Electric Fishwrap has moved

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.