Beginnings and endings

This week, I’m putting bookends on the shelf of my early journalism endeavors.

Today, I got interviewed for the position of managing editor for print at the Independent Florida Alligator, where I’ve spent so much of my life since I started working there in January of 2007.

I got the job, and I’ll be working with Ken Schwencke, who is managing editor for online, and Jessie DaSilva, who is editor in chief.

I don’t think it’s possible to put into words how grateful I am for this opportunity, but I’m a journalist, so I’ll try.

I’m beyond excited to be able to manage a newsroom and work on interpersonal communication. It’s a job where my top priority is talking to people and getting to know their problems, concerns and triumphs, which is rewarding. I also get to play a part in the coverage of news, both in Gainesville and at the University of Florida.

It’s a big responsibility, yes, but I can’t wait to take it on with people who I see as friends and as great journalists.

On Monday, I’ll end my internship at the San Antonio Express-News, which has exceeded my expectations of what an internship could be. I’ve learned so much there about reporting, being edited and working in a newsroom, and I’ll be sad to go.

I’ve done stories on everything, whether it was animals, shootings or weather. It’s been crazy and sometimes stressful, but I’ve loved all of it.

I’m looking forward to what my last year as a college student will bring. And I’ll be blogging all of it.

An intern’s how-to on making the front

Having finally achieved the Intern Grail of having a story on the
front page, I got to thinking: what factors go into making a story
front-page worthy?

I clearly am not the authority on this, having broken A1 all of one
time in my 10 weeks here, but here’s what I’ve gleaned from being
around People Who Know Stuff.

How to crack the front page during your internship, In My Humble Opinion:

1) Cover a really big breaking news story. The setback to this plan:
You are an intern. Depending upon what paper you’re interning at, you
might not have the opportunity to cover the big news stories. Those
stories will often go to reporters who have proved their ability to
cover big stories on deadline.

2) Do your research. Find out what issues are important to the
community. I knew the animal shelter story had created controversy
before, and it’s on my beat, so I thought I would pursue it. If you
can dig into something high-profile, the potential is greater for that
story to have better play in the newspaper.

3) Be newsy. Even if you’re working on a feature, tie it to something
happening now. It might be interesting, but if you don’t have a news
peg, your story is likely to be buried.

4) Be original. Another story on how cool long-lasting lightbulbs are
or the potential for ethanol research, even if you have a valid news
peg, probably won’t make your section front. I’ve found that even
weaker “news” stories with an original angle usually get section-front
play, if not better. Combine Nos. 3 and 4, and you’re gold.

5) Be enterprising. Many of my best stories so far have been stories
I’ve found on my own. As cheesy as it sounds, you bring your own point
of view to the news, and that’s valuable. If you think something is
interesting, pitch it. Not having been in the same newsroom for years
gives you fresh eyes on the issues that editors often welcome. Plus,
enterprise gives you a clip that shows off all your skills as a
reporter, from conception to execution.

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.

My crazy night on the cops beat, and other observations

Summary of this blog post: The two cops reporters who had a baby be born and went on vacation, requiring me to serve on the cops desk Sunday night, picked a really bad time to do those things.

I kid. Kind of.

I trained for the cops beat last Thursday under the tutelage of a fellow intern — relatively uneventful, other than the FBI digging at a local landfill and a press conference I had to jump over a train to get to. (Yeah, about that — the train was stalled in front of where we needed to be, cue jumping across train platform. I didn’t really think the press conference was all THAT important, but hey, I just do what they tell me. And yes, I was terrified the train would start moving.)

So when I say that was uneventful, well, I compare it to my first night working night cops.

OK: Night cops. If you’ve never worked a cops shift before, it’s honestly an entirely different breed of journalism. You’re always listening to the police/fire department scanners, trying to pick up the words “DOA,” “Hurst tool” (the jaws of life), or, even better, “shooting.”

Before I had gotten there, the cops reporter before me had written a brief on the drive-by shooting of a 6-month-old girl that had happened overnight. So I took the police scanners from her and started my shift.

Night cops on Sunday is usually pretty tame, especially in San Antonio, which up until now I considered a pretty boring city.

Until about 4, things seemed to be going that way. Then I picked up “shooting” on the scanner.

I frantically call police dispatch, Mapquest where this place is, and head out in the company jeep used by cops reporters.

As I’ve noted before, I have an awful sense of direction. Somehow, I manage not to get lost and make it to the scene.

No one was dead; there were no pools of blood in the street. There had, however, been a drive-by shooting that caused a driver to “badly negotiate a right turn” (the police sergeant’s words, not mine) and hit a house/gas line. One of the passengers was grazed in the arm. A TV reporter found out I was the Express-News intern and said, “Oh, they let you do this? That’s cool.”

I head back, write up a brief and give it to my editor. I head out to the 6-month-old’s house to see if I can talk to her family. No one’s there, so I head back to work. I’m almost there when I hear the word “shooting” again on the scanner.

It’s about 9:30 at this point, so I pull up Mapquest again and head back out.

I’m at the same exit I’ve taken once before today when I realize I’m at the same neighborhood as the last drive-by. This time, two people have been shot with bullets, and two kids have been injured by shattered glass. No one’s life is threatened, but the street is filled with ambulances, cop cars and TV reporters “going live,” so it’s a bit more intimidating.

I go back to work and write up another brief. I hear the word “shooting” another time on the scanner and want to cry.

“You’re just not going to catch a break tonight,” my editor says.

I call police dispatch and find out it’s only a house in the same neighborhood that was shot — no people.

By now, my briefs have been combined into a story, since three kids were hurt in a 24-hour period in drive-bys.

I’ve put the cop-reporter jeep into the garage, and I’m getting ready to leave for the night when I hear that a man has been shot in the chest in — you guessed it — a drive by. It’s in pecan valley, which after the first three shootings I recognize by name as being in the same neighborhood.

It’s 11:45, and I’m only 15 minutes from my shift being over. I’ve also just parked the jeep.

“Do I have to go out again?” I ask my editor.

She tells me to get what details I can over the phone. I do, and dictate across the room as she’s leaning over the page designer’s shoulder editing the story.

Finally, I get to go home and sleep.

“At least you got a story out of it,” my editor says.

At least I did.

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.

The honor of telling a story

I wrote my first obituary yesterday.

It’s rare in journalism that you get to write something without questioning people’s motives, without digging deeper to get to the dark lining of the silver cloud.

And sometimes, I think that’s good; cynicism, after all, does make journalism go ’round.

But once in a while, it’s nice to put aside the cynicism and tell the story of someone who was loved for the person she was: a great mother, a loving wife and a good friend.

So when I told the woman I talked to that it was an honor for me to write about her loved one, I was being sincere. There is no greater honor than to be trusted with the story of a life well-lived.

The Texas loop system: plague of a directionally challenged journalist

I get lost in malls.

Seriously. I will go out of a store and blithely walk the way I came for about 5 stores until I realize, “Wait, I’ve already seen all this.”

This, as you might be able to guess, presents a slight challenge to a reporter who is actually supposed to go out and report on things happening places that are not directly across the street.

So a week ago, I had to go to New Braunfels, which is about 45 minutes away from the newspaper offices, to report on a story.

First of all, the downtown exits are in weird places. And Mapquest is not helpful.

This is what it tells me to do:

“1: Start out going NORTHEAST on AVENUE E toward THIRD.”

OK. Look at this map. The little star is where my car is. So, I look around and see the sign for 3rd Street.

So I think, Oh, that must be where I’m going. I go around in two large circles before I finally try the other way. It takes me ten minutes to get out of downtown San Antonio.

Also, where I come from, aka Florida, aka PLANET EARTH, we have actual highways that go straight in one direction or another. San Antonio has what is called a “loop” system, with all kinds of crazy access roads and “loops.” (If you don’t understand, it’s OK. Neither do I.)

Actual loop system

There are “turnarounds” and yield signs and lots of other really confusing things.

Alternate view of loop system.

Somehow, I managed to make it to my location, which was in the midst of picturesque hay bales and barns.

I hate driving. I go home, where my mom tells me, “If you see something where the directions say, ‘Make a U-turn,’ just ignore it. Mapquest gets confused by the loop system.”

You and me both, Mapquest.

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.