Why read newspapers?

So, one of the copywriters (so nice) said it was unfortunate that I was coming to the Times when they weren't in the process of developing a new campaign and thus asked me if I wanted to work on a special project with him. By special project he basically means a project that most likely will not be run in the newspaper (but who knows? maybe it will be amazing) but that we're going to work on so that I can have some more involvement in the creative process. Cool, right? So, on Friday we went to one of the conference rooms (we're that important-lol) and brainstormed. I think on Monday, we'll start concepting them or something.

Other than that, work at the Times has been good. Writing copy for sell sheets (trying to convince advertisers to give us their money), direct mail pieces (trying to convince readers to re-suscribe), and any random project that comes my way -- such as writing copy to promote a new editorial piece running in the paper or looking for newspaper quotes to make into headlines on our personalities campaign (if anyone is in LA and sees a Dan Neil billboard with the line "Limited only by your ability to post bail"... I came up with -- well found -- that). My favorite project was helping massage a 10-sec tv script. Again, if anyone sees a commercial with TJ Simers... I suggested about 5-sec of that dialogue. Hahaha.

Mentors? It's kind of weird at the Times I suppose because everyone in the writing section has helped me out at some point. Jim is the senior copy writer and he was my point man on a lot of the work I did originally. Patrick is the direct mail writer (among other things), and once he came back last Friday (he was on a month-long vacay) he's become my point man on the direct mail pieces and some of the sell sheets I've been working on. Graham is the 3rd copywriter and the one who's working with me on the "special" project. He's great and has talked to me about how he got started in advertising (apparently portfolio school is the way to go if you want to enter an advertising agency on the creative side). Hye is the copyeditor and she was my guardian angel in the beginning... there wasn't a lot of work for me to do, but she managed to scrounge up some copyediting stuff -- which was actually a nice way to get started because I got my feet wet looking at the ads the writers wrote before actually writing my own. Nicholas and Cooper are the on-line geniuses, but I havent' actually gotten to work much with them since my internet experience is minimal. Unless, they want facebook experience...