Electric Fishwrap

A quick update: My beat has changed from education to an all-encompassing government and politics beat. You can follow me on Twitter at Gov_SVH. I had recently hit 400 followers on my former Twitter account, Schools_SVH, and that Twitter address was printed on my business cards a few weeks ago. Curses! I am going to miss the education beat a lot, but I really enjoyed covering politics when I was in Colorado.

I have a few loose education stories to wrap up before I start government full time, but when I do, I will cover Skagit County and the cities of Burlington, Mount Vernon and Sedro-Woolley (with smaller cities as needed). Social services is also part of my beat. I’ve probably forgotten something in there — it is a really large beat.

The Education Writers Association was invaluable in my growth as an education reporter. In February I attended a statistics bootcamp, which taught me how to effectively use Access and Excel (I had used Excel for years but the training was a whole new level). Those skills are transferable to any beat.

For my July Story of the Month, I chose one story that I helped write, and its follow up, about a climber who was stranded after rescuing a member of his climbing party.

I remember the morning we wrote that first story. After making her morning calls cops reporter, Tahlia Ganser, discovered that a climber had been left behind during the previous day’s rescue of another climber who fell and was airlifted to a Bellingham hospital. The weather was terrible and the stranded climber was trapped on Mount Terror until the weather could clear and a helicopter could get him out.

A view of the Picket Range from Newhalem Visitor center, click the picture for mountain names.

She drove up to Newhalem to find and talk with friends and relatives of the stranded climber, Jason Schilling. Soon she called the newsroom during the 4 p.m. editors meeting to find a reporter who could drive to Bellingham to interview the man who fell, Steve Trent. A photographer and I drove up there and were invited into his room with his parents to talk.

Here is the finished story.

For the second story, Trent and Schilling were kind enough to accept me and a photographer into Trent’s home so we could talk with them about their experience. Trent’s home was a shrine to his love for climbing. It had a huge picture window view of the North Cascades, and climbing magazines and books sat on a coffee table.

It was really interesting to interview Trent, his friends and family about his passion. I won’t be at all surprised if their story somehow becomes an action movie.

Photo used by permission through a Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brewbooks/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I had to resist posting on this blog as soon as our story about the Burlington-Edison School District’s property problem ran in the paper. Entitled “Good Purposes Collide,” the story was the result of six months of investigation into the how and why of a property purchase two years ago.

Obviously I don’t mean six months straight. Small daily news reporters must juggle many stories. I had to carve out chunks of time here and there, or ask (or beg) an editor for a reprieve on my required Monday Education Focus story.

I was very happy with the result. Usually the night before a big story like this one runs, I  toss and turn and wake up in the middle of the night, afraid of errors in the copy. But this time, I went through line by line and questioned how I knew each fact. Confident that I could back up all of the facts with either an audio recording, notes or paper records, I slept easily. My editor also was kind enough to e-mail a final version to me at home so I could read it before it ran.

Needless to say, the following School Board meeting was awkward.

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.