Category: journalism

When No Time Is Right

In the news world timing is everything.

A story about Michele Bachmann would have little resonance nationally right now, but 500 words on Tulsa, Oklahoma, race relations would fit on most front pages. News has to be new; if it isn’t the latter it isn’t the former. It’s basically the definition of the industry.

Sometimes in the media world, however, timing hurts more than it helps. A few weeks ago I saw a trailer for a movie called Neighborhood Watch about, well, a team of neighborhood watchers. It was a comedy, its schtick was these guys thought they were tough but really weren’t. It probably seemed like a good idea before 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a man serving on the neighborhood watch. All the sudden being “timely” was no asset.

That’s what happened today at the Conway Daily Sun. Last week there was a police training exercise where officers from several departments went through scenarios built on actual events to hone their skills. We sent a reporter and a photographer, thinking the training would make a neat feature. In one scenario an officer wound up getting shot because of circumstances and some decisions the officer made. It seemed like the quintessential incident to build a story around. The officer hopefully learned the lesson, and it makes for a intriguing slice of life piece on people in uniform.

That story was slated to run tomorrow. Then last night a man shot five policemen in Greenland, N.H. One of them, a police chief from a small town with two weeks until he retired, died. All the sudden the interesting slice of life story took on a much sharper edge. I went into work with the thought we would kill the story, at least in the short term, out of respect and to give people some time to process what had happened. A week, I thought, would be fine, but a day was not enough.

I got overruled on that thought, and we modified the story to reflect the incident. There were also a host of concurrent stories that highlighted local connections with the victim. The timing, in some ways, couldn’t be better. In other ways it couldn’t be worse.

I’m not sure how to best deliver horrible news. Today my story ran on the small child who was beaten and raped in Albany, N.H. When is a good time to read that? As a newspaper reporter I have a duty to inform, but at the same time I want to be sensitive to my readers’ stomachs. That doesn’t always happen.

I talk to the police weekly, sometimes even daily. But today I didn’t want to call. I drove to the courthouse and noticed the flag in front of the police station flying at half-staff. The fraternity is mourning the loss of one of their own. It didn’t seem to me to be the time to be prying.

But that’s the job. Luckily it wasn’t my story, because on the heels of last week’s piece I wasn’t in the mood. I very much enjoy catching wasteful spending or pressing politicians about policy issues, but beaten children and dead police officers are not my thing. The problem with a newsroom, unlike other jobs, is that story you heard around the watercooler is the one we have to delve into. Whether it’s amazing or grim, we get immersed in it. Wherever I went today people had two questions: How did that happen to that poor child? And can you believe what happened to the poor police officer?

The bad news comes. Sometimes there is no way to time it. Sometimes it seems to come in waves. I haven’t even mentioned the triple shooting in Dalton, N.H., about an hour from Conway. Two dead in that one. How are we supposed to time this news? I’m not sure there is a way to.

Some Days More Than Others

Some days work sucks.

Not because the boss is riding you, or because you spill your coffee. Some days are worse than that. Some days you swing by the court just to check in and the clerk hands you more than 20 pages of documents. Some days those documents all have to do with one thing — the man who beat a two year old child so badly his intestines leaked fecal matter and nearly half his blood into his abdominal cavity. Some days you have to go back to your desk and read about it, line by line, word by word, so you can explain it to the community.

Those days suck.

That was today. The child is now in his father’s custody, out of reach of his mother’s (hopefully) ex-boyfriend, who, if I was reading the account right, police allege sodomized the two-year-old boy in the woodshed while the mother slept.

My job may have sucked today, but at least I’m not the ER nurse who police interviewed who had the traumatized child put in his arms. At least I’m not the pediatric surgeon who repaired this poor boy’s insides. I can’t say with certainty the man alleged to have punched, burned and raped this small child did it, but someone did. Luckily I only have to read about it in black and white. That poor boy had to live it.

Not much gets to me in this job. It was almost a year ago that the 20-year-old Krista Dittmeyer wound up first missing then dead. That was a tragedy, but the picture prosecutors painted at the arraignment of the three men arrested in connection with her murder left Dittmeyer looking less than angelic. She was a drug dealer, according to the senior assistant Attorney General, which makes her murder far less mysterious. Had she been a 20-year-old drug dealing male, wearing a hoodie and baggy pants, it wouldn’t have garnered much attention. Her child, thankfully, was never injured, even as her mother found herself floating in a pond.

Not this time. This time the mother slept while the child was raped and beaten. That hurts. That weighs on me in a way Dittmeyer never will. This child’s dangerous game was not of his choosing. He didn’t get airlifted to Maine Medical because of risky choices he made. His mother made decisions that contributed to the situation, he did not. He was two. TWO. He learned at two something many of us will never know: what true ugliness looks like. And the fact is he did nothing to deserve it.

I read about this boy this afternoon and I hated my job. I hated the sheets of paper I was holding, the words I was reading and the person who did this to this child. I hated it, and my hatred changed none of it.

Thankfully, I got a reprieve, a breather, from this story. The weekend paper is aimed at tourists, it isn’t the place for stories of toddler rape. I’ll write that story up for Tuesday, when all the tourists have gone home. Hopefully by then I’ll have steeled myself enough to reread the account.

Ugliness is out there. It doesn’t help to shy away from it, but facing it isn’t going to be easy either. Some days it’s OK to hate your job. Sometimes it’s the only sane reaction.

On the Big Screen

On Thursday evening I gave a talk to about 25 people at the Conway Public Library on my reporting trip to Iraq last year. A friend of mine has a son in the library youth program, and his son asked if I would be willing to come speak. It was open to the public, and there was a pretty good turnout. It was my first formal revisit of the trip, and in order to give it I had to root back through my posts while I was there to remind myself of the experience.

Every story I told reminded me of another story, and every vignette sent me directly into the next vignette. It was my attempt of sharing everything I couldn’t cram from that three week experience into the radio stories and blog posts. I had a fantastic time, and my friend tells me it was well received by the audience as well.

I’m bouncing a few of these types of projects around as we speak, although none of them are as comprehensive or with as solid a foundation as that one was. There have been a number of changes at NHPR since last year, and though I still feel welcome to contribute I doubt I could find the same level of support I found then.

That has me mulling around just what the next such project should look like. Like I said, I’ve got a few, but none of them are on the same scale. It is hard, however, to imaging matching the pace of reporting on U.S. troops in the midst of a country that had been a top American enemy for more than a decade.

And besides, I’ve been enjoying rocking the local paper. Day after day I’m churning out interesting stories on real issues. The past year and a half have taught me a ton about the practice of journalism, and I intend to keep those experiences coming.

I do foresee, however, some cool projects on the horizon. Keep your eyes open.

A Plane Ticket Away

Riots in Russia had me thinking about buying a ticket to Moscow. Shelling in Syria got me wondering what it takes to get smuggled across the Lebanese border. Elections in Libya have me looking at maps for Tripoli. And burning Korans in Afghanistan have me thinking it’s time to keep my head down.

After more than a year since Iraq, I’m starting to think about what’s next. I’ve worked out a situation where if I can come up with a cool story I will be able to go, so now I just need that story. I’ve been looking at a lot of war photojournalism lately, like this from James Nachtwey, and it has me again thinking about a trip, only this time without embedding.

I’ve also been shooting a lot of photos, working deliberately towards improving my composition. Some of my shots have been popping up in cool places, like these on a local ice climbing site. Photography is barely a part of my day job now because the paper has an awesome photographer, but every time I can I pull out my camera. Mostly my photos wind up all over Facebook because I’m just out there having fun, but I’d like to take one of those trips with a mission to only shoot, shoot, SHOOT.

I felt that way when I got back from Iraq, where I spent more time playing with microphones than behind the camera. I wanted the other side. Now I’m trying to figure out how to find the time to make all sides — print, audio, photo and video — happen in one trip. And along with that, how to make money doing it.

So I’ve been perusing plane tickets again, and I’m pretty close to buying. It isn’t the sort of thing where I’m looking at AK-47s this time, but instead an environmental story from South America. I am looking at the whole kit — video, audio, photo and print. But at least this time IEDs won’t be a part of the mix.

That will be soon enough.

Close Call

A school board member with a long history of holding student athletes to high standards almost got wrongfully smeared in the paper today. So did his son. The close call was a good lesson on just how much you have to look into things before you put them into print.

Every day I get a copy of the police dispatch logs from the days before, which including information about what police and firefighters had to deal with over the last 24 hours. Among the call log are also the arrests, and in one from last week was the 17-year-old son of a school board member.

The son had been arrested for driving after his license was either suspended or revoked. He got handcuffed, put in the back of the police car, formally arrested and bailed. The parent is the school board member who has long said student athletes who misbehave off campus must be held accountable on campus. That had us asking all sorts of questions, since the son kept playing basketball after the arrest.

We were all set to point out the hypocrisy of the school board member’s position, since no one reported the son’s arrest. It was getting close to a banner story.

Then I called the cops, who told me the whole thing was an administrative error. The Department of Motor Vehicles incorrectly had the son’s license as suspended. The arrest will appear on his arrest record now, the police said, but it was not his fault.

I immediately took the boy’s name out of the police log and called all the people we’d contacted who were connected with the story to make sure they had the full information, but it was that close to a story. The official police records said there was an arrest, and there was no backstory on how it was essentially an erroneous arrest. Think about how that would have looked in tomorrow’s paper.

That was the second story dealing with that same school official where everything pointed in one direction but some key phone call or piece of information tipped the scales in the opposite direction. Both would have been monumental errors on the paper’s part, made someone look bad and in no way left any recourse for those hurt.

These are the dangers of three-quarters journalism. The evidence may point in one direction, but that may be only 90 percent of the evidence. The other 10 percent may make it clear that what the other 90 percent points two is inconsequential. It isn’t about what the evidence points to, it’s about the truth, and for that three-quarters (or even 90 percent) isn’t good enough.

Close calls are a reminder of why solid reporting is so important. Banner stories die because you do your job well. Sometimes it feels great to kill them.

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.

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…