Electric Fishwrap has moved

If you’re having trouble putting my blog into Google Reader or another blog reader, use this link: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ElectricFishwrap. Remember, I am moving this blog to http://www.electricfishwrap.com.

When I put the URL into the Google Reader subscription, for some reason it kept using my old blog URL in as the source. Eventually I’ll put a redirect to this site, but for now we’re going to have a few moving pains. As always, if you have suggestions for the site let me know.

Howdy all! I am moving this blog to its namesake, Electric Fishwrap. All future posts will be made there.

I made the move for a few reasons:

1. I thought katemartinonline.com could be hard to remember. Some people have tried just katemartin.com, which is definitely not my blog. Also, the online part of the url seems redundant.
2. ElectricFishwrap.com is easier to remember because most people I have told about my site at least laughed when they heard the name.
3. I wanted to start with a clean slate and a fresh design.

I’ll be changing a few things around, possibly adding a few more clips this week during my week’s vacation. In the meantime if you want to contact me or provide feedback to the new site, visit my twitter page @katemartin13 or send me an e-mail: katie.martin.13{at}gmail.com.

I’ve been trying to make time to tell the unusual and interesting stories on the education beat. Between the meeting coverage, Monday packages and budgets, budgets, budgets, it’s often hard to find that time.

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’m going to start posting a month with a few feature I’ll call “Story of the Month.” The purpose is to highlight a story or two that I’ve done in the past month that I enjoyed reporting on, or that I feel had a significant impact on the community.

I’ll talk about the challenges and some of the details of how I reported the story. Depending on the story I might talk a bit about form. I don’t consider myself an expert in any of these areas. I’ve found that a thorough analysis after the fact can only help me become a better writer.

Occasionally I attend SPJ meetup events. Usually held once a month on the first Friday of the month, we sit around, drink beer and eat incredibly unhealthy food.

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.

Again I’ll post the top three fun stories of 2008. I wrote a post about this last year. The goal is not to write about the best stories I wrote, but the stories where I had the most fun reporting them.

3. Trent Henderson follows in his father’s footsteps

At the time when this story was written, the Mitchell Report was in the forefront of many players’ minds. Talking with a baseball scout and the players about steroids gave this story extra context. I am also grateful that my editors gave me time to work with the sports department to write this story. I’ve always enjoyed writing sports stories, and this was one of two I wrote in 2008.

2. A standard for failure

One of the most challenging tasks for reporters is making sure government speak is translated so an average reader can understand. I am not sure how often I succeed, but I think I did with this story. Every year in August, the results for the Washington Assessment for Student Learning are released to the public. And every year, reporters struggle with how to present that information to their readership. The data is complicated and it’s difficult to sum up that amount of information into an easy-to-digest format.

I had thought about how to do this for weeks, when I had an idea. Long story short, there are about three dozen categories schools must pass in No Child Left Behind. If the school fails one, the entire school fails. So I measured how many categories each school had passed as a percentage of the total they measured against (because not all schools use each category). The result is a tidy bar graph for each 10th-grade class in the county. A reader can quickly glance at the graphs and compare other districts’ 10th graders. They can also see that every district has lost ground because the standards have risen.

The story also gave school officials a chance to vent about the system. This was my first year reporting on the WASL results. Next year I’ll definitely reach out to more parent groups and students to gauge their thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

This write up is mostly for coworkers, who could not attend the Twitter and social networking class sponsored by Western Washington SPJ in November.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout October and November, Western Washington SPJ has been hosting its fall continuing education series. On Nov. 3, Seattle PI breaking news reporter Casey McNerthney taught the video workshop.

McNerthney went over some basic tips about video from his personal experience. It is worthy to note that he does not have any fancy equipment and all of the software he shared is free. In this realization lies the value of his training: You don’t need expensive equipment. Anyone can do this.

His equipment/tools:

• Canon Powershot
• Windows Movie Maker (WMM tutorials on YouTube, or iMovie)
• A computer for editing, nothing too fancy

Most importantly is the attitude he brings to every story. McNerthney said he bought his Powershot about a year ago. Since then he appears to interview most, if not all, of his subjects with his Powershot running. His reason for videoing everything: “Sometimes daily stories turn into something big.”

(Note: I record audio of almost every interview I conduct. Not only does it help me keep quotes straight, I also have the option of using the audio later for a multimedia project. Obtaining audio in this way requires no extra effort on my part and I can only imagine if I had a small video camera with me all of the time, it would be just as easy.)

He shared one particular example of video he shot recently, about a crane operator who helped police nab a fleeing fugitive:

McNerthney talked about what shots you need to get if you’re going to record your interviews. Check out the crane video. It only takes a few seconds to get b-roll (the flavor shots of the crane in the middle of the story).

Read the rest of this entry »

Those who follow me on Twitter already know that I moved in mid-September. It was a cross-town move, from Snohomish to Everett, but either way I hate moving with a passion. Part of the frustration was trying to find an apartment within the allotted 20 days my former landlady gave us to move out (she needed our unit for a family/friend emergency).

I set out to search for an apartment online. Using Google Maps, the Community Transit Web site (we had to pick a place near a bus stop for my husband to commute to UW), ApartmentRatings.com (to avoid the really bad places) and Craigslist. But after a while I felt bad about using Craigslist because a lot of people feel it’s contributing to a decline in classified ad revenue.

I sought out a local paper when my husband and I stopped at the grocery store. Lucky for me one of them was doing a subscription drive and I got one for free (no I didn’t subscribe, sorry!). I opened the pages and found a typical three-line ad for an apartment for rent, no address, just brief platitudes and a phone number.

I’m not going to call someone to ask for an address, plug it into Google Maps to see if it matches up with an address within a 1/2 mile radius of an acceptable bus stop. I realize classifieds are still sold by the line, so I understand the reason for brevity. Not giving up hope, I checked news Web sites in the region, and none in my search area offer expanded classified services for those who bought space in the dead-tree edition. (Question for readers: do any Web sites offer expanded classifieds online?)

Why can’t newspapers print a reference number with each ad (sort of like the old personal ads), which customers could then type in at the Web site to see the full online listing? Someone buys a classfied (or any) ad and they are given a login to copy and paste whatever information into the online ad that they want. (Maybe local newspapers already offer that, but none of the listings I saw online indicated that this was the case.)

As an aside, I could swear I saved some blog posts that talked about this very topic before the move, but my desktop computer unfortunately went to the big server in the sky and thus is unable to assist me in this search. My Google-fu has also failed me.

So you have a great idea about how to save the news industry but your editors aren’t listening? Or maybe your editors like the idea but there’s no manpower/money/upper management support?

With the Knight News Challenge there are no excuses. For those not in the know, the Knight Foundation is in its third year of funding innovative ideas in news reporting and delivery. This year the pot is $5 million. There are just three rules:

1. Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base.
2. Serve the public interest.
3. Benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

Not sure if your idea qualifies? Visit the Knight News Challenge Garage, where prospective applicants can talk about their ideas before they apply. Here are some applicants who have already applied.

My favorite past winner of Knight funds is Spot.us:

“Spot Us” is a project of the nonprofit Center for Media Change that allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists.

Other past winners here.

Hurry, that idea floating in your head has to be on paper by Nov. 1.