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.

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 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!

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.

First off, the length of the Soundslides is rigorously determined by the length of your audio clip, so make sure the audio is tight. Use of natural sound is incredibly important. Casey suggested checking out the multimedia archive at the Seattle-PI for examples of great Soundslides presentations. A good example of natural sound is the Soundslides about 110 parakeets that were up for adoption at a local animal shelter. Note that this is only 49 seconds long. The photographer, Mike Urban, recorded sound of the parakeets chirping, then likely recorded the interview with the animal shelter official in a quiet room.

A production that took Casey a long time was a Soundslides about the legendary high school football game of Blanchett vs Garfield, a game in 1975 that lasted 2 hours, 55 minutes and went into four overtimes. He took hours and hours of interviews and boiled it down to almost a four minute slideshow. I think he said it was his first Soundslides presentation. Listen to the audio. About midway through he does an interview with two players in a bar, and you can really tell the difference. So be sure you are in a quiet place when collecting audio.

Other points Casey made:

• Have an editor listen to the audio before you compile the pictures together in the Soundslides program. If you have to change the audio afterward, it messes up the pacing of the pictures if the sound track is off by even a tenth of a second.
• Talk with the Web people who will put the Soundslides and the story on the Web site. Make sure your story will get good play or it won’t get good hits (which will make editors and others think Soundslides is a worthless time investment).
• If this is a reporter/photographer team, make sure the photographer is as enthusiastic about the project as you are.
• Photogs need to take bunches of extra pictures for a Soundslides to work. Casey suggested about 40-50 pictures for long projects (3 minutes or more). It’s better to have too many pictures than not enough. Keep the opening shot in mind (like for this presentation by Joshua Trujillo about a sailboat called the Adventuress) as well as a closing shot. Any little detail is fine. Better to have too much than too little.
• It doesn’t take much time to do some Soundslide presentations. He mentioned a breaking news presentation by the News Tribute after a school shooting that was up two hours after the shooting took place (sorry, I looked for it but couldn’t find it on the Trib’s site). Conversely they can also take a long time to get the pacing right.
• When editing audio, have a program open like winamp so you can order and re-order the clips and get a good idea for where they should go.

I like Soundslides presentations because they help journalists do their job: to tell a story.

Here’s a resource page for more the more mundane information, like how to edit audio, what programs to use and what equipment to buy (not linked to Casey McNerthney).

Finally, here is a truly amazing piece of work by Jim Sheeler and Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News. This is their Pulitzer prizewinning piece, Final Salute, the story of a casualty assistance officer with the Marines whose job is to tell the loved ones of fallen soldiers that they have died. To view the slide show, click on the tag that says audio slide show. The story is equally impressive and utterly heartbreaking. While this is not a Soundslides presentation (it’s Flash based), it does show the potential for such projects. Keep in mind, Sheeler spent the most part of a year doing this project and this project alone.