Author: erikeisele

The Killing Fields

I just finished watching The Paper, Shattered Glass (Vanity Fair article about the true story) and The Killing Fields (New York Times article about Dith Pran, one of the central figures in the film) all in a row for a show I’m doing with a friend on the local public access channel. It was essentially an afternoon packed with reporting.

Between the three there were a litany of pitfalls alongside poignent examples of why reporting is so crucial. Two are based on true stories. They would be striking enough if they were fiction.

I love reporting. When I go back to work after a weekend it never feels like work. It is about trying to catch myself up on what happened over the last few days to try to fill everyone else in. I love it.

But the impact of reporting—whether the story is about about a candidate for selectman with a criminal record or genocide in Cambodia—is central to our democracy. Through all of three movies, even the one filed under fiction, that central tenant of journalism holds true. It holds true for me as well, and that’s why I love it.

Click here to see photos of and by Dith Pran, or here to see a video. They are all worth it. Pran died of cancer in 2008.

A Bit More Amazing Reading

I read this last week, and I neglected to post it. It chronicles Seal Team Six as they raided the compound in Abbottabad to kill Osama Bin Laden. It’s an amazing perspective, the kind of reporting that really gets inside the national security apparatus. Reading Limits of Power right on the heels of reading this article raises some interesting questions about the path and future of the American military. “Success,” but at what cost?

The Power of Wind, God, and Ideology

This is what I stumbled on today: a 145-foot long wind turbine blade on a trailer with ruptured brakes. Who even knew brakes could rupture?

It was a cool find, and I had a great time talking with the team transporting this thing to the North Country about it. It weighs five tons and is made out of balsa wood and fiberglass. To me it looks like an eel, a whale fin or a dinosaur part (think stegosaurus plate), but everyone who came up asked if it was an airplane wing. How unimaginative!

Last night I read this about the formation of Michele Bachmann’s political ideology, and tonight I finished Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: The end of American Exceptionalism. What differing worlds: Bachmann’s view is founded in faith, while Bacevich argues our best days are behind us if we don’t start owning up to our difficulties.

The blade exemplifies their differences perfectly: to Bacevich it’s the future, to Bachmann it’s a farce. It’s amazing that they both are part of serious political dialog, considering how far apart they are. And it’s equally amazing that both of them can find legions of supporters.

I’m watching the Republican convention roll inexorably toward New Hampshire, and this trifecta got me that much more excited. Ideology is a crazy thing, particularly if deeply rooted. Washington already has too much of it oozing out every window. I’m not sure more is called for, but we’ll see how the voters turn.

I had to think, however, that God and ideology determine the division of our energy sector. For some people, though, there’s more power in the devine than can be harnessed from wind. I wonder what that worldview would do in the White House.

Parting shot:

Once In a While

Every once in a while you get a note that really is nice. Today was just such a day.

Lately I’ve been doing a bunch of work on stories that I think are really interesting, but then again sometimes I’m interested in mundane intricacies of finance and such that regular people just breeze past. But today I got the note below from the editor, which says to me I might be on the right track. Cool, huh?

The Next Project

I’m starting to brainstorm for the next cool thing.

It’s been a bit over six months since I flew back from Kuwait. I’d like to think the experience changed me forever, but that would be a lie. I look back on the photos and my posts from that trip and it’s like another world, one of many I get to dive into briefly as a reporter.

But unlike most other trips, it’s the one with the story most worth telling. I’m in the midst of War, the book by Sebastian Junger about the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. His descriptions have dredged up feelings and memories from my brief trip and reminded me of some of the lessons I learned.

It’s an incredible feeling, to read a book like that and feel a bit like you understand. I’ve read many classics in the genre, from The Things They Carried to The Forever War, but the fear and the camaraderie experienced by soldiers was only abstract. Now when Junger describes the stress soldiers feel waiting to be attacked, I get it. I remember my night ride to Camp Delta in the back of an MRAP, feeling woefully vulnerable, like I was in the middle of a drum about to get pounded.

Those memories scare me, but they also remind me of what is still going on out there, what kinds of stories are always happening. I love my job and have no intention of leaving it, but I am starting to look for a way to tell more of those stories. Where will the next one come from?

The Big Picture

It all comes together in the end—drugs, murders, rape, overdoses, heroin and shoplifting—that’s what you learn covering cops and courts.

That isn’t my only job at the Sun, but lately cops and courts have been a large part of what I cover, and today I got to put the finishing touches on a story that weaves together a lot of that coverage to get at the bigger picture.

A few months ago I was not in the good graces of the Conway Police Department. I reported on some irregular spending right before the town meeting vote, and the story likely contributed to their not getting approval from residents for two additional officers they wanted. They were not psyched, but there was no question about the accuracy of my reporting.

Then came the Krista Dittmeyer case, where, as the local media, I was the familiar face in the crowd. We were fair yet aggressive, and as were the police, and I got to know the administration a little better.

Last was the story of the money stolen from within the police department. I handled that as carefully as I could, avoiding sounding accusatory while still pressing for the story.

All that time, every day, I type up the police logs and the court news. Every day I see what they see, although instead of seeing it on the street I see it in black and white. And what I saw recently had me concerned.

Fire and medical calls are dispatched through the police dispatch in Conway, and I started seeing repeated calls for people unconscious in random places. One or two wouldn’t be a big deal, but they kept popping up, usually younger, between 18 and 50, an age you wouldn’t expect to just pass out.

Around the same time I read a story in the New York Times about a new drug called “bath salts.” The light clicked for me that these might be a new drug problem.

It turns out I was right and wrong—they weren’t bath salts, but they were the town’s drug problem, a problem most visitors never even consider. But it’s serious, and it centers around prescription medications.

And to top it all off, over the course of my covering serious cases at the court I’d noticed strange overlaps of people, overlaps that were one or two people removed, but close enough to think there must be connections between actors in several of the serious crimes in Conway.

It all tied together, but it’s hard to pull those connections into a story. I can’t just write what’s in my head—you need facts, quotes, other people to confirm things. But tomorrow’s story, somehow, is just that—what was in my head. I was able to peg it to an event, talk to people in law enforcement, health and human services and emergency medicine and pull state and national statistics together to make that comprehensive story, the one not about day-to-day events but about the big picture.

Big picture reporting is hard. It takes time, and sometimes the story is just, well, too big. Today, I think, I pulled it off. It follows a thread throughout, but it goes everywhere, and hopefully in the end it opens people’s eyes. Looking at police logs and court documents certainly has for me, and reporting is about being the eyes for everyone else.

From the Inside

I have been following the disappearance of 11-year-old Celina Cass since the day she disappeared with interest. It happened in a place I love (the North Country), and it closely resembled a story I covered (the disappearance of Krista Dittmeyer). Each day I’d check the local media and Facebook for updates, and I often heard the latest on NHPR as I drove to work.

Four months ago, when it was Krista Dittmeyer who disappeared, I sent NHPR a note to see if they wanted anything about it. No thanks, they responded, we don’t really cover crime.

I was happy about that, after seeing the television news crews salivating for the latest details (usually gleaned from my reporting in the Sun). I cover crime, but I don’t see day to day coverage of it really adding value to readers’ lives. It’s about feeding their interest, not informing them—probably important from the business side of things, but from the journalistic side of things not that valuable.

But when it came to Celina Cass, NHPR was on it. They had repeated stories about her, right down to when the Attorney General’s office announced it was her body they pulled from the Connecticut River.

I’m not sure anything really changed, however. They have a staff reporter up north, and he had a story to cover. He would have been covering something else if not her disappearance, so they took whatever he could offer.

I, on the other hand, would have been an extra expense. As a stringer, I get paid for what airs. If I covered the Dittmeyer disappearance for them it would have been a hit to their budget. Some part of it may have come down to money.

But also some part of it may have been staff. A few weeks ago I got a note from NHPR saying their news director had left. He’d been there 11 years, and I’d worked for him for two and a half. He’d been the one who got behind my trip to Iraq, and he’d been a great guide on how to improve my radio reporting. Perhaps his news judgement in part effected those decisions.

But ultimately what I take away from this is that reporting is a business, even when that business is a non-profit. There is a bottom line, and every decision that costs money has to be carefully considered. I see that at the Sun too, where business decisions have to be made. If I had a week to dive into every story I wanted to I could do fantastic work, but that isn’t an available luxury. I sometimes have a day to do a story, sometimes a few hours.

At the Reporter I was far enough removed from business decisions to be oblivious to them, but at the Sun, where I walk past the ad people and the publisher every day, I get to peek into their world.

Reporters are free from financial restraints, at least at a well-run paper like the Sun, as I’m sure they are at a well-run station like NHPR. But their impact still makes it into reporting, even if its in a roundabout way like choosing not to cover a big story or a complex story because you don’t have the resources. It’s interesting to see, and something I wouldn’t have noticed were I not on the inside.