#APME2012 Nashville Day Two Recap

New AP chief stresses news, business cooperation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Gary Pruitt, the new president and CEO of The Associated Press, pledged Thursday to continue close cooperation with member news organizations on news collection, open government efforts and generating online advertising revenues.

In remarks at the annual Associated Press Media Editors convention, Pruitt noted that the AP Mobile news app presents a key area where the cooperative and members can "be business partners today in a way we couldn't before."

"You can be our local partner," said Pruitt, the 13th person to head the news cooperative since its founding in 1846. "AP can supply the national news, the international news — you can supply the local news. And we'll share ad revenues."

Pruitt also announced to the gathering of top editors and news executives that the AP will contribute $25,000 to the APME's touring journalism workshops called NewsTrain as the program enters its 10th year. As newsrooms face substantial budget cutbacks, he said, training "is a very tough issue these days."

"It's not an easy year for AP to make a $25,000 contribution, but it reflects our confidence and our judgment about what a valuable program NewsTrain training is," he said.

Pruitt, who took over the AP job in July, noted what he described as a changing business relationship between the AP and the newspapers that own it. U.S. newspapers currently account for just 22 percent of revenues, while broadcasters represent an even smaller portion, he said. Meanwhile, 35 percent of revenues are generated abroad.

"That doesn't mean you're less important to AP. That doesn't lessen our commitment to you," he said. "Rather, it allows us to serve you completely and affordably by having that diverse business space and growing platform of customs.

"It's only in that way that AP can provide you the most up-to-date, the most accurate, the most complete and the just-plain best news report in the world every day."

Pruitt was a First Amendment lawyer before joining The McClatchy Co. as general counsel in 1984 and rising to the position of chairman by 2001. He recalled "lots of fights" over access to public records and court hearings, defending libel lawsuits and quashing subpoenas.

"AP's great, because there are more places to fight in that way," he said. "And we can be brothers and sisters in arms in the battle to uphold the Constitution."

Pruitt said he looked forward to continuing a strong working relationship with member organizations.

"While the business may change — and it will change, and it's changing right now — our mission doesn't," he said. "Ours doesn't and yours doesn't. And that feels pretty good in these changing times."

Top AP editors also gave an overview of political coverage in a hard-fought election year, plans for upcoming state news coverage, the latest developments in the photo report and the growing role of social media.

Political Editor Liz Sidoti said the AP and other news organizations remain committed to fact-checking the candidates, even though candidates don't appear to modify their behavior when they're caught "spewing falsehoods on a host of matters."

"The candidates every day still are twisting the facts and are outright lying," she said. "Yet we all are providing accountability journalism that's so critical to campaign coverage."

Mike Oreskes, senior managing editor for U.S. news, said the challenge is to contrast the candidates' statements with the facts without becoming "combatants in the election."

"Part of what happens in a campaign is that the candidates know that repetition is their secret and they'll repeat the same thing over and over and over," he said. "And the journalistic tendency is not to repeat anything. You say something once, it's news and it goes away."

Oreskes said the AP is working to provide online features that fact-check material in a more continuous way.

Sidoti warned that a series of new voter ID laws could complicate declaring the outcome of races on Election Day, as the candidates "have huge numbers of lawyers on standby ready to challenge the count in courts."

Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said the growing number of early and absentee ballots is changing the value of the "fiendishly expensive, very complicated process" of exit polling.

"We spend a lot of time on the forensics of where the votes are out, what our statistical patterns show and we do a lot of research before we make a call on a race," she said. "The complication of when people are voting — and more importantly when those votes are being counted, and having to try to statistically guess how many votes are still outstanding — that's going to be the real dynamic this year."

Kristin Gazlay, the AP's vice president and managing editor who oversees state news, announced that as a result of discussions with members, AP statehouse reporters will be ramping up their coverage of how President Barack Obama's health care law is being implemented.

The goal will be "cutting through the spin and homing in on the issues most pertinent to each individual state," she said.

Gazlay also addressed the growing role of social networks like Twitter and Facebook as reporting and promotional tools for AP journalists, and said those who refuse to use them as newsgathering tools are missing out on a valuable resource.

"It would be like a reporter saying, 'I don't really want to use email,'" she said. "You're choosing not to be competitive, is the message we give."

Carroll stressed, however, that the AP does not use social media as a platform to break news.

"You all pay us a chunk of change to break news to you, and so we do," she said. "And once it's broken to you, we promote it on the social networks."

More than half the world's population sees news reported by the AP on any given day. The not-for-profit cooperative, based in New York and owned by its member newspapers, has journalists in more than 300 locations worldwide, including all 50 U.S. states.

Reporters discuss issues in mental health coverage with conference goers

~Written by Alex Hubbard

The state of mental health in a small Wisconsin town grabbed headlines this summer and brought the two reporters who covered the story to this year’s APME conference to discuss their findings.

Megan Sheridon and Trista Pruett, of the Beaver Dam Daily Citizen, a small newspaper just outside of Madison, were the winners of the APME’s Community Journalism and Public Service Initiative, a competition that awarded a $1,000 grant to a newspaper to cover a public service concern.

Pruett and Sheridon made their issue mental health in Dodge County, where Beaver Dam is located and where there are more cows than people, according to Pruett.

“Both Trista and I had covered some county board meetings where they talked about mental health and how the county had a mental-health initiative, and they were adding more hours and adding more staff,” Sheridon said. “I kind of kept that idea in the back of my head as a project that I wanted to work on, and this was a really great opportunity from APME for us to really flesh it out and put some kind of hard work and time into it.”

Megan Sheradin and Trista Pruett of the Daily Citizen are interviewed by Alex Hubbard. Sheradin and Pruett won the APME Community Journalism Initiative for their coverage of mental healthcare in rural communities.
~Photo by Matt Masters

Sheridon and Pruett set out to speak with government officials, private psychologists and people affected by mental health problems.

Pruett followed two children who dealt with anger disorders, and Sheridon covered a woman with manic depression.

It developed into a three-part series, which ran throughout the summer of this year, with written features as well as multimedia presentations depicting the struggles of mental health patients as they worked with what instantly appeared to be inadequate mental care options.

They discovered patients who had to wait up to six months to be seen by medical professionals, and a government that simply did not have the ability to cope.

“Dodge County is a very fiscally- and socially-conservative county,” Sheridon said. “Spending taxpayer dollars on a county program like this– that’s not going to happen.”

Still, Pruett and Sheridon said the point was not to inform government officials, but to inform the community.

”The government people who need to be working on this, they have been informed that this is a problem,” Pruett said. “I think our goal in this was to make the average citizen aware because just walking down the street, most people aren’t thinking. When they’re thinking of all the problems, they’re thinking of the economy, they’re thinking of healthcare in general. They’re not thinking of a lack of mental healthcare.”

Pruett covers the county court system and said she was relatively prepared for what the investigation discovered, but for Sheridon, who covers two small towns and grew up in the community, the experience was eye opening.

“Coming back here, you know, I’m seeing more than just what that childhood vision of what Dodge County was like,” she said. “It’s not just people working in a rural county. It’s people experiencing life and trials and tribulations.”

Berens talks ‘quantifying’ in investigative reporting

~Written by Mark Mize

Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle Times investigative reporter Michael Berens’s session focused on how using the right process and repositories of information can be the key to successful watchdog journalism.

“The most powerful way to make stories is to find these repositories and find a way to quantify them,” Berens said.

Berens said that most of his skills were honed in his first four or five years at The Columbus Dispatch on the police beat.

He said that when deciding on which watchdog stories to pursue, journalists must look at which ones will yield the best results.

“There are lots of examples of really well-done stories, but they’re boring, or they’re  not relevant, or you see it wasn’t their story,” Berens said.

Pulitzer winning reporter Michael Berens of the Seattle Times talks about strategies and opportunities to find and report better stories from public records.
~Photo by Matt Masters 

Creating checklists may seem like a basic task. However, Berens says they can help journalists understand the elements that make for great stories if there is the tangible element of quantification.

“When you look at the award-winning stories out there, for want of a better description, and compare it to stories that don’t quite meet that bar; one of the things you’ll notice is the quantification,” Berens said.

He went on to list tools and repositories that will help quantify information for enterprise stories.

The Fatality Analysis Reporting database is available free from the federal government, and keeps records on every fatal car crash in America, such as the weight of the car, nature of the crash, and information about those injured in the crash.

“If you develop this tool in the newsroom, and a lot of newsrooms keep this updated annually, so they can use it on a flash, you can start doing watchdog stories right from a breaking news event,” Berens said.

Payroll data can be also be useful to jump start stories. Berens said payroll databases can not only create interesting stories by searching criteria, such as which city employees are the highest paid, but may also be a good way to find valuable sources.

“When I’m doing a story on any kind of city or state agency, I get the payroll database, and I look for everyone who has retired during the last six months and give them a call. They’ve just left and now they’re free to talk, and boy, they will talk,” said Berens.

Berens said in-patient hospital discharge database is the most valuable database that he has ever come across.

“It’s a roster of every patient who’s admitted to every hospital in your state. It’s a list of whether they were on Medicaid or insurance, did they come through the emergency room, did they come in through the prison, did they come in through the nursing home, what was their diagnosis code,” said Berens.

It also includes other information, including some patient demographics, what they were treated for and how much it costs, which can lead to various kinds of medical-related stories.

“It’s about the people. What we do isn’t about numbers; it isn’t about databases. It’s about telling the stories of the people,” said Berens. 

Journal Sentinel wins APME Innovator of the Year Award

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's multimedia effort for its "Empty Cradles" series about the death of children before their first birthday was selected Thursday as the winner of the Associated Press Media Editors association's sixth annual Innovator of the Year Award.

The Journal Sentinel's effort was selected by the attendees of the 2012 APME Conference in Nashville among a field of three finalists. The two other finalists were the Arizona Republic and KPNX-12, Phoenix, for the convergence of print, broadcast and online in its website, AZCentral; and The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, for innovations throughout its website.

APME is an association of editors at newspapers, broadcast outlets and journalism educators and student leaders in the United States and Canada. It works closely with The Associated Press to foster journalism excellence.

The judges, who narrowed the field to three finalists, said the Journal Sentinel project "tackles a social issue and not only tells the story but, as an information source, is part of the solution. The project gets readers involved." 

In addition to the award, the Journal Sentinel received a $1,000 prize from GateHouse Media.

#APME2012 Nashville Day One Recap

APME conference video coverage available online

If you missed sessions in the first day of the APME conference in Nashville, you can find video coverage on the APME YouTube page...

www.youtube.com/user/apmevideo?feature=results_main

The highlights include Pulitzer prize winners talk about what led them to their big stories and how they reported them. You'll also find interviews with key speakers at conference events.

Also check the APME website for updates... www.apme.com.

Seigenthaler News Service debuts at APME

Middle Tennessee State University unveiled Wednesday an innovative federal judicial system reporting project that will allow students to be immersed in daily coverage on federal law enforcement operations in Nashville.

Seven students from the College of Mass Communication will spend eight hours a day, five days a week supplying coverage of the U.S. District Courts and other federal entities for publication by The Tennessean in its newspaper and website. They will operate out of The Tennessean's newsroom for the semester.

The effort will be known as the Seigenthaler News Service, named by MTSU in honor of journalism icon John Seigenthaler, who worked closely with the university, federal court officials and Tennessean executives to create the hands-on learning opportunity.

The seven Seigenthaler Scholars, all seniors, are: Emily Kubis, Amanda Haggard, Christopher Merchant, Richel Albright, Kate Prince, Kylie Kolz, and Alex Harris.

"It is fitting that this endeavor, which we believe to be the first of its kind devoted to coverage of federal courts, will bear the name of John Seigenthaler, a legendary journalist and defender of the First Amendment," said MTSU President Sidney A. McPhee, who announced the effort at the national conference of the Associated Press Media Editors.

Seigenthaler was a reporter, editor, publisher and CEO of The Tennessean, where he remains chairman emeritus, and also served as an administrative assistant for then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He served as founding editorial director for USA Today. In 1991, he established the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center in Nashville.

"We are honored to partner with MTSU and help lead this innovative endeavor," said Maria De Varenne, executive editor and vice president/news of The Tennessean. "It will allow us to provide more coverage of federal issues, agencies and courts for our print readers and digital audience."

In 1986, MTSU established the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies, honoring the veteran journalist's lifelong commitment to free expression. The Seigenthaler Chair, housed in the College of Mass Communication, supports a variety of activities related to free speech and free press rights.

The Seigenthaler News Service will be directed by MTSU journalism professor Wendell Rawls, a 35-year journalism professional. He will be assisted by Dwight Lewis, former editor of The Tennessean's editorial page and a former federal beat reporter.

"Only a handful of journalism schools are doing anything similar — and none are reporting on the federal courts and other federal law enforcement agencies as this project is envisioned," said Rawls, who also serves as chair of MTSU's Seigenthaler Center.

Roy Moore, dean of the College of Mass Communication, said students in other disciplines throughout the university, such as political science, business and criminal justice, will be eligible to apply for future slots in the program.

Moore said the students will prepare daily coverage, in-depth articles, profiles and long-form feature articles, as well as video and audio pieces, for The Tennessean. Their work will also be provided to Gannett Tennessee operations in Ashland City, Clarksville, Dickson, Gallatin, Murfreesboro and Springfield.

The students will also cover the U.S. Attorney's office, and the bureaus of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, federal public defenders office, IRS, U.S. Marshals service, the Federal Grand Jury and the civilian defense bar.

There will be daily reporting, editing sessions, reporting instruction, source-cultivation instruction and weekly lunches with the leaders of The Tennessean, the chiefs of the various federal offices the students will cover, and well as leading defense attorneys.

Joe Haynes, chief judge of the U. S. District Court for Middle Tennessee, as well as the other federal district judges and their associates, committed to help with the project, Rawls said, offering access to the Federal Court electronic records computer system as well as to the law library.

The judges have also provided a private room for students to use for writing and filing stories and will make themselves available to court procedures, testimony and court rulings, Rawls said.

MTSU student media at APME

Today's edition (Sept. 20) of The Daily News Journal covered the news about MTSU covering the news about people who cover the news:

Mass communication students covering APME The Daily News Journal MURFREESBORO — MTSU students will be covering the news for the people who cover the news this week as they provide exclusive stories, photos, audio and video for the Associated Press Media Editors' national conference in Nashville.

Andrew Oppmann

Associate Vice President and Spokesman

Marketing and Communications

Middle Tennessee State University

Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Office: 615-494-7800

Cell: 615-339-8851

Visit www.MTSUnews.com

-------------------------------------------------------

Sent from my iPhone

Aurora shooting panel provides look at mental health

~Written by Alex Hubbard
Emily West contributed to this article.

For every disaster, there is a journalist who must cover it, and dealing with those after effects was the subject of a Wednesday panel.

Moderated by Carole Tarrant of the Roanoke Times, the panel featured Associated Press editors from Denver and Kansas City, a Denver Post editor and the former executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

“We heard early today from a very inspiring Pulitzer panel about how to do journalism,” Tarrant said. “This is the flip side of that is how to take care of those people who do that.”

Entitled “Lessons from Aurora,” the three editors all helped manage coverage of the Aurora, Colo. theater shooting.

Chris Clark, Associated Press News Editor, responds to audience questions.
~Photo by Matt Masters

Though each editor viewed the event from a different vantage point, they were left with a common problem: how to manage their reporters in order to ensure quality work and maximum personal health.

Chris Clark, an AP editor from Kansas City, inherited one of the toughest tasks when he flew in to Denver to relieve Jim Anderson, the news editor in Denver, who had worked for an uninterrupted month as much of the West experienced wildfires.

Clark had commanded a newsroom in a time of disaster before, when a tornado struck Joplin, Mo., but this was something completely different.

“I was this interloper that had to do things, and so I did kind of the same thing,” Clark said. “I said, ‘Look, let me take 90 seconds of your time. I’m not Jim, but I am the news editor.’”

Clark asked the staff to remain flexible, but also to know when to take breaks while dealing with a long-term story.

It was a good tactic, said Bruce Shapiro of the Dart Center.

The panel consisted of Chris Clark, Associated Press News Editor, Jim Anderson, Associated News Editor Colorodo, Montana and Wyoming, Kevin Vaughan, Senior editor Denver Post, Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and moderator Carole Tarrant, Editor of the Roanoke Times.
~Photo by Matt Masters

“Good management actually really matters,” Shapiro said. “Peer support really matters. Your journalists who are most at risk will be those who become isolated from one another, who are not talking to one another or to managers.”

Shapiro and Anderson advocated creating a plan not just to deal with the disaster itself, but also to deal with how to handle those who cover the disaster.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation developed a peer-support plan to help journalists create a strong network among coworkers, Shapiro said.

Despite a focus on reporters, photographers are not exempt from emotional backlash.

“Several studies show that photographers appear to be at somewhat greater risk for PTSD while covering the same assignment,” Shapiro said. “Now we don’t know why that is.”

He recommended allowing photographers to put together photo and multimedia presentations in order to sequence the photos to invoke the psychological coping mechanism though sorting them out into a logical set of events.

However, covering tragic events can sometimes blend into journalists’ personal lives, as Kevin Vaughn, senior news editor of The Denver Post, experienced this summer during the Aurora shootings.

“My friend Tom Sullivan lost his child that day,” Vaughan said. “Sitting in the newsroom that night, realizing the picture of my friends was going to be our art just as they were realizing what was going on, I didn’t know what I thought about it. I was so emotionally drained from my personal experience that I couldn’t really think like a journalist. “

Vaughan went home that night to visit his friend and his family. For the next couple days, Vaughan used his previous experience from other incidents, such as the Columbine shootings, to help coordinate with other editors and devise a coverage plan. 

“It was a very weird thing, and I’ve never experience anything like it,” Vaughan said. “I have never covered anything like this.”