Busy news day.
I wake up waiting for a "yea" or "nay" on whether I can cover this or that story.
First sound in my ears from the radio as I wake up:
"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is expected to resign..."
Enough said. I'm out of bed, incapable of sleeping further, on my way to the station to get a recording kit without permission and head out to Bush's appearance at the fundraiser for Senator Domenici, who set the whole chain of events in motion leading up to this historic resignation, regardless what happens.
Of course, because of what's happened, the Governor is running late flying out of Crawford. Of course, I'm running early.
I know a thing or two about how to try and get in to tightly controlled events like this. Hell, I knew Governor Bush before he had to be protected by the secret service. (Doesn't work. Fine, then. He's "not available for comment".) I gather up the recording equipment I need and head out to the site several hours early, before the cops stop people from walking up and down the road (without stopping drivers. Go figure.).
I call the newsroom a couple of times from the site. At this point I don't know whether or not Damon Scott -- a journalism major/work-study -- has gotten credentialled by the White House to cover the event from inside or not. I hope he has, with visions of "bookended" "inside/outside" stories running off eachother dancing my in my head. He hasn't been credentialled, it turns out, because they're not issuing press passes for this event at all. It's totally secret -- you have to pay a thousand bucks to Senator Domenici's re-election campaign to even get in the door.
Damon tried -- and tried -- like five times -- to get the Senator to comment on the fundraiser. No luck. Domenici's office would not return his calls, and the Senator was always "unavailable". Likewise he had no luck trying to get Larry Abraham, the mayor of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, to comment on the fundraiser happening at his own house. Both referred him to the White House Press Office, which he duly contacted, and got nothing in response except a "when and where" type press release.
We tried *repeatedly* to get "the other side". They stonewalled. They just flat-out refused to comment, or even return our calls. Thus when I went out to the event, there *was* no "other side" to *get* besides that of the protestors. That and Bernalillo County Sherriff's officers telling people to stand off the pavement, a few hundred yards from the entrance to Mayor Abraham's property. There *were* some pro-Bush people directly oppposite the gate to Mayor Abraham's property, standing on their own property, which unverified rumour had as the Rainoceks, the owners of Frontier Restaurant, where I used to work. But the police would just not let us through, not even to interview them. I tried. Way to go, on a day NPR reports confidence in the Administration hitting "Watergate lows". (If *ever* there were a time to open to the press, or even court it, THIS WAS IT, unless you had something to hide.)
Protestors spoke, for the most part, very well. They were aware of Gonzales' resignation just a few minutes before, and overwhelmingly called for Senator Domenici to resign, as well. The sense of the hour was that the whole administration was collapsing in a way no administration has collapsed since Nixon's.
Is there another angle on this? Certainly. There are probably dozens. But no one from the administration, and no one from Senator Domenici's office, would discuss it with us; while the cops wouldn't even let me walk over to interview the handful of pro-Bush demonstrators standing on their own property.
We had to run with the story we had. In the wake of Gonzales' resignation, the Senator's office refused to comment, beyond a press release bemoaning A.G. Gonzales' "situation", which the Senator himself helped create with his call to David Iglesias, which Iglesias perceived as "pressure" to pursue untenable prosecutions of Democratic Party-affiliated institutions.
Damon showed up to the protest a couple of hours after I did. (I showed up *way* early 'cause I know how these things run, from Crawford, Texas, to Los Angeles, California.) He got several interviews of his own. I'd already gotten several of my own. We coordinated to make sure we didn't interview the same people -- we didn't. He headed out before I left. I should have asked him for his windscreen since I didn't have one fo my mic -- but oh well. (Such are the joys of community radio.) I'd done all the interviews I would that day, regardless, by the time the wind kicked up.
As soon as I left, I got word that the presidential motorcade had left Kirtland Air Force Base. Tough decision, but not *too* tough. I knew the protestors would hardly get to see the motorcade because of how the White House has insulated the Governor. But I had to get back to the station to edit what simply *had to* be a story for the evening news. No one seemed prepared to do civil disobedience -- like lie down in the road of the oncoming motorcade -- so there was nothing for me to do but head back to download and edit.
I did so. When Damon showed up I was tasked with guiding him through the download and editing process. He's a journalism major, but specializing in print. So he knows what he's doing in terms of how to conduct interviews. But when it comes to editing "tape", it's a whole different world, technologically speaking. (I put "tape" in quotes because it isn't really tape. It's all digital, now.) He's done live feeds from the field, and is pretty damn good at that, as his tapes attested. A fair bit of his tape is very good stuff of him speaking, describing the scene, as if it were all live. Totally different from how I do things. But for the purpose of this story we've got to use both our interviews and combine them in a single narrated story in a few hours' time. He's got a great style. But with a deadline looming before which, in adition to editing the story, I'm kind of put in charge of training Damon on how to edit his tape (in addition to editing my own), this is just not the time to change the whole station's way of reporting.
I edit and transcribe my own clips in front of him, verbally justifying every cut, then let him loose to do his own.
He does his own, and we wind up with three cuts.
Steve says it's not enough. He wants five minutes. I'm *always* glad to have more time to play with, but the three cuts we've got really are *just* the best. Winds up Jim's working on an interview he did with David Iglesias, the US Attorney who was pressured by Senator Domenici in the first place before Attorney General Gonzales fired him, which ultimately led to Attorney General Gonzales' resignation. The "bookend" won't be "inside the fundraiser"/"outside", it'll be "Iglesias"/"protestors", because no one inside the fundraiser will talk to us. I want Damon to write and voice the piece, but with five minutes to play with, it kind of falls to me -- winds up newbies in the newsroom do short stories. (Hence my coverage of the legislature a few months ago, the cardinal lesson of which seems to have been "first, be concise".) But with two guys in the field and no one returning phone calls, this is just way too big a story for two minutes. OK.
I edit my own sound, then Damon edits his. He "gets" it. Fast. Editing out "uhms" is fair (usually), and desirable (usually) but is sometimes impossible on purely technical grounds. Other times it's central to the speaker's statement -- showing how they're thinking as they speak. But you *never* want to change the *meaning* of what your speaker is saying. Both of our interviews wind up in the story. He has to leave at four, so by default, I wind up doing the final edit and script.
Steve helps tremendously with rewrite as I find myself rapidly falling into the trap of "He agrees/She disagrees, but otherwise agrees". BORING. He gets me into "writing" it -- not just introducing one voice after another, but taking the time to breathe and say where I am, what's going on. It's a luxury I'm not accustomed to, at this point. But I'm glad to have it. It's the difference between "he said/she said" and "this is what happened: YOU ARE THERE".
Then Jim jumps in -- with a story of his own to finish -- and in about five minutes solves all my multitrack editing woes. I *still* edit way too close. Too tight. To save those precious hundredths of seconds. I do go overboard -- airtime is priceless, yes, but people don't want to get peppered with Walter Winchell's delivery, which is really best suited to utterly trivial stories. They need to have "breath-time" to *understand* what's being thrown at them.
Jim loosened it up. Big time. By the miracles in editing that only he can work, the story got "loosened up" but *still* somehow wound up two seconds shorter than what I'd had. Thanks therefore go to both Steve and Jim. Whatever "story" I got wouldn't have worked like it did without both of their taking the time out to help me, between twenty and five minutes to air, when they had their own stories on deadline. And weather. The story was finished right then. Steve was literally on air when the file got saved to the folder it needed to be in.
Thanks also go, obviously, to Damon, without whose interviews I wouldn't have been able to fill even four minutes. It may be me saying my name "for KUNM" at the end of the story, but it's *not* just *my* work, all alone. Without everyone else's help it would have been *far* weaker than it is. (And I'm still *barely* satisfied with it.) The facts reported would have been the same. But as it turns out, it's not weak, it's not dry -- and the credit for that goes to three other people I worked with. That, as I see it, is the *meaning* of "community radio". I eagerly look forward to the day that I contribute more to a story than I take public credit for.
Is that *maybe* why literally dozens of awards for journalism wind up sitting in a cabinet instead of hung up on the walls?
A motorcycle cop was killed in the presidential motorcade when he hit a curb, then a tree. The papers and TV of course were filled with that, the day after it happened. But those motorcade cops drive crazy. Second time a motorcade cop has died on Bush visiting Albuquerque.
Bush doesn't have to do anything more than come to town for people to die. Do these things happen in other parts of the country? I wonder.
At the end of the day it was, I think, one of the best sounding news broadcasts we've had in a *very* long time. I'm grateful, glad, and proud to have had a hand in it. With the new format -- no discrete "Evening Report", but local and regional stories interspersed throughout NPR's national news -- I think we've run the risk of losing coherence as far as local/regional news goes. Yesterday, I firmly believe, we got it back. It was a *totally* coherent news package, very adeptly broadcast.
Alas, this doesn't come through in my story on its own -- it only comes through on the air. But that's the point. Regardless. Here's the story:
I'm posting all out of order, if you can't tell. That's a good thing. It means I'm putting more attention and effort into making stories than posting them.
First sound in my ears from the radio as I wake up:
"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is expected to resign..."
Enough said. I'm out of bed, incapable of sleeping further, on my way to the station to get a recording kit without permission and head out to Bush's appearance at the fundraiser for Senator Domenici, who set the whole chain of events in motion leading up to this historic resignation, regardless what happens.
Of course, because of what's happened, the Governor is running late flying out of Crawford. Of course, I'm running early.
I know a thing or two about how to try and get in to tightly controlled events like this. Hell, I knew Governor Bush before he had to be protected by the secret service. (Doesn't work. Fine, then. He's "not available for comment".) I gather up the recording equipment I need and head out to the site several hours early, before the cops stop people from walking up and down the road (without stopping drivers. Go figure.).
I call the newsroom a couple of times from the site. At this point I don't know whether or not Damon Scott -- a journalism major/work-study -- has gotten credentialled by the White House to cover the event from inside or not. I hope he has, with visions of "bookended" "inside/outside" stories running off eachother dancing my in my head. He hasn't been credentialled, it turns out, because they're not issuing press passes for this event at all. It's totally secret -- you have to pay a thousand bucks to Senator Domenici's re-election campaign to even get in the door.
Damon tried -- and tried -- like five times -- to get the Senator to comment on the fundraiser. No luck. Domenici's office would not return his calls, and the Senator was always "unavailable". Likewise he had no luck trying to get Larry Abraham, the mayor of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, to comment on the fundraiser happening at his own house. Both referred him to the White House Press Office, which he duly contacted, and got nothing in response except a "when and where" type press release.
We tried *repeatedly* to get "the other side". They stonewalled. They just flat-out refused to comment, or even return our calls. Thus when I went out to the event, there *was* no "other side" to *get* besides that of the protestors. That and Bernalillo County Sherriff's officers telling people to stand off the pavement, a few hundred yards from the entrance to Mayor Abraham's property. There *were* some pro-Bush people directly oppposite the gate to Mayor Abraham's property, standing on their own property, which unverified rumour had as the Rainoceks, the owners of Frontier Restaurant, where I used to work. But the police would just not let us through, not even to interview them. I tried. Way to go, on a day NPR reports confidence in the Administration hitting "Watergate lows". (If *ever* there were a time to open to the press, or even court it, THIS WAS IT, unless you had something to hide.)
Protestors spoke, for the most part, very well. They were aware of Gonzales' resignation just a few minutes before, and overwhelmingly called for Senator Domenici to resign, as well. The sense of the hour was that the whole administration was collapsing in a way no administration has collapsed since Nixon's.
Is there another angle on this? Certainly. There are probably dozens. But no one from the administration, and no one from Senator Domenici's office, would discuss it with us; while the cops wouldn't even let me walk over to interview the handful of pro-Bush demonstrators standing on their own property.
We had to run with the story we had. In the wake of Gonzales' resignation, the Senator's office refused to comment, beyond a press release bemoaning A.G. Gonzales' "situation", which the Senator himself helped create with his call to David Iglesias, which Iglesias perceived as "pressure" to pursue untenable prosecutions of Democratic Party-affiliated institutions.
Damon showed up to the protest a couple of hours after I did. (I showed up *way* early 'cause I know how these things run, from Crawford, Texas, to Los Angeles, California.) He got several interviews of his own. I'd already gotten several of my own. We coordinated to make sure we didn't interview the same people -- we didn't. He headed out before I left. I should have asked him for his windscreen since I didn't have one fo my mic -- but oh well. (Such are the joys of community radio.) I'd done all the interviews I would that day, regardless, by the time the wind kicked up.
As soon as I left, I got word that the presidential motorcade had left Kirtland Air Force Base. Tough decision, but not *too* tough. I knew the protestors would hardly get to see the motorcade because of how the White House has insulated the Governor. But I had to get back to the station to edit what simply *had to* be a story for the evening news. No one seemed prepared to do civil disobedience -- like lie down in the road of the oncoming motorcade -- so there was nothing for me to do but head back to download and edit.
I did so. When Damon showed up I was tasked with guiding him through the download and editing process. He's a journalism major, but specializing in print. So he knows what he's doing in terms of how to conduct interviews. But when it comes to editing "tape", it's a whole different world, technologically speaking. (I put "tape" in quotes because it isn't really tape. It's all digital, now.) He's done live feeds from the field, and is pretty damn good at that, as his tapes attested. A fair bit of his tape is very good stuff of him speaking, describing the scene, as if it were all live. Totally different from how I do things. But for the purpose of this story we've got to use both our interviews and combine them in a single narrated story in a few hours' time. He's got a great style. But with a deadline looming before which, in adition to editing the story, I'm kind of put in charge of training Damon on how to edit his tape (in addition to editing my own), this is just not the time to change the whole station's way of reporting.
I edit and transcribe my own clips in front of him, verbally justifying every cut, then let him loose to do his own.
He does his own, and we wind up with three cuts.
Steve says it's not enough. He wants five minutes. I'm *always* glad to have more time to play with, but the three cuts we've got really are *just* the best. Winds up Jim's working on an interview he did with David Iglesias, the US Attorney who was pressured by Senator Domenici in the first place before Attorney General Gonzales fired him, which ultimately led to Attorney General Gonzales' resignation. The "bookend" won't be "inside the fundraiser"/"outside", it'll be "Iglesias"/"protestors", because no one inside the fundraiser will talk to us. I want Damon to write and voice the piece, but with five minutes to play with, it kind of falls to me -- winds up newbies in the newsroom do short stories. (Hence my coverage of the legislature a few months ago, the cardinal lesson of which seems to have been "first, be concise".) But with two guys in the field and no one returning phone calls, this is just way too big a story for two minutes. OK.
I edit my own sound, then Damon edits his. He "gets" it. Fast. Editing out "uhms" is fair (usually), and desirable (usually) but is sometimes impossible on purely technical grounds. Other times it's central to the speaker's statement -- showing how they're thinking as they speak. But you *never* want to change the *meaning* of what your speaker is saying. Both of our interviews wind up in the story. He has to leave at four, so by default, I wind up doing the final edit and script.
Steve helps tremendously with rewrite as I find myself rapidly falling into the trap of "He agrees/She disagrees, but otherwise agrees". BORING. He gets me into "writing" it -- not just introducing one voice after another, but taking the time to breathe and say where I am, what's going on. It's a luxury I'm not accustomed to, at this point. But I'm glad to have it. It's the difference between "he said/she said" and "this is what happened: YOU ARE THERE".
Then Jim jumps in -- with a story of his own to finish -- and in about five minutes solves all my multitrack editing woes. I *still* edit way too close. Too tight. To save those precious hundredths of seconds. I do go overboard -- airtime is priceless, yes, but people don't want to get peppered with Walter Winchell's delivery, which is really best suited to utterly trivial stories. They need to have "breath-time" to *understand* what's being thrown at them.
Jim loosened it up. Big time. By the miracles in editing that only he can work, the story got "loosened up" but *still* somehow wound up two seconds shorter than what I'd had. Thanks therefore go to both Steve and Jim. Whatever "story" I got wouldn't have worked like it did without both of their taking the time out to help me, between twenty and five minutes to air, when they had their own stories on deadline. And weather. The story was finished right then. Steve was literally on air when the file got saved to the folder it needed to be in.
Thanks also go, obviously, to Damon, without whose interviews I wouldn't have been able to fill even four minutes. It may be me saying my name "for KUNM" at the end of the story, but it's *not* just *my* work, all alone. Without everyone else's help it would have been *far* weaker than it is. (And I'm still *barely* satisfied with it.) The facts reported would have been the same. But as it turns out, it's not weak, it's not dry -- and the credit for that goes to three other people I worked with. That, as I see it, is the *meaning* of "community radio". I eagerly look forward to the day that I contribute more to a story than I take public credit for.
Is that *maybe* why literally dozens of awards for journalism wind up sitting in a cabinet instead of hung up on the walls?
A motorcycle cop was killed in the presidential motorcade when he hit a curb, then a tree. The papers and TV of course were filled with that, the day after it happened. But those motorcade cops drive crazy. Second time a motorcade cop has died on Bush visiting Albuquerque.
Bush doesn't have to do anything more than come to town for people to die. Do these things happen in other parts of the country? I wonder.
At the end of the day it was, I think, one of the best sounding news broadcasts we've had in a *very* long time. I'm grateful, glad, and proud to have had a hand in it. With the new format -- no discrete "Evening Report", but local and regional stories interspersed throughout NPR's national news -- I think we've run the risk of losing coherence as far as local/regional news goes. Yesterday, I firmly believe, we got it back. It was a *totally* coherent news package, very adeptly broadcast.
Alas, this doesn't come through in my story on its own -- it only comes through on the air. But that's the point. Regardless. Here's the story:
Bush Visits New MexicoHow Sam gets these things up online so fast is beyond my capability to start to understand. And here's a *very* wonkish story you would have to follow state politics extremely closely -- or be paid by the state --- to even begin to pretend to care about:
State Treasurer Lewis Reports on Commission FindingsAnd here's one I didn't think would make it to the web: the story that convinced me, finally, of the importance of getting the other side, where I treated a whole category of phone companies like they were elves, faeries, or leprochauns:
Inquiry Opens Into Inmate Phone Service ProvisionsNot my best work, that! Not by a long shot! But it *is* what got me *serious* about this. It's not a game. It's not a hobby. It's deadly serious, and deserves my full attention. (File above story under "lessons learned).
I'm posting all out of order, if you can't tell. That's a good thing. It means I'm putting more attention and effort into making stories than posting them.
posted by xeltifon at 9:22 PM
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