Category: Reporting

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.

One More Candidate…

We had former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in the office a bit ago. He sat and talked to us for an hour, and I recorded a video (as usual). He was really interesting, the kind of guy you both trust and might trust to do a good job in office. The only problem is recent polls have him below 1 percent.

I know I’m not helping. I have an hour of video I haven’t posted yet (my wife’s birthday had me running up to Quebec for a long weekend, and I just haven’t sat down to process it). But when I look at the primary system I get the feeling such an electable candidate can’t make it far.

Here’s my view on the current hot candidates: Romney is like Kerry in 2004 — he similar name recognition, and evokes a similar lack of enthusiasm. He would be tough for conservatives to get behind.

Then there’s Bachmann, who’s campaign sends me eight emails a day, despite not once coming near my coverage area. She’s a Tea Party favorite, but I’ll be interested to see how centrist voters view Tea Party candidates once this debt ceiling debate winds down. Hardliners appeal to primary voters, but in the general election she’d have a tough time drawing in the center. Nominating here would be akin to voting for Obama, I’d bet.

Huntsman and Johnson could have a shot, but no one knows who they are. Pawlenty and Santorum don’t seem to have gained traction. Gingrich’s campaign began with a flop and has since headed down. Ron Paul has generated excitement (clearly), but he again is like Bachmann—not the kind of guy to win in the general election.

The primary process weeds out the moderates. At the Sun we get the chance to chat with these people, and the people who give reasonable, rational, pragmatic, non-ideological answers are the ones who will never make it anywhere. The most interesting candidate we’ve had so far, the one who could most like give Obama a run for his money, is Johnson. Unfortunately, name recognition is more important than policy positions. Otherwise it could be a real race next November.

Update: This is what I mean—only one candidate for the debt ceiling compromise! Instead the candidates supported self-imposed economic calamity. Scary. November 2012!

A Quick CDS Video

Somedays at work are tough. Other days rock. This was a day of work a week and a half ago, but the story just ran this weekend:

 


 

The full story about the trailwork is here. They’re meant to work as a package, so you know what you’re looking at. If I ever complain about how hard my work is, be sure to remind me of this day!

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.

Berlin, once again

I heard the news of the death of the Laidlaw Berlin Biopower project on NHPR last week, and the information has been trickling in ever since. I’m not sure what to think. I have always understood both sides of that argument — some people for it, some against, based on whether they needed jobs now or could wait for some better future down the road. Now it’s gone, the federal prison is on hold, and the state prison survived after some threats by the department of corrections. Where is Berlin headed? I wish I knew. I’m not there nearly as much as I was, but I still make it up there far more than I ever did before I worked there. And I still think about how to get back there. What will it be? Who will work there? I think it’s like most working class places — dying out. The fact is the socioeconomic strata that the mill supported has evaporated in the United States. Portland, Maine, and Portsmouth are clear examples of what happens next: they get turned into upscale apartments that the former working class residents can’t afford. Will that happen in Berlin? It already is, but it hasn’t become a trend yet. We’ll see if it reaches that tipping point. And we’ll see how the people that trend edges out react. It looks to be an interesting time, for sure…

Recruiting Disciples

We got to sit down with GOP contender Ron Paul last Friday for 45 minutes of discussion in the office. I videoed all of it, and now it is on YouTube. And it’s on fire.

The first clip has more than 3,500 views. I posted it three days ago. The other two clips (each one about 15 minutes) have almost 800 and more than 400 views. They both went up yesterday. They are all high definition, so they took around six hours to upload. Combined with the holiday weekend and it didn’t happen in an instant.

But the disciples flocked almost instantly. People love Ron Paul. His message resonates. Newt and Giuliani got around 100 and less than 50 views, respectively. Ron Paul is getting 35 and 70 times as many views.

But you have to wonder whether all that fervor can translate into a candidacy, and whether a Paul 2012 candidacy would be electable come next November.

You can hear me ask RP that in one of the segments. He says he is electable because his time has come, and the issues he’s championed for 30 years are now in vogue. He also said he is willing to be bipartisan, reaching across the aisle to work with Democrats on certain legislation.

But Paul’s steadfast adherence to his values is both a good thing and a problem. While it is refreshing to talk to a politician who doesn’t seem like he’s shifting with public opinion, the only time Ron Paul works with the opposition is when they see eye to eye with him. He is uncompromising in the most literal meaning of the word. That unwillingness to compromise means he often doesn’t, even if at times that makes him ineffectual.

But his honesty and integrity draw supporters. It’s probably much easier to get behind a candidate like Paul than one like Romney, who changes his positions repeatedly on important issues, but it isn’t as easy to get a guy like Paul into office. Despite three decades in Washington, Paul is still an outsider. Romney would work within Washington’s power structure. Paul is looking to tear that structure down. It would be pretty easy to see how easily a bipartisan effort to stop Ron Paul could take shape.

And while that may seem all the more reason to support Paul (everyone says they hate D.C. politics, even if they only ever see it from afar), the fact is his libertarian ideology isn’t the system that led to America’s past successes, and like any other -ism it might just fail. It would be scary to scrap the model of government that has held true for the last 100 years on the promise of a Texas doctor. No one really knows what effectively denuding the federal government would do, but suffice to say that would be real change.

But even if he was elected, even with the recent flare-up of the Tea Party and other limited government factions, the president doesn’t have that power. He would make some changes, and they would galvanize the opposition, and four or eight or twelve years later the pro-federal government forces would retake the White House. The U.S. government was built to lumber along, not to make leaps. The ideology of an -ism would break across it’s bow, and the disciples would lose their shepherd.

Just look at the disciples who elected Barack Obama. They had faith. They believed. Yes we can? Not in Washington, no you can’t.