Electric Fishwrap

Last year, students from a program called Secret Harbor started moving into neighborhoods in Skagit County. The program used to be housed on an island in Puget Sound, but because of costs, they had to move to the mainland. Many communities didn’t like this because students from the program had, in the distant past, a history of violent behavior.

This Story of the Month is a follow up to much of the reporting I did last year regarding the boys from Secret Harbor. I wanted to know how they were doing, and it just so happened that a few of them had started making dog treats as a school project. What a great coincidence! It ran Tuesday, May 26.

You can read the story on the Skagit Valley Herald Web site.

Some stories are data driven, others are fueled by a person’s compelling character. The article I wrote about homeless students in Skagit County had elements of both.

In the story Young and Homeless, I began with a girl who left her home because of her mother’s drug addition and violence. The story continues through the debate that school officials have about the legitimacy of the definition of homelessness under the law, called McKinney-Vento.

This story began as a records request about homeless statistics in February. I coordinated with all of the homeless liaisons in Skagit County to get current information. I looked up prior years’ statistics at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction Web site. Lastly, I interviewed a student from Mount Vernon High and others at the Oasis Teen Shelter.

The day after the story ran I got a call from a woman in the county who wanted to offer her spare bedroom for the girl. She was very moved by her story and wanted to help.

Even as a reporter, you can’t help but wonder what a person does with their life after you’ve slipped in for a snapshot of it.

As a person, I hope she does well.

Having trouble coming up with online graphics ideas for your news story? Never fear, the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is here!

OK, I’m a nerd when it comes to anything in Periodic Table format (such as the Beeriodic Table). This is a great way to brainstorm visual ideas for your online stories.

Some of the visualizations could work in print, but many of them take up a lot of space or are interactive and might not work for a print version.

(via the 10,000 Words blog)

I found this link via Angela Grant about how to help your video get to the first page of a Google search result.

If you want your video to rank well, you must give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround videos with relevant on-page HTML that is easily indexed by the search engines. Optimise for key phrases that reflect the content and the terms users search on. You could even tag each scene.

The video title also has to be something people would want to click on. Don’t forget to add “video” to the tag listing.

Just for the heck of it, here’s a Colbert Report video on the newspaper lobby:

Hey if you can’t laugh you’ll cry, right?

Now to the serious stuff.

If you’re having trouble putting my blog into Google Reader or another blog reader, use this link: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ElectricFishwrap.

When I put the URL into the Google Reader subscription, for some reason it kept using my old blog URL in as the source. Eventually I’ll put a redirect to this site, but for now we’re going to have a few moving pains. As always, if you have suggestions for the site let me know.

My first love in journalism was sports. While I rarely report on that now, at least once a year I get the next best thing: elections.

I reported on Burlington-Edison School District’s quest for a construction bond for the better part of a year. March 10 was the culmination of all of their hard work and planning. Economic concerns probably caused many voters to reject the proposal. Here’s a link to the short item we posted on the Web site the next morning.

Story text below:

read more »

Howdy all! As you can see, I finally moved my old blog to its namesake, Electric Fishwrap.

I made the move for a few reasons:

1. I thought katemartinonline.com could be hard to remember. Some people have tried just katemartin.com, which is definitely not my blog. Also, the online part of the url seems redundant.
2. ElectricFishwrap.com is easier to remember because most people I have told about my site at least laughed when they heard the name.
3. I wanted to start with a clean slate and a fresh design. The old blog was located at www.katemartinonline.com/blog. The original site (without the blog part) was designed with Dreamweaver and in my opinion looked really amateur. I wanted to avoid that with this current version.

I’ll be changing a few things around, possibly adding a few more items to the clips section this week during my week’s vacation. In the meantime if you want to contact me or provide feedback to the new site, visit my twitter page @katemartin13 or send me an e-mail: katie.martin.13{at}gmail.com.

I’ve been trying to make time to tell the unusual and interesting stories on the education beat. Between the meeting coverage, Monday packages and budgets, budgets, budgets, it’s often hard to find that time.

In late January, a photographer at work told me about an unusual basketball game. It was just a normally scheduled game, but the stands were packed, everyone was dressed in school colors and the atmosphere was electric.

Turns out it was a rivalry game, but not just any rivalry game. Anacortes High School had asked Burlington-Edison High School if they would be their rival. The story is here, but the short version is Anacortes has lost students over the years and their previous rivalries have disappeared as Anacortes has moved down a league or two. School administrators and students wanted to ramp up school spirit.

I decided right then and there that I had to write a story about it.

A secret: I am a huge sucker for school spirit. This may brand me as a dork or a nerd, but I always dressed up as whatever spirit day it was when I went to high school. Wear green and gold day? Check. Injury day? Leg braces, an arm sling and crutches. By the time senior year rolled around, I was voted as “most spirited girl” in the senior superlatives. This was a huge surprise to me because I thought I wasn’t that popular.

So in short, the nerd in me was intrigued. I thought it was cute that another school would ask another to be its rival.

Reporting the story was a challenge because the game had already happened. Not only that, when the photographer worked the game, they were shooting a basketball game, not the fans. It took me a couple of weeks to get all of the reporting done. I had to find snippets of time between my other assignments to fit it into my schedule.

In the few days before it ran, I kept poking and prodding the story: twisting a sentence here, changing a phrase there, double and triple checking my spelling. I actually woke up in a panic the night before it ran because I was afraid that something was wrong.

I was really happy with the finished story. Turns out a lot of the staff had read it before it went in the paper and they started sharing stories of their high school days (who knew we had three former cheerleaders in our newsroom?). One person even said they wished they could have gone to the game after reading the story.

This post is the first in a monthly series, Story of the Month.

I’m going to start posting a month with a few feature I’ll call “Story of the Month.” The purpose is to highlight a story or two that I’ve done in the past month that I enjoyed reporting on, or that I feel had a significant impact on the community.

I’ll talk about the challenges and some of the details of how I reported the story. Depending on the story I might talk a bit about form. I don’t consider myself an expert in any of these areas. I’ve found that a thorough analysis after the fact can only help me become a better writer.

Occasionally I attend SPJ meetup events. Usually held once a month on the first Friday of the month, we sit around, drink beer and eat incredibly unhealthy food.

This one was different.

On Monday, the staff at the Seattle P-I was told that the paper was being put up for sale. If a buyer was not found, the paper would either fold or it would move to an online-only production.

Feel free to watch the entire heartbreaking announcement.

Editor Dave McCumber has started a blog called Sixty Days. It’s a really good read, by the way. For years the P-I has told the stories of Seattleites. Now, McCumber tells the stories of the newsroom. With only 60 53(?) days, you can be sure he won’t have time to tell them all.

With this in mind, an emergency SPJ meetup was called (like we ever need an excuse to get together and drink beer, hah). I wanted to show support for friends who work there. So after work I drove to the Whym Diner, not sure what to expect.

It was a somber gathering. But there was also hope. Monica Guzman told me about a plan while holding a ball gown she planned to take with her to the inauguration in D.C.

Thursday, a group of people got together and brainstormed ideas to save the P-I. The result is this page, no news is bad news. It’s pretty bare bones so far, but there’s a lot of potential. I signed up, and am waiting to see if I can do anything to help.

They’ve already got a Twitter hash tag, #nnbn, and a Flickr Page.

Toward the end of my time at the meetup, I was talking with a Seattle Times online worker, whom I’ve never met. As we were talking, I saw the Seattle P-I globe peeking out from between two buildings. If I hadn’t stood in that exact spot, the globe would not have been visible.

The text that rotates around the globe usually states “It’s in the P-I,”but due to damage from winter weather, the “t” in “It’s” was unlit. Will the globe go completely dark? I would like to think not. There are a lot of passionate people who want to see the P-I continue, and I am among them.

But for me, it’s not because it’s the P-I, though I love their online content and the several friends I’ve made there. For every news organization that folds, fewer stories are told and fewer governments and organizations are held accountable. Who will be the voice of record? The PR people? The spin doctors? They won’t get away with that if a good journalist is doing his or her job.

I know the Times will still be around, and that guy I talked to seemed frustrated that nobody cared about the Times. The Times newsroom has probably had probably about 80 layoffs or buyouts in 2008 alone and is likely relying on attrition to balance the 2009 budget. The challenge of the Times is more subtle. Competition makes everyone stronger, and the Times will be less by the loss of the P-I.

Keep an eye on no news is bad news, folks. There are a lot of people who talk the talk about saving journalism. It’s time to walk the walk. We have 53 days and counting.