Electric Fishwrap

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.

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:

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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.