truth!

I love this piece of advice on note-taking from Dan Clery: "I use notebook and pen and my own bastard shorthand. One of the benefits of this not very speedy technique is that it creates voids that the interviewee feels obliged to fill. If they finish what they were intending to say, and you don’t immediately come back with another question because you’re scrawling down their words, they’ll often just keep going and say things they might not have wanted to say or make off the cuff comments that provide good colour."

This is so true. So true, in fact, that is usually happens to me.

The benefits of being a beginner, I guess.

Writing headlines is hard

Our executive editor, Tom Warhover, wrote a great column last week about the sexual assault discussion that is taking place right now on our campus among the curators. In his piece, he lauded the UM System for its adoption of new definitions and interpretations of sexual assault. The changes will make it easier for campus investigators and will hopefully empower women as they work through paperwork/bureaucracy post-assault. Tom also mentioned his distaste for George Will's recent column about how sexual assault victims are given too much power and even privilege.

When the article hit the rim slow queue Friday, I was the copy editor on duty to edit it.

Tom's column had a headline that summed up his points perfectly: DEAR READER: In the dialogue on sexual assault on campus, UM takes two steps forward, George Will two steps back.

The only problem was that his headline had more than 20 words in it. Our typical maximum length for web heads is 10 words. I sifted through his main points again and tried writing a few different ideas. But, I liked what Tom had. I didn't want to ditch it.

His excerpt was also quite catchy. He had taken it from the middle of the column. It was something along the lines of, "George Will's claim that sexual assault victims are some sort of protected class is incendiary and ludicrous." I really liked the excerpt because it hit his point home and because I've never actually used the word "incendiary" in my speech or in my writing. I thought it was great.

It was at that moment I realized I could switch his headline and his excerpt. In my months on the desk, I'd never thought of that option before. My mind is starting to think outside the box. And as I learn the rules and become more comfortable, the strict boxes I once used to structure my thinking, are starting to loosen.

I shortened up his excerpt a bit and added it to the headline box. It was 14 words. Still long. But, better. I added his headline to the excerpt box.

I'm not sure how Tom will feel about this change. I tried to keep his points intact and not change his words too much, but at the same time, make it easier for our readers.

I know that headline writing, no matter how long you do it, is an exercise in mental agility. Great headline writers are great readers. And, I know I need to do more reading and writing to get better.

So these days, I'm writing new headlines rather than just sending them through as they come in. Sometimes, in AP wire, I can't get a better angle. Sometimes, I can. I figure it's good to take some chances and partake in the mental agility game.

Hopefully, Tom will approve.

The unexpected benefits of gardening

I showed up at Kilgore’s Community Garden on Wednesday with a splitting headache. I’d been in class, interviewing people and then writing up articles for the Missourian since about 9 a.m. At 3 p.m., it seemed like I wouldn’t be able to make it out to the garden in the 80-degree heat and in that kind of condition. But, it wasn’t yet time to make a final decision.

Around 5:30 p.m., I wrapped up an article I was writing on napping and instead of heading to bed, I got into my car and drove up Providence. If Advil couldn’t kill the headache, I thought maybe pulling up some weeds would.

 I arrived about 45 minutes late, but was glad to have made it. Liberty, the edible landscaping manager, and Aly and Kate, two other volunteers, greeted me with a wave.

I grabbed a shovel and started pulling up Bermuda grass. We chatted and weeded and weeded and chatted.

 I forgot about my headache and soon enough, it had dissipated. The pounding that had made it difficult to interview, take notes and write up articles for nearly the whole day, suddenly vanished.

 It felt good to pull up the grass around the blueberry bushes. We were giving the bushes some breathing space and reducing the competition for water.

We also spent some time plucking peas and harvesting herbs. The scent of sage and oregano filled my nose as I created a few little herb bundles for the Anne Fisher Food Pantry.

I learned a valuable lesson on Wednesday. Gardening relieves stress. And making life better for the plants also makes life better for our bodies.

As I drove off, headache-free, I was really glad to have spent my evening at the garden.

Performance goals - week of 6/16

Med school diversity
-final edits with Jeanne on Wednesday 6/18
-complete ac/cq by Friday 6/20

Collegetown:

Drinking safety
-first draft by Wednesday 6/18
-complete ac/cq by Thursday 6/19

Sleep/Work/Life balance
-first draft by Wednesday 6/18
-complete ac/cq by Thursday 6/19

Angela Anderson
-first draft to Jeanne by Thursday or Friday 6/20

Pinhook & thinking about story organization

We recently read a 2011 article by Anthony Schick called, Mississippi River town of Pinhook struggles to reclaim its community after levee break.

The article is long — over 15 pages printed. Our professor, Jeanne Abbott, asked us to read it with an eye for organization and try to reconstruct the reporter's outline.

So, here goes.

Pinhook outline:

Start with a bible quote -"And I heard a voice from heaven, like the voice of many waters, and like the voice of loud thunder."

Lede: bring reader into the flood area. Visuals are deer and water creeping into cornfields.

Nut: "That was life by the river. The people of Pinhook knew when a flood was coming, and they knew what to do when it did.

But it never came like this." (The nut graf foreshadows what happened and also hints that the history will be given.)

What happened: The Army Corps of Engineers blew open the levee intentionally and flooded 130,000 acres of land. They did this to prevent levee failures. Officials opposed the action.

Technical information about flooding in the area: The residents live on a ridge, so they didn't think they had anything to fear. Gives a little history about the last time they evacuated and the only other time the levee had broken. Residents were informed of the upcoming levee break by officials.

Robinson's family experience with the levee break: They waited for word, but the water came and they were told to evacuate immediately.

Evacuation story: Packing cars, saving keepsakes and getting to the bridge.

Robinson family history in Pinhook, starts in 1943. Included past interviews and statements.

Growing up in Pinhook: details about life back then. Jim Crow South.
- living off the land and each other, families relied on one another to survive
-fish fries

Information about the levee and the flooding that occurred every year:
-included reason about why they were unable to fix it

After the flood of 2010: picking up the pieces, included another bible quote and a reference to a bible that had been destroyed in the flood - really nice detail here
-details about what the people lost and what those items meant to them, when they acquired them, etc.

Financial aspect of the story: federal buyout

Where are they now: still getting together to share time and food, hoping to go home

Reframing philanthropy

Before I was a grad student, I worked for a nonprofit in Portland, Ore. I started there in 2004 fresh off an internship with Nike. After just three months working for one of the world's largest corporate giants and just a few months after being yelled at in the locker room for wearing Asics running shoes, I decided to veer left and head into the nonprofit sector.

This particular nonprofit, now called Medical Teams International, focused on providing medical care to people in developing countries. It also brought dental care to children and the homeless around the state. The organization mostly worked in war-torn countries and occasionally stepped in to assist following natural disasters.

The year I started working there, the great Boxing Day tsunami and Hurricane Katrina hit. As a young professional just out of college, I spent the first few years watching and learning. I saw how complex the politics of the aid world can be. I yearned to head "to the field" and see the people all of my hours and weeks and months and eventually years of work were directed at helping. But I actually never got that opportunity.

Eventually, my co-workers, many of whom had served with the Peace Corps, talked me into joining and taking on the "hardest job you'll ever love." Peace Corps Volunteers can always tell when the thirst for development work is real and I think that sensed that in me.

But between my departure for Turkmenistan and my first day at Medical Teams International, about five years passed. I watched the nonprofit weather many seasons. The tsunami brought nearly $10 million through our doors. In 2007, we received a PEPFAR grant. In 2008, we hunkered down for The Great Recession and I watched my department of five became a department of two. After that, things were never the same, but still, I learned.

While my work at the nonprofit taught me many things, it did not teach me to question the way the philanthropic system as a whole works. My master's studies have taught me to do that. The critical thinking we do as journalists and as students, pushes us to take a macro-view of life and to think about big-system questions. At Medical Teams International, I was a worker bee. In the Peace Corps, I was a worker bee. In AmeriCorps, worker-bee again.

But this year, I entered the realm of journalism graduate school and this experience has given me both the ability and the license to ponder big issues.

I recently watched a TED Talk about philanthropy and marveled at this man's brilliance. I hope, as a journalist, to be able to nudge people toward his own perceptive realizations. It seems that everyone, including journalists, have been framing philanthropy less effectively than we could have been. But, according to Pallotta, the system was set up a long time ago and changing it will take some real innovation. Then, perhaps, it might actually be possible to change the world.

Dan Pallotta: The way we think about philanthropy is dead wrong

Performance goals

After the conference last week, I'm feeling a little behind on reporting. I'm hoping to spend some time this week wrapping up my first article and then moving on to the next one. My performance goals for the next couple weeks are:

Diversity at MU's medical school: Submit second draft to Jeanne by June 13
Anderson profile: Submit first draft to Jeanne by June 19 (haven't reached Angela yet)

Story ideas:
Physician discipline board research with Caleb O'Brien (more longer term story)
ACA update: profile someone who signed up and get their thoughts/opinions (mid-July)
What happens to the stuff people don't buy from Goodwill? (more longer term investigative story)
Heartland virus, new tick disease in Missouri (quicker story?)
Collegetown articles due June 19

AHCJ conference recap

I attended AHCJ's rural health conference last Friday in Portland, Ore. Key takeaways for me were:

• Health outcomes for urban and rural populations are more alike than they are for suburban populations. Surprisingly, these seemingly disparate populations face similar challenges. 
• Dental therapists are contentious within the dental community. 
• There is a shortage in health care providers of all kinds, but the shortage is especially pronounced in rural areas. 
• There is less of a financial incentive for medical school students to become family practitioners than surgeons. A surgeon typically makes three times what a primary care physician makes. 
• Community health workers — the gatekeepers — are as powerful in the U.S. as they were to me as a health educator with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan.
• States that opted for local state marketplaces and expanded medicaid had twice the number of new ACA enrollees as states that opted for the federal exchange and declined medicaid expansion.
• The U.S. spends more money than many other developed countries for health outcomes that are not as good. In other words, our health care is more expensive and less effective.
• Americans pay for health transactions, not health.

I learned so much in just a few hours. I hope to blog more about some of the presentations this week. I want to thank AHCJ for sponsoring my travel for this conference. 

trying out a new platform

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek changed the way a lot of people thought about how to present stories online. I've even heard the story's headline used as a verb: "you should snow fall that story," to mean, add photos, audio and video to a plain text article.

Derek Poore, one of our visiting photography professors, visited our advanced reporting class last week to show us how to 'snow fall' a story. He said that following stories like Snow Fall and the Guardian's Firestorm, a few startups set out to give the masses the ability to do in a few minutes what used to take months. Among the free platforms are Creatavist and Medium.

On my way out west, I spent a few hours combing through my photos and videos from Turkmenistan. The desert flashed across my screen as the plane zipped through clouds, and the images took me back to a place and a time that now seems imagined.

I watched myself speak Turkmen with friends in the old bazaar. We climbed ancient ice houses. I remembered falling in and out of love with a country so maddening I will always have a love/hate relationship with those memories. Despite the struggles, my nostalgia is mostly romanticized now. Time has lessened the pain of the wounds that naturally arise from living as a Westerner in an autocracy. One thing I learned as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that sugar-coating doesn't really help anyone. Presenting uncomfortable realities can be a little awkward, but these days, I find there is no way not to do that. I've seen too much. Anyway, back to the project at hand.

Building the multimedia project itself took little under an hour. I'm sure there's lots more to explore. I created some chapters, embedded a video, clicked around for drop caps and eventually gave up after about 10 minutes of not figuring it out. The final produce is basic, but so much more visual than text blocks.

A story from Turkmenistan: Running in forgotten lands

MU Research review (& one other thing)

I worry sometimes that the Missourian is too MU-focused. I wonder if, because we are MU students writing for a community newspaper, that we lose touch with the community and get lost in our MU bubble. Of course, the answer is not easy and it probably depends on who you ask. I realized this evening as I read through the MU Research News site, that for me, the story often starts at MU, but it can certainly venture beyond the university itself. The first connection might be an MU-related person, but then that person can and should connect us out to the wider world beyond MU.

The MU research site has an endless number of story ideas. The overviews are like reading news briefs. There is no central character or narrative, but there is the possibility of one.

These were some of the topics I think could make potential stories (with the right narrative and character):

• Specialized clothing for individuals with disabilities
• Photovoice and empowerment
• Health broadcasts too short to be helpful
• Baby boomers and their savings accounts (especially post Great Recession)
• Food insecurity in Missouri (with a link to an interactive map)
• Should alcohol and pregnancy mix or not?
• Child maltreatment deaths in Missouri (follow up with fellow)

I also really want to write about what happens to stuff when it isn't sold or is deemed "too gross" for Goodwill. Many people treat it as a catch-all for everything they don't want, so how much is sold and how much is sent elsewhere (where?) or tossed out? I hope to look into this question sometime next week.

Waiting for the results; life goes on

We went to Ellis Fischel today to meet with Aaron's oncologist. We cuddled and cried and bought some breakfast and cracked jokes about Aaron's heartrate being too slow to detect.

He's one calm dude. At his cancer check-up, his heartrate was 58. I figured mine was twice the speed, but no one was checking me.

After the nurse had been in our room nearly 10 minutes, typing away, taking Aaron's vitals, she asked, 'and who is this,' waving toward me. Aaron said, 'my girlfriend.' She quickly typed a line and left the room.

Cancer broke into our life last January. It left me with fear and memories and loss. But, it also woke me up. I'm not the invincible teenager I once was, with timeless expectations and infinite possibility. Life is a series of intentional decisions and I can see that now. Aaron's cancer gave me that clarity of vision and that appreciation of time.

It's been about five months since his initial diagnosis. We've been through surgery, a rough few days filled with pain pills and sorrow. The knife cut out the cancer, but it also left a bright red wound that turns to purple in the cold; a constant reminder of our mortality.

The recovery was slow at first, then the semester caught us off guard. We woke up one morning a few weeks after surgery with looming assignments and the promise of yet another research paper. I buried myself in books, sharpening my thoughts, taking to research and studies like that knife to Aaron's skin.

Aaron's appointments are always scheduled on a Tuesday. We are always placed in a sterile room with that famous John Lennon lyric, 'life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.' I've noticed that doctors like consistency.

I like that lyric, but only because the doctors keep giving us good news. I think I would permanently maim that paint job if a doctor told me I had just a few months to live. The fact that John Lennon died prematurely would be of no comfort to me in that moment.

On this particular Tuesday, there was no maiming of any property. Dr. Hossein walked in and before he had a chance to sit down, I blurted out, "Is everything ok?"

He smiled. My tension immediately faded and I started crying. For now, no cancer has developed. Aaron and I have another three months before the suspense begins to build again. Every time it gets easier. Maybe that's because this experience has become routine and I know what to expect, or at least I think I do. Or, maybe it's because time builds optimism.

Either way, I'm grateful for today; for the good news that Aaron does not have cancer.