.
Emily Sweeney, a reporter from
The Boston Globe, came to talk to our class about a month ago about online journalism and how publications such as The Globe are moving towards becoming a more web based publication.
Sweeney has had the opportunity to work on a lot of interesting projects outside of the Globe. She was in a documentary that accompanied the movie
"The Departed."“A group of filmmakers from California, I think they were from Warner Brothers, came out here to shoot the dvd for The Departed and I showed the guys around Boston and Dorchester. Places like the liquor store where Whitey Bulger and the mafia would hang out,” Sweeney says.
Sweeney knew a bit about organized crime in Boston from doing
her series in the Boston Globe about the topic. She also worked on a series regarding organized crime for the Brookline Tab. Sweeney is also from Dorchester, so she was fully capable of giving a guided tour of her old neighborhood.
“It was a really cool experience and a great opportunity,” says Sweeney.
Sweeney is from Dorchester, Massachusetts and graduated from Northeastern University in 1998. She started out her journalism career at The Bedford Minuteman, a smaller 3,100-circulation paper, as a staff writer in August 1998. In November 1999, Sweeney worked for The Brookline Tab, an 18,000-circulation newspaper before working for the Waltham Daily News Tribune for two months in July 2001. In September of 2001 Sweeney went to work for The Boston Globe and has been there ever since. Right now Sweeney works for the City Weekly section of the Globe. She also works for Globe South, a section of the Globe devoted to 48 communities south of Boston that is published twice a week; Thursday and Sunday. In addition to working for the Globe, Sweeney is also the president of the New England Society of Professional Journalists chapter.
“On a day-to-day basis I’m covering local news stories south of Boston,” Sweeney says. “Recently there was a plane crash in a parking lot in Easton, a town that’s south of Boston, and I covered that.”
Sweeney also was able to collaborate with colleague and longtime friend Billy Baker, a columnist for the Science Section of the Boston Globe, on
Boston Slang words. Baker had written the article and planned on doing an audio commentary with Sweeney to go along with it.
“Multimedia is a big thing right now so they asked if there was something I could run on boston.com. Emily Sweeney still has a crazy Boston accent so I was like ‘let’s see if I can talk to her about the words.’ She set the whole thing to photos and I had no idea until the day the story ran,” Baker says.
Baker went to Boston Latin high school with Sweeney and played on the hockey team with her. “She was famous as a girl on the hockey team,” Baker says. “Because she was the only one.”
They also had one of their first jobs in journalism together; not for the same publication but they worked for two newspapers that were owned by one company. Sweeney worked at the Brookline Tab and Baker worked at the Needham Times.
“When we were in High School Emily was the most plain Jane; she wasn’t fashion conscious. She put her hair in to an elastic and didn’t care. Then I’m not really sure what happened,” says Baker. “In the last five or six years she’s flourished in her personal fashion. I wonder what it must be like for her to show up as a Boston Globe reporter; she doesn’t like your typical Globe reporter.”
When asked what exactly a typical Globe reporter looks like Baker says, “Just the opposite of Emily Sweeney.”
Sweeney, also known as “Spikey ‘Em” has been described “one of the hippier writers for the Boston Globe…” by Bostonist.com. When she showed up to talk for our journalism class many students in our class were surprised to learn that she worked for the Globe. Since most Boston journalism students see the Globe as the Mecca of co-op jobs, they were intrigued to learn that the girl with bleach blonde hair and tattoos worked where they dreamed. Sweeney has six tattoos in total, including a "DOT RAT" tattoo on her back as a tribute to being from Dorchester. She finds that her attire (sometimes collared shirts and ties or pants with many zippers and straps) has never been a problem for her although some people find it quite different.
“When we did the story on the Boston Slang we were on some local TV show talking about it and my parents were shocked because they hadn’t seen her in years,” says Baker. “My dad was like ‘you need to be Emily Sweeney for Halloween.’”
According to her former editor, Christine Chinlund, Sweeney has a special ability to see stories that other reporters would normally not take a second look at.
"Em has many strengths, but one of the most important is her ability to see stories that others might overlook and develop them in her own signature way," says Chinlund. "Much of what she brings to the section is the value of her fresh eye for news. She is also tuned in to the interests of real people, rather than just government or bureaucracy. She successfully anchors her stories in the personalities of the people she reports on."
“She’s really sort of soft-spoken,” Baker says. “When she worked for the Brookline Tab she caught a superintendent embezzling money or something really bad. She did it in such a soft-spoken way, just checking her facts. She’s a real tiger reporter. I hate any story that makes me file a freedom of information request but she’s a quiet assassin for those sorts of stories.”
Although Sweeney may be soft-spoken, she enjoys going out in to the Boston area and reporting on stories.
“She doesn’t like being chained to the desk,” says Lauralee Summers, Sweeney’s spouse of two years. “She likes going out and learning new things every day; that’s why she likes reporting. She likes to meet new people and she’s the type of person that makes people feel comfortable. People generally can open up to her.”
Summers and Sweeney have known each other for about fifteen years and they got married in 2006. Summers teaches at Charlestown High School and has also written a book of memoirs entitled “Learning from Dogs Without Collars,” about growing up homeless, wrestling competitively and graduating from Harvard. The book was published by Simon and Schuster and took Summers several years to write during graduate school. The two are a very accomplished pair.
“Emily is positioning herself well for what journalism will become in the multimedia age. She does the audio, visual, the whole package,” Baker added.
For journalists such as Sweeney and Baker, the multimedia aspect of journalism is new to them but they are willing to learn and in Sweeney’s case, she has definitely been a fast learner.
“I do videos and maps to go along with my articles. If you would’ve asked me 10 years ago if I would be doing things like that today I never wouldn’t have thought I would,” says Sweeney.
“I don’t feel old but I graduated college before I had an e-mail address,” Baker said. “It wasn’t a part of our life then. There used to be a separation of ‘church and state’ where reporters took notes and photographers took pictures but now people use things like flip cameras.”
With multimedia being available to bloggers and citizen journalists, it is becoming more prominent in online media. Citizen journalists such as
Steve Garfield like to use visual aspects in their writing but it really depends on each writer’s own preference.
“I really think that it’s an individual thing; whatever the story teller feels most comfortable using,” says Steve Garfield. “I am familiar with Em’s work and she was one of the first people at the Globe that I noticed using video to accompany her articles.”
“The Globe hasn’t done a lot of video yet,” Garfield says. “I’ve noticed newspapers like the New York Times have a lot of video and it’s good video.”
"Em has led the way, contributing video well before it was the newsroom norm," says Chinlund. "Her creations are original and compelling, and as the Globe's on-line presence has evolved, her video talents have become increasingly apparent."
With the state of journalism as it is today it is important to be able to have these sorts of skills to survive in the media industry. Without the ability to use video and other multimedia features on top of reporting it is impossible to get a job in the journalism industry.
