Category: media

Not So Good

They found the body of 11-year-old Celina Cass in the Connecticut River. This story was far enough outside of my area that I only tangentially covered it, but it sent me rushing back to four months ago, when it was a 20-year-0ld mother authorities were fishing out of the river, and senior assistant attorney general Jane Young was avoiding my questions.

The Dittmeyer murder case is still awaiting formal charges, but today I worked on another part of the story. Recently there have been a number of unexplained unresponsive people around town. One of them wound up dying of a drug overdose. The person who found him was visiting a swimming hole with his family when he found the man frothing at the mouth.

These types of stories aren’t fun, but in picturesque communities like the Mount Washington Valley they need to be done. Spend the day in Jackson and it can be easy to forget what Washington Street in Conway looks like.

The same is true of the North Country. I love it up there, and I appreciate its beauty every time I visit, but there are ugly stories that come out of everywhere. Today’s ugly story is out of West Stewartstown. I’m glad it’s not on my front door, but its not far enough from my backyard for me to ignore. Maybe the next search will end better…

Encouraging Words

The Ron Paul interviews are approaching 7,000 views, and when I got into work today I got this encouraging email:

 

As the last print journalist, I understand where Mr. McDanel is coming from. The coverage of the Casey Anthony trial (of which I know next to nothing) adds so little to our public discourse, and yet hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to it. The substance of what candidates actually stand for, meanwhile, is crucial to our democracy. If people aren’t informed they can’t self-govern. Newspapers still play a crucial role in this. It’s good some people still recognize it.

On the other hand it’s too bad it takes a video posted on YouTube to make someone appreciate newspapers again. Hopefully that isn’t a sign of the print apocalypse.

Facebook Friends

A colleague asked me the other day how I was able to get in touch with a man who until the day before was in jail pending assault charges for a hatchet attack.

Funny story…

Not really, but it is interesting to note how much information is available out there on social networking sites, and how much it of a help it can be for reporting.

Like this: people were defending a man accused of murder on the Conway Daily Sun Facebook page, so I shot several of them a message with my work phone number. One of them got back to me, and I interviewed her about the man’s character.

Then a couple weeks later there was this hatchet attack. The same woman was listed in court documents as living with the accused. So I called her up. She talked to me briefly, but when the man got out of jail on bail she had him call me.

He then said he was threatened and called racial slurs prior to the attack (the man is black). I looked at the MySpace page of one of the men involved, and his last name on that page was “Reich.” He was also fans of skinhead neo-Nazi bands. It lent some credence to the man’s story, and it sparked an interesting conversation with the police about whether they would charges coming out for anyone else in the incident.

I have also used Facebook to link people, such as relatives of the man who fathered Krista Dittmeyer’s daughter. It’s amazing what is available online. Reporters don’t have a lot of rules, and they have to use everything at their disposal to get the story. Facebook and other social media have proven to be one hell of a tool.

More War

This story by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is a great explanation of exactly what it is that makes me want to go back to places like Iraq. It isn’t about hanging it out there and putting my life on the line, it’s about realizing that there are stories out there so terrible no one wants to hear them. Those are exactly the stories that ought to be told.

Particularly with photographs, journalism from war zones can redirect the future. Our lives, here in the United States, are pretty easy. Life here is good, even in the worst of times. It’s easy to forget that rape is used as an offensive strategy in the Congo, or that Mexicans are dying every day in a war fueled by Americans’ drug habits. Reporters have the job to go where others won’t, to find out what isn’t obvious and make it known. Sometimes those places are courtrooms, sometimes it is the battlefront. The reminders, however, have to happen, because otherwise it’s too easy to forget.

The article did a good job getting that across. I’m no daredevil; I’ve remarkably conservative, actually. But those stories need to be told, and I’m not going to leave it up to chance that they do.

News Cycle

Want a quick lesson in journalism? Newspapers do the real work.

Want to know how I know? All it took was a mistake.

At the press conference today the cameras were again lined up to shoot the assistant attorney general as she gave the latest report. The Conway Daily Sun photographer and I showed up about 10 minutes early, long after all the television crews had set up.

One of the camera operators noticed us standing a bit behind everyone else. “You guys from the Conway Daily Sun?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He smiled. “You guys are killing it with this story,” he said.

“Yeah,” said another guy, “we get all our news from you.”

But this post isn’t for me to boast. Actually, just the opposite. At 7:30 p.m. last night, after more than nine hours waiting for a body to come out of the pond, I took a closer look at the police log from the night before. Two men had been interviewed by police at the base of Cranmore ski area, right near where the body was found. One of them was the brother of the man Krista Dittmeyer had a child with. Suspicious, I thought, this has to go in the paper.

Had I been a bit more on top of it I would have noticed the reason police met the two men there: because they called police. But I didn’t, and the story I wrote said police stopped the two men, not that the two men asked police to come meet them.

Fast-forward to today, 6 p.m. The NBC affiliate in Portland announces two men were stopped by police at the base of the mountain, one of them the brother of the man Dittmeyer had a child with. A quick look by a fresh pair of eyes would have cleared this error up, but no one there gave it a look. They just read off my story.

My story wasn’t wrong, but it set the wrong tone about the two men. One wound up arrested on an unrelated warrant, and because I omitted the phone call they look bad.

I can admit it — I screwed up. It was a long day, and I miss read a report not meant for human consumption. At least I’m not the television station, however — their only excuse is that they didn’t check the facts they were reporting straight out of the newspaper (uncredited, I might add). Who screwed up there? Not one person, but their entire process of reporting.

I did what I can to make it right on my end. I wrote a new story that will run tomorrow. In it is says they made the phone call despite it leading to one of them getting arrested. I also include the criminal record of the man not arrested, so it isn’t all positive, but it certainly puts the two in a better light. It doesn’t provide all the answers, but it gives a clearer impression of what happened.

I’ll be interested to see if the television station will correct their mistake (they weren’t the only ones, by the way), or if they’ll just keep on rolling. We may be killing it, but I report for one paper. Everyone else would do well to do their own reporting.

Hot News, Sad Day

What a day today was. I spent most of the day in the Cranmore parking lot getting sunburnt, surrounded by television crews. Police found the body of 20-year-old Krista Dittmeyer in a pond at the base of the ski area this morning, putting an end to a multiday search. It took them until 6:30 p.m. to confirm they found her, and for much of the day people were very upset with us for reporting on Facebook that a body had been found. People thought we were being disrespectful of Dittmeyer’s family, or that we were jumping the gun and reporting things we didn’t know.

I knew there was a body in the pond at 9:15 a.m. I 100 percent knew it, a police officer confirmed it. For me there was no choice but report that as soon as possible.

I get paid to do what is essentially a public service: to keep the public informed. When I know something, and I know the information is good, it is my job to inform the public.

And yet it provoked anger, rage even.

On Saturday I posted on the Conway Daily Sun’s Facebook page that a 20-year-old Portland woman was missing, and that her baby had been left in the car. I got that information from a police officer, and I trusted it to be true. I put it on the Facebook page as soon as I could, not knowing how else I could get it out there (our next paper wasn’t until Tuesday).

For days since that first post people have begged for information. Each morning there were requests for. On Easter Sunday someone asked for an update before I was out of bed. As soon as I saw it I put a call in to the police station. There wasn’t any news, and right away I posted that on Facebook.

I would never have held information back then. I would welcome criticism if I did. But the same is true for bad news.

When I posted the police found a body I didn’t say it was Dittmeyer’s because I didn’t know. But I did say they found a body, because the fact is they had.

“But you didn’t know,” people might say, “no one confirmed there was a body.”

If the house in front of you is burning, yet the chief of police says it isn’t burning, what would you report? Confirmed or not by an official police spokesmen, I knew there was a body in that pond.

“Other news agencies aren’t reporting it yet, it must not be true!”

It’s true, other news agencies didn’t report it, but it was true. There was a body in that pond, and it was Krista Dittmeyer. It was true at 9:30 a.m. when I posted on Facebook they had found a body, and it was true at 6:30 p.m. when the assistant attorney general told the TV cameras it was Dittmeyer. I had good information, and just like when it was good news, I did not hesitate to give it directly over to the public. The Sun never said it was Dittmeyer before the assistant attorney general identified her, but the fact is from the start we were right on the body.

That wasn’t by chance. It was because of good, solid reporting by the Sun team. Official confirmation or not, we knew.

Only the day before I had a great lesson in this. For days no official source would say a thing about the father of Krista Dittmeyer’s baby. So I started digging. With the help of colleagues at the Sun and others around the community, I discovered a man named Kyle Acker was the father, and that he was in prison in Maine for selling drugs. When I approached official sources about this, they refused to comment, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. It went in the paper. We beat out every other news agency in the country with that information. That’s good reporting, and it was the TRUTH.

I take my job seriously. I do not publish information I believe to be incomplete or untrue, and I will not hold back information I believe the public wants to know. The community at large has been hungry for information about Dittmeyer since the start of the case. They celebrated us for giving it to them when they hoped she was alive; they can’t crucify us for doing the same thing now that she is dead.

If I can confirm it, out it goes, just like it did this morning.

Official sources are wonderful, but they can’t rule a journalist. When an official source wants to get information out they can, but what about when those sources want to hold back information?

That is when a journalist’s job actually begins. Retyping press releases isn’t reporting. Reporting is learning new facts and verifying statements, even if people don’t want you to know those facts or check their statements. The public is entitled to the TRUTH, even if it sucks. And they are entitled to it right away, without censorship or delay.

I do not fault the official sources — in this case the attorney general’s office or the Conway Police Department — for trying to keep a tight lid on this investigation. But just because they don’t hand me every fact on a platter doesn’t mean I should stop looking. Today I verified there was a body in the pond, and I put it out to the public. To do otherwise would be unethical.

Painful truth is still TRUTH, and verified facts are still facts. Reporters delve for truth and facts, instead of only publishing the easy story, should be celebrated, even if the truth is painful.

The Latest

Krista Dittmeyer has not turned up yet, but news about her baby’s father has. He is in jail for dealing drugs, something thus far that has been out of the news. It was only because of my colleagues’ longtime connections in the community that I was able to uncover who he was and what he was in prison for, but we beat the national media hovering over Conway. That feels good.

Now we’ll see where other community connections get me. I’ve been hearing a bunch of rumors that are tough to substantiate about what Dittmeyer was doing over here. I’ve got a few leads out there, and may have another interesting story by tomorrow night. This one is going to wind up on the Today Show, I guess, but I turned down the chance at an interview. I’ll just keep doing my job, and leave television to the television reporters.

Press Conference

Krista Dittmeyer has been missing for several days. The search for her began on Saturday after her 14-month-0ld daughter was discovered in her car parked in the parking lot of a local ski area. It’s become a bit of a media circus, but the Sun has tried to keep its coverage professional. Here is a short snipet from the Conway Police Department’s press conference:

Read the full story here.