The Reporting Life, Part Five

By Kathleen Miller.

6:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Now’s the time when you send your story over to an editor for review and let your mind rot a bit while you surf Facebook, Perez Hilton or Media Bistro Fishbowl D.C. - if you’re me. It’s also a good time to scan your competitor’s websites, make sure there was nothing major that broke and they’re already reporting while you wrote your story on something entirely different.

The editing process usually is fairly painless. The boss reviews your article, catches any glaring typos and asks you for more detail if they feel like there are some holes in your work.

Most days, I look at my stories afterwards and thank God for editors. The good ones will make your story flow 100 times better than it was before, slice out extraneous information and make sure you spelled George Leventhal’s last name as Leventhal, and not Levanthal.

There are bumps in the road, however, even with a good editor. A few years ago, I pitched a story about county fair woes, including the fact that they seem to attract gangs and nobody I know goes to fairs anymore. My editor loved it. He lived in Montgomery County and heard much of the same from his friends and neighbors, nobody takes their families to the fair anymore, largely because they’re worried about crime.

The greenlight was given. I started reporting and spent four days talking to police, fair operators and residents. The people I stopped on the streets of Rockville said exactly what my boss and I had predicted: essentially, “We don’t go to the fair anymore, we used to but our friends were robbed last time we went and it’s just not safe.”

Except I had a major problem: the stats didn’t back up that sentiment. In fact, the Montgomery County fair had record attendance the year before, and while police had detained an armed, known gang member outside the entrance gates, there hadn’t been a major incident inside the fairgrounds.

I had informed one supervisor of this, and said I was going to have to write the story differently, focusing on how despite record attendance there are new concerns for fairs. I.e., police have to be more vigilant about crime and with the economy tanking, many vendors can’t afford to travel to as many fairs as they used to do.

The other editor, however, read the final version of my story and found it totally unacceptable. He wanted the original idea we’d discussed. I told him I couldn’t write that because the facts didn’t back it up.
We fought. And fought and fought and fought. In a weaker moment, I walked outside and sat in a park near tears. There was no way I was going to let the story appear in print with my name on it if I didn’t agree with the underlying premise. On the other hand, he’s the boss. He has the final say.

I debated playing the reporter’s only trump card: I could pull my name from the story, tell him he was free to run it as he wished (which he can always do without my permission anyhow), but I didn’t want my byline attached to it. It’s an approach that makes everybody unhappy, but it is the last thing a reporter can do when battling with an editor.

I’d never done it before, and it didn’t get that far that day. I’m not sure either of us was ecstatic about the final version of the article, but I felt it was fair. We talked about the crime concerns, used anecdotes and quotes, but also noted the record attendance and that the biggest local incident had been averted by cops outside the Montgomery County fairgrounds.

There is often a natural tension between reporters and editors. We’re hired to write and report stories, and they’re hired to question them and improve them. It is literally their job to correct what we do. The system probably functions best when they’re comfortable challenging our work and we’re comfortable standing up for it, but it does require a thick skin on both ends.

Conclusion

Once the editing’s done, a reporter is free to go home - where, as I’ve noted, they’ll often continue compulsively checking facts long after the day is supposedly over.

Then, it’s time for bed, when the worries sink in that another publication will have a story you didn’t or have dug deeper than you on a given topic.

Trust me, there is nothing worse than getting beat on a story. It can happen in all sorts of ways. You can be flat-out oblivious to something. In my case, see Washington Post reporter Ann Marimow’s “County Executive to get $65,000 Bathroom” story. I was clueless there was any sort of bathroom brouhaha whatsoever. Or similarly Post reporter Miranda Spivack’s scoop “Report on Water Quality Withheld.”

You can be looped-in on a topic and miss a major development that another reporter catches. In my case, see Janel Davis’s “Disability Retirement Review Nets Another Employee.”

And, perhaps most painful of all, you can have the story but be holding out for one more comment, one more fact and lose the whole thing in the process. This happened to me in Marimow’s “Montgomery Disability Practices Under Fire.”

It works both ways, however - I received friendly emails from other local reporters congratulating me on a story I broke that there was a federal investigation into the disability retirement packages of two former Montgomery County assistant police chiefs.

This winter, other news outlets followed a story I broke at the AP about a congressman from the Bronx that had collected thousands of dollars in property tax credits over ten years by claiming his primary residence was in Montgomery County although he was registered to vote and drive in New York. Bloomberg and the Post followed the story shortly thereafter, noting that a high-ranking California congressman had similarly exploited the Homestead Property Tax credit for his Anne Arundel home.

Again, competition should work both ways - and when it does everybody benefits. Reporters work harder when they know somebody is chasing the same story, and the audience gets more-informed articles.

This area is lucky to have The Washington Post as the paper of record - however, that’s generated a sense of entitlement among many local folks that complain when the Post doesn’t cover this county issue or that county issue. The Post, like most media organizations, is dealing with financial strains that don't allow them to run every story their reporters pitch. In many newsrooms right now, there is a battle for space that pits reporters against other reporters and editors against editors at the same paper every day to score a spot for their article.

To those in the community who feel slighted, I say cry me a river - you’ve got plenty of other places to go to pitch stories and read local news.

Make use of them. The Gazette has dozens of reporters covering Maryland, the Examiner sets aside space for at least six Montgomery County stories a week. This blog itself is read by most insiders, activists and reporters in the area.

You never know. Bob Woodward got his start at the Sentinel, and Maureen Dowd covered some of the issues surrounding Robin Ficker’s first ballot referendum victories on landfills and sewage sludge for the now-defunct Washington Star.

If it’s a good story, it will capture the public’s attention no matter who covers it.

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The Reporting Life, Part Four

By Kathleen Miller.

5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Now it’s time to write. Everybody goes about this process differently.

The lede, or first sentence of an article, is arguably the most important part of a story. You’re trying to hook readers and summarize the story at once, typically in less than 40 words.

I personally prefer to dive in, throwing all my information onto the page and allowing the story to shake out as I write it. My boyfriend, who I’ve occasionally had to double byline stories with, takes the opposite approach. The kid will literally spend an hour visiting dictionary.com and using an online thesaurus to revise and rework every single word in the lede until he’s totally satisfied with it before thinking about the rest of the story.

I’m too anxious. Plus, I think while you’re writing the rest of the story, it often helps hone your lede and reminds you of what the overall point here is. That being said, his ledes are typically better than mine. But his stories are often late.

After the lede comes a nut graph, in which you put the whole story in context, generally referencing the background elements that led to the breaking news. For example, if council members voted to restrict homeowners’ rights to add-on to their homes, the nut graph may mention that “mansionization” has been an issue in Montgomery County for years as neighbors complain that some people’s massive reconstruction efforts block other people’s sunlight and intrude on their privacy.

It’s basically as simple as that typically, with the story filled out by quotes and insight from people on both sides of whatever issue is being covered.

There is a new school of thought in journalism championed by the AP’s Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier that says reporters should “cut through the clutter,” or essentially call bullshit as they see it.

I took a journalism ethics class in graduate school where we learned that during the McCarthy era, many reporters felt professionally restricted, only able to report exactly what McCarthy and his targets said, and not offer any independent insight or analysis about the situation. The press in those days, apparently, was often far less-educated than the people they covered, and there was a sort of hesitance to challenge authority or do anything other than basically act as stenographers.

Last summer, Fournier said in a memo to AP reporters that they should “write with authority.” “The AP's hard-earned reputation for fairness and nonpartisanship must not be used as an excuse for fuzzy language when a clear voice is demanded, nor should it force us to give both sides of a story equal play when one side is plainly wrong.”

Fourner said that shortly after Katrina struck, he had “dutifully reported” that President Bush had said nobody anticipated the breach of the levees, when, in actuality, many experts had actually predicted a major storm would bust New Orleans’ flood-control barriers.

“In the past, that’s all I would have written;” Fournier wrote in the memo. “Readers would get both sides of the story and then be expected to draw their own conclusion. This time, I went a step further and simply wrote: He was wrong. Why not? Why force the readers to read between carefully parsed lines when the facts are clear? Why not just get to the point? The president of the United States was wrong. The governor lied. The congressman broke his promise. The preacher, the CEO, the banker, the coach, or whomever, failed. Don’t mince words... Too often we depend on the government and its critics to tell us what happened, and we end up with he said/she said stories that never get to the bottom line.”

It’s an interesting concept. I think it’s both smart and dangerous. If you’ve covered an administration or an issue for years like Fournier or many of his team, you are probably an expert in your own right and deserve the power to call it like you see it.

You can’t use that style every day, in every story or on every topic, however, or you risk editorializing. There are some topics - for me, environmental policy - where at this stage of the game, I have no business calling BS or cutting through the clutter. I’m too green, (yikes - pun unintended) to take on that role. In others, like local immigration policy or WSSC drama, I feel like I’ve been in the weeds enough to cut through the crap on occasion.

Tomorrow: 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

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The Reporting Life, Part Three

By Kathleen Miller.

1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Shortly after lunch, it’s time to start assessing what information you’ve got, and what information you lack. It’s time to fill the holes in your story and often time to dash out to cover a press conference or meeting.

If the event’s a ribbon-cutting for a new recycling center or workforce housing program, it’s a safe bet the press isn’t there to cover the excitement. Often, it’s the only way you can pin down a number of influential people or elected officials on other issues. Or eavesdrop on what other reporters are asking.

You feel slightly sleazy as a reporter when you’re standing next to somebody from a different paper or station and literally taking notes on their questions. But you quickly learn they do it to you, and it’s better than the alternative, letting them have the elected official to themselves, including any juicy tidbits they might drop along the way, or getting sucker-punched by an article in the next day’s paper.

3:30 to 5:00 p.m.

About mid-afternoon, it’s time to start assessing what information you’ve got, what information you lack and what information you absolutely can’t live without. It’s also time to play tough-guy with your sources. Remind them of your need for information and that the story will run with or without their comment.

I think sometimes people think it’s best to say no comment on touchy subjects, but I couldn’t disagree more. If the story’s gonna run, it’s gonna run. The reporter will be given a certain amount of space to fill, and if you’re sticking with “no comment,” you’re giving the other side more space for their spin.

It is the journalist’s obligation to attempt to give both sides a chance to speak, but they’ve done their job by trying to reach you by phone and e-mail. If you’re not returning their messages, that doesn’t mean they won’t run the article. It just means you won’t get a chance to present your case.

Sometimes you’ll see different terms tossed about for “no comment.” A “could not immediately be reached for comment” generally translates into “we called them at the last second and they weren’t there to talk” or “this story is breaking right now and they didn’t answer their cell phone.”

A “declined to comment” means “we reached them with plenty of time, and they weren’t mean about it, but they wouldn’t touch the subject.”

A “refused to comment” means “we’re mad they won’t comment, they’re mad we’re writing the story but they won’t say anything on-the-record,” - loosely translated, of course.

This is also the time when sources will try to play tough guy with you, a.k.a try to kill a story.

Last December, I was tipped off that an assistant fire chief had crashed a county-owned vehicle into a cop car while driving home from a Redskins game. I called several county sources about the tip. One tried to kill the story by making me question my own reporting skills and news judgment. He told me I was late, that everybody else had the story days ago, and that no other reporter in town thought it was worth running, so he wasn’t sure why the Examiner and I were so interested. Said with just the slightest hint of derision, of course.

It worked for a few minutes. I got off the phone and thought about whether I wanted egg on my face for this story while I was applying for another job. Whether I wanted egg on my face in general, if this all turned out to be no big deal. Whether I should bother pursuing it, if as this guy said, nobody else thought it was worthwhile.

Then I realized that at face-value, this story was interesting. “It’s my worst nightmare to crash into a cop car,” I said to the source during another phone call, “and I don’t drive a county-owned vehicle.”

Even if the story turned out to be nothing more than a simple “Thank God that wasn’t me” article for readers, it’s worth noting that a county’s assistant fire chief crashed into a cop car while in a county vehicle. Not Watergate-level news, but certainly worth a few head shakes, even if the guy turned out to be stone cold sober.

So we ran the story. A spokesman for the fire department noted there had been questions about the assistant chief’s sobriety, but said he’d seen nothing that proved he was drinking. My bosses ran it on the inside of the Examiner, in a single-column story, no pictures, no big, bad headline. We played it straight.

And the next day the emails and phone calls poured in. People had been talking before the story ran. I was contacted by folks who said they were county residents and their firefighter neighbor had mentioned the incident, others who said they had previously heard firefighters at a lunch spot discussing the accident themselves. They said the assistant chief had been drinking at the Redskins game.

Four days later, we ran a second story after it came to my attention the county had in fact tested the assistant chief’s blood alcohol level after the crash. The police had not done so, but a personnel office did the tests as a matter of course after an accident involving a county vehicle. They told me they wouldn’t release the blood alcohol test results, citing personnel confidentiality rules. The Post followed the story that day as well, with several of their reporters looking into the issues.

I wound up getting a new job shortly thereafter and moving to a Annapolis to cover the state legislature for the Associated Press, but I always wondered what those blood alcohol tests said, and wondered if we’d ever know.

We do know now. The Post’s Spivack stuck to the case, and was able to get a copy of the blood-alcohol test results. The guy blew twice the legal limit, hours after the accident. Luckily no one had been seriously hurt.

This is why competition is good, why it helps to have multiple papers competing for stories and access to information. I may not have had the right contacts to ever obtain those test results, but Miranda Spivack did. Maybe her editors weren’t interested in running the story at first - pure speculation - but they got interested after the Examiner ran it. Or maybe the county official lied to me about the Post passing on the story in the first place.

And this is why it matters to trust yourself, and not be swayed from a story by a person who questions your judgment.

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The Reporting Life, Part Two

By Kathleen Miller.

Around 10 a.m.

Sometime around 10 a.m. every day, an editor would saunter over to my desk and hit me with the inevitable: what’s going on Kathleen?

Editors have to tell their bosses what to expect, to give them an idea of the number and the magnitude of the stories that will appear in the next day’s paper and coordinate the layout and need for photos or graphics. There’s no grand conspiracy_it’s basically as simply as a reporter telling their editor a handful of things going on in the area and the two of them hashing out what’s worth covering.

And, I hate to break it to you but hard news - i.e. breaking developments in policy changes, a crime, a vote on a controversial issue or investigative reporting into a potential scandal, cover-up, conflict-of-interest or ethical lapse - is always, always, always going to win out over “fluff,” i.e. a story about a group of kids cleaning up a highway or a fundraising effort for a local shelter, no matter how nice and inspiring the fluff is.

My mom - a first grade teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Northern California - disagrees with this approach. She used to send me e-mails when I worked for the AP in Cheyenne, Wyoming, suggesting I do a feature on a group of nuns in a remote part of the state that were making their own all-natural soap. “You never write about anything positive, Kathleen…..”

One day, feeling particularly empathetic to the need to highlight good over evil, I mentioned her line-of-thinking to my boyfriend, a reporter who covers Virginia for the Examiner. He paused for about one second and totally dismissed the idea.

His take: we cover counties that employ at least ten people each for the sole purpose of promoting the region’s image. They’re called public information officers. On the other hand, how many people get paid to bring questionable or controversial acts to the public’s attention? Most counties have an inspector general. Montgomery’s IG Tom Dagley does great work - you need no more evidence than the fact that many county officials chafe at the mention of his name. However there are probably more county council members than IG office staffers. So that leaves the media, a shrinking group these days.

Perhaps it’s grandiose to see it as our mission to be the public’s watchdog, but when we don’t question or investigate enough - i.e. Bernie Madoff scandal, economic collapse or oh, say the Iraq War - we’re also the public’s favorite punching bag. You can’t win. I’m siding with the boyfriend over Mom on this one.

Every morning, I’d try to have three or four story ideas ready-to-go. There’s usually a give and take between the reporter and the editor. My bosses would let me know what sounded like the biggest story to them. If I felt passionately that something else was more important, I’d fight for it. You try to wind up with a story you’ll shoot to deliver and a back-up you can guarantee you’ll deliver.

Why? Because every reporter knows what it’s like to have a story fall-through on them. Occasionally you’re working with inaccurate information, sometimes you can’t get an essential call returned or access to a necessary document and at other moments you’ve just simply bitten off more than you can chew in one day.

On top of that, every reporter knows what it’s like to have an editor approach their desk around 3 p.m. and say, “We’ve got another hole in the paper, what can you give us?” Sidenote, for people looking to get media coverage, this is where press releases and friendly relationships can be very handy.

There definitely were times when this happened and stories that I never would have pitched at 10 a.m. and editors certainly wouldn’t have accepted before lunch time start to sound real good.

10:30 to 1:30 p.m.

From that moment on, it’s all about working the phones and sending emails. I try to make as many contacts as possible before lunch because frankly, you never know if/when people will call you back or if you’re even contacting the right people.

Sometimes, in the course of a conversation about a totally unrelated topic, a source will mention something that beats all pre-conceived story ideas and you have a new focus for your day.

In Montgomery County, residents should rest assured that - love them or hate them - you guys have an unusually hard-working, motivated bunch of elected officials. And sometimes just giving one of them a call to press them on a point would lead to a much bigger and better story. They really do know what’s going on and they can certainly back up the positions they take with anecdotes, facts and logic.

I realized you can learn a lot just by shutting your mouth on occasion and giving people a chance to tell you why they felt a certain way. I called now-Council President Phil Andrews once in spring 2008 to discuss some relatively wonky concerns he had about the collective bargaining process. In asking him why your average resident should care, he gave me a fascinating tip that was probably common knowledge inside Montgomery County government, but surprising to me and many readers.

He noted that the county was eight years late on a promise to equip cop cars with video cameras, a promise made by Montgomery officials as part of a settlement brokered after an unarmed black man was shot and killed by police in the ‘90s. The victim’s family had accepted a smaller settlement if the county agreed to install the cameras, but conflict between county and union leaders meant the agreement had never been fulfilled.

To make the story even better, the late Johnnie Cochran had been involved in negotiating the settlement. I hung up and googled the story. There were links to the agreement but nothing about the fact it hadn’t been followed. I called the local attorney who’d worked with Cochran on the case and he was astounded. He’d never thought to make sure the county had lived up to their end of the deal, nor had the victim’s family. Yet eight years had gone by without the cameras that were common in many neighboring counties.

Moral of the story? Sometimes, just giving people a little time to explain their views will yield far better stories than the reason you called them in the first place. It doesn't matter if you side with Andrews or organized labor (who argued the agreement violated the Maryland Wiretap Act, which requires the consent of all parties before conversations can be recorded), it's an interesting - and I think still unresolved - story.

Tomorrow: 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

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The Reporting Life, Part One

By Kathleen Miller.

A reporter’s day starts with a pit in your stomach as you trudge to the end of your driveway or turn on your computer to see exactly what the competition has that you missed.

Our day often ends hours after we've climbed into bed, awakened with a start from a dead sleep, eyes wide open, palms sweating and mind racing about whether we triple-checked a figure, spelled a name like Schwarzenegger right or are going to be screwed by the headline an editor sticks on our story.

Most of us care about what we produce and we take our work seriously. We know people’s reputations are at stake and that if somebody is kind enough to call us back, they deserve to be quoted accurately.

I know. You probably don’t believe me. According to the recent Pew Center Annual Report on American Journalism, less than 50 percent of people think news organizations are moral or helpful to democracy. Adding insult to injury, the majority of people surveyed also said they believe our stories are often inaccurate.

My name’s Kathleen Miller and I’m a former reporter for The Washington Examiner and the Associated Press. For the past three years, I’ve paid the bills as part of the so-called mainstream media, the past two years of which I’ve covered Maryland, most of that time focusing on Montgomery County.

Now, I’m one of the unemployed masses, a healthy chunk of whom, it seems, hail from the news industry these days.

I’m self-aware enough to realize a common perception among many people - PR types and government officials especially - is that journalists are lazy, biased, blood-sucking leeches or something along those lines. Let me tell you how I see it.

We’ll start at the beginning.

7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.

Contrary to popular belief, a typical day working in the media does not begin with any sort of axis-of-evil collaboration between reporters and their editors about how to bring down a particular political party, interest group or advance a given agenda.

Rather, it starts with reporters absorbing each other’s work and following blogs like this one.

Print reporters tend to show their faces in the office a little on the later side, like 9:30 or 10, unless you’re working for a wire service that has a specific staffing schedule. This does not mean most of us are sleeping in or watching the Today Show. While I’m downing my breakfast, I like to devour everything other news outlets have put out that relates to my beat - praying/wishing/hoping that there’s nothing the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, MPW, WTOP, WAMU or the Gazette has that was going to totally blindside me.

Like it or not, I think it’s better to know what other media outlets are reporting as soon as you wake up in the morning - both so you can think of what you’ll say to your boss if you got beaten on a story and so you can get a jumpstart on putting calls in to follow any of the competition’s work with your own second-day look at the issue.

You learn a lot from other people’s articles: sometimes you kick yourself for not tracking an issue or calling a certain person the day before and sometimes you scratch your head and wonder who thought that story would make for an interesting read. Regardless, it always expands your knowledge of the area you cover.

Reporters, like readers, are drawn to different kinds of stories, and if say, wetlands or the Purple Line don’t make your pulse race, it’s still good to read articles about them from people who naturally gravitate to those subjects.

Tomorrow: Around 10 a.m.

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The Reporting Life: A Preview

One of our favorite MSM (mainstream media) reporters is Kathleen Miller. Ms. Miller covered Montgomery County for the Examiner and the state legislature for the Associated Press. We particularly appreciated her reporting on Delegate Luiz Simmons’s (D-17) position on slots, the state government’s anti-union website, the O’Malley administration’s transit project cuts, the preference of some County Executive staff for buses on the Purple Line and House Majority Leader Kumar Barve’s property tax issues. Now, we have truly lucked out: in an exclusive five-part series, Kathleen Miller is spilling the beans on what it’s like to be an MSM print reporter in Maryland.

Some of our readers have questioned why we discuss the media as much as we do. Let’s make one thing clear: you cannot understand politics without understanding how politicians reach out to their constituents. And even in the era of blogs, that demands understanding how the MSM acts as a conduit between elected officials and the public. Kathleen Miller lifts that veil in a way that has rarely been done in Maryland. If you are a politician, a wanna-be politician, an activist or anyone else trying to get attention, her description of a day in the life of an MSM reporter is a must-read for you. Read on tomorrow!

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