Six More Stories Behind the Stories

 

1. Savannah Connect Magazine- An ordinary art student with an interesting major https://lnkd.in/dPrz99n

This is a story for Savannah Connect—an alternative weekly in Georgia’s second biggest city-- about a college senior and her first professional art exhibit. My relationship with Savannah Connect is one in which I don’t have any choice over what I report. The stories I get are pretty standard. In this case, for instance, there wasn’t a lot I could initially discern on the surface about why this one artist is different than any other artist being featured in a gallery. It’s more of a challenge in Savannah because the city’s youth scene is dominated by alumni and students of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

So the challenge on me is often to take a pretty ordinary story and spruce it up. Oftentimes, I discover the angles I want to take along the way as I’m having the conversation. In this case, I thought her relationship with her father and her unusually transient childhood (she was born to 19-year-old college freshmen and lived in student housing) were interesting points. More importantly, she was actually not a traditional major of art but rather sequential design which is the study of making comic books. That was something I never heard about which meant I was onto something. The story had to be about her current paintings so I had to strike a balance 2. Podium Magazine- Perennial Fourth Place Finisher Achieves His Dream and Mysteriously Retires Before Olympics

https://lnkd.in/dkCEgMj This is one of the story's I'm most proud of this year. Andy Bayer was the unlucky 4th place finisher at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic trials and finished 4th in two world champion trials, before finally making the team in 2019. This year, as his shoe company dropped his contract, he decided to retire right before the Olympic trials despite a high world ranking. I previously asked a quote from him for a story so I decided why not contact him and ask why he retired and maybe that’s a fascinating story. The story eventually got approved by podium magazine I love track and field, this was a joy but also because a retired athlete is WAY better to interview than an active athlete. No answers have to be softened to appease a coach, teammate, or PR company. It also helped that I ran track and watched it quite a lot, so I was able to talk shop with him with a lot more intimacy.

3. Zebra Magazine- Opening of Reagan National Airport’s New Terminal Feels Like an Ordinary Tuesday to Most This article happened because I heard about an event after it happened. My parents volunteer at Washington Reagan National Airport and they called me one day to tell me that members of the press were having a tour of the new terminal. I had just read an article about the significance of this new terminal by Dan Zak of the Washington Post: DCA airport's infamous Gate 35X is gone but not forgiven. Briefly, the story goes like this: In 1997, when the new DCA terminal came to be, there were plans to build a terminal for smaller regional planes that never came to fruition so far 24 years, passengers for those flights had to endure a crammed shuttle and long wait out on the tarmac. “Gate 35X didn’t qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washington’s lack of a J Street. Gate 35X was just a bus station. In an airport…..Even worse, these indignities weren’t bifurcated by class. On Capitol Hill, that upper class includes several congressmen whose home districts fall in those geographical cracks between the urban centers that are only served by regional routes. Congressmen weren’t the only wealthy people to feel the discomfort, but they did have a national microphone to air their grievances which is how Gate 35X got upheld as the epitome of air travel failure in congressional hearings,” wrote Zak in the aforementioned article.

So when I got a call, I thought this is a great idea. However, I got there too late. Still, the tour was done 3 days before the grand opening so I decided to pitch a scene piece where I’d report on opening day. I started a dialogue with an editor I had worked with before at Zebra Magazine. She was interested but we had to negotiate whether this was on spec (not guaranteed publication) and while I had the support of the media relations team behind the airport, they were unwilling to give me a first-hand tour. The article was also complicated by a partially true concern over whether people (most importantly, airline and airport employees) were willing to go on the record (newspapers traditionally like first and last names). I think scene pieces (a cross between traditional reporting and a tone poem describing a time and place) can generally be a whole other level of writing when done right. But there was some definite concern over this one. Fortunately the interweaving of Dan Zak’s wonderful article, statistics provided by the media team, and knowledge of a flight that was delayed and my observations and quotes gave an article that my editor was really pleased with.

4. Today I Found Out.com - The United States' First Trip to the Olympics

Since watching the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, I’ve always been an enthusiast for the games. In fact I’m simultaneously excited for the Tokyo Olympics and dreading just how much my schedule will be upended by being glued to the television.

I did a number of pieces on the 2012 Olympics for Mental Floss after catching and pitching the editor on Twitter and that opened the door for this article for the 2016 Olympics on the very first US delegation to the inaugural Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. I’ve recently started to love deep historic research and a lot of times, I think back to a specific source of mine rather than just blindly google. In this case, there was a fascinating book I read years before I pitched the article at my local library. Because my local library didn’t carry it, I went to the Library of Congress reading room or as it is better known the Hogwarts of D.C.

 

 

5. Falls Church News Press- Apartment Safety Procedures Throughout Pandemic Has Limited Lifestyle Benefits

https://www.fcnp.com/2021/04/16/apartment-safety-procedures-throughout-pandemic-has-limited-lifestyles-benefits/ This article is a pretty weak product by any standard and I’m actually pretty proud of it. The reason is that while I consider journalism to be art, that doesn’t mean journalism doesn’t have constraints that a good journalist must abide by. Journalism isn’t novel writing or poetry. There’s an industrial component to it and it’s absolutely essential to the profession that something has to be produced by a deadline. Oftentimes, I make the mistake of treating every article I write like it must be held to a certain standard of quality when that is simply not necessary from the perspective of my editor who simply needs to fill some space with certain articles. When push comes to shove, sometimes it’s necessary to shut off the off the “I have to make this good” part of my brain if the deadline is approaching.

This is what happened on a Tuesday when both an initial assignment idea and a back-up assignment fell apart. The editor and I put our heads together and thought of something that was passable so that we could fill half a page and legitimately fulfill the promise to the paper’s advertisers of having real-estate related content (not something we ordinarily do). And trust me, racing around town and trying to find anyone to go on record within a five or six hour period, while not desirable, was an adrenaline rush. 6 The DC Line-Swimply Pool App

I read an article somewhere on a tech blog about a pool sharing app that worked like Uber in the way that the app facilitated the rental of pools as a third party. My article was written at the height of Summer in the pandemic so I felt as if I was vicariously living through the lives of Swimply users who got to explore the luxury of different pools as swimming access was so scarce. Although I did many interviews for this article, I greatly enjoyed my interview with the company founder because he did a really good job explaining the simplicity of his idea and its execution. He used Google Earth to look up backyard pools in the suburbs of Long Island and knocked on several doors to ask if the owners of those pools would be interested in renting out their pools through a new pilot app. Hundreds slammed the door on him but he had four takers and that’s all it took to start his business. Talk about entrepreneurship.