Trucking, trucking, trucked

Johnny Dataseed reflects on his year as NICAR's training director, traveling the country teaching computer-assisted reporting techniques to journalists while balancing the challenges of constant travel and administrative work. He shares his positive experience working with passionate newsrooms and talented colleagues while announcing the search for his successor.

Call me Johnny Dataseed. As NICAR's training director since January, I've spent my time wandering the country, scattering data, spreadsheets, and database managers wherever I've been.

It has (and few who know me will be surprised to find a Grateful Dead reference here) been a long, strange, and completely wonderful trip. In fact, I can't think of a better job.

What could be better than standing at the cutting edge of journalism and teaching excited and willing audiences how to do their jobs better? What could be better than getting on-site insight into newsrooms around the country? (And, given that I telecommuted to NICAR Central in Missouri from my home in New Jersey, what could be better than being more than 1,000 miles away from your boss?)

It's been a year of travel, averaging two weeks out of every month. The travel is both enjoyable and draining. It's hard to leave home and hearth that often. (It must be said, though, that the travel hasn't interfered that much. By the time this reflection sees print, my wife and I should be the proud parents of our first child.)

It's been a year of hanging out with journalists, all of whom were passionately interested in journalism and how to add computer-assisted reporting techniques to their arsenal of professional weapons. It's been a year of learning my craft better and learning how to teach it.

In some ways it's been a year of show biz - it's impossible to hold an audience for a two- or three- or five-day seminar without injecting a good deal of entertainment, stand-up comedy and bad puns.

And, most of all, it's been a year of working, even at long-distance, with the NICAR and IRE staffs, some of the most collegial, supportive, talented, committed and just plain decent people in journalism. (Although trying to fill the shoes of my predecessor, the extraordinarily talented and energetic Jennifer LaFleur was, at best, intimidating.) It's been challenging in other ways, as well. Administration, organization and, most of all, patience, is not something that comes naturally to many reporters. And certainly not something that comes naturally to me. But administration and organization is critical when you're on the road doing one seminar, planning the seminar you're going to lead next week, making contacts for the seminars you're going to do next month, answering e-mailed questions from the folks who attended the seminars you did last month, and overseeing seminars being led by other NICAR staff members and friends.

There have been other benefits. Meeting reporters, editors and news executives all over the country hasn't hurt professionally, as Jennifer Lafleur's move from this post to the San Jose Mercury News and mine to the Miami Herald clearly shows.

In all, it's been a blast. I recommend it to anyone.

NICAR is searching for a new training director. Those interested should e-mail NICAR Managing Director Brant Houston at brant@nicar.org, or call (573) 882-1984.