Learning a Hard Lesson Close to Home

Imagine my surprise when, during my morning Facebook check, one of my elementary school teachers posted this on my wall:

"Becca did you hear about Tesseract?"

I hadn't, so I started checking all the walls of my former teachers and classmates from Tesseract: the small, private elementary school I attended from kindergarten through sixth grade.

From what I could piece together, things didn't just look bleak. Things were over.

Apparently, school officials had told teachers, parents and students this past Tuesday that the school would be closing for good -- on Friday. Three days and a get thee out.

I thought this was an incredibly newsworthy story. At least, it would be a tale of how perhaps the economy is impacting education at small private grade schools. At the most, it could be an investigation into why the school shut so questionably and abruptly. What it ended up being was financial, yes, and a question of what will happen to the kids.

A search of Google News shows, as of 1 a.m. Friday, three media outlets have picked it up:

The Star Tribune newspaper
http://www.startribune.com/local/south/90964839.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUo8cyaiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

KSTP 5 Eyewitness News (ABC TV station)
http://kstp.com/news/stories/S1515476.shtml?cat=1

KMSP Fox 9 News
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/eagan-school-closes-earlier-than-expected

As a reporter at KOMU 8 TV in Columbia, MO, watching the downfall of my elementary school play out on two of my four hometown news stations served as a surreal lesson. I was torn between mourning the loss of something that I and several thousand others have woven into the fabric of our pasts and comparing/contrasting/critiquing the two stations' stories.

Watch the Fox 9 story and the 5 Eyewitness News story.

Both chose to send live reporters to my elementary school. Both live reporters pitched to packages within their shot.

I thought Fox 9 treated the story better. I'll tell you why...

Award-winning CBS photographer Les Rose was talking with us Mizzou students just a few hours ago about storytelling. One thing he said was: in a story about kids, show kids. Get their perspective.

Fox 9 talked with kids - although I think the videographer should have made more of an effort to be right at their eye level the entire interview.

The Fox story had an element of compassion the ABC story lacked.

I was confused when the 5 Eyewitness reporter interviewed three moms standing next to each other and the videographer didn't frame the other two out. The one speaking looked like some mafia boss flanked by her bodyguards - all in sunglasses. And why were they all wearing sunglasses? If it was because they had puffy red eyes from crying all morning, then I - as a viewer - want to know. Are they that sad about it? Such a fact could really help fill out the story and add emotional depth.

In both stories, I would've liked to see tighter interview framing on the emotional interviews.

At the end of the day, however, it was sad to see two local news stations going live outside my elementary school for such a reason.

Although I am too close to this story's subject to tell it in a fair, balanced and ethical manner, it has made me consider the tempered compassion with which I can approach similar stories in my own reporting. While I wouldn't interject my opinion into the news, I do want to show people I am human and acknowledge that something like this is a sad story.

Please post any comments, responses, critiques or comparisons YOU may have in the comment field below. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Eternal Life Online?

Twenty cups of coffee, countless hours and a few red-eye nights have birthed my Web site into the great, wide online world. Check it out, if you have a minute or two. (Please feel free to shoot me any feedback. A colleague at KOMU last night pointed out I was missing a word in my resume!)

Birth is an easy go-to metaphor for anything creative or requiring hard work. "This [car, story, painting, Web site, etc.] is my baby," implying that person has been laboring over her or his project for some amount of time.

That's interesting when you contrast the birth of Cyber You, in the form of a profile or Web site, with a panel topic from the 2010 SXSW conference called Post Mortem: Digital Death and Legacy. I was listening to the local NPR station when I heard a report about it. Read the description and try telling me this isn't intriguing:

If you passed away today, how would your online friends find out? Should logins and passwords be in your will? Has technology changed mourning? Will your digital media stay online forever? Our lives are lived and documented online, it’s time to talk about the implications of death and digital legacy.

What a thought, huh? I've wondered that about Facebook profiles of victims we report on in the news.

Let's pretend nobody knew your Facebook password, you didn't have it written down somewhere and it was entirely distinct from all your other passwords. Let's also pretend - for the purposes of this conversation - you somehow die. (It can be quick & painless)...

- Is it irreverent and discourteous to keep your profile up?

- What is Facebook's role in this? Who would authorize it to deactivate your profile?

- What would it take, legally, for a family member to obtain that private information from Facebook? How much might that cost (on top of funeral/burial costs)?

- Would friends at first use your profile as a mourning site to post memories? (See this Newsweek article, "R.I.P. on Facebook") What would it later become, years after your death?

It's like Cyber You lives on while Physical You is gone.

This prompts two thoughts:

1) It's probably a good idea to keep a record of your passwords somewhere -- even if it's in a safe vault at your bank.

2) Perhaps this is the new way of wills. Alongside to whom you will your car might be the name of the person entrusted with carrying out your Digital Wishes, whether deactivation, deletion or - who knows - Digital Immortality*.

Here's a Web site that has gone so far as to discuss Stages of the Digital Afterlife. It mentions what I talked about earlier: death... remembered... forgotten.


(Here's a great, short little explainer video)

Regarding the Forgotten stage, the site says this:

"As far as I’m aware, there are no services addressing this stage. This is where the real potential exists in this industry. Imagine being able to examine the online content of your ancestors and know who they were and what they thought. I’m not sure how this will work, but we’re here to talk about it."

Sound like it's a conversation pushing itself to the forefront of the cultural conversation.

* For kicks, I Googled "Digital Immortality" and stumbled across this creepy Web site. Despite its "old-school" appearance, it does address questions about the ethics of Digital Immortality (copyright, for example).

Six Hours Hooked Up to an IV Drip

If being a fledgling reporter is like having the common cold, then I spent a chunk of my morning and afternoon soaking up that which will help me get better.

You've heard it said since you were young: the best treatment for the common cold is a combination of rest, fluids and waiting.

Somewhere in the mix, you heard something about vitamin C and how taking it might prevent - or even cure - your ailment.

However, studies show no real link between the nutrient and even shortening the duration of the common cold, let alone curing it. Read more about that in this Newsweek article.

According to that article, though, doctors don't mind that many people take vitamin C in hopes of improving their health, since "consumption of vitamin C is not considered a public threat. (In fact, some studies have associated vitamin C's antioxidant properties with a decreased incident of some cancers.)"

Plus, when the only real cure is to wait it out, don't you like to think you're doing something to help the process along? Taking vitamin C makes the waiting, resting and hydration a little easier.

So if being a fledgling reporter is like having the common cold and the real cure for that is time - or experience - then taking Vitamin C is like motivation.

Motivation alone won't better your reporting skills - just like vitamin C won't cure your cold - but it will help you through the process of improvement and learning.

Today I was hooked up to an IV drip of pure motivation in the form of Boyd Huppert. He's a reporter for Minnesota's KARE 11 TV and highly decorated, at that. Widely considered one of the nation's finest storytellers in television news, ~80 University of Missouri School of Journalism students sat, entranced, as he imparted his wisdom to us during a seminar. (Get a sample of his writing and delivery tips from these YouTube videos.)

One big lesson I took away was to let viewers discover the layers of a story. You can literally spell out for people what they're seeing on the TV screen or you can let them take in information by hearing and seeing it for themselves. Then your writing is free to be a little more nuanced.

He talked about his twelve tools of good writing techniques, which, used sparingly, can help bring a story to life. Those include using metaphors, alliteration, supposition (supposing that xxx, then yyy... see the opening line of my blog!) and the rule of three.

Motivated by his seminar, I am taking actions to improve my journalistic skills, starting with updating my blog and ending with who-knows-what.

What I do know is that I'll be putting his tips to use in my reporting from now on.

See more of Boyd's work in his series, Land of 10,000 Stories.

This is my brain, on acid.

Acid does funny things to the mind.

Whenever I'm on a bike ride - no matter how intense or leisurely - the final stretch becomes agonizing. Some of it is fatigue after two hours on the trail, but most of it is my conditioned r

esponse to acid.

Lactic acid, I mean.

My tired quads start burning, and I start wondering silly things like whether I'll even be able to make it home.

It's not like the last mile is more challenging than the rest of my ride. I think just knowing the adventure is almost over

causes me to drag my feet - or wheels. The exhilaration of the ride is coming to a close, and instead of finishing well, I dread ending it.

The same thing's going on with my mind as I round my last collegiate lap. Graduation is in May. Job hunting is even sooner. I see the end of this particular life journey, and instead of pushing triumphantly to the end, I dread the conclusion of this ride.

Lactic acid panic of the brain.

If only I could figure out some way to change my response to lactic acid from dread to a burst of enthusiasm, I'd feel much better about the entire ride.

Who wants to end on a sorry whimper when you can sprint to the finish?

While I work on this problem, I'll continue to use my performance-enhancing drug of choice: black, home-brewed Caribou Blend coffee.

By the way, the title of the post is a nod to this classic 90's anti-drug commercial, starring Minnesotan native Rachael Leigh Cook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kci12O2EI8I

Better Late Than Never: True or False?

I am a senior at Mizzou and JUST viewed my first True/False Film Festival film. A highly-acclaimed and -recognized film festival has sat, literally, blocks from my home for the past three years, and only tonight did I attend. And loved it, I might add.

Thanks to the Missouri School of Journalism, I got two free tickets to a flick. I chose The Invention of Dr. NakaMats because it looked quirky. It was. The director was there, along with one of the film's score composers (the other composer, Mark Mothersbaugh, was unfortunately not present).

See a preview here.

The film reminded me a lot of my own trip to Hong Kong in fall of 2006. We had a media guru/documentary filmmaker with us and met a character much like Dr. NakaMats - loud, slightly out of touch with westernized & youthcentric culture, unapologetic and seemingly unaware. Loveable, in his own way, but also very trying, at times.

So - does the saying "better late than never" apply to the True/False Film Festival? I think my tea bag answers that. According to the tag on the tea bag I opened after returning from the film, "You're never too old to become younger," - Mae West.

Coincidence? False.

On a side note, I just learned about Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette's personal tragedy in the face of national attention. Watching her skate tonight and take the bronze medal despite having lost her mom on Sunday was a beautiful display of strength.

In with the new...

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" is a saying that more-than-slightly reeks of ageism and may lie, unspoken, behind many "lettings go," jobforce-wide.

It might be more correct to say, "You can teach a seasoned dog new tricks, but he might not like 'em -- or at least the initial idea of them."

Part of the work in my capstone class - Media Management - includes tackling case studies, in which I play the role of news director in a specific scenario. I'm currently working on a case study, in which, among other issues, a TV newsroom is facing this nebulous concept called convergence. Veteran reporters are suddenly confronted by tasks they've never had to do before, such as writing their own Web stories and tweeting.

My job, as hypothetical news director, is to smoothly oversee this transition. In order to gain perspective, I spoke with one of the anchors at my station -- KOMU 8 TV -- Jim Riek. Jim has been in the TV industry since 1977 and has seen sweeping changes since he first hopped aboard.

Jim is on Twitter, as are all of KOMU's main news anchors, but he said he wasn't an early adopter. He signed up only after "peer pressure" from some folks in the newsroom. He tweets now - and I enjoy learning all I know about golf from those - but he said he has spoken with other people his age in the business, who expressed some frustration over the changes.

TV news now doesn't look very similar to how it did when Jim first got into it, he said. In the late 1970s, TV stations, newspapers and radio stations were three very distinct newsrooms. Now, as almost every journalists knows firsthand, the lines are much more blurred. In some cases, you can't even tell where one newsroom ends and the other begins, not to mention the addition of all things Web and digital in order to further disseminate content.

The one thing Jim said hasn't changed is the opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and do things you wouldn't otherwise do.

Jim is an incredible asset to KOMU -- not only in the stories he puts out (see my latest favorite, about the remnants of nuclear missile launch sites that still lie all over Missouri!), but also in the mentorship he provides to so many of the students at University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate KOMU 8, where the newsroom functions as both your typical NBC affiliate newsroom AND as a teaching lab.

But, as Jim mentioned, KOMU is unique for that reason. So what about other career journalists who have been in the business for decades and are now facing a whole new world of Web stories and Facebook?

Harking back to my case study, Jim recommended I - as "news director" - suggest to veteran reporters and anchors to give Twitter and other new media a shot. There's no harm in trying, really, and sometimes the first step is the hardest. As Jim said, he wasn't the first to jump on the Twitter wagon, but now that he has, he likes it.

Although not every seasoned TV journalist has college students to directly mentor, per se, many of them do have institutional knowledge and a finely-tuned ability to tell stories from which younger journalists can learn.

A young pup may come into the newsroom with tech savvy Twitter know-how, but a well-trained canine can help that pup learn to craft the stories that need to be tweeted about in the first place.

In with the new... mentored by the "old." And since experienced dogs can learn new tricks, too, and become quite good at them, then perhaps, in turn, the pup can help pave his mentor's way to the Web.

The Week I Slept on My Floor

What started as a Saturday afternoon of cleaning my room soon became an evening of completely rearranging my space, interrupted by dinner plans and a night out.

I returned home to find I had earlier piled half my earthly belongings on top of my mattress in order to clear the floor and vacuum, so I resolved to roll out the mattress pad and Goodwill sleeping bag and call it a night.

Thus began the saga that will go down in my history as the-night-that-turned-into-the-week-I-slept-on-my-floor.

You know these things life hands you once in awhile -- or, more correctly, that you decide to take on yourself:

Unfinished Projects You Obviously Underestimated, Regarding Simplicity.

UP YOURS, for short.

They're the "good ideas, at the time" that land you, for lack of a metaphor, on the floor -- in a shiny blue sleeping bag from a secondhand store designed for someone six inches shorter than you.

Oh, but doesn't it feel good once you actually complete one of these little projects? When you actually complete one... IF you actually complete one...

Stay tuned for the blog post when that happens. (Hopefully, it will be sooner, rather than later. I miss my mattress.)