BrianManzullo.com

My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown

Four years ago, aggregating at Central Michigan Life was virtually unheard of.

Staff policy was fixed on reporters and editors doing the legwork themselves – as in, make the phone calls, cross-reference and analyze. Don’t base your reporting on another newspaper’s reporting. Every story at CM Life required 2-3 sources at least before it could even be considered for publication. That was just part of the learning process.

In these days of Web 2.0, things haven’t changed too much. We still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. But, in cases of breaking news on cm-life.com, especially in big statewide or nationwide stories, aggregation can be key.

Case in point:

Last week, at midnight Thursday (or Wednesday, depending on how you want to look at it), the Michigan government shut down for two hours because it could not finalize a temporary budget nor a final budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year. It was the second shutdown in the last three years for a state that, really, has one of the weakest economies in the country.

Unfortunately, our political reporter(s) weren’t on the story. But I took matters into my own hands (I apologize for the cliche).

The link above will take you to the final product of our coverage. But it started at about 12:15 a.m., when I posted one quick graph on the government shutting down. It linked to the Detroit Free Press story (link’s broken now):

“The state government is shut down as lawmakers could not agree on a state budget by midnight Thursday, according to the Detroit Free Press. Keep checking cm-life.com for more details as they unfold.”

Immediately after posting, I tweeted it, Facebooked it and told everybody to keep checking cm-life.com for updates.

Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links. I tweeted every time there was a new update, particularly with the portion of the state budget that concerned students the most (the Michigan Promise scholarship to thousands of students).

This continued for about three hours, all the way until the end of the shutdown. I didn’t talk to one physical source- all information I got was from other reports.

The results?

• The story earned our site more than 500 hits on Oct. 1 (the morning it was posted/updated) and was retweeted eight times.
• Google News crawled our story and mixed it in with the other government shutdown stories on the Web.
• We had 12 comments, several in the early morning hours.
• Most importantly: We successfully informed our readers of the state government shutdown as it was happening and its impact on them (mainly college students with the Michigan Promise scholarship money).

Like I said, we still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. Nothing replaces those connections. But the lesson here is this: Sometimes, when you have no sources to talk to, you just need to roll up your sleeves, do your duty of informing your readers and centralize the content other news organizations are getting. Even if you are mixing those links in with sources you’ve talked to.

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Lights, camera, practice: A Final Four trip to remember

When you are a fledgling journalist, you don’t get many chances like these.

I knew this three months ago, walking into Ford Field in Detroit, Mich., for the fourth time in two years. All three previous trips were for CMU football games as a beat writer, including two Motor City Bowls. This trip was similar in one sense. I carried a press pass and a bag of a journalist’s favorite tools (camera, notepad, voice recorder and pen, among other things), fully dressed with a tie on, like I did before, as I walked through security into the stadium.

While Ford Field mostly is known for hosting Detroit Lions games, the Mid-American Conference Championship game and the Motor City Bowl, this was April – well outside football season. Ford Field instead was gearing up for Final Four basketball. It was Friday, practice day for the four teams, all open to the public, and the main floor, normally carpeted with turf, was overlaid with chairs, press tables and – you guessed it – a basketball court. (See above.)

My purpose at this event was simple: To write a scholarship story. I was e-mailed two weeks earlier by Tom Stanton, an assistant journalism professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, with an invitation to attend a United States Basketball Writers’ Association (USBWA) seminar with some of the top basketball writers in the country. This included a chance to be assigned to one event during the Final Four weekend and to write a story in a $1,000 scholarship competition.

The previous day’s workshop was a blast. I went with a couple of my coworkers at Central Michigan Life to the University of Detroit Mercy, where we got to meet sports journalists such as Boston Globe writer Bob Ryan, Washington Post columnist John Feinstein, Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com and Steve Carp of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. All of them were extremely nice in providing sportswriting tips and answering questions for about 100-150 students in attendance.

The following day, I found myself at Ford Field working alongside some of these writers. It was like I was living a career dream. That was enough motivation to get to work.

(NOTE: In between all of this, I managed to shoot photos and take audio to create a nice, quick Soundslides presentation on a 3-on-3 U.S. wheelchair basketball game. You can view it here.)

First, I had to come up with a storyline. What was I going to write about? At first, I wanted to deviate from doing a story on Michigan State because of its predictability. I wanted to uncover something deeper. But there was a particular moment right before the Spartans began their practice (teams practiced in 50-minute allotments and MSU was first) which shined for me.

I was standing courtside, next to MSU’s entrance ramp, when the team began its march into the Ford Field lights. The crowd absolutely roared. A good 20,000 people, 95 percent of which were State fans, where cheering during the introduction. The band was playing, the jumbotron was going and the cheerleaders were jumping. It was quite a sight – for a practice!

I immediately had a lede in mind, wrote it down and went the entire 50-minute practice from there, recording everything I heard and saw. I also got a chance to play photographer for 10 minutes, sitting courtside and getting nice shots of players running their drills. Now all I needed to do was get player reactions to the rather unusual practice atmosphere.

As I walked toward the locker rooms, I caught sight of John Feinstein. I talked with him briefly the day earlier about my sportswriting experiences, particularly as CMU’s football writer. I walked up to him to say hi and if he had any words of wisdom for my interviews. I gave him the early idea for my story.

“Talk to the little guys,” he said. “Don’t talk to any star players. Get the guys no one is talking to.”

Perfect advice.

While everybody and their mother is hearing about Kalin Lucas and Goran Suton and their thoughts on the Final Four trip home, there are other players on the team who, for one, wouldn’t mind some media attention. They’re in the tournament semifinals just like Lucas and Suton. And they can be a quote gold mine if you give them the time to talk.

I memorized several player numbers while waiting outside the locker room, writing down interview possibilities. When the media poured in, I stood back for a minute or two to let everyone settle in.

Once I walked in, I looked for players sitting down, talking either to one media member or none at all. I started with center Idong Ibok. Then Austin Thornton. Then Korie Lucious. None of these players averaged more than 10 minutes per game, and all of them had quite a bit to say about their early experience.

“We’ve had many games with less people than that … it was unbelievable,” Ibok said. Golden.

“I kept catching myself looking up at the stands and thinking, ‘Wow, we are at a practice right now, and we have, like, 15,000 people here watching us,’” Thornton said. Even more golden.

Once interviews were done, I put away my voice recorder and notepad and headed back to courtside to catch Connecticut practice. Like I said in this entry’s intro, you don’t get many chances like these. I had an opportunity to watch great college basketball teams practice!

I also went to the Final Four media room (pictured below) to find other familiar faces. I found Bob Ryan writing a story, so I dropped by to talk to him for a few minutes. I was gracious of his time because Globe writers, especially those as renowned as Ryan, surely are busy people. I made sure to grab a bite to eat, too – within all the Final Four hoopla, I forgot my stomach was growling.

I went down to courtside, once more, to watch the final practice: The eventual Final Four champion North Carolina, complete with Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson and coach Roy Williams. It was another one of those moments where I fell in love with what I did for a living. I could get used to this for a long, long time, I thought. It reminded me of when I began covering CMU football.

I left about 10 minutes early to beat traffic and make my way to Columbus, Ohio, where the Society of Professional Journalists Region 4 conference was held. Following that small trip, I sat down at my desk in Mount Pleasant, Mich., surrounded by media guides and releases, and began writing my story.

I treated it like anything I would write for a professional publication. I fact-checked, proofread, verified and clarified every sentence I wrote. I re-read my story at least 50 times. Once I was done, I handed it to a few of my colleagues and my adviser for proofreading. They gave me minor things to fix and clean up.

In the end, here was what I came up with.

A couple weeks passed. I didn’t think too much about the scholarship. There were at least several dozen other college and high school writers in the competition. While my chances were low, I had an amazing experience nonetheless.

I was in the Life office on a Sunday, working on adding widgets to the Life Web site, when I received another e-mail from Tom Stanton.

“It was a tough decision — with many strong entries — but the judges have selected a winner in the Final Four sportswriting scholarship competition: Brian Manzullo of Central Michigan University.

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5 feature/profile reporting tips for beginning journalists

Sometime last Spring, Central Michigan Life’s adviser, Neil Hopp, asked a coworker, Dan Monson, and I to spend some time working with some of the newer sports reporters on how to write extensive feature and/or profile stories. The request came after our Hearst wins – Monson placed 14th in Personality/Profile Writing for “Hidden pain” and I placed 18th for “A passer’s perseverence.”

We never got a chance to schedule a sports writing workshop. But I did manage to write five tips down. I figured I would share them here, since I don’t have much else to update with for now.

(If you have any of your own tips, please share them in the comments section. It obviously takes more people to provide a well-rounded number of suggestions. Thanks!)

1) Really get to know the subject by getting involved in your interview.

When I began writing stories, I would write my set list of questions down for each source, go through the list and be done with the interview. I spent little time really getting to know who I was talking to, and it paid off very little with my writing. Ask tons of follow-up questions when they spur in your head. Get details clear. Ask “Why?” a lot, to get more perspective. The more you know about your subject, the more you can convey it in writing, and the better you can describe them.

One of my editors at The Saginaw News told me that if there’s any certainty, people love reading about people. Even in event coverages, ask about the person you are speaking with. But especially in features and profiles, it’s essential to get the little details that make a person full circle for the reader. That doesn’t mean just age, name, hometown. Get inside their head. What brought them to where they are now (depending on what your story is about)? What inspires them? That sort of thing.

2) Be prepared to spend a lot of time interviewing many subjects.

For “A passer’s perseverance,” I did an initial one-hour interview with the main subject, Brian Brunner, and at least two follow-up interviews that took, on average, 10-15 minutes. The follow-ups came after I initially began writing my story and mainly were to clear up details, ask questions I came across while writing the story or to find other sources to talk to with contact information. These are extremely important for fleshing out your story, so plan on spending this extra time with the subject.

It also is important to get as many sources as you can, even if you do not use them all. Get a wide range of perspectives. You need them. When doing a personality profile, always talk to the parents, if possible. Usually, nobody knows your subject better than they do. Talk to friends, other relatives, colleagues, anybody. The more sourcework you get, the better chance you have of getting quotes that will emotionally vitalize your story.

3) Remember the focus of your story.

This might seem easy, but when writing a feature story upwards of 1,000 to 2,000 words, it’s actually easy to fall off track with what you are writing about. Be creative, but don’t stray too much from the focus. Don’t write too much on a particular aspect unless it’s extremely pivotal to the story. If you are writing a life story, write the meat of it in chronological order so you don’t confuse the reader. Let the details you write unfold the rest.

For a good example, check Central Michigan Life coworker Jake May’s piece he wrote for The Buffalo News as an intern there. It is on a woman who retired after 15 years as director of the Buffalo City Mission’s Cornerstone Manor. The focus is on what drove the woman at City Mission – her time during World War II as a refugee and a particular moment at City Mission that resurfaced those memories. I’ll leave the suspense to you (so you can read it, of course), but you will notice how despite the different flashbacks and moments, Jake never truly wavered from the focus of the story – each one played a part into putting the story full circle.

4) Get involved with different elements of the story.

Don’t just focus on the writing part of your story. Attend the photo shoot, if there is one. Knowing the type of art that will go with the story helps me come up with a lead that will compliment the design almost perfectly. Or, even better, if you already wrote the story, offer your ideas to the photographer and let them know what the mood of the story is. That will help them in getting a better idea of what type of photo to shoot. This type of communication does absolute wonders for a front-page package. Dan Monson and Matthew Stephens’ work on “Hidden pain” is a great example.

If there are any other multimedia projects that go with the story, be a participant. Shoot a video interview. Get sound bytes. Ask the photo staff to come up with a slideshow, if they have file art of the subject on hand, maybe. In today’s age, stories generally are better told through the use of multimedia. Plus, it’s great experience for you in the long run.

5) Have many colleagues read your story to proofread and offer suggestions.

You have no idea how important this is until you actually do it. I had 3-4 different people, including Jake, read “A passer’s perseverance” before I submitted it for editing. Jake had me read the story I linked in #3 before he sent it in. Your colleagues will have a knack for catching things that went way over your head, and can offer suggestions that could make your story up to two times better than it was before.

Another example: I wrote a story last March/April on Detroit’s Final Four practices in a contest for one $1,000 scholarship as a participant in the United States Basketball Writers’ Association weekend workshop. With the story completed and not due for another week, I handed the story off to Neil, Jake, Dan and two others so they could look at the story. Their suggestions and improvement, I feel, helped me win the scholarship a couple weeks later after three judges from the Detroit News and Free Press read all the stories. (What also helped was the advice I received from some of the nation’s top sports writers, such as the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan and Washington Post’s John Feinstein, who were at the workshop) I will post this story in a later update if you would like to see it.

* * * * *

I could probably go on with little things that will help you when writing features and profiles, but that covers the gist of it. You never want to feel like you waved at what could possibly be a wonderful story for people to read. I’ve seen it happen all too often in my four years. As a journalist, you want to capture everything you can that will engage your readers and invoke a certain emotion in them. That is what will get you by in the long run as a writer.

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