I met Mr. Mike Warren, one of five Top Story editors of the Associated Press, last Saturday at a Starbucks to ask him about the journalism workforce and the attributes needed to succeed. After seeing my portfolio and hearing about my international background, he kindly invited me to shadow him for a day at the Atlanta Associated Press office.

 

The office was located at the 24th floor of the Centennial Tower. It was quite expansive, and when I walked in, I saw black-and-white photos that were Pulitzer Prize winners. Surprisingly I only recognized one.

 

Each desk had two connecting computers that could be lifted to ease the strain on each worker's back, and yellow paper pads were present everywhere.

 

When Mr. Warren arrived in the office, he introduced me to the other staff members present that day. There were surprisingly not many people in the office. Mr. Warren explained that several people transferred to other AP offices in the country recently, and the staff size was initially small in general to begin with.

 

We spent the morning listening to three meetings over what looked like a little sci-fi communication tool. It looked like a flattened tripod enabled with speakers. The first meeting was the international one, where leaders from each region around the world reported which stories were highly important at the moment, and which oens to hold off until tomorrow or the day after. As they discussed and debated, Mr. Warren used his I-Pad to show me the stories they were talking about.

 

The second meeting was a U.S. stories-based meeting. They largely talked about Prince's death, and angles for the story. Donald Trump's #Womencard was also a trending topic they discussed briefly. Mr. Warren shook his head, exasperated when it came up.

 

The last meeting was the only where Mr. Warren added his input into. He, the other four Top Story Editors in the world, and his boss briefly discussed what the next Top Story could be. One that intrigued me was the fact that twp Texas school districts recently planed to build football stadiums for $50 to $62 million, especially since another school district did so for $60 million in 2012. They discussed to what extent this story could be novel, and there were arguments for and against it, interestingly enough.

 

We spent the rest of the day mostly editing stories from the AP network. Mr. Warren explained that this was an unusual slow day, and normally, there would be more bustle and hustle.

 

Mr. Warren's patience to meticulously edit each and every sentence, sometimes scrapping the original draft entirely, was extremely impressive. I remember us trying to edit a very confusing article on a marriage fraud case that was related to the San Bernardino case, and he practically had to rewrite the entire piece. I'm happy that some of my suggestions went into the published draft.

 

The only piece of significant breaking news that day was the bomb threat at a Fox News Station. Some other AP staffers seemed to be handling it (and this was something the AP office here could handle, because that station was within jurisdiction).

 

At the end of the day, Mr. Warren introduced me to a staffer that explained the AP internship (only for college juniors to graduate students). I already knew about it to some extent, but his explanation really highlighted how competitive it was. Applicants have to send in a diverse variety of quality work, from video to online graphics to photos. I'll have to ask my fellow video experts from Convergence Media to teach me some things and let me tag along with them for work if I want to ever apply for the AP internship.