From busy New York to D.C., the ghost town

We visit the Apollo Theater in Harlem after dinner.

The excitement that generated in the newsroom when our boss gave us our tickets for our trip to New York was one that cannot be explained. For some of my colleagues, it was a homecoming and for others, a dream trip come true.
It was the College Media Association Spring National Convention. Our boss had sorted our everything from transport, hotel accommodation, conference registration and, of course, per diem.

It was one of the coolest train rides for me that Saturday as I Facebooked, Tweeted and listened to some very good highlife music from Kojo Antwi, Kwabena Kwabena and Youssour N’dour on my laptop. There was wifi access for the three-hour trip, thanks to Amtrak. We arrived in the afternoon, and after checking in our hotel room, we toured the city.
My colleague, Matt Nelson, and I ended up at the 9/11 Memorial site. For me, it was a humbling experience to see this, and I shed tears. I watched the 9/11 attacks almost 12 years ago on CNN in a friend’s house, and my visit to the site coincided with his birthday. I will never forget the experience.

At Times Square

Then my friend and colleague Selase Kove gave me a tour of his school, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, after which we went to a Ghanaian restaurant. There, I enjoyed some Ghanaian wakye and took some banku and tilapia to enjoy in my hotel room.
The conference started on Sunday, and I enjoyed some sessions. The showcase on Design: From Page 1 to the Digital Space with CNN’s Kyle Ellis was a masterpiece. Sunday’s keynote session with NBC’s Willie Geist was very instructive and interesting. I really learned a lot and will carry most of the things I learned into my career. I made a few friends as well.
My colleagues and I also had a nice evening in Times Square. Another interesting moment was our dinner at Sylvia’s Queen of Soul Food Restaurant in Harlem where fried chicken and shrimp and grits were popular orders.

The trip to Columbia to meet the dean of student affairs with my colleagues, Amer Taleb, Ian Kullgren and Jasmine Aguilera also made me hungrier to go to Columbia to do graduate studies in journalism.

Inside the World Room @ Columbia Journalism School

The pizza Matt introduced me to and the walk past the New York Times building at night summed up one of the nicest experiences.
Alas, our days at New York were over, and we had to head back to D.C. Kojo Antwi, as usual, kept me company until the end of the trip.
One thing I was told when I was coming to D.C. was that it was a very busy place with a lot of people who go about their duties mostly in suits. From our first day until we boarded the train back to D.C., New York looked choked, congested and busy.

When we waited in the Metro tunnel at Union Station after getting off the train, I felt a vast different between the two cities, and then I concluded:  D.C. is a ghost town compared to New York.



http://shfwire.com/busy-new-york-dc-ghost-town
 

From Rosa Parks’s statue to NPF’s dinner dance

My colleagues and me at the National Press Foundation Dinner.

Wednesday was one of the busiest days at the bureau for my colleagues and me.
Some of us had one event or the other to attend; others had an interview or two to do while others had to complete their stories.
I had to attend the unveiling of a nine-foot tall bronze statue of Rosa Parks at Statuary Hall, in the Capitol.
Parks’s refusal to give up a seat for a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. in 1955 sparked a bus boycott for a year and later resulted in the abolition of the segregation law. Parks has been credited as the mother of modern day civil rights advocacy.
 This event brought President Barack Obama and congressional leaders together and they paid
 glowing tribute to a woman whose single action more than half a century ago has affected U.S. history. It was refreshing to see her family members from across the U.S. at the Capitol gracing the occasion.
It was also a delight to see civil rights advocate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the event. I was glad when he granted me an interview and spoke of the life of Parks.
The event taught me a lesson that any action we take whether good or bad could have impact on generations so many years later.

Inside the auditorium where the NPF dinner took place

By the time I came back, most of my colleagues were busily getting their stories done early enough to be ready for the 30^th annual National Press Foundation dinner and awards. By 6:30 p.m., we were all done for the day and were headed for one of the NPF’s flagship programs for the year.
The event brought together some of the heavy weights of the U.S. media and rewarded journalists who had distinguished themselves in the year under review.
As a Ghanaian, two of the awards caught my attention most. First of all, the award for best Excellence in Online Journalism Award won by The Wall Street Journal will be something Gary Al Smith, former editor of my school’s newspaper “Communicator” will be happy about. He has always advocated for a category at the Ghana Journalists Awards for a category solely for online journalists.
Another award was the W.M. Kiplinger Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism which was won by Frank Deford, who writes for NPR, HBO and Sports Illustrated. Deford reminds me of veteran sports journalist Kwabena Yeboah. Yeboah is arguably Ghana’s best sports journalist. I pray he gets duly recognized for his contribution to Ghana’s sports journalism just like Deford.

With my colleague Amy Slanchick

All the award winners either mentioned or dedicated their awards to their colleagues in the newsroom. This taught me that, no matter how good a journalist is, he still needs the help of others. I learned the essence of unity and team building.

With good drinks at the pre-dinner reception and a very good meal at the dinner and a wonderful post-dinner party, my colleagues and I had a lot of fun, met new people but were sad it was over so soon. We were challenged and inspired by the stories of the award winners and encouraged ourselves to work hard. Who knows, some of us if not all could be back at NPF’s awards dinner, not as mere participants but as award winners.

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