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.

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

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.

First up, Twitter. Here are some terms:

• Twitter: The platform wherein the writer uses 140 characters to answer a simple question: What are you doing?
• Tweet: An individual post to Twitter
• Tweeps, Tweeple: People who follow you on Twitter

Last month I went to a workshop about Twitter, hosted by the Seattle PI’s Mónica Guzmán. She runs the PI’s Big Blog and uses Twitter to connect with sources and find stories. (Read her writeup of the event.) She said writing the blog lends itself to using social media.

She encouraged people who attended to dive in and start using Twitter. I’ll admit it’s a little awkward at first. I started a few months ago by following other journalists in the area that I knew, and then some across the country whose blogs I read. Then as I started tweeting other people started following me. Then I found a local teacher in one of the school districts I cover.

Guzmán said using Twitter is about being open and finding your boundaries. Share things you find interesting, or what you are doing. You have to talk with your tweeps or they will ignore you.

Here are some other links for using Twitter as a reporting tool:

• TwitScoop: What’s hot on Twitter right now. Watching the tag clouds expand and contract live is somewhat addicting
• Twitter Local: Find people within a certain geographic area who use Twitter.

Guzmán says you should follow people who follow you, but I am not sure I agree with that 100 percent. Yes, it’s polite. But the time it takes to sift through all of that information could be intimidating. I’m following less than 100 people, and Guzmán has more than 1,000.
Twitter is being used to report from the courtroom, where few people have access. Ron Sylvester of the Witchita Eagle has been doing so for about a year. His tweets are incredibly addicting. The American Bar Association wrote a nice article about Sylvester’s efforts after he tweeted from a murder trial.

Sylvester uses a T-Mobile Dash phone and a Bluetooth foldable keyboard to send his updates to Twitter through text messaging. He always asks for permission before bringing his equipment into a courtroom, and judges are amenable.

“They like my set-up with the phone and keyboard, because it is smaller and less noticeable than a laptop,” he told ABAJournal.com. “Judges who won’t let laptops in will let me use this set-up—as long as I keep it on the silent setting. Judges tell me if the phone makes noise, I lose it.”

One other item to note. Twitter seems to be a metro phenominon. There are not many people out in the sticks using Twitter. It is not a representative sample of the population, either.

Twitter has been used to break news in a number of ways, the most recent were the attacks in Mumbai, India. Mindy McAdams’ post discusses Twitter and journalism:

The example of Mumbai reinforces a few things I am always telling journalists about our online future:

1. Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
2. Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
3. The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.

McAdams has many more good points, so visit her post for more.

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Facebook is another application Guzmán uses to enhance her reporting. I personally have not used it much for that purpose, but I think the potential is there. For me it’s a matter of whether I would have much time to do it properly.

With all social media, a few no-brainers include don’t talk about politics or religion, be careful and verify your sources.

MySpace is good to find information about teens, bands and the media. It is also popular in rural communities. Facebook is best for students and people from urban areas. Guzmán said a lot of people tend to use real names on Facebook. I’ve also noticed that.

Facebook also has tons of groups, like employees of big companies. I think Facebook could be especially useful for a business reporter.

Regarding friends on Facebook, what does it really mean? Guzmán said she creates a permissions list for people who friend her, but she doesn’t know. Those people cannot see many of her personal details.

A belated thanks, Mónica, for sharing your expertise.

One day, I cut and pasted all my “tweet” updates into a traditional story file. It measured 80 inches. Now, I don’t think anyone would have read an 80-inch story from the newspaper on this trial, as compelling as it was. My editors certainly wouldn’t have run a story that long. But what I found is that people will read an 80-inch story, given to them a paragraph at a time, 140 characters long.

Man, I’m cringing about a 30-inch story I am writing for Monday, yet people were glued to his tweets (when Twitter was up in any case). And he didn’t just sit there and tweet all day. He also did multimedia presentations for the Web site the next day:

Between the text descriptions from the courtroom over Twitter, and the multimedia, we were able to give people a feeling of being there that I had never before been able to do in my career. This trial had a “press room” in the law library of an adjoining courtroom.

Watching Ron tweet inspired me as well. I started tweeting on April 30, back when he posted about Twitterlocal. Right then, I decided to try Twitter and see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been sorta tweeting about school board meetings as they happen on Twitter. My newsroom has a Macbook with a Verizon Internet card, which is awesome for researching past stories, file during meetings and saving a ton of time because I have my notes typed out. (Ever want to hit ctrl + F to search your paper notes? But I digress.)

I should also mention Ron Sylvester is running for president-elect of SPJ national.

Stormtrack storm chasers (here and here) had been watching the supercell (posts include technical jargon, also with great pics of radar with the hook echo visible), which had a rare northwest track, since it formed. It put on quite a show, gouging a path through Windsor and then headed toward Fort Collins.

Loveland was also under tornado warning for some time, and staff at the Reporter-Herald huddled in the downstairs hallway for about 15-20 minutes. (Guys, I hate to say it, but if that tornado was anything above an EF-3 that hallway isn’t going to cut it.)

—EDIT: Adding info from Jeff Masters’ Wunderblog. Masters says the damage appeared to be at least EF-3. Check out the great pictures and explanations of the hook echo on his site (animation of reflectivity here).—

Based on the damage from aerial shots from the Rocky Mountain News, Windsor has a long road to recovery ahead of them.

Some incredible video from KUSA is posted on the CNN site. Halfway through the video you can see egg-sized hail pelting the reporter, who is on an overpass of US 34 west of Greeley (I think?). Check out the other videos on that page as well. Just watching the video gives me chills and makes me thankful that Loveland didn’t sustain a direct hit from this monster.

A friend of mine works at the Eastman-Kodak plant in Windsor:

Since we work in a factory which is essentially a big concrete box, we were quite safe, and the noise was minimal. A bunch of us dumb asses, however, were watching it come in front of the big plate glass windows in the office, thinking it really wasn’t coming. It’s kind of a deer in the headlights thing. As soon as the hail hit, the lights went out, and the sirens sounded, we beat feet for the shelter. About two minutes later it went though.

It lasted maybe two minutes, but of course it felt like ten years. When we came out, there was a huge hole ripped in the roof of the warehouse, and there’s a smaller one in the office. Water was running down the back stairs like a waterfall. We could smell gas, there were many leaks in the area, although I don’t think it was actually at our plant.

…

The town is a wreck. It looks like the tornado passed next to our plant – a direct hit and I think I would have still been okay, but I think that shelter (the women’s bathroom ) would have been all that was standing.

Poynter has a good article on using Twitter and Tweetscan for news updates, receiving and sending. Other news sites with video include the Greeley Tribune and the Coloradoan.

When I worked at the RH, I was very much aware that the area is on the edge of a tornadic zone. Colorado does not evoke many images of tornado activity, but Weld County has the most tornado hits every year, mostly due to its size, of any county in the state. Because I’m a huge weather geek, I would’ve had the NWS Denver radar loop up on my computer screen, I checked the NWS storm prediction center every day. I might have tried to go out and get tornado coverage if someone didn’t knock sense into me first.

Colorado weather can change in a second as this storm shows. It was a beautiful sunny day by all accounts before the tornado rolled through. You can bet I’ll be following updates on the area.

This time, Sylvester is covering another murder trial. The copy desk said “no more.”

People are going on vacation. We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

Like any journalist with a passion, he thought around the problem. He started posting updates on Twitter. Usually his paper doesn’t cover jury selection, but this time they did. It was a capital murder trial. He wanted to know who was going to be on the jury.

Who would notice?

I didn’t expect the reaction..

I received an email from a Wichita police officer following the trial on Twitter, saying “Keep it up.”

(snip)

But this is important to me, because they are local people, looking for local news. They’re not readers or viewers or audience anymore – in this world of social networking, they’re my friends. I like that.

Katie, our online content developer, is working on a widget to put my tweets on Kansas.com, when the trial really gets going.

Read Sylvester’s post on Technolo-J. This is great for reporters who want to find a fast easy way to start using this as a liveblogging tool. But you have to be extra vigilant about your copy because there is no safeguard between you and the readers.

(Note: I literally just started using Twitter last week. I’ve been updating much of my technology skills, like making sure I had all my RSS feeds in a Google reader, updating my blog (still in process) and subscribing to Facebook. During my last Anacortes School Board meeting, I sorta practiced with Twitter, right around when Mr. Sylvester started liveblogging the jury selection.)

Follow me on Twitter: KateMartin13