Writing about friends

You’re not supposed to write about your friends.

It’s a pretty straight forward rule in theory. If you could be or if it appears that you could be unduly influenced by the person, you hand off the story to someone else.

But it’s a small town and it’s a small newsroom and sometimes there’s no way around it. Sometimes your friends are newsworthy and you’re the only one to write about it.

Saturday night I was the only reporter on shift with a skeleton staff for Sunday’s paper. The night before, a filmmaker I know had been on CNN to talk about a trial underway in Philadelphia for a doctor accused of murder and how his abortion clinic had been allowed to operate for so long.

It’s always news when a local person has his or her 15 seconds of national fame, but mostly they have minor parts, brief snippets on one show or another.

The filmmaker was brought on to join a panel of experts, due to a documentary he wrote and directed. It was front page news, here. But it had happened on Friday. To wait so someone else could write it would mean it wouldn’t run until  Tuesday, too long to matter anymore.

So I called my friend and wrote the story that night, between the crime lists and obituaries and a late-night run to the ice cream store down the road.

“I’m working tonight,” I told him when I called, and we both knew it meant that for the next 10 minutes we’re not friends. For the next 10 minutes we leave out our spouses and children and life outside of the newsroom behind and I am just a reporter and he is just someone I’m interviewing.

Really this particular story isn’t a big deal – there’s nothing controversial about being on national television, so there’s no way I could be unduly influenced.

But it’s still odd when the rules of journalism are so completely broken.

News gathering

I don’t remember what made me think of him.

I’d typed the police report last weekend: a young father flown to Pittsburgh after his ATV crashed into the guard rail. On Thursday, with little to do, I remembered him, somehow, and ran his name through Facebook again. I do that sometimes, wondering what happened after an accident or a crime report. I wondered if he was home, or still hospitalized, or deceased.

Not a lot had changed since the weekend but this time I found a link to a fundraiser page. His friends are putting on a benefit for him and his family and I called the friends, got details and learned about his family, his children’s ages, his wife and they help they all need.

The story ran Sunday.

Last week they told me to find a contribution for a weekend column of news snippets and I had nothing. There’d been no meetings and no one sent any emails or made any phone calls that fit the bill.

I started looking up coffee shops, independent businesses and even a few community organizations on Facebook.

One of the coffee shops was celebrating its 10th anniversary that weekend, and my contribution was made.

Those are the kind of stories we do a lot, but they reflects the way my generation of news gathering is just a little different from previous ones.

I never left my desk. I don’t live near those people and I didn’t see the fliers in the grocery store and I wasn’t making rounds looking for news tips.

Not physically, anyway.

Oh, getting out into the community and building relationships and just checking in with sources is still vital. But some of that you can do online.

On Facebook, even.

To Earl

I’ve got a picture somewhere of him and I. He’s wearing a VFW hat. I’m trying to look like I lived in the 40s — shortish skirt, funny hat, crisp blouse tucked in.

We were at a Pearl Harbor Day remembrance event. I had written his story, part of a county-wide project matching high school students with World War II veterans.

And I had fallen in love with telling stories.

I don’t know when Earl died. I don’t remember his last name, so I can’t look it up. I know he was aging when I met him, sitting in the booth at Dairy Palace while my mother ran the video camera and I tried to take notes. He was aging, but he was ready to tell his story and the things he said, I remember them. Hints and shadows of the darkness, the horror, of trench warfare slid in and out of his words. So did the strangeness of war — how they had an unofficial ceasefire on Christmas Day, then went about trying to kill each other again the day after.

We talked a long, long time. I didn’t know how to ask the questions that would have drawn out the story, but I didn’t need too.

I remember struggling to turn my notes into something clear. I hadn’t read many newspapers, did not know how a news story flows, so I wrote the only way I knew how: starting at the beginning, when the bombs fell and a teenage Earl signed up to serve, to the end, his marriage and his life back home in Texas.

The woman running the project, she loved it. She offered me a freelance job (unpaid – but what an opportunity for a high school student!). She said it was one of the best pieces she received.

Earl liked it, too.

And I? I was intoxicated.

I wrote a letter-to-the-editor the next year, a thank you to Earl for his service. The newspaper ran it. His family said he was touched, surprised to see his name again.

And then life moved in. I don’t know how much longer Earl lived. I was published two, three more times, but oddly decided nursing was a better career (it probably would have been).

I changed my mind two weeks in, and then we moved.

But ever Pearl Harbor Day I remember Earl, and how he woke in me the love of telling stories.

So thank you, Earl, for serving so many decades ago. And thank you for your more recent service – the one you maybe didn’t realize you did – of starting a teenager on the road to journalism.

Building trust

The distrust was palpable.

It’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, made it so obvious. Something in her body language, in the way she spoke?

But I pulled out my notebook and hoped she would thaw.

She didn’t.

The others gathered around the table, some knew me. The woman beside me had been chatting about her grandson for the 10 minutes we waited for the doors to open. I’d quoted the woman across the table plenty of times before.

But the one calling the shots, the one refusing to answer my very basic informational question  — I hadn’t worked with her before.

And she didn’t trust me.

It’s a community that doesn’t trust each other, that thinks the worst of one another. So I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that she didn’t trust me, either.

But it made the story hard to write.

Today I looked over the notes I scrawled across the notebook and they’re sparse. I can write a story but it’s not a good one. I filed it anyway, put in what I have.

Because you can’t build trust in one interview. And I know it will take story after story to build — and even then, perhaps, it won’t, because ‘fair’ doesn’t always seem fair to someone in the midst of a bitter fight.

But I’m reminded that reporting is more than showing up at meetings and taking notes during an interview. It’s an investment of time, of sitting down just to talk about what’s going on, of being around, saying hello, remembering to ask about the grandson.

I’ll be back, to put the notebook away and buy a cup of coffee and try to build the trust that isn’t there.

How deadline works

Deadlines, for me, are usually 9:30 a.m. Any later and editors are asking for measurements and time estimates and copy editors are looking tense and everyone’s tempers seem a little higher.

I like to file by 9, when I can.

But some days you can do everything right and you’re still scrambling to pull everything together after the page should have been sent down. It doesn’t help when the news is changing as fast as you can write it.

Today was one of those days.

7:30 a.m.: An editor hands me a release from the local branch of the state Department of Transportation that says one of our major highways has been shutdown after an accident. We’re pretty sure that means a fatal accident, since we can tell from the 911 dispatch log that firefighters were sent out at 5:15 a.m. That’s a long time for the road to be closed, except for a fatal or overturned coal truck.

A call to the coroner’s office confirms that the coroner is somewhere, responding to some call. We put 2 and 2 together and save space on the front page.

I’m on police today so I let it sit, type the other small crimes and theft reports and wait for the coroner to get back to the office.

7:45 a.m.: State police fax over a report, confirming the accident and the fatality. I have more questions but this takes the pressure off; at least I have something to go on. It’s also unexpected. They’re not always so prompt.

9 a.m.: No report from the coroner yet, and I’ve given him about as long as I can. I try his cellphone, and he answers on the second ring. So far this has been easy. He won’t have a report out for a while but he walks me through the accident, details such as location and place of death.

But he also tells me they’re looking for a second person. Apparently there was another person who was supposed to be in the truck, but he or she was unaccounted for this morning. Maybe the person never got in the truck; or maybe there’s an injured or dead person laying somewhere in the tall weeds by the side of the road.

Minutes later I talk to the state police spokesman, who tells the same story: searching for this possible second victim by helicopter.

That’s my lede.

9:30 a.m.: The story is filed, with plenty of time despite the unexpected second-person twist. But I’m nervous. We’re running a story that says “police search for a possible second person at the scene of a fatal accident” but there are a couple hours still before anyone picks up a paper — what if that person overslept today? What if they find out he or she was never in the truck, not part of the situation at all? I write a back-up lede, just in case.

9:50 a.m.: I call both the state police spokesman and the coroner for one last check. Neither have any updates. The paginator has the front page done, out for reads by copy editors. Whatever changes after the press run will be dealt with tomorrow.

10 a.m.: The state police spokesman calls me back. They’ve left the scene, did not find a second person — and that person in question sent the deceased man a message more than an hour after the accident. They’re not looking anymore. We pull the story from the page and I add the new details to my back-up version. But my phone’s ringing again. The coroner changed his mind about an autopsy, just in case this other person was involved somehow, in case someone ends up with criminal charges. Better to have the formal autopsy on file.

Of course these second person thoughts are vague and no one really knows what’s going on by the sound of it, not yet anyway and so I add in just the simple details: a search for a second person who was not found, a message sent post-accident, search ended.

And now we really are out of time and the page is gone and I’m dancing in my seat I’ve got to pee so bad and why, I wonder, does the news suddenly have to become so fluid right at deadline?

On staying neutral

When she won’t give me a copy of her comments, I’m surprised. Most people are happy to; she takes my email address instead.

When I hear the whispered conversation behind me (‘Who is she?) I understand better. I forgot to introduce myself.

She comes up with apologies and she just didn’t know how to trust but I’ve been vouched for, I’m welcome to a copy. Several of her friends around us comment on my last story, that it was well done, and I’m glad but nervous, too.

There’s a red light blinking on my phone when I come in about 6 p.m. on a Saturday night for a late shift, and it always makes me nervous, that light blinking after a story.

He tells me he needs to talk to me and I know his name — I quoted him just the other day — and I start running over words in my head: Where did I go wrong? Did I go wrong? He most have guessed this because it’s not a complaint, he adds at the end, just call him.

I do. It’s a concern he has that I’ll look into, but I can’t make any promises. But I’m relieved on a different level than just the not-a-complaint level.

The man who called and the ladies who commented on that story, they’re on opposite sides of a deep divide that tears at a rural community growing out of a river. It’s got to the point where a person can barely say ‘hello’ to someone on the opposite side without it seeming suspicious, or insulting.

And somehow I have to cover this, to not only maintain neutrality and objectivity in the words I write — which isn’t that hard — but to somehow communicate that to everyone I talk to. And I can’t control perceptions. There have been days that one side or the other says something inflammatory or foolish and I quote them, and hold my breath for a backlash.

But when people from both sides are either happy with my coverage, or angry with my coverage, I know I’m pulling it off. The ladies’ comments and the man’s possible story, both show confidence in my reporting.

I’d been wondering lately, how I’ve been doing.  So it’s nice to start a week knowing that yes, for now, I am doing fine.

On bias

His deadline is at night and so, when the meeting wraps up at 10:30 p.m., he’s got just 30 minutes to write.

The page is set and he’s been given a space to fill: no more, no less.

My deadline is the next morning, and though I’m beyond tired with sandpaper eyelids when I stumble into work after six hours of sleep, I have two hours to write.

My story is longer, more comprehensive, because it can be.

He gets the angry calls: why can’t he be more like the Gazette? Why doesn’t he tell the whole story?

It’s not unusual, having people read bias into things we can’t control, like meetings ending 30 minutes before deadlines.

I once was accused of bias against the Navy and homeschoolers, because in a story about two dogs vying for an award, the more interesting dog had a bigger piece of the article than the other.

I was homeschooled K-12, so it was surprising to learn of my bias against myself.

But it goes the other way too. Sometimes I get credit for things I didn’t do.

There’s been a sad story unfolding and I came in on the second half. A young father was trying to relight his woodburning stove with kerosene when a ball of fire shot out. He and two small boys were flown to the hospital, where the 4-year-old died.

That was all written by someone else. I came on this week, when a couple people who had not met the family decided to help. The family and their friends are Amish, so the one man gave a ride to a group of their friends. He learned of their financial needs while waiting at the hospital, told his sister, and they established a trust fund and emailed us.

I wrote the story on a late Saturday morning, typing quickly because I wanted to catch a ride home instead of walking 3/4 of a mile in the snow.

Late Saturday night, someone else put it on the front page of our paper, in the lower right hand corner.

As it turned out, the story was below a picture of Whitney Houston. And the man I’d been speaking to was ecstatic. He called me Monday morning, on deadline, effusive in his thanks and praise. It was a wonderful article. He couldn’t believe what a wonderful article it was. He was “flabbergasted” when he saw it on the front page, and under Whitney Houston’s picture, so everyone would see it!

I weakly tried to give up the credit for placement, and I really don’t think editors thought about the Whitney Houston picture drawing eyes down the page, but he wasn’t having it. When I thanked him for his help with the story, he started again with his praise.

I’d certainly rather take unwarranted credit than unwarranted blame.

(The story doesn’t have a good ending. The father died less than 24 hours after my story ran, leaving four children ages seven and under, including the 5-year-old still recovering from burns. The trust fund will be used to cover as much of their expenses as possible.)

But to those of you who pick up a paper now and then, may I encourage you to be careful before calling bias? The short treatment that story got might just be due to a deadline pushed to the breaking. The lack of quotes from the other side of an argument could be due to phone calls left unanswered. Bias is a serious accusation to someone whose job depends on their credibility. It shouldn’t be made lightly.

Awards season

It’s awards season again.

We’re culling through our work for the past year, trying to pick pieces we think were good, that judges somewhere will like. And it’s entirely a guessing game.

I run a search for my name, and find a couple stories I forgot about. One or two I think are really good; I think they deserve an award. A couple I just tossed in for good measure. I’ve never been able to guess well what journalism judges like, but the more I put in the better chance I have.

That’s what I hope, at least.

Starting in February, I’ve got story after story about legal fights involving renovation projects at one of my school districts. I remember how every Friday, it seemed, something new turned up and I’d be scrambling all afternoon, hoping not to have to work late into the weekend.

I can’t think of a way to enter those stories. There are too many, they’re too complicated. I let them go, but an editor differs. We’ll break them up into two entries for continuing coverage. It’s a novel enough situation that we covered well. It needs represented.

And so the process goes, trying to pick the best out of a year of work. It’s both depressing (don’t I have more really great pieces to show for a year of work?) and encouraging. There are a lot of entries showing my name when I run the search. Stories lost in the repetition stand out, mundane pieces I entirely forgot about that really aren’t that bad, now that I read them again.

It’s a frustrating process, too, because it’s hard to guess what the judges will like. And I really need an award this year.

I’m the one who writes for a living, who claims to do this writing thing well enough to ask for a paycheck based on it. But he’s the one bringing home first place prizes for his work, with actual dollar figures attached.

Not that I’m competing or anything, but bragging rights would be nice.

 

Police beat days

The days that I’m scheduled to cover police and fire events, I listen more closely to the life flowing around me.

Work follows me home.

I listen to sirens passing on the road out by the grocery store, counting them and noting the time. One or two might be cancelled; much more and I’ll probably have to make a few phone calls.

The snow started falling during the evening hurry home and a woman speaking loud beside us at the private school basketball game, she said sirens were blaring and there was two inches of snow and more, falling fast.

She wasn’t talking to me but I filed her words away, a warning for the next morning. Sirens blaring in early-evening snow means a long list of accidents to report on in the morning. I planned to leave early, give myself a few extra minutes before deadline.

Snow fell all evening but stopped by 9 p.m., and the trucks made their way up our street and the roads were passable, if not exactly clear. And despite my best attempts I was not early, and did not have those extra 15 minutes.

The sirens the woman heard were not for wrecks along snowy roads. That was obvious from a glance through the police reports and the list of calls made to fire departments. It wasn’t until I called police to fill in a vague report that I realized they’d been arresting a suspect in a theft at a Walmart quite near to where we were that evening. Those were the sirens she heard. It was a front page story; I wished that somehow I could have guessed, slipped out of that basketball game for a few minutes for those details that make a crime story really worth reading.

I’m not on police this week. Sirens can wail and I won’t notice, not really. Women can chatter about the state of the roads and potential accidents all night long and I won’t listen. These little things are someone else’s responsiblity these days.

These days that I don’t cover police? Work stays right where it should.

The sky is falling! (So call the newspaper?)

About 30 seconds after the buildings shook, our phones started ringing.

“Hi, yes, did you feel something? My building just shook!”

That’s when we realized that what we felt wasn’t due to falling paper rolls or shifting machinery on the press downstairs.

And by the minute point, when I looked back at my computer and refreshed my Facebook page? Statuses filled the page, mostly by my DC area friends, with “earthquake” followed by exclamation marks.

Glancing back up at the television on the wall — still within five minutes of the shaking — I saw images of the White House and called out to the newsroom and we gathered around, soaking in just enough that when our phones rang again, calls lighting up the switchboard and being funneled our way, we had something to tell people.

Over the scanner an alarm blared and police officers complained that the system was overloading and was the building shaking? They briefly evacuated the buildings on campus.

One of them called me, asked if I knew what was going on and even as I told him — earthquake in Virginia — another alarm blared loud through the phone and he hung up.

That was the only hint at damage in the county.

The first calls were the anxious, excited ones: did we feel that? Did we know what it was? So I’m not going crazy?

But the information spread so very quickly that within 15 minutes we were getting other calls, readers eager to be part of the news happening around them.

“Just thought you’d like to know I felt it out here,” they said when I answered my phone. “Felt like the vibrations on the bridge crossing into Pittsburgh at rush hour.”

Walking home in the sunshine of a cool afternoon, past boys in football pads and new students with notes in their hands, I wondered at the immediate reaction in those minutes after the buildings trembled.

To immediately pick up the phone, call the newspaper, wouldn’t have crossed my mind — and I work at one. There’s an odd faith in news, I guess, thinking we must know what happened even though we’ve just experienced it along with everyone else.

And there’s the need to be part of the story — whatever the story is.

That I saw on Facebook; heard in the voices. There was an eagerness, a quickness to share their experience, what they felt. Friends posted exclamations and I did too, only have pretending it was to elicit reactions for the story.

And walking home I felt comforted, strangely. Because I work in profession in the midst of a crisis, and there’s been questions asked and rarely answered about the future of newspapers, and journalism, and what will the news of the future look like? And they say newspapers are nearly obsolete, in print form at least, but I love the feel of paper between my hands and how you can spread it out on your front porch and use it for wrapping paper.

And most days I wish I had been born just 10 years earlier, to really enjoy journalism before this crisis.

But when the buildings shook and men and women, they picked up their phones and called us, called for answers and called to share their stories, I was comforted.

Because wherever we’ll be 10 years from now, we’re not obsolete yet.

The people here, they still need their local newspaper.