Sometimes I just dunno.

Recording devices. Yea or nay?
  The book tells us not to use them. Well, it tells us not to rely on them, at least. I have to admit, when I'm sitting there and I scramble to get all the words down, I am definitely thinking about a voice recorder.
   The textbook also refers to a few journalists who expressed their opinions about recorders. One guy said he started to depend on them too much when he first started out. Another guy mentioned that his voice recorder would always die at the most inconvenient moment.
    Another person said that voice recorders are fine if they're back up.
   Well, to be honest, I kinda like the last opinion. Fine, I'll scribble down notes in my notebook. My shorthand is awful (I don't even know where to begin with shorthand). My chicken scratch is even better!
   But to have a back up? Yeah, that sounds good to me.
   Recently, I did an interview with VOX at the same time as Brittany Schaefer. At the beginning, Brittany asked the girls if she could record the conversation. She took out her phone and we began the questioning.
   As I was putting the last touches on my article today, I realized I missed something: I forgot to put a name down next to a quote I used in my notes. Or I didn't realize who said it after I was done writing because they were all jumping around. Either way.
   A voice recorder looked real good to me at that moment.

Summary vs. Delayed Leads

I really thought I would like summary leads better. They're faster, to the point, and informative. But honestly, they're everywhere. They're starting to bore me. They don't pull me in. I am a fan of the novel, so that could be why.
     The Boston Globe is good at having a variety of writers. I read articles from there all the time with different styles of leads. To be truthful, the delayed leads get me. They wrap their tendrils around my neck and pull me under the water until I want to keep swimming under, or reading, and am genuinely interested in the story, even if it is about trains in Boston.
    Here's a summary lead that is good, informative, and tight.
    "Federal regulators approved a highly anticipated breast cancer drug Friday, two and a half years after they sparked patient protests by refusing to grant it a speedy review." (By Robert Weisman of TBG.)
    My mom has breast cancer. Cancer has coursed its way through my family members. Yet somehow, this article lead doesn't entrance me. I could pretty much care less. On the other hand:
   "When South Station opened in 1899, it had 28 tracks that sprawled from Atlantic Avenue to Fort Point Channel. Today, with only 13 tracks, trains idle outside the station while they wait for other trains to vacate berths, causing maddening delays." (Martine Powers, TBG.)
   I've ridden a train once. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to Boston. And honestly, is this article even that interesting? It's about an old train station, a hunk of change, and some upset people. But the delayed lead! It captivated me until I read the whole thing! Of course variety is good. I'm just in the mood for a little delay in the news room--a slower pace.

The pace makes the race with interviews

Finding interviews really isn't too bad. I've had a lot of luck with my main interviewee referring me to other people to talk to. The people are usually just as knowledgeable if not more so. So what's the problem? Well. Ahem. There's a few.
     Whether I think of an original story or get one from TNH, the deadline always comes faster than I would like. The issue I have is not with deadlines, it's with myself. I have to be more assertive when it comes to getting interviews. By the time I've finally gotten in touch with my main interviewee and they refer me to someone else, guess what? It's too late to contact them because: they're not in the office until Monday, they will refer me to someone else who might know more, and interviewees like to take their sweet time sometimes.
     While certain pieces aren't as time sensitive, others are. Further, some sources are original. For the next piece I will turn in, I need information from a nutritionist. I found one, but there's another one that knows more. She would've been more valuable to my piece. Alas, she will not be in the office until Monday, and I didn't know about her existence until Friday. Sigh.
     So the one-of-a-kind interviewees--I struggle with securing them, finding them, and incorporating them early enough.
    For instance, "FDA OK's breast cancer drug created in part by ImmunoGen" is an article today in The Boston Globe by Robert Weisman. The article is interviewee-sensitive because only certain people are going to have the information needed to do the interview. That's not to say no one else could, it just means that certain people will have more facts and will help the news aspect more. 
    In other words. I'm excited for that moment of growth when I can better manage my interviews and work my way around names better!

Larry Kessler's throne

Summary lead: The regions largest refuge for people with HIV and AIDS hired long-time HIV crusader, Larry Kessler, as their new executive director. With strong finances and clients, the refuge turned back to a hopeful horizon.

Different delayed lead: He walks with a cane. His body withers, his mind remains strong. Best of all, he came out of retirement to help sick people.
      Larry Kessler has a legacy in Boston. He's a crusader for HIV and AIDS, and advocated for them when no one else would. He founded the Aids Action Committee of Massachusetts.
      Now, he takes the throne as Executive Director at the region's largest refuge for people with HIV and AIDS in Boston's Living Center.

story from:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/18/boston-living-center-bounces-back-from-scandal-hires-long-time-aids-advocate-larry-kessler/0Hd92maGjYCjArPaiFgHCM/story.html

A tragic 10th anniversary

     Dim lighting, loud music, sex on the mind, and 30 seconds away from dying--all at once.
     It's the type of anniversary that can't be forgotten, no matter how badly the survivors wish they could. On Wednesday, victims of a nightclub fire will be reminded of their tragic stories: how they almost died and how they watched others perish before them in flames.
    "People that weren't here really don't understand why we can't let this stuff go," said Walter Castle Jr., 39. Though a survivor, Castle suffered third-degree burns in his lungs, throat and bronchial tubes.
    The fire took Castle's friends in 2003. 100 people died. Castle was in counseling until 2009. In 2010, he returned to counseling as the 10th anniversary propelled him into terrible nightmares.
    On Sunday, relatives and friends of victims suffered through the bitter cold to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Station nightclub fire in Warwick, R.I.
 

The poor birdy

A 31-year-old talking animal, known for his one-liners and grasp of over 100 English words, created a black hole between the worlds of fantasy and reality when he died last week of natural causes.
    And he was only a parrot.
    The world knew him from scientific journals and television shows alike. He appeared in news articles and worked with a comparative psychologist from Brandeis University and Harvard. Alex, the African gray parrot, established himself in the community as an entertainer as well as a science project--and people wanted to know if there could be others like him.
 

Anecdotes! I see one!

I have learned the hard way that I don't really understand anecdotes in news writing. Nor do I know how to formulate one, listen for one, or put one on paper.
    I'm lucky enough to be able to see one after reading the textbook. An anecdote, as relayed by the textbook, is a recounting of an entertaining or informative incident within a story.
   Well, reading The Boston Globe today, I think I found one.
    The story is about a woman--a woman who is the head of a commission for snow control in Boston. The beginning of the news article doesn't introduce it that way, though. It says:

  Joanne Massaro learned about working under fire a lifetime ago, toiling in the 1970s as a self-taught cook in a Washington restaurant run by Claude Bouchet, a French chef who served presidents and powerbrokers.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. I'm actually interested in this woman's life before I even know what the story is about! Yay for writing! And then, the anecdote moves towards a sadder ending:

Now Massaro faces an entirely differently kind of pressure cooker: The girl who grew up in Hyde Park and dreamed of being a chef is Boston’s commissioner of public works. For the past four winters Massaro has overseen snow removal, a key city service that has come under fire since a blizzard dumped more than 2 feet of snow and some side streets remained impassible for days.

And without knowing this woman, I empathize with her. It sounds like she went through a lot, struggled, maybe forfeited some dreams and to do what? Pick up snow around Boston? 
   Yup, anecdotes work.

Background

     In previous interviews, I didn't know what I was asking about. I asked rudimentary questions that were probably answered on Google.
    For the first interview I did for a news story, I interviewed a few people from the UNH survey center. I did a phone interview and two in-person interviews. Lined up in my notebook, I etched out questions. Each person I planned to interview had maybe 10 to 20 questions to answer (or not).
    More than half of them were aimed at what the survey center usually did for operations. I had some background information because my friend worked at the UNH survey center, but other than that, my knowledge was non-existent. The story worked because the news was how much the survey center had to poll around the Presidential Election. The comparisons worked. The knowledge was helpful.
    The last story I wrote had to do with gluten allergies. I interviewed restaurants in downtown Durham, N.H. I wanted to know about the gluten free movement and how much it was affecting restaurants. As a person with a gluten sensitivity, I realized I didn't know enough about it before I went. I asked a lot of basic questions that didn't help me write the news part of the story later. The background didn't help.
    The reason I bring all this up is because news writers always seem to be informed. In an article from The Boston Globe about Obama and congress by Jim Kuhnhenn:

This president, like recent ones before him, has gone to the public before in hopes of persuading lawmakers. It hasn’t always proved a winning tactic. President Clinton failed to use the public to win support for his health care overhaul. President George W. Bush was unable to make changes to Social Security in his second term.

     For my next story, I tried to be more informed and researched USPS online before trying to ask questions about them. Some of the questions I asked were still basic and I didn't end up using the answers, but in the end, I learned a lot and had more important material to work with. I guess being informed works for me.

Sensitivity and Opinion

Avoid bias. Avoid opinions. As a newswriter, journalists owe it to society to be truthful. Yet around campus and around the world, controversy brews and waits to be boiled over by angry civilians and politicians.
     So with sensitive topics, how does a writer keep their opinions out? How do they remain unbiased and only present the facts? And does rearranging the facts count as truth in a news story?
    Today, one of the headlines for The Boston Globe speaks about how Massachusetts deports more immigrants for civil violations than for serious ones:

Federal immigration officials are deporting more immigrants in Massachusetts for civil violations than for serious crimes under a fingerprint-sharing program that expanded from Boston to the rest of the state last year.

   The lead has no bias, though the writer must have had some sort of opinion on the issue! It doesn't show. The next paragraph strays from bias, too.

As of December, only 45.6 percent of the 768 immigrants deported through the Secure Communities program since 2008 had criminal records, far below the national average of 76 percent and lower than states such as Arizona, New York, and Texas.

    Reporter Maria Sacchetti did her research. And she presented it fairly, with numbers. The passage is almost without bias. The only part I question is far below the national average. Even so, I couldn't keep out all my bias as well as she does here. The issue is sensitive. Conservatives and liberals are in battle about who to send out and who to keep in. Obama, I've heard, wants to help immigrant children. Conservatives don't always agree. 
    The most important thing for me to work on as a writer right now is to keep out my opinions. Reading stronger examples helps. 

Done with Rehash

Our journalism textbook has a lot of good rules. A lot. One really sticks out to me (because I break it): don't rehash what the quote is saying.
    So often in high school and even in college, we're taught to explain a quote. I was taught to introduce a quote with a short sentence, insert the quote, and then explain what the quote says. Too often, I fall into a lazy pattern of rewording what the quote says while thinking it explains it to the reader. I forget that the reader may not have my pre-existing knowledge. While I constantly do it wrong, here's a passage from The Boston Globe that has it right:

       ...But because so much of the Earth is ocean, only about once a century does something comparable occur over an inhabited area.

“Objects falling over the oceans could be almost completely missed,” Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an e-mail. “Only the Air Force and Department of Defense have information on a lot of the airbursts that are unobserved from the ground.”
       The atmosphere largely protected the Earth this time, Binzel said, heating up the meteoroid and causing it to break apart....

      At the end of one paragraph, there is a line that could introduce a quote. Then, a quote is introduced from a valid source. After the quote, the beginning of the next paragraph does not sum up the quote or rehash it, like I would have done. It paraphrases another quote and moves on with the story. The quote itself explains what the reader needs to know. I've learned that I don't need to dumb down everything and be so redundant. 
     The benefit to not explaining each quote is that it saves space and time. It also keeps the writer from forming opinions about the quote. Readers triumph! Writers are saved! Bias is prevented! 

Car accident injures three in Belmont, MA

*newswriting exercise*

     Three females swerved off the road in a mustang on Mile Hill Road in Belmont, Massachusetts Sunday evening around 9 o’clock after their car hit an embankment, flipped onto its roof, and trapped passengers for 45 minutes.

     According to Lt. Judith Barkmus, Belmont Police Dept., the driver was 17-year-old Jamie Peterson. Peterson crawled out of the car by herself.  Rescuers took 45 minutes to free the two passengers from the crumpled car.

    The victims were taken to Memorial Hospital in Belmont.

One of the passengers was in stable condition. The other was airlifted to Mass. General Hospital in Boston. A Mass. General Hospital spokesperson would not identify the victim but claimed that there was a car-accident victim being treated for brain injuries from a Sunday evening incident.

    Josie M. Crandall saw the white mustang heading north on Mile Hill Road around 9 P.M. Crandall saw the accident from her home and phoned it into police. “I’ve never seen a car going so fast on this road. It’s a dirt road, and it’s really easy to lose control,” Crandall said.

Mile Hill Road does not have streetlights. On December 24, 2005, two local teenagers were killed at the same spot.

    Tom Carroll Jr., 17, was driving on Mile Hill Road the same time as the mustang. The first on the scene, he told police that his pick-up was behind the Mustang, and he saw it speed around a curve. When he next saw it, the mustang was on its roof.

     Carroll looked under the flipped car and told police he saw empty Budweiser cans on the ground. “I thought the worst. They were flying. It’s hard to see kids your age in something like this,” Carroll said. “You realize when you see it what could happen, especially on this road. That guy, the driver, was definitely drunk.”

Why things matter--reading through the textbook

     I've come across some important tidbits in the textbook readings that would never have occurred to me. I struggle with how to decipher which facts are significant to a story and which are not. The textbook had a simple solution to my problem: significant facts = facts with consequences. Furthermore, the book quoted a journalist who redirected my aim. The journalist said that we are not writing for our sources; we write for our readers and listeners. The difference entails how we portray the sources; if the sources are skewed one way or the other, we have to let our audiences know.
     The 5 W's is what really got me, though. It is a simple format for how to write and yet it is the most important information I can give as a journalist. The two to lead with are the who and/or the what. The what gives the news its substance. The who gives news its humanity and personality.
    Since I really struggle with leads, the chapter about them has been extremely helpful. One of the questions the book asked was what makes the best lead? And I never would have guessed the answer: emphasizing why things matter.

Finding Nemo in a Blizzard

Nemo created some problems for the local students of Durham, New Hampshire:

     "It was a bad weekend. I felt like death. I was wet all weekend from the snow. I wanted to go to Portsmouth to get new shoes because my shoes are falling apart. My friend crashed his car. I haven't heard from him, but I'm sure he's okay...I'll hear about it on Monday. I trudged through the worst part of the storm to Rite Aid to get medicine for my cold. On the way back, I walked by four biddies who were pushing each other in the snow. One of them said her butt was wet from the snow, and then said, 'We can all get naked in the laundry room!'" Chris Carroll said.
    "My weekend was great. I went home because my parents missed me. My dad, when he snow-blowed the driveway, blew it onto the dryer vent so we almost got carbon monoxide poisoning. And my dog couldn't go out to pee or poop--she was a bit of a diva this weekend," Amelia Dickinson said.
    "My weekend was okay. I stayed inside and watched movies all weekend, and my roommate left her phone at school when she went home so I had no idea if she was okay or not. My friend crashed when he was driving home. He survived, but he was in the ICU for 48 hours. I'm going to go see him on Wednesday," said Claire Cariello.
     

Adaptations

I knew that news writing would be hard. I understood that it was a different style of writing. I had no idea that it would take so much effort to switch from narrative style to inverted pyramid. I find it especially difficult to prioritize my writing so that the most important facts come first. The more I read news articles online, the more I recognize the proficient writers versus the non-. 

     Because I recognize that I need a lot of work, I think I see a remedy. First and foremost, I need to read more articles; skimming is my enemy. Next, as I have learned with essays, the best way (for me) to proofread is to print out the essay and formally go through it with a pen. For some reason, the tangibility helps. Likewise with articles, I think the only way for me to process my errors in the most efficient manner is to print them out, rip them apart with highlighters and pens, and then fix them on the computer. I've gotten stuck with good-writer syndrome; someone along the way told me I was good at writing. I accidentally took it as permission to not try as hard. Time to start over.

How I went about my story

(How I went about finding my story, and why I think it's news)

I decided on a story that personally related to me. I have a gluten sensitivity and so I've noticed a trend that more gluten free foods are becoming available for us food-sensitive folk. Not only is there a decent selection in the dining halls, but there are local restaurants that have jumped on the band wagon. 
     The gluten free movement is a trend. It's relevant to everyone with an allergy and everyone who's heard about the benefits of a gluten-free diet. Not only is it a movement in chain restaurants and in grocery stores, it is a movement within our very own town. Mama Mac's has gotten into gluten-free pasta and a gluten-free cheese sauce (who knew the original cheese sauce included gluten!?). The Candy Corner offers gluten free cookies and naturally gluten free chocolates. DHOP even offers gluten-free pizza crust on a limited basis. 
      The gluten-free movement is being noticed by a lot of people. As gluten-free foods take up more space in grocery stores and on menus, it represents a change in the status quo: people want to eat healthier and take care of their insides. 

Fairy-tale homicide

Forest--A talking wolf attempted double homicide early morning towards a young girl and her grandmother in the forest. The two survived after a nearby huntsman relieved them from their ingested state with his knife.

  The wolf came to Little Red Riding Hood halfway through her journey early morning yesterday. She was instructed by her mother to bring food to her sick grandmother. 

  The wolf engaged in conversation and appeared friendly. He aimed at distracting Little Red Riding Hood and suggested that she stray from the path. She obliged to pick wildflowers while the wolf disappeared and Miss Hood went deeper into the forest. 

What is news to others?

           In a small group, my classmates and I discussed what news is to us. Brittany defined news as the knowledge of daily occurrences. She said that it can be transmitted not just by the media, but also through word-of-mouth at the dinner table and the office, as it becomes a staple of conversation. It affects people daily and is a large part of peoples' lives. Danielle agreed, and defined the news as everything that's going on around someone. It is inescapable, can be local, national, or global, and it is an important facet of everyday life. To understand the world, it's important to know what's going on around it.
           Jack defined news as reporting through a medium information to the general public. In a perfect world, he said, the news is unbiased and without an agenda. He argued that news should be for to make society better off. In the end, we concluded that news is to inform the general public about the world, should be for the better of society, and is an important aspect of everyday life in contemporary society.