Details

Journalism, lest we ever forget, is all about the details. You can say all you want about journalism serving as an agent for social change and democracy (something I've talked about, perhaps a little too sentimentally, in previous blog posts), but when you're talking about the daily grind of being a journalist, it's all about making sure all those pesky little details that seem too insignificant to merit your attention are exactly right.

I can't honestly say that this weekend's presentations made me sure that when push comes to shove, I will confidently be able to say that I will never force my newspaper to run a correction for a mistake I made. After all, perfection is impossible. But I find that I so often romanticize journalism -- thinking only about its capacity to affect the course of history and expose the truth -- that I forget about the meticulous craftmanship that a journalist needs to exercise. As I head into my internship this summer, I cannot promise that I will be perfect. But I can promise that I will try my best to be perfect. I will double and triple check my facts; I will never sacrifice accuracy for speed, as politics editor for USA TODAY Catalina Camia warned us against doing; and I will certainly never, in the words of co-founder of the Chips Quinn program John C. Quinn, "make an ass out of you and me" by making assumptions.