After a front page story, I can die happy

So I’m late to the game here, considering this story ran last week on Wednesday, but I did have my first Page One story of my internship. It was a story I pitched, about the progress Animal Care Services has made two years into a five-year plan to end euthanasia in the city shelter system.

Cue confetti, streamers, etc.

This was a hard story to do. As my editor said, it could have been twice as long, but I underbudgeted (whoops). Also as my editor said, that’s the new discipline — squeezing a lot of information into a small amount of space. Thus, a progress report on two years of city work in 25 inches.

Plus, it’s difficult when you know a story will generate public interest, but isn’t going to generate the type of public interest everyone necessarily wants. I know Animal Care Services was hoping for something more positive — but I report the news, which isn’t necessarily the news as they see it. I was careful in this story to make sure I had someone from the city respond to every criticism because I didn’t want it to be a hatchet job. I also wanted to show that some progress had been made. But whether that progress was enough — well, that was something the public had to decide.

Something I didn’t expect that was a side-effect of the story was that I had several phone calls and e-mails inquiring about a basset hound that was in the photo accompanying the story. From that interest generated, I’m sure he got adopted.

It’s always good to have a reminder that you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time and that sometimes it’s hard to write a story that shows all sides of the issue.

This story was that reminder for me.

Less about blog posts, more about zoos

I’m a little bit exhausted from all the controversy this week, so hopefully this post won’t be controversial (I’m crossing my fingers).

I was trawling the Internet this week, via Google News, for stories I could use on my beat, namely animal and zoo stories having a San Antonio connection. One of the queries I submitted was “san antonio zoo.”

I linked to my first zoo story in a previous post. Imagine my surprise to find this blurb:

Zoo has trouble feeding family of 900
Kansas City Star, MO - Jun 24, 2008
The Kansas City Zoo is not alone in this pinch. The San Antonio Zoo busted its food budget by 39 percent in May, and the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Ariz., …

That “39 percent in May” is directly from my story — a number that I reported, i.e. taking notes during a phone call.

So, out of curiosity, I clicked through to read the story.

It’s a really great story. It has more details and it’s a bit more in-depth than mine was.

But note the Kansas City story’s lede:

“Like other shoppers, Liz Harmon must cope with rising grocery prices. But Harmon has more than 900 mouths to feed.”

Funny. Now take a look at my lede:

“Rising food prices might make it difficult to buy a week’s supply of family groceries, but imagine having more than 3,500 individuals to feed.”

Of course, that’s the obvious lede for this story. The more pressing question is the figures.  I found a Missouri broadcast media station that cited the Kansas City story’s figures without attribution.

And look at the publication dates: June 13, June 24 and July 1.

My story ran June 13.

With the Internet, the world is your beat. The lines are getting blurred as to what is acceptable and what is just inserting local tidbits into another newspaper’s story.

I want to be clear: I don’t think that that happened here. It does trouble me, though, that newspapers are starting to use figures from other sources without attribution. Broadcast has been ripping stories from newspapers for ages — but since it’s a different medium, it wasn’t viewed as competition in the same way. I have a problem with print media jumping onto that same bandwagon. How can we verify the accuracy of stories if we don’t do the reporting, and especially if we don’t attribute the source?

Maybe the Kansas City Star did call the San Antonio Zoo, but frankly, I doubt it. I think it crosses a dangerous line to begin that practice. It’s a slippery slope from not attributing sources of facts to outright plagiarism. The Internet makes it easy to find national angles to stories, and I think that’s great. I just think it needs to be clear where the information comes from in the first place. Otherwise, we lose a lot of our credibility.

I’m flattered that my story was good enough to contribute to the Kansas City story. After all, I was always told by reporting professors to “localize” national stories for class.

But if I hadn’t attributed a figure that I got from the New York Times in a story for my reporting class, I would have been in trouble.

That’s the difference.

Hilary goes to the zoo … and writes about it

My first zoo story!

Letting the newsprint children leave the nest

I’m going to sound like one of those crazy, fawning newborn mothers here, but whatever.

When you’ve worked on a story for a while, you get to care about it. It becomes your child. You care about its well-being and exposure to the world, and when it gets older (published), you hope it carries itself well and does you proud.

My story that got published today was like that. It means a lot to me. And I hope the readers care about it as much as I do.

Firstborn story

The first published story of my internship.

I enjoy doing stories that I know people will read. If it’s interesting to the reader, it’s interesting to me.