran a corner grocery store.
• He tries to distance himself from stories but he's not a robot. "Sometimes it's impossible for me not to get angry, pissed, upset, sad, whatever," he said. "If you can feel and see the emotion in a story, put that in the story. You know your readers will feel it too."

• When he was a general assignment reporter, his editors would throw stories at him. And he always followed up on the leads. He's never turned down an assignment.
• He suggests that you pitch stories rather than wait for editors to hit you with assignments. You'd much rather do the stories you're interested in, rather than the random stuff your editors may come up with.

• Steve shoots images and video with his iPhone for the stories he writes.
• He says you should learn how to edit video.
• If you have multiple skills, you will be employable in journalism. And Steve said that you won't likely have to do the old bounce around from small media outlet to slightly larger, to slightly larger outlet, before reaching your dream outlet.

• Winning awards is great (The Ernie Pyle came with a bundle of cash) but awards are subjective. It's just the judgment of a group of folks. Being honored does not signify to him that he has reached a pinnacle of his career. But it did feel good to win.
• He still hustles on every story. "Any assignment I do," he said, "I do to the best of my ability."

He forgot to mention in class but the Allentown Morning Call offers a bunch of internships - paid and unpaid. Check them out here.

What stood out for you?

Can The Public Really Help The Newsmakers?

A NEWSPAPER IN THE UK is now posting their story budget for the next day's paper, hoping that readers will see the story list and contribute to it.

Is this a good idea?

"What if readers were able to help newsdesks work out which stories were worth investing precious reporting resources in?" the national news editor of The Guardian wrote yesterday. "What if all those experts who delight in telling us what's wrong with our stories after they've been published could be enlisted into giving us more clues beforehand? What if the process of working out what to investigate actually becomes part of the news itself?"

Is this a bright move, inviting citizens to become active participants in journalism? Or is this a gimmick?

Is this a ploy to get citizens to do the actual legwork that journalists used to do?

The story list began running today. Check it out here.

Can You Say That On-Air or In Print?

LAST WEEK, THE Washington Post discovered that, for many years, presidential candidate Rick Perry leased a hunting camp that he had a racially offensive nickname for. Here is the lead of the Post's story:

In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.

“Niggerhead,” it read.

Other media outlets followed the story and repeated the name, including the New York Times.

Should the media use the term in print? On air?

Does running the term perpetuate the awful connotations, or do we reduce it's power by repeating it?

When Are the Protesters Newsworthy?

Protesters have camped out in New York City since September 17, and more than 1,000 have been arrested so far.

During the first week of the "occupation" by a group organized under the banner "Occupy Wall Street," there was virtually no coverage by the mainstream press.

"The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective," NPR's executive editor told their ombudsman, the person in charge of determining whether the network has performed properly.

Media coverage is beginning to pick up now that the protesters are becoming more active - 700 protesters were arrested on Saturday when they attempted to occupy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Still, little has been reported about protesters staging rallies in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Does it matter that the original crowds were much smaller than expected? Does it matter that the protesters lack a specific mission, or an accepted leader?

Should the media be reporting on the acts of civil disobedience?