Electric Fishwrap

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.

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.

Colin Mulvany was undoubtedly tired after filming 12 hours of footage driving 300 miles to film a piece on a maggot farm for the Spokesman Review. But on the way back home, he spotted a plume of smoke.

I called it in and by the time I got back to the newspaper twenty minutes later the small brush fire had bloomed into a raging wild fire. I had already put in 12 hours on the maggot story, but that little voice told me this wildfire was going to be big news.

He put on his wild land firefighter gear (every reporter who expects to cover a fire someday should have some) and raced back to the scene. But he didn’t have a video camera with him (he’d left it at the office). Instead, he took a bunch of stills, one of which ran six columns across Friday’s front page.

I like how he thinks about all aspects of his job. Ideally if a reporter hears some great sound at their assignment, they could whip out their audio recorder, talk with the photographer (or take more photos if they are the photog) and lay the groundwork for Soundslides production.

I love the story behind the photo, which is not explained to the readers much in most newsrooms. He explains the composition and what makes the photo powerful. This gives the reader a deeper layer of understanding of what the photographer was thinking when shooting the photo or video.

Good job, Colin!

Lately I’ve been on a multimedia bent, but I promise that’s not everything I’ll write about.

Monday I went to a training sponsored by Western Washington SPJ about how to create compelling Soundsides presentations. For those not in the know, Soundslides is a flash-based program where you can combine audio and pictures into a melded project.

The talented Casey McNerthney of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer taught the group of us what goes into a great Soundslides.

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