Category: Conway Daily Sun

More Lawyering

This week I was in charge of attorney issues. We finally got the documents from the court case we won, but tons and tons was redacted. I had to get on the phone with two attorneys and argue why what they did overstepped the court order. I was happy to be able to successfully negotiate this one away seeing as the other option was going back to the courts, but considering all the holes in the paperwork that would have been a viable option.

And then there was the matter of abolishing the budget committee and whether that violates Conway’s charter. I was on the phone with the town attorney, asking if he thought the ballot question to transform the budget committee from a board with statutory authority into advisory-only was legal when I pointed out a way the voters could wind up eliminating the budget committee all together, which would put the town in violation of its charter. The town attorney’s response: “That’s a good point.”

I’m not sure what attorney’s get to talk to me, but I know what I get to talk to them and it isn’t much. Sometimes its fun to push people outside your paygrade.

That is essentially what journalism is, I guess — asking people who ought to know the answers basic questions to test them. Late last year I got to challenge candidates vying the U.S. Presidency. One of them makes more in a day than I make in a year (guess which one). If that isn’t quizzing above your pay grade I don’t know what is.

The nice thing about being a reporter is you aren’t being paid by any side. You are being paid to find the truth. Press every side, then press them again, and if something that appeared right before goes sour press it until it pops.

I had back-to-back hour long conversation/arguments this past week about the court case we won, both of them on the phone. Coworkers were stealing glances my way, wondering who I was sparing with. At the end someone said they wanted to buy me a coffee because I’d had such a rough couple of days. I, however, couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Pushing like that is why I do the job. Who wants to be an attorney — those guys are paid to defend their client. I’m paid to defend whoever is right.

Budget Time, and Public Office

Local government is an amazing thing. In New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, the goal is to put control directly into the hands of the voters for the most part. That means elected officials sit before citizens and have to answer direct questions directly. Imagine if the same were true on the national level…

I’ve been caught up in the budget debates in recent weeks, from how much teachers make to grant applications for police officers. The only thing that seems to be missing, however, is the public.

Last night I was at the public hearing for the town of Conway budget, which just passed the 10,000 population milestone. There were roughly six members of the public in the audience. Everyone else was an elected official. Tonight it was the town of Bartlett budget public hearing. There were 10 people there, including the fire chief and the police chief. While proportionately better (Bartlett has about 3,000 residents, I think) it was still a dismal turnout.

The day before I was at a Conway selectmen’s meeting. A local neighborhood association had urged people to come out and voice their position on an issue, but there were less than five people that heeded that call. A couple other people who were there for unrelated reasons shared their opinions, but overall it was a flop (there may have been a few emails sent to town officials, however).

I wrote about this problem years ago in Berlin — Where is everybody? Local government gives people a lot of control over how decisions are made, but first people have to show up. And they don’t. When they do, like at last year’s school deliberative meeting, they can exert amazing force, but in day to day governance boards and commissions are left on their own. It’s sad to see.

And yet people complain. They write to the paper and post to Facebook about how much local government sucks. They may not realize the level of power they could wield, accustomed instead to federal elections where one vote is a drop in the bucket.

If there is one thing I’ve learned by covering hundreds of public meetings (literally) it’s show up. And run. Get involved. Try running things and you’ll probably criticize a lot less. Or at least you’ll be able to do something about it.

AND WE WIN!

The ruling out of superior court showed up recently on the Right To Know case I filed and then argued late last year. Apparently my argument as to why exactly the Conway School Board must release documents pertaining to the behavior of one school board member was more compelling than the two attorneys’ arguments as why the papers should not be released. The courts favored disclosure, as we hoped they would.

Here is the story about the ruling, which came in just last week. We had been waiting and waiting to hear, and then the publisher found it among the junk mail.

The order itself raises a number of questions, like why there was no action taken by administrators who knew the school board member was acting inappropriately. I’m looking forward to getting the documents themselves to see just what they say, and then continuing the story into how bad behavior was allowed to continue for years.

It was my first case, so to speak, and I won. Hopefully all of them in the future work out so well.

Death, and What To Do About It

Yesterday a woman fell ice skating and presumably hit her head. By this morning she was dead. It wasn’t one of those stories you get a press release about, it’s just what happened.

And, since it was at a public skating rink, it was news. That isn’t my favorite kind of news to report, but like fires and felony arrests it landed in my lap.

So here’s the thing: we knew who it was, but we didn’t have all the information. We know her name and where she works, but not her address or her age. Just putting a name out there without more targeted information is bad form, so I started scrambling to get more.

I was able to get people to tell me they had heard it was this same woman, but they also just heard it through the community web, so it didn’t have the kind of value that can be turned into ink on the page. I was finally able to get a little information out of the fire chief, but still no name, address or age.

So what do you do? Do you print the story, knowing you’re right but also knowing someone with the same name could be incorrectly connected because of the holes you were unable to fill?

It’s one of those things where I know I’m right, and so does the rest of the newsroom, but I’ve got no source I can cite. In other words, I don’t know it.

The woman’s story made it into the paper, but she was left unidentified. I tried her kids, her work, the police, town records, anything I could, but that’s where it landed. At least we got something in the paper.

The worst part: figuring out there is a story here at 3:35 p.m. on a Friday. Do you know how many people answer their phone at that time? Not many.

New Projects…

So I’ve got a handful of new projects I’m lining up, some international, some national, some local, all cool. I made my first pitch to the New York Times, something for their travel section, which I’m waiting to hear back about. And I might be able to do a one week fellowship that would give me a foot in the door on doing some international reporting. That, combined with a couple good stories I’ve got in mind has me looking all over while enjoying each day at the Sun.

And it’s not like I’ve got a shortage of stories there. I’m working on one about how the budget committee is becoming a resurgent force, and another about how Irene is impacting the town four months later. That one will likely be an NHPR story as well.

Somedays things are quiet. After four days of vacation, that wasn’t today.

Luckily I got a great NYC trip in, with a slew of fun pictures. Now to just figure out how to incorporate that into my world more…

Good News

So I’m planning a few big trips this year. For the past year, with two weeks of vacation, I was fairly limited on what I could do for big reporting adventures. I got to go to Iraq because I had arranged it when I took my job at the Sun, but it was kind of a one time thing. Now, however, I’ve proven myself at the paper and have permission to do things like that more often.

Not all of them will be to war zones, mind you. I’m working now on putting together a proposal for a travel article for the Boston Globe. That will hopefully be on climbing the largest piece of granite in the United States, El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. And then I’m putting together another project to South America to report on the impact the eroding glaciers have had on the tourism industry.

I’m also looking at going to Southern Sudan for the one year anniversary of their declaration of independence, but that is a bit more touchy (Islamist militants and such). But I have the green light to get out there and freelance a bit more aggressively, something I’ve been having a hard time finding the time to do.

And best of all, I don’t have to leave the job I love. It’s awesome when this stuff works out.

More Money

So last night was the real start of the budget season, and the police department budget was up for review by the budget committee. They got taken to task for increasing their budget because in previous years they moved money around to buy equipment they said they needed. That was a story I wrote back in March — it was good to see it referenced this season, and to see that my reporting has the community making possibly different decisions than they might have otherwise.

I’ll post the story as soon as I write up last night’s meeting. Time to get to work.

Primary Flop

This post’s title is not meant to reflect any of the candidates in yesterday’s G.O.P. primary. It is a commentary on how that primary wound up in the Mount Washington Valley. Since mid-December not one candidate came to the Mount Washington Valley. The national media made New Hampshire sound like a madhouse, where you couldn’t go two steps without running into a presidential hopeful. Well I’m here to say that wasn’t the case in Conway, Jackson, Bartlett, Madison or any of the towns I cover. The closest a candidate got was the Mount Washington Hotel, in Coös County,  on the other side of Crawford Notch.

It’s interesting to reflect on that wall to wall coverage with that in mind. I read several stories today about how there were more reporters at candidate events than New Hampshire voters. It certainly felt that way here. I spent the afternoon covering a death on Mount Washington instead of covering politics because, as far as I could tell, there were no politics to cover.

Oh well, the next race is only four years away.

Decisions, Decisions

We got the judge’s order in our Right to Know case today. Apparently I was convincing enough that the judge felt the need for an in camera review of the documents, meaning he gets to look at them and decide if they are of a private or public nature. Others in the office were taking it as a win, but I am a bit more cautious. To me it means neither side won handily, and the judge needs to peek at the cliff notes to make his decision. It does, however, prolong the matter. So we didn’t lose, which was the big thing.

On a similar note, the 26-year-old son of a police commissioner was arrested in November for stealing a truck, and it will be on tomorrow’s front page (below the fold). It in no way reflects on the performance of the elected official, but it was a significant enough crime we just couldn’t ignore it. The result is her name and that of her son will be taken to task because of their relationship. If it wasn’t for his mother’s position on the police commission we wouldn’t report this crime. And yet there is no way to ignore it, because if we don’t put it out there people start wondering if we are colluding with the “powers that be” to keep the commissioner’s son out of the paper.

It’s kind of too bad, but the decision had to be made that way. There wasn’t much we could do after we learned the story — it’s just a newsworthy event. And what’s more, the young man was the victim of an armed robbery two weeks before he allegedly stole the truck, an incident I agreed he didn’t need to be named in because he was the victim. It was again newsworthy that it was a family member of the commissioner who was robbed, but I didn’t think which family member it was was relavant.

Fast forward two months, however, and I can’t leave out that detail. It all ties together. In some ways these stories write themselves. I couldn’t have imagined two months about the person I was trying to protect from undue scrutiny after he’d just had a gun in his face would be looking at a year in jail himself. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you have any decisions to make when you write a story — this one is one of those instances.

2011

It’s the time of year everyone is doing their “Year In Review.” I’m no different — at work I started writing up 2011 today, and I hope to be finished by tomorrow. For the Sun my year was two things: Dittmeyer murder and Irene. For LPJ, however, it starts a few months earlier:

Iraq — It seems that would obviously be the seminal experience of any year, but in a year like 2011 three weeks in Iraq and Kuwait quickly falls into the background. Looking back, however, it still amazes me I got on that first flight out of Boston, made it to the Iran/Iraq border and made it home. It was one incredible trip.

Dittmeyer — She was killed on a Saturday night, and by Monday the Mount Washington Valley was seething with reporters. We were able to beat all of them, however; probably one of the coolest experiences of the year.

Drugs — I’ve said this before, but sometime in August I wrote what was probably the best story I’ve done so far about how drugs and crime are intertwined in the Mount Washington Valley, and how the problem is only getting bigger. It was a great narrative, something I read today and am still surprised I wrote.

Investigations — There were really two, both involving the police department. One was into how they spend their money, and the other was into money stolen from the evidence room. Both of them wound up being one-off stories in a sense, but they proved that the Sun knows what it means to be a watchdog newspaper.

Irene — This was a big one. When the storm hit we were out of town, and the Saco and Rocky Branch flooded, blocking us from getting home. We slept in Portland, Maine, and when I got dropped off at the paper in the morning I went right to it. That week was all about telling people’s stories, stories that most people didn’t realize had happened. It was a blur, much like the week of Dittmeyer, but it was one where the paper made a difference in how people saw their experience. Again, that’s why I got into this job.

Candidates — From Newt to Mitt, Santorum to Paul, nothing is more interesting than getting to sit down with the people vying to sit in the presidential seat. I’ve been able to argue with and push several of these perspective contenders, something few people get to do. It only happens once every four years, and I’m sure glad I was there for it.

Court — This is the latest in a string: arguing before a judge about the public’s right to know about the actions of elected officials. I still don’t know the outcome, but it was still an experience to be going to the courts to fight for transparency.

There have been dozens of other notables, from producing videos to my first NPR paycheck and being named employee of the year, but that’s the highest highs. Hopefully 2012 will burn even brighter, but I’m not sure how it can.

Happy New Year.