Job Shadows: What You Saw, Part 4

Here's a sampling of some of the various job shadows done by you all (this will be updated as job shadow reports are turned in, so please check back frequently). Take a look and see what you can learn from everyone's visits. There's a lot of good stuff here to help you decide what you want to do with your lives; what you need to be doing to get there; and what to expect when you do get there.

Please give each one of these a quick read as they come in, will you?

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For my job shadow I followed Jonathan Oosting, a political reporter for MLive. He covers all matters of legislature at the Capitol. I followed him on October 20. We purposefully scheduled the jobs shadow on that day because legislation was in session and Oosting thought that it would be more beneficial for me to see a day where congress was in session.

            For Oosting he usually gets to the MLive office somewhat early because a lot of time he left something for himself to do from the day before, plus it makes him get motivated for the day if he feels like he accomplished something. From there he does research on what’s going on at the Capitol that day. That day the things that he was most interested in a Criminal Justice committee meeting, a vote on teacher evaluations, the Senate Local Government Committee, and a debate on raising taxes for new roads in Michigan.

            Going into the day he was most excited for the debate because it was something really unusual. A conservative lawmaker issued an open challenge to anyone in the house or senate to debate him on raising taxes. A democratic freshman senator took up the challenge and the two were going to have a debate open to the public. Going into the day Oosting was planning on trying to periscope the debate live and then write a follow up story on it. While we were in the Capitol we heard from another reporter that the tea party issued a public advisory to all of its followers to pack the room for the debate to try and support or the lawmaker.

            Before we headed to the committee meeting Oosting gave me a quick lesson on exactly how the Capitol, like the differences between committee meetings and the house floor, which was much appreciated because most of my knowledge about how laws actually formed was from School House Rock, the West Wing, and House of Cards. The major take way that I took was that committee meetings were usually more important than what actually happened on the house or senate floor. For example, most of what happens on the house or senate floor is a lot of “pomp and circumstance” as Oosting put it. Committee’s actually debate the wording of the law and listen to testimony from anyone who wants to speak on the matter.

            Going into the first committee meeting we went to Oosting was going to mainly cover a bill about increased penalties for destroying or vandalizing road signs. However at the meeting something else being discussed was a bill increasing penalties for motorcycle riders who aren’t registered to be motorcycle riders. This caught Oosting’s eye because the two people who are working on the bill are a senator and the senator’s opponent in the last election. So they were rivals recently but now they’re working together on this bill.

            Oosting said that going to committee meetings is how he finds most of his stories. He said that most of his job is going to places and listening. The few exceptions to that are when legislation isn’t in session, so there are no committee meetings that can be sat in on.

            Oosting and I also talked about social media and how he uses it, sometimes he’ll use to live tweet events or committee meetings but he has to find the balance. For example, he doesn’t want to live tweet a committee hearing that 99% of his followers don’t care about, so he’s got pick his spots for it. Other than that he mainly uses it to promote his articles.

            The major takeaways I took from shadowing Oosting was that there is always something going on the in capitol, he usually writes three stories a day. He’s got to find ways to multitask and sort of know what’s going on everywhere.