It’s 2:21 a.m., a Thursday night, a cold Thursday night (it’s really Friday morning) and instead of sleeping in my bed, I’m thinking about the energy potential lying 8,000 feet beneath the ground– approximately six Empire State Buildings away from my lime green couch.

Why am I thinking about this at 2 a.m.? Because it’s down to crunch time and I, my friends, am behind.

For the past 3 months I’ve worked on a story about what’s in store for North Carolina if the state passes legislation legalizing the natural gas-obtaining method known as hydraulic fracking. Today, I realized that I have less than two weeks to turn in a semester-long project that has faced its fair share of bump-ups.

Here are a few things I learned along the way — some tips that might just help future class-takers power a nation someday.

1.Procrastination will never be a true friend in the end.

2.When a senator says he’ll call you back, chances are slim to none that he will. Pick up the phone.

3.Having that third bourbon and coke on a Thursday night at Linda’s will only make 9 a.m. Fridays harder.

4.If you’re struggling for ideas, go for a walk, a run or just take a break.

5.Set your goals high, but always have a back-up plan.

6.Don’t be afraid to start over.

7.Push yourself.

~Isabella Cochrane

Freelancing scares me a bit, makes me anxious. Aside from inspiration, the readings we did for this week's class also provided some cynicism, which I generally appreciate but can also be triggered by. It's inspiring that writers can work like choosey bees, flying from hive to hive without having to commit all their energy to one; it's anxiety-producing that writers can find themselves spending whole days by themselves, drifting in and out of thought and becoming preoccupied with whatever those thoughts carry. As writers or journalists, we find ourselves naturally gravitating toward stories and storytelling, so it makes sense that this social isolation would trigger many things, not least of all a desperation to reach out to other human beings.

So, I probably won't be a freelancer exclusively, most likely. But it is good to know that I'm not the only one who needs human interaction, and a good amount of it, to sustain some degree of sanity.

~Erin Sagen

How much material or footage is too much? How much material or footage is too little? And how to we find the right balance?

Access must be the No. 1 issue shared by journalists of all mediums during the production stage of reporting — where print journalists jot down their notes, photographers take their photos and multimedia reporters shoot video, etc. But with post-production right around the corner, reporters of all mediums must make a crucial decision: how much reporting, how many photos, how much footage...is too much? What is too little? And how do we find the right balance? There is no easy answer.

Anne Hull writes in "Revising — Over and Over Again" (from Telling True Stories) that note-taking is akin to “dredging the lake” because “you can sort it all our later.” Though I generally agree with this statement, I believe it is easier said than done. In the same book, Sonia Nazario describes the “feeling of paralysis” she experienced after reporting for her book, Enrique’s Story. “I didn’t want to face the mountain of material,” she said referring to her 110 notebooks, hundreds of hours of taped interviews, and typed notes from more than 100 phone calls. Ultimately, Nazario says she used about one-tenth of the material she gathered. By no means does this suggest that she over-reported, only that this was the amount of material she needed to get the story right.

Multimedia reporters can also pay a price for having too much material. A five-minute documentary video can often have some three to five hours of raw footage associated with the project--creating a ratio far less than the 10:1 that Nazario experienced. And since the footage is video, it must be sat through — often in real time — rather than skimmed. For this reason, successful multimedia journalists have trained themselves to think as editors while they are shooting in order to limit extraneous material.

I have too much footage. How will I ever edit this down?

The answer: Organize. Organize. Organize.

Sonia Nazario hit the nail right on the head when she recalled (in Telling True Stories) her editor’s request for her to organize her material as a proper starting point for writing Enrique’s Journey. Her editor, Rick Meyer, had asked her to transcribe 100+ notebooks, 100+ audio interviews and 100+ telephone calls. At first she balked, but soon after realized “it was the right thing to do.”

Nazario spend six full weeks organizing her material, meticulously typing up notes and sorting the material by topic. Transcribing “gave me a general sense if what I had,” she noted. Her next step was to “garbage it down,” or create “very” rough draft in chronological order--she even kept a note on her computer that read: “It’s the chronology, stupid!” The draft took six months to write and contained 95,000 words, but it was a tangible draft, not thousands of pages of paralyzing notes. Some 10 drafts later the book was complete, down to a 35,000 word manuscript.

It should come as no surprise that this process is just as familiar to a multimedia reporter. My first step with video editing is to organize my footage. Once it is in the proper folders, with the correct naming conventions, I import it into my editing software. Once there, I being the often grueling task of assembling together a reel of selects until I have sequences of each event I shot. It’s all about getting over the fear of starting and creating an organizational system for moving forward.

Final advice here is to find your focus and really know what you’re looking for. This will help weed out all extraneous material and nonessential characters. Screenings with trusted eyes outside of your project is another way to find out what’s working, and what’s not in your subsequent drafts.

Editing Non-Traditional Story Formats: Where to Start

As someone who produces user-interactive graphics and games, my revision process is much different. There’s no point in the project when I have all my material gathered and I just have to piece it together. Every step adds new material. So where do you start the revision process? From the beginning.

As soon as I start thinking about a project, I start revising. Revising my ideas before ever mapping out a project is essential, or I’ll dream up something too complicated and be disappointed when I can’t accomplish it.  There’s revision along the way too. After gathering data, I pare down my original idea to match what my research shows. When designing the comps, or static mock-ups of a piece, I revise my ideas further in order to match my design skills.

The biggest revision, however, is when I start programming my project. There are certain parts of a project that I know how to code, and others that I have no idea what I’m doing. With the parts that I don’t know how to code, I have to make a decision: do I learn how to code this or cut it out of the project? Of course, learning a new aspect of programming is the ideal route; you improve and get to keep it in your project. In “Revising — Over and Over Again,” Hull writes, “If you put yourself in a challenging environment and force yourself to stretch, you will improve.” But sometimes there’s a time crunch. You can’t learn everything you need to know to program your project and still meet deadline, especially if you had big dreams in the planning stages. You just have to be able to put your ego aside, and not be scared to simplify your work.

~Joshua Davis and Stephanie Bullins

What would you do if you saw a sick child that needed to go to hospital?  Her parents have no money for gas to take her there and you have a car with a tank full of gas.  Without a doubt, you would offer to take the baby and her parents to the emergency room.

But what if you are a reporter or a photojournalist and they are your subjects?

Our discussion this week is about ethics and ethical dilemmas.  As journalists, we will face an ethics issue at some point in our career if not one in every story we do.  It’s what we do in these situations that can define what kind of reporter (and person) we really are.  The most difficult part is making the decision in the moment, while the most important part is being able to look back on the decision and be able to justify it.   

The scenerio I started out with actually happened to Anne Hull, a writer at the Washington Post, which she wrote about in a short essay called "A Dilemma of Immersion Journalism" in the book "Telling True Stories."  She and the photographer knew that the parents of the child expected her to offer her car, but she also knew that if she did, it would ruin the story.  She was there to see how people on welfare and far below the poverty line coped with the issues that come up in life.  What ended up happening was that the father of the baby had to pawn his shotgun to his neighbor to get the money to fill up the car with gas to take the infant to the hospital.  THAT is the story.  

But how do we figure out where the line is?  When should we intervene?  One of the most heartbreaking pictures I’ve ever seen is the child in Sudan with the vulture.  Kevin Carter took the photo in 1993, and he won the Pulitzer for it.  He also received a lot of criticism for the photo, with editors and readers asking why he didn’t help the girl.  Should he have helped her?  Would that have been journalistically ethical?  I think that Carter could have helped the girl as long as he mentioned that in the caption.  In fact, I think it would have answered a lot of questions that the photo raised.  Transparency is key; I think that a lot of actions can become unethical if they are not disclosed.             

As journalists, especially visual journalists, we want our subjects to treat us as if we aren’t there.  But our very presence often affects the situation, no matter how invisible we become.  Our subjects expect us to help them if something drastic happens.  How do we become immersed in someone’s life without actually being a part of it?  I don’t think we’ll ever know the answer.

~Ariana van den Akker

A few things to think about:

“The Ira Glass manifesto,” parts 1-3 http://transom.org/?p=6978

Listen: This American Life, “Act 2: Denying the invisible,” from episode 431, “See no evil” (The story starts at minute 31) http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=431&act=2

----

I love Ira Glass. I know, I know, everybody loves Ira Glass. But there is something about the way he speaks that makes me want to tell stories. What is that quality?

As the introduction to the Transom piece mentions, he is a listener. In some respects it is ironic that a man who is lauded for the stories he tells is most effective in his use of silence. This can be applied to the work we are launching into in Powering a Nation; Silence isn’t the most comfortable state for us humans, so the skillful use of a pause can add tension and drama to piece. Silence is also useful because we aren’t as good at multitasking as we think we are. Oftentimes we need a moment to absorb what we’re listening to, what we’re looking at. In the high-pace world of contemporary journalism, so many stories are driven by deadline, and there is a temptation to grab at the first story that comes easy. But sometimes the best stuff comes when you take the time to listen.

But that patience should be tempered by an awareness of when to give up. Give up, that sounds bad. I first encountered this concept through the phase “Kill your darlings.” Yikes.

Let’s have it in Ira’s language:

“Killing your story is nothing to be ashamed of. I figure, if I’m not killing at least a third of the interviews I do for the radio show, we’re not taking enough chances. Killing stories is just part of the process of finding great stories.

"If one interview doesn’t work, try another, and another. Follow the things that interest you and attract you. Amuse yourself. Keep getting more tape until luck kicks in.

"Luck will always kick in.”

I wonder if it gets easier? Taking risks, not being afraid to fail and fail and fail again. But there is something about the search for a good story that’s akin to the joy of the hunt. As a journalist, I’m still wet behind the ears, but I’ve experienced that moment where you know you got it – they said that thing you hoped they would say, and so much better than you expected. The light wasn’t even all that bad!

For our Powering a Nation class, we’ve pitched our topics and started researching.  Now we need to find our sources and start listening. And hopefully we’ll get lucky!

~Kelly Izlar

One size fits most...

We've all seen this message referring to how some piece of clothing, often a T-shirt, isn't available in different sizes. And the one size that IS available was chosen because it can be worn comfortably by different people with a wide range of shapes and sizes. Talking about energy issues seems a lot like this T-shirt. How can we as journalists talk about an issue like hydraulic fracturing so that everyone involved gains a better understanding of the issues and challenges?

The answer we seem to be heading toward is to start asking questions and to be transparent about the process of learning more. Some stories are from the human side of the issue, while others share the legitimate concerns of the industries or legislatures trying to balance the risks and benefits of the new technology. In either case our goal isn't to take sides but to show the complexity of the issue.

What do YOU think when you read/hear these two stories about current energy issues?

http://www.propublica.org/article/hydrofracked-one-mans-mystery-leads-to-a-backlash-against-natural-gas-drill/single
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/440/game-changer

These stories show one side of an issue but raise a lot of questions about what's going on at the same time. It's obvious that these are not intended to give an unbiased perspective, but I think we can learn more by being honest about some of the reasons that have caused people to land on this side of the issue. Then we can go on to find out more about the reasons people have landed on the other side of the issue as well.

If we can show each side as openly and honestly as we can, we'll land somewhere in the middle.

-Carol Perry