See you in July

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

One of my master's degrees requires I fulfill 160 hours of an internship. Obviously, it would be ethically difficult to work for a competing journalism outfit without creating entire layers of conflicts of interest, so the powers-that-be allowed me to complete the requirement with my special project, Fatal Encounters.

I have a University of Nevada, Reno faculty mentor, who's going to guide me along, but I'm pretty self-actualized on this project, so I hope he'll have a relaxing summer.

For the first project of my internship, I filed for nonprofit status with the state of Nevada. I'm doing this for two reasons: 1) I accept donations on the website, so it's the law; 2) A pretty good-sized Western university has offered to partner with me on the site, and they've mentioned some pretty sweet perks. Apparently, the formal nonprofit status helps enable the partnership. We'll see.

The internship is basically supposed to revolve around the data entry of a year's worth of data for the United States. I figure if I work 16-hour days, seven days a week for the next month, I might be able to get all the information I have into the www.fatalencounters.org database. And then we'll have something worth talking about.

In the meantime, since the registered address for the nonprofit just happens to be my home address, I'm very concerned that visitors will see a nice environment with a nice new garden on the east side of the yard, a good vegetable garden in the backyard, and a clean, professional looking interior with clean and freshly caulked windows.

I'll write again when I return from my month of unpaid labor. While I'm gone, call Brad Bynum at ext. 3520 with arts and culture questions and complaints, call Dennis Myers at ext. 3522 with your newsier questions and complaints, and call Sage Leehey at ext. 3514 with all your compliments.