Had there not been a pandemic, I would be in Pittsburgh right now to catch a flight to JFK in New York early tomorrow morning and then on to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics. Alas, there will be no overnight turnarounds, flight connections, and airport customs to go through, but this will still turn out to be a pretty busy week, starting tonight with a review of the e-mail addresses rejected by the software that I am using. The report indicated that some were incorrect, others it did not know. I am concerning myself mostly with the addresses that are for sure invalid. My goal is to continue until there are no more known bad accounts. If I get too involved with the ones that are unsure, this project is going to take much longer than it already has, so I will leave those alone and hope for the best.
I was also able to get in an interview this evening with Nathan McCarter, who has done work for Bleacher Report and is now with One FC Championship, an ultimate fighting league in Southeast Asia. This is a chance to share a little about how I go about reporting. I have an iPhone which includes the Voice Memos function, so I record my conversations with interviewees, always making sure they are okay with my recording them. I ask the questions, they respond, then later I go back and transcribe our conversation, taking the quotes I think will be the most appropriate for the story. That is how I have been doing it for almost two decades now and it has worked for me. Any of you aspiring journalists out there would do well to use the Voice Memo function on your cell phone if you have that capability.