Category: Conway Daily Sun

GO, GO, GO!

Four days into Irene coverage, Gov. John Lynch stopped by. It was the same day a presidential candidate stopped in, and the same day I decided to tour the area hit hardest by the storm, and a day after someone got killed by their own tractor.

Some days come faster than others.

A guy this morning was driving through Transville Acres, where numerous houses got flooded, dropping leaflets on cars destroyed in the flood saying he buys junk cars. He wasn’t trying to profit off other people’s loss, he said, but these people could probably use a couple hundred bucks.

One guy lost something like eight guitars. Another guy lost thousands of dollars in power tools. And Buddy Roemer couldn’t stop calling me “Virginia,” after he asked if I was from Texas and I said no, I was born in Charlottesville.

Days like this are few and far between, but it had me shooting photos, pushing a Harvard educated economist, former congressman and governor on trade policy, asking the governor what the state would do for these people and talking with a guy whose trailer got tossed like a horseshoe.

I love this job. Every day should be as good.

Weddings and Hurricanes

My sister got married on Saturday, and on Sunday my wife and I got stranded in Portland trying to make our way back home to New Hampshire during the tail end of Irene. Several rivers near our house flooded, knocking out all roads. We got the call and detoured to a friend’s house in Portland.

So I’ve been trying to shoot more photos lately, and I was excited for this weekend to be able to shoot my sister’s wedding. Little did I know how many photos I’d be able to take once I got home. The only problem has been all the reporting I need to do. Between major roads being closed and individuals losing everything they own I haven’t had much free time. I stayed out extra-late trying to talk to people whose homes got wrecked, but that turned out to be a bit of a bust. I did get to go into this woman’s house, but the man who let me didn’t let me take any pictures. He said it was his father-in-law’s girlfriend’s house. The water was up over her kitchen counter and already the place smelled like rot. I didn’t get to take any photos with me, but the smell was something I’ll hold onto.

So all I’ve got right now are wedding photos, so they are what I’m posting. Soon enough, however, I should be able to land some flood pictures, just as soon as I take a break from writing about it.

Full wedding photos here.

Sometimes You Don’t Know What You Have

I shot this photo today of Steve, a 21-year-old man just back from Afghanistan. He won several medals while he was there, and his grandmother is from Fryeburg. I’m writing something up for our 9/11 10 year anniversary edition. Steve is going to send me some photos of him from while he was in Afghanistan, so the photo was an afterthought. I was flipping through the images on my computer tonight, however, and I came upon this one. Now, granted, I know he was part of team that was attacked after an IED attack, and he was one of those who counterattacked and maybe saved someone’s life. I also know he was at his base when IDF—indirect fire—started raining down, and he and the rest of his platoon left the protection of the bunker to respond with M240 Bravos. And I know when I was his age I just as easily could have joined the army because my hometown seemed boring. But the fact is I look at this photo, his anchored gaze, and it catches me. I feel like he can see me now, hours after I thanked him for his service. It is an incredibly powerful image, because it shows just who is risking and sacrificing for the United States: kids. Well-intentioned, friendly kids. Kids who loved the Red Sox in 2001, when the war he just returned from started.

That’s why I love photojournalism—one photo can change your entire day, your entire experience, your entire life. One shot can tell a story. This one does for me.

(Unfortunately the colors don’t reproduce well here. I’ve got to figure that out.)

Write What You Know

Every once in a while you get to write about something you know a lot about and about someone you know. Sometimes that can be great. Other times that can suck.

I didn’t put anything up about this story, I don’t think, but last week a man fell roughly 100 feet while rock climbing on Cathedral Ledge. I know about climbing, and I knew the man. Thankfully he lived, but he had to spend two nights in the hospital and was very shaken afterward.

The other day he came by the office and dropped off a card. That’s where I snapped the photo. He gave me and another reporter two scratch tickets each, a play on how lucky he was to survive the fall. His streak ended, however, before he bought the tickets, because neither Tom nor I won anything.

Somedays the news is impersonal, something abstract and in no way connected to you. Some days, however, it is the exact opposite. At least this time the news wasn’t all bad.

Kickin’ It With Ed

Ed is not like Newt, or Rudy, or RP or Gary Johnson. Ed is waaayyy more mellow, although he too has political aspirations. He’s a local guy who believes he’s been screwed by the town of Bartlett. I’ve talked to him a bunch, and he is convinced his rights are being trampled on despite a number of court judgements arguing otherwise.

Now he’s running for Bartlett selectman in 2012, despite that race being more than six months away. I got a chance to talk to him today and shoot a portrait, but I was distracted by something in the background: his campaign sign. Seven months early, but he’s hard at it.

And did you notice how he refers to himself? “Hobo Ed.” Imagine if “Hobo Mitt” were to storm the campaign trail!

A Day of Clean Up

Today was all about picking up after myself, journalistically speaking. I came into the office just in time to get an email about an error in a story. There was a high school party over the weekend where police had to get a search warrant to bust eight teens for underage drinking. I wrote it up, including the fact that many of them were athletes and the arrests may affect their eligibility. For one of the young women I listed the wrong sports, implicating another young woman who’s name is very similar. The mother of the second young woman, understandably, was very upset. I did what I could, putting together a correction and an apology for her daughter, but it still sucks.

A story can be 99 percent right, but that’s not good enough. In a story about eight teens getting arrested, with ages, addresses, and facts about the arrest, the thing I got wrong was basketball and volleyball instead of cross country and track. Still, that’s enough. It’s enough that one young woman in no way connected to the incident felt implicated.

I did what I could with an honest mistake. It happens, and it’s bound to happen again. Hopefully the next time it occurs the person it happens to is as willing as this girl was to accept our apology. My apology.

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 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.