Archive for January 1st, 2009

Top three fun stories in 2008

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

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.

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