This week, I start as National Journal’s social media intern, where I will work to expand the reach of content on the recently relaunched NationalJournal.com through social media.

I’m really excited to start a job that presents some very unique challenges and opportunities. National Journal is a well-known and well-respected brand inside the Beltway, but only dropped its online paywall in late October. In a way, the online brand has to be built from scratch.

I’m very fortunate to be reporting to David Beard, who most recently ran Boston.com. I’ve been working on some ideas for the past few weeks and I can’t wait to try them in a production environment!

I took some data from the Federal Aviation Administration showing aircraft operations at each of the agency’s enroute Air Route Traffic Control Centers last year.

Then I made a nifty bubble chart. Enjoy!

For those who don’t get it, the AP Style for a site on the Internet changed in the middle of April, from Web site to website. The last post here (with so much substance) came before that.

Enough with that. The reason that I haven’t posted much is because I’ve been busy between the end of my junior year and my new internship at BNA, where I cover lots of government-related developments in D.C. (mostly Congress).

Me listening to Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., at a news conference. Photo by @newmediajim.

I have always loved politics (it is my double major), so this internship has been a great way for me to get a front seat to everything that’s going on in D.C. I write for a specialized publication that caters to a diverse group of executives, government staffers and the like. Recently, I’ve been covering lots of banking issues, and this coming week I will be chasing the Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010 on the floor of the House.

During the course of this internship, I’ve also seen President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

(Yes, I do realize that if I was a seasoned Washington reporter, seeing these people would be just another day at the office.)

But I also love Web journalism. When it’s time to look for jobs in about 10-11 months, how do I put those two interests together? Blogging? Thoughts?

I’ve also been fortunate enough to go to two ONADC meetups in the past two months. I’ve met some really interesting people there, and have learned a lot too.

And, thanks to Digital Capital Week, it seems that I’ve run into some really cool folks from the new local news website TBD on a daily basis. I’m very interested in this new approach to news they’ll be trying. TBD is launching this summer!

I guess you can say I’ve met quite a few people recently thanks to Twitter. Craig Kanalley (@ckanal), an editor for The Huffington Post by day, wrote about this phenomenon yesterday. Ironically, I haven’t met Craig in real life yet, but when I do, it will be because of Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, that’s probably the best place to find out what I’m up to on a daily basis. I’m at @ethanklapper if you didn’t already know. There’s also my Tumblr and Posterous, which I sometimes find a way to use.

I was trying to clean out some old MySQL databases from my hosting. In the process, I accidentally deleted the entire database this Web site ran off of.

Not to worry! Because Google cached almost every page and post from this Web site, I was able to do a near-perfect install. Missing is a single post, as well as many tags. But not to worry, pretty much everything has been restored. What a miracle!

Now if I only posted here more often. Hopefully that will change soon!

The conversation topic, “what is the job of a Web Journalists & what skills do you need?” was a fitting way to begin what looks like an ongoing conversation. Many brought very specific answers to the table, while others (including me) tended to be more abstract about the skills needed (like being a good teacher).

The conversation lasted two hours, and few people wanted it to end. It was nice to see some familiar faces (like University of Missouri senior Kelsey Proud, Emma Carew of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Greg Linch of Publish2) and to meet some new people, like Professor Hernandez, too.

As some of you may know, I am not a fan of #journchat (no hard feelings about that — I wrote it a year ago). But this was better, because it did a good job of narrowly focusing on the type of journalism that I specialize in and it seemed to be more inclusive of like-minded individuals; not to mention it was an easier chat to follow.

While I am normally busy on Wednesday nights, working on Web production for The Eagle, I hope to be able to drop in on a regular basis and contribute to what I know will be a great conversation.

In my post, I write about a recent “kerfuffle” of sorts between CNN’s Ed Henry and Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton — a kerfuffle that unfolded on Twitter.

Enjoy!

News innovation is a somewhat ambiguous phrase. Most often, I interpret it to mean something to do with journalism 2.0 — someone’s bright idea about how to play with journalism on Web sites. It’s the future. It’s my future.

That’s why I am starting this blog today — to share my ideas about news innovation, to discuss some cool ideas that other people are doing and to start some good conversations about the future of this craft that many say is in trouble.

Read the rest of this entry at Journalism of Tomorrow »

The semester went well — I took mostly classes for my major met a lot of cool people and got rehired as an intern at The Washington Post. This time, I work in the news video department, and we’re in the process of moving from Arlington, Va., to the storied Post building on 15^th Street in downtown D.C.

I’ve done lots of work on Web sites lately — hopefully that will actually pay off some day. I’m sure it will — since they say it’s good to be ambidextrous in this new media environment. I was very popular amongst my classmates in a HTML/CSS class I took this past semester.

I’ll be back at The Post next semester — and I hope to share some great new stories along the way. I’m super excited to be working more closely with Post journalists this time around. We used to be separated by the Potomac River, but no more. We “merge” with the paper on Jan. 1 — but that’s a bit of a misnomer since the Web site was always part of The Washington Post Co., just a separate division.

Things at The Eagle have been going well too. The semester definitely ended better there than it started. Working on the Web site has been a test of everyone’s patience, but slowly and surely it’s getting done. I would have liked to see development proceed a faster pace, but I do feel that we’ve come a long way, and that the overall user experience is much improved. I hope to work more on this site in the coming weeks.

So watch this space for more frequent posting — my little pet project over the break is to clean up the site’s design a bit. This is probably the most personal of the posts you’ll see here too!

Later!

But what brook was it?

As one of my sources said, it’s the “Narashan Brook.”

“Don’t ask me to spell that for you,” he added.

Immediately, I searched Google and looked through my paper’s stylebook to no luck. I then realized that the copy desk probably won’t know how to spell it, either.

After all, relatively minor geographic features like a small, meandering brook are not household names.

I then decided to look it up on a topographic map, which can be downloaded as PDFs for free.

In a search that didn’t even take me five minutes, I came across the correct spelling: Nauraushaun.

I highly recommend all journalists like me try to “cq” the spelling of an obscure geographic feature against a topographic map — because it’d be hard to find the spelling otherwise!

The WSJ uses Twitterfeed, a very popular way to automatically aggregate RSS feeds over Twitter. The problem lies right there in the automation: the service will cut off Tweets in order to fit a link in and, of course, to make 140 characters.

This is what the tweet looked like:

Twitterfeed chopped off what was most likely supposed to say assets and turned it into another word.

Poynter’s Amy Gahran had a write-up of the incident:

A much better strategy is to manually write or edit your tweets to make sure they’ll fit on Twitter. You only have 140 characters total to work with, including spaces and links, after all.

Gahran is right here. A large news organization like the WSJ should probably use more caution and stop using Twitterfeed.

Newspapers who turn off the feed and actually place a human behind the tweets also are more popular.

Look at what happened when the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent turned off their Twitterfeed:

On May 1, when I found it, the Independent had 12 followers; its audience has steadily increased since then. On Sept. 1, it had 95 followers. Today it has 196 followers.

And a word of advice from the Independent’s Web editor, Stephanie Romanski:

I would completely and without reservation recommend that papers shut off the Twitterfeed and find someone who can tweet headlines by hand, and TALK to the readers.