Category: newspapers

Chris Hagan and the case of the missing wrestler

About 3o minutes ago I got this e-mail from my editor at the paper:

Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Hallelujah!!!!

You are heading toward Super Versatile V!!!!

This is all because of a high school wrestler’s mug shot. The journey that photo took from a small community just east of Salem to my e-mail box is a long, complicated ordeal. One full of danger, intrigue and rural high school photo directors who occasionally take Mondays off.

As part of our high school coverage, the Statesman Journal picks an all-star team for every sport and then displays the team in a lovely grid on B2.

The athlete of the year gets a full photo shoot and feature but the lowly members of the team (All-Region when I started but now All-Mid-Valley) get a mug shot, stats and one quote from their coach.

Stats and quotes are normally not too bad. Every once in a while there’s a coach that will stiff you and not call you back, but most of the time some other coach has stats and can even provide a few glowing words for a rival.

The problem is art. Finding anywhere from 10 (cross country) to almost 50 (football) pictures can stretch the patience of even the most grizzled, chain-smoking prep sports veteran.

This year I was given the wrestling team. I know next to nothing about wrestling, but I know how to fill numbers in on a chart and write vague wrestling-sounding sentences while trying to figure out what makes a teenage boy grapple (this year, because he’s good at). All of the pictures even came in relatively well, except for one.

The wrestler in question is on his way to becoming the most decorated athlete in the history of one of the small schools we cover. He won a track and field state title as a sophomore as a member of the 4×400 relay. This year he was on the state-champion football team and then won a wrestling state title at 215 pounds. His coach already has visions of more track titles this year and then another football/wrestling combo next year.

Normally I get photos through the coach. In this case, though he coaches wrestling, he’s is not an employee of the school and so it took a little longer to get in touch with him. The story was going to run on a Tuesday and I spoke with him for the first time on Thursday.

We talk about the two wrestlers from Scio we have on the team and what it was like watching them make it all the way to the state title. He tells a great story about how is heavy-weight can throw him all around the gym and marvels at how much the kid has already accomplished. I already have what I need but I’m enjoying the conversation so I ask about if the football title (both kids were on the team) helped them this year. Seems like a cool guy.

I mentioned the need for photos and he was all over it. They had plenty, he said, just say where to send ‘em. This is where I make my first mistake.

The e-mail system at the paper is terrible. If you sign on remotely it makes you re-enter your password every 10 minutes and the storage is minuscule. I don’t want the very last piece I need for this project to get lost in Outlook hell.

So I read off my gmail address. Or at least I think I do. My work e-mail is six character before the @, my personal one is 12. I’ve just doubled my potential for error.

At that point, though, I think everything is fine. Over the weekend I keep checking my gmail, with no success. By the time I come in Monday I’m nervous but still have a whole day to figure it out, so it’s not so bad.

I give the coach a call. He picks up immediately and I let him know about the dropped e-mail. He knows he sent it off earlier and is quite surprised to find I don’t have it. He promises that once he’s near a computer he’ll call and we’ll get it figured out.

The week before I had unsuccessfully called and e-mailed the Scio athletic director. He was in Pendleton, Ore., basically in Idaho, with the school’s basketball teams at the state tournament. I had hopes he’d be able to help me out, as the kid played for him on the football team. Around noon I left a message for him to call me and waited by the phone.*

*I don’t want any of this to come off as me complaining about the people at Scio High School. I gave them very little time to help out with my request and if someone is busy on any given day, that’s not their fault. Things happen and I understand that, and as a reporter it’s my job to work around it. That’s why some of us still get paid. But I want to make it clear there is nothing against Scio.

Around 2 p.m. my editor comes by. We had spoken Saturday about the photos. One quizzical glance from him and shrug from me and we’ve communicated that the picture is still a non-entity. He suggests trying to get a school secretary or something who might be able to just send a yearbook photo.

The Scio secretary is very polite and explains that she needs to check and make sure the kid isn’t on a do-not-disclose list that would keep them from giving out the photo. Otherwise she’d be happy to help and can I check that and call you back?

Now in my head I have the coach, athletic director and school secretary looking for this photo. I scan Google to see if there are any random pictures online (he’s won three state titles already, there’s got to be something! Wait, stop panicking …). At 4 p.m. I open the phone book.

There is one entry for the kid’s last name in Scio. I have no idea who the listing is for but I figure in a town of around 700, the odds are on my side. No one answers and I leave the creepiest if-Justin-lives-here-I-need-a-picture-of-him-but-if-not-don’t-worry message ever. I hope I never hear from the number I call just in case.

At 4:30 p.m. my phone rings. It’s the creepy number people.

I find out I called Justin’s grandfather, who very kindly explains he can’t e-mail me anything but gives me the number for his son, Justin’s dad.

Justin’s dad has a love-hate relationship with his computer. Basically he hates it and would love nothing more than to take it into the street and shoot it with a shotgun. But he gives me his wife’s number. I call her cell and leave a message.

Time begins to tick away. I start going through the archived takes from when our photographers shot the state championship events this kid participated in. How could we be around this kid with a camera so many times and not get one picture that’s muggable?

Around 5:30 p.m. I get a call from the kid’s mom. She assures me there are plenty of pictures that could work (what mom wouldn’t have a million stashed around?) and she’ll e-mail me later that evening. I forget to ask when later might be.

At 7 p.m. I decide I need to go home and get some food. I found the worst mug shot in the world (high school sports category, not talking jail) from the football state playoffs and I’ve left it for my editor just in case.

Fettuccine Alfredo and mixed-vegetables. I feel much better now.

Just before 8 p.m. I check my e-mail and glory be to the patron saint of high school wrestling (which I guess is Saint Sebastian, patron saint of athletes. Thanks Sea Bass!) there is a mug shot. I send it to my editor at 7:50 p.m. and I’m done for the evening, aside from reading that cool e-mail.

This is not a unique story. It happens with every sport and every team in some fashion. For the most part we always pull it out. It’s just a reminder that for almost everything you see in the newspaper, there is a mountain of work that went into it. So if occasionally we don’t cover your school or have the best shot of your athlete, just give us another chance. We’ll definitely try our best.

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The one where Chris talks about community engagement and football

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adobemac/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Two days a week I’m the producer and host for the Statesman Journal online sports shows. A third I livestream a high school football game compete with CoverItLive chat.

So it’s a little sad to see 702.tv, a video project of the Las Vegas Sun, go down.

In the post at Poynterinked above, the Spokesman Review’s Colin Mulvany noted “I’ve never seen a newspaper-produced TV show on the Web that has ever been successful.” As much as it pains me to say so, me either.

At the Statesman I’ve produced two high school shows and a college show to go with the Friday night football and there hasn’t been one that has really taken off. Recently though I’ve had one project that has given me a little bit of hope.

This is our first year of incorporating CoverItLive into our high school football livestream. The first few weeks went by without much interaction at all outside a few people noting when the video or audio of the feed was having some problems.

The past few weeks (which not coincidentally I believe came with the two biggest games in our league this year) we have had a number of comments and questions and even, God forbid, commenters* talking with each other.

*Sorry for the Pozterisk, but I’m noticing that the WordPress spell-checker doesn’t like commenters as a word. Odd. Does it want commentators? That doesn’t seem like the right way to go.)

We still get zero questions on our high school and college sports shows, but this tiny bit of interaction has given me some hope that what we’re doing can take off. That there is a possibility that this is a way to bring the community out and together around athletics. Or at least drive up our pageviews and keep me in a job.

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She’s a punk rocker, she don’t trust no one

During my furlough last month I went down to California to visit family. Taking a week to mooch off of one’s parents has seemed to become the unofficial furlough trek for journalists of my demographic.

While down there my younger brother decided to get me out of the house and took me to see Dan Potthast at Gilman in Berkeley (one of my favorite places to see a show and one of my favorite artists to go with it).

Watching the teens cycle through the room in various state of punk rock (mohawks, tight jeans, patch jackets and screen-printed t-shirts) made me feel a few weeks short of my own age-related death.

Listening to one of the opening bands shout “Won’t never be a business man!” over and over, I started thinking about my own resistance to the whole act of making money. Not one of my favorite topics (just ask my wife). I really hate money. I hate dealing with it, putting in the bank, taking it our, even spending it.

But journalists have been forced to think, for the first time in generations, how the hell do we sell what we do? And many of us don’t like it.

I think it’s mainly that for the most part, those creating and shaping the words (reporters, copy editors and low-level desk editors) more closely resemble the screaming kids on stage than the businessmen they railed against. We sit around dreaming of how to take down the powerful and fight against the system, but how to monetize that struggle.

We just want to create. We don’t have guitars and raspy voices, but pens and laptops, but like our punk brethren we have this weird need to ask questions of everything.

Journalists, at least the ones I work with (and especially the good ones) don’t want to be associated with anything having to do with money and most importantly the word “sell.” We started writing because we never wanted to have to sell anything.

But now we’re all forced to think about it, if only because this time next week we may be involuntarily our own one-person publication.

In time it will all go away, wrapped up in the larger myth of journalism. Being able to sell your own adds on a community supported site will be like selling pins to fans. Being able to sell a banner add in the face of oppression will be a mark of being a good reporter.

But that transformation is part of the larger change we’re all facing, and just one more interesting note in the whole process.

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Am I killing the news industry?

On my Facebook account I’m connected to a lot of journalists. Makes sense considering that for the past six years the majority of all the people I socialize with have come from the industry.

Recently I noticed more and more people were joining up for the National Buy a Newspaper Day event, started by Chris Freiberg.

The idea sounded intriguing until I read lower in the description of the post:

So for one day, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009, please make it a point to pick up your local newspaper (reading it online doesn‘t count).

Why not? Well, it’s pretty clear and I get where Freiberg is going. The point of the day is to pump money into the industry in a way of voting with your dollars. Every cent that goes to a newspaper is one that will count toward keeping the news alive and showing people still care about the product.

And I think that’s what bothered me. Yes, the news is free online, but if someone wanted to participate in a day like this without picking up the print product what would they do?

A lot of sites have things such as Paypal or Amazon support, and maybe that’s what news Web sites need as well.

I’m still on the fence about signing up for the event. Part of me feels like it’s straining to support an industry and business model that are in need of change, not reinforcement. The other part of me vehemently agrees with what Freiberg says in his description on Facebook, that the in-depth reporting done at daily newspapers needs to continue.

Feb. 2 I’m going to do my part to show that I still care about news and what newspapers do. I’m just not sure what yet.

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