Electric Fishwrap has moved

Last week, Time magazine reported that Gloucester High School’s pregnancy rate soared because a group of sophomores planned to get pregnant together.

Today we hear that initial report is unfounded. Why? Where was the breakdown in reporting? Kelley McBride has a great column up on the Poynter Web site about the Gloucester, Mass. pregnancy pact.  Time quoted the high school’s principal as saying “They made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.”

The local paper, the Gloucester Daily Times, tells a different story.

From McBride’s column:

First, sure the principal used the word pact and Time quoted him saying it. But there was no other reporting quoted in any of the stories that backed up the existence of a pact. No pregnant girls from the town describe an actual plan. … There are a lot of people describing intentional pregnancies, but there’s a long way between intentional and a pact. This is especially true when you are talking about teenagers, who make a lot of plans they never execute and often suffer consequences for things they do without thinking at all.

The only source reporting a pact was the principal. Even the pregnant teens themselves said they did not have a pact. I’m not sure how Time allowed this clear disconnect into their magazine, but then again if I had a principal I know tell me there was a pact, then it probably would’ve gone in print.

It always hurts when I see yet more layoffs in the industry. I really do love this profession. I think it serves a vital need. But how can we serve the readers when we have a more important group to serve — stockholders.

In this year alone — and it’s not even half over — More than 4,400 news jobs have been slashed across the country. Check out this great Google Map of the layoffs (Thanks CyberJournalist).

More recently, McClatchy announced a 10 percent cut in their work force. I’m surrounded by McClatchy papers here in Washington: Bellingham, Olympia, Tacoma and Kennewick. The Bellingham Herald announced Monday that it is in talks with my paper, the Skagit Valley Herald, to print their paper after we move to our new building (see the building cam down on the right side of the Web page). We’re moving in sometime this fall/winter, and could start printing the Bellingham Herald sometime in 2009.
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As we all watch the news updates on evacuations for the floods in the Midwest, we must remember that journalists live there too. Yesterday, our managing editor sent out an e-mail that was mailed to him, that reads, in part:

The staff of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, for example, has been overwhelmed with the generous and unsolicited help and offers to help from newspaper colleagues as they continue to publish and broadcast on all platforms through the flooding disaster in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. They were especially overwhelmed by the truckload of bottled water, cots, fruit and other donations from the Dubuque Telegraph Herald.

The Iowa Newspaper Foundation wants to help you help these people in need. Newspaper employees in Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Vinton, Iowa City and other towns in the flood zone face personal losses. Some employees have had their homes and personal belongings destroyed or severely damaged.

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I’ve read News Gems and Technolo-j for quite some time, but I surfed around SPJ’s blogroll this morning and found a surprising gem: FOI FYI.

Now, not all SPJ blogs are being updated every day. FOI FYI tries. Every month since October 2007, there have been at least 24 posts per month.

I really like this post about building a FOI records file:

In a Word or Excel file, start a list including the headline, date, publication, author, link to the story, the good that resulted, and the specific records used. Then, when an agency denies you access to records, look up your list of stories and pull examples that demonstrate how the records help society.

The post also points to the FOIA Files, a list of stories that would not have been possible without the use of FOIA.

This blog should be helpful to any reporter, but I definitely plan to search past posts to help me on my ed beat.

Ron Sylvester has a great analysis of his Twitter experiment on Technolo-J. I must admit I was one of those people hitting refresh as much as time allowed. At times watching the tweets roll in was addictive.

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.

Check out this amazing multimedia presentation by the Des Moines Register.

Two weeks ago an EF-5 tornado, the biggest possible on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, ripped through the southern half of Parkersburg, Iowa. Like most communities after tragedy, the town pulled together. Neighbors searched for each other among the wreckage. People pitched in together and cleaned up the roads. So far, eight people have died from their injuries.

The Register’s multimedia presentation merges an attractive flash interface with user-submitted stories, photographer-shot video and it combines before images from the county assessor database with images photographers took after the storm.

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A couple of years ago I went to a narrative writing workshop with Tom Hallman, a Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter from the Oregonian. Just like anything else, narrative writing takes time to learn. (There is a form to narrative writing. Just read “Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction” by Jon Franklin and you’ll see what I mean.)

Reporters asked how they would ever find the time to learn this new style when many of them have story quotas. The short answer was prioritize your work and realize that not every story deserves your full attention. The long answer was learn at home, read books, try new things with your copy on your own time.

The same can be said for multimedia. I know a number of reporters who want to wait on the company to teach them multimedia skills.

Colin Mulvany, the multimedia editor at the Spokesman Review, says reporters should train themselves on their own time.

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This Sunday my paper published its first ever video on our Web site. It was for my graduation package (see the main piece and video here, and student introductions and favorite teacher here). [As an aside if you cannot view the video let me know. I can’t on my computer at home, nor on the computer at work. It just flat out won’t load. Our IT guys are trying to figure out why.]

[EDIT: IT guys say if you cannot view the video you need to download Flash 9.]

Years ago, my paper used to cover every graduation. Since there are more than 14 in the area (including alternative schools) it was an onerous task. The entire staff was involved. The editors scaled it down to one profile per school. The whole staff was still involved, but it did not include racing from one graduation to another, or sending four reporters out on a Friday night to cover each graduation.

My task when I came here was to pare down our coverage. We were short-staffed throughout the spring due to inevitable turnover, and editors thought graduation took up too many resources. So I had this crazy idea to invite one student from every school that we had previously covered to a panel discussion. We sat down with the seniors and started asking them questions. Are they ready for graduation? Do they want to keep living in Skagit Valley? Will global warming impact your life? How about the Iraq war?

I asked most of the questions with county reporter Ralph Schwartz helping to moderate. City editor Colette Weeks and reporter Aaron Burkhalter recorded the video.

We got some great answers, and I definitely want to do this again. But because this was my paper’s very first try with video, here’s what we would do differently.

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Ever run spell check to see what your sources’ names would look like afterward? I have, to hilarious result. I’m reserving the corrected names to protect the innocent, but try running your name through a spell checker to see what I mean.

In any case, the AP ran a story about spell-check gone wild in a high school yearbook.

Middletown Area High School’s yearbook listed Max Zupanovic as “Max Supernova,” Kathy Carbaugh as “Kathy Airbag” and Alessandra Ippolito as “Alexandria Impolite,” just to name a few.

Only four of the yearbook pages have those corrections on them.

Just goes to show that spell check is not a good backup system. That’s what good copy editors are for.

Last night was the SPJ Excellence in journalism ceremony by Western Washington SPJ. Many of my colleagues at the Skagit Valley Herald earned awards for their work last year. The paper as a whole came out with 13 awards.

I was on the SVH staff team that earned a third-place showing in the environment and energy category with our series Skagit Warming. This is a highly competitive region, with papers from five states vying for awards (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska).

Unfortunately the two reporters who got the most, Josh Lintereur (four, including two first place) and Franny White (three, with two first place), are either gone or leaving soon. That’s turnover in a small community daily. It seems like there’s a lot more turnover here than anywhere else I’ve been. Maybe it’s because people who live here are transplants from somewhere else. Franny and Josh both moved back to their home towns to work.

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