Day 31 of 1000
Kelly needs to write and publish as many blog, newspaper, and magazine articles as possible to refine her skills: interviewing, writing, editing etc. She needs to build a portfolio to help her win future opportunities. Last week, she signed up with an organization whose charter is to help young journalists of a certain political bent (pretty much in line with Kelly’s bent) to hone their skills and prepare for careers in journalism. We were very surprised that a couple of days after she signed up, she got a call from one of the editors with an assignment. Actually, it was a very interesting assignment. Kelly and I will write more about this after we see if it comes to fruition, but both of us have been scrambling.
Kelly has to contact and interview high mucky mucks and mucky muck wannabes in Washington D.C. by telephone. She needs to get some quotes so she wants to record the calls. The first thing we had to do was find out whether it is legal to record phone calls. It turns out that there are generally two kinds of laws that cover this sort of thing in the U.S. More than half the states have what is called “one-party consent” laws. That is, only one of the parties in a phone call has to consent for the call to be recorded. The rest of the states require that both parties to a call must give their consent for it to be legal to record. For interstate calls, it is best to err on the side of maximum disclosure. Fortunately, I found a website that shows that both Washington D.C. and North Carolina are both one-party consent states, so she does not have to declare that she is recording for this article.
Next we had to find a recording device. We have the great “professional journalist” recorder on its way. Unfortunately, the recorder is not scheduled to arrive for a few more days, so Kelly will use her laptop as a recorder until then. I had to find a device that would get the stuff going into and out of the phone into the recording device. We found the EXACT right device down at Radio Shack. It is the Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device pictured at the left. Lorena and I ran down to pick it up while the kids studied after dinner, but Christian and I could not figure out how the silly thing worked. It seems like a device like this would require at least two plugs: one for the recording device and one for the phone. As you can see, it only has one.
After about fifteen minutes we gave up and read the instructions. All you do is plug the jack into the recording device and put the ear plug in your ear. If you look closely, you can see that there is a little microphone on the opposite side of the ear plug from the end that goes into your ear. When you hold your phone up to your ear, both ends of the conversation go into the microphone where the signal is sent down the cable to the recording device and through the earplug speaker into your ear. It works AWESOME.
We will keep you posted on how Kelly’s new writing gig works out if and when it comes to fruition.
Radio station note: The person who called Kelly into the interview at the radio station got laid off so Kelly is in limbo with respect to her radio station internship. She already jumped through all the required hoops at her school–they will give her credit for the internship spring semester, but now she has to figure out whether they still want her. She sent an email to one of the hosts. We will keep you posted on that, too.