When I woke up this morning I wanted to kill myself. After a night of heavy drinking and a mile walk home from the metro, 5:30 A.M. has a way of sneaking up on you like a venereal disease after Spring Break or a trip to Tijuana. It's probably for the best that my Ruger .357 Magnum stayed under my bed in Pineville. For a long time, handguns have been illegal in D.C. The logic behind banning handguns to reduce crime never made much sense to me. D.C. continues to have one of the highest crime rates in the nation. It probably cuts down on suicides, though, and D.C. offers plenty of reasons to drive someone to suicide, or homicide- mainly the Georgetown bars and the people who go there.
Puddle of Mudd played at the 9:30 Club in NW D.C. last night. I'm not a big fan of their music, but when I found out my old schoolmate's band (from Shreveport) was opening, I shot him an e-mail and he put me on the guest list. I'll go into more detail about the show in another post.
So, I've been sitting at work all day deciding how I could tie last night's shenanigans into something insightful, and I can't. I concluded that this would be a good time to talk about The Hotline, since you're probably wondering why I'm not busy right now.
The Hotline is an online magazine published by the National Journal. From their website:
"Combining original, bipartisan reporting with coverage from over 2,500 media sources, The Hotline gives readers what no one else can: a comprehensive picture of the political landscape, from the president to your own local mayor."
Our office is on the 3rd floor of the Watergate 600 building in the Foggy Bottom area. I wake up at 5:30 every morning to get to work by 7:00. For the first part of the morning, the staff (15 people or so) searches a database of over 2,500 news sources (newspapers, blogs, transcripts, etc...) for any coverage of statewide races, White House '08, Bush, ex-politicians or anything funny or scandalous about politicians, etc... Once the search is complete, We "rewrite" the stories by condensing the important information into short paragraphs. Everyone works as an editor, in that sense. The Hotline is usually published online at noon. I spend the next few hours eating snacks, watching youtube, surfing ESPN.com, doing stories for the House Race Hotline (published at 2:00 P.M.) and reading the Hotline.
For the most part, The Hotline staff is young. It's overseen by Editor-In-Chief Amy Walter, a regular panelist on CBS's Face The Nation and contributing editor for National Journal. She's very casual and easy to work for. All the fancy shirts and ties I bought before I came up here are taking up space in my little closet because there is no dress code at The Hotline. The office is fairly quiet during the day. Everyone watches Youtube with their headphones on and laughs to themselves. My desk is between the other two interns' in the front of the office (intern row, as it's called). They're from Ohio and Minnesota, and i believe they're both around my age.
This post is dragging on more than originally planned so I'm going to stop here. But, in case you were wondering, I really like my job and the people I work with. I'll discuss my co-workers another time.
