Labor Day is my favorite holiday.
That’s when 20 college journalists spend the weekend in a South Florida homeless shelter. They take over the shelter’s newspaper and publish an entire issue in 36 hours. They also build a website from scratch. It’s called Will Write For Food.
Over the past four years, those students have been lied to, yelled at, propositioned, and trapped in an elevator. They haven’t flinched as sources told them about the taste of a feces sandwich, showed them a hernia the size of a watermelon, and masturbated in front or them
(“I just maintained eye contact”).
My favorite and worst memory is from Labor Day weekend 2010…
When a terminally ill shelter resident repeatedly called her a “creep,” “drunk,” and “fucking whore,” Ashley Hemmy stoically sat by his mattress (which was in a hallway) for hours, until he softened up enough to chat about his love of bologna and Dick Tracy. “He said he really enjoyed talking to me,” Ashley proudly and humbly told me.
Nine days later, the man died.
Here are some random memories that stuck with me this weekend…
…writing my phone number on the upper arm of Christopher Whitten, so if he got busted while posing as a homeless man, I could bond him out. Or so he thought. My limited grant money doesn’t include a line item for “bail.” Thankfully, he didn’t get arrested.
…admiring Chealsea Boozer for tackling WWFF12′s most gut-wrenching story: violence against the homeless. After she met Robert Cassito, whose head was caved in by a 20-pound ax three years ago, she seemed a little shaken. Even more so when she learned who did it: “His friend, also homeless and living on the street at the time, was jealous that Cassito had money.”
…admiring Jane McInnis for spending hours as a homeless street vendor and getting cooked under the South Florida sun. Upon returning to the newsroom, she yelled at me, “If I get skin cancer in five years, I’m gonna sue you!” She was joking, of course. At least, I hope she was joking. My limited grant money also doesn’t include a line item for “lawsuits.” (McInnis made nearly $10, good for about 10 seconds with a board-certified dermatologist.)
…laughing at this irony: Students took it in stride when the toilet backed up in our makeshift newsroom, which was a narrow anteroom (or wide hallway, depending how you look at it) with a leaky roof and a sloping wood floor with nails sticking out of it – but they bitched incessantly whenever the wi-fi failed, which was often. Who realistically expects a homeless shelter to have reliable wireless? Or any at all?
…reading in horror Veronica Figueroa‘s blog post titled, AND THEN I FARTED. It’s an amusing anecdote from a shelter resident. But the two photos right under the headline feature me. So not only does it appear I farted while hovering over Veronica, but if you Google “Koretzky farted,” this is the top result.
…buying an alarm clock for Joshua Santos at 2:14 a.m. at the CVS down the street from the shelter. Then watching him destroy the alarm clock for one photo. My limited grant money also doesn’t include a line item for “breaking shit you just bought.”
…working through the night and shutting down WWFF12 at 7 a.m. yesterday with art director Fiji Blaize, photo/video shooter Cayla Nimmo, editor Loan Le, and design adviser Mariam Aldhahi – then driving Loan straight to the airport so she could fly back home to work on her school newspaper, where she’s the executive editor.
If this sounds like fun – and it doesn’t to most college journalists – join us next year. Since we never get more than 60 applicants for 20 slots, your odds are reasonable. (Whenever I pitch Will Write For Food to students, the reaction is usually along the lines of this actual quote: “Why the hell would I want to do THAT?”)
Click here for more details. See you next year. But probably not.
I’m sorry you are forever immortalized on Google under “Koretzky farted.”
Then again, you did scare the shit out of us and it wasn’t that bad. What’s one angry homeless person screaming their head off or the world’s scariest elevator or breathing Cononie’s second hand smoke?
It was terrifying. Thank you for the opportunity.
I commented last year on a previous post regarding this same program. Then, I was concerned about student safety. While the author addressed many of those concerns in a reply comment, which I appreciated, I still wonder if parents are made aware of all that happens here — not just from a safety standpoint but also from a decency standpoint. I question whether students being “propositioned,” regaled with details about a “feces sandwich” and enduring a masturbating source is a wise way for SPJ to spend its members’ money. I also worry about the longterm effects on students who confront these situations far from home and under stressful conditions, when they may not be emotionally equipped to handle them. I’m certainly open to persuasion, but these are my concerns based on what I’ve read so far.
oh jeeze
To the concerned professor,
WWFF is partly about getting those things you can’t get in a j-classroom. Last time I checked (graduated in May 2012), that means the real world.
This makes year 4 for WWFF, each year producing a paper and several websites, articles, videos, photos, etc. If a parent were concerned over sending their kid to this — their legally voting and army-eligible kid, at that — there’s plenty of documented information for them to consult.
As for being propositioned, it’s happened to me several times while doing pro work. As for getting details about a feces sandwich… Well, that’s pretty original, but I’ve definitely dealt with sources who where full of it.
As for spending SPJ funds wisely, please consult the staffers about what they learned and if it was worth it (most of them got partly refunded for travel and such, but also put their own hard cash into getting there). Then juxtapose that against students who’ve done different programs, like pizza lectures and donut round tables. Compare the results.
As for longterm effects, you’ve got me. But if being far from and home and under stress is a bad thing for student journos, better they find out now than when they become pro journos — you know, where those things are usually in the job description (well, it’s usually listed as high pressure environment, but you get the point).
Don’t you think?
Sincerely,
Gideon Grudo
WWFF 2010 writer
WWFF 2011 editor-in-chief
WWFF 2012 adviser
SPJ National Board Student Rep.
To the concerned professor,
I felt I learned more from this than any CMA convention I attended (3 so far) and left thankful for the experience. And I completely agree with everything Gideon Grudo replied with as well.
Why not apply to advise at next year’s WWFF instead of forming opinions based on what you’ve read so far?
As a response to the concerned professor, any student not “emotionally equipped” to see this part of reality is not emotionally equipped to see much of anything. We are aspiring journalists because we wish to understand the world and share it with people. There would be no understanding without taking risks (And I can tell you, there is not much risk here… we were in good hands). I agree with Dylan, accept the challenge to advise!
Concerned professor,
I’m the girl featured in the very first photo of this post. My parents were not at all pleased about me spending Labor Day Weekend at a homeless shelter, even though the shelter is only 15 minutes from our house. I also had some reservations about what I would encounter at the shelter. I had read posts about previous years and they were frankly quite unsettling.
Now, looking back, I can’t believe I ever doubted what an amazing experience this would be. In the photo above, I’m about a foot away from that man’s leg, which had a large sore on it. I saw the shelter’s owner bandage up a resident with a gash down his stomach. I saw the aforementioned hernias and also met the man responsible for the feces sandwich. But more importantly, I learned more about journalism in those 36 hours than I did at my fairly sanitized internship at the Miami Herald.
I now feel so much more prepared as a journalist than I did coming in and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. And with all your reservations, I agree that it would be fantastic if you advised the students one year. I really think you would be astonished by them.
- Alysha
Ps. The president of SPJ spent the majority of the weekend with us, so clearly he has no objections
I think the professor’s looking at this backward, though his/her concerns are legitimate. I can’t think of any program that better prepares students for a cops beat or being a disaster/war zone correspondent. (I’m sure there are some.)
Compared to those roles, this is a relatively tame and controlled environment. Advisers are always close by, and as the students documented, safety and sanitation are a constant focus at the shelter. But it offers a small real-world taste, enough to say: is this something I would do with my life?
Additionally, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (http://dartcenter.org/content/tragedies-journalists-7) argues that “the act of articulation — writing, drawing, painting, talking or crying — seems to change the way a traumatic memory is stored in the brain.”
Articulation through writing and talking to peers “often provides a release of the emotions associated with the event and leaves its author able to recall the memory in the future with less or no pain,” and that’s something this collaborative environment can teach students to do.
In other words, WWFF can actually help develop a coping strategy and make students better emotionally equipped to handle a career in any adversarial kind of journalism. There’s a lot you can get in the classroom, but not that. And I think the fact that students seek out this experience after hearing about others’ shows they realize it.