This day is significantly less photo-heavy than the previous day.
Bonus - The cool coffee machine on GMU Campus (Southside Dining Hall if anyone’s interested). Actually pretty good coffee. It had presets for making lattes and cappuccinos, but I didn’t want to know how long the milk had been there so I just stuck with regular black coffee with french vanilla creamer.
Afterwards, we went to Mason Square.
There, we listened to two speakers: Andria’s White Murdaugh from CBS 6 and Kevin McCarthy from FOX 5. McCarthy actually had a short recording prior to speaking at Mason Square. I think I remember our FA linking the full segment about McCarthy at WJMC. I was actually able to ask him a question, which was something along the lines of “what would you like to see in more media/films today?”.
Afterwards, we went to Nighthawk for lunch.
Our FAs allowed us to go to the local Target to shop, which was incredibly helpful for me as my sock had a hole in it and I forgot my suit jacket at home prior to coming to the conference.
Honestly the suit jacket was a little big, and most definitely did not match with my pants, but I needed it as we were heading to…
I don’t know which photos I can post, as earlier I read that photos in member-only spaces cannot be published, and I don’t know if we were in a members-only area.
The interior of the building was very nice though.
Our speakers for that time were Susan Goldberg, President and CEO of GBH, and Nicholas Johnston, the Publisher of Axios.
In her part, Goldberg showed us the trailer of 2023 film 20 Days in Mariupol, which was a documentary shedding light on Mariupol during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Something that stuck with me is how, upon accepting the Oscar award for the film, director Mstyslav Chernov says he wishes he could trade the award for Russia never invading Ukraine. I wish the crew behind the film had been able to come to WJMC as speakers.
Johnston’s part was pretty lighthearted. One quote I remember was along the lines of “there are very few places a politician can hide from a journalist with a press badge”, as he was talking about his time as a congressional reporter. I hope I got that correct.
Due to the NATO Summit, traffic was awful. At one point, we traveled nine miles within the span of one hour. The trip back was not fun.
Dinner was good. For experiencing DC traffic, I decided to treat myself to more desserts than I usually would eat (though I would come to regret this as eating that much was too sweet for me to handle. I did not waste any food though).
Final activity of the day was Color Feud. I have hearing sensitivity, so I couldn’t really participate much unfortunately as removing my earbuds would cause a lot of physical discomfort due to the noise in the room. I think Green got in the top three or top five? I can’t remember as I wasn’t really participating. I did stay in the room though for the entire duration.
(The question in second image was “what does a journalist never leave home without?”)
Each color group had formed their own chant. For example, Teal had “teal team six” and Silver’s incorporated squeezing a silver-colored sparkly glowing rubber ducky mascot.