Home › Blogs › Ventura County Star
« March 2006 | Main
April 21, 2006
What would happen if ...
Assistant photo editor Rick Quinn has this wonderful ability to grimace at us when we hand over a photo assignment asking for a picture of something that isn't there. We do this a lot to our photographers. We're asking for photos to go with stories we're writing about things that are coming up in the future; or things that have already happened.
We're doing it again Sunday, with a fascinating story by reporter Tom Kisken. He took on the assignment of what would happen in Ventura County if Congress succeeded in removing all illegal immigrants.
Tom tries to weed through the hyperbole and rhetoric to give as accurate picture as we can paint about the impacts of illegal immigration on the county, both negative and positive. It really is an interesting read.
And our crack photo staff did a good job of giving us an image of something that doesn't exist.
I'll be on Page One on Sunday.
Posted by John Moore at 10:19 AM
April 18, 2006
Vote for your Page One
The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison is conducting an interesting experiment to link its online readers with its print product.
The Journal is giving its readers the chance to vote on which stories they want to see on Page One in tomorrow's edition. The editors make a selection of a few (apparently five to seven) and readers get to pick the stories that should be on the front of the section.
Ellen Foley, the editor, talks about it in a Q&A here.
If you go to the Journal website you'll see the box on the right side for Readers Choice with an explanation. Interesting, though, that when I checked it out this morning, there was no live link to vote. I don't know if they hadn't posted the list, or disabled the program. I'll keep checking it out.
Our publisher, Tim Gallagher, found the site and Ellen's commentary about it. It goes to our interest to find more ways to improve our dialog with you. Will we do this? I don't know.
That was one of the reasons for this blog when it started months ago, to give you a quick look at what we were thinking about for Page One tomorrow. We've sort of drifted away from that list of story ideas, but could certainly revive that, if there was interest.
What do you think?
Posted by John Moore at 10:36 AM
April 11, 2006
But is it news?
We had an interesting newsroom discussion yesterday about the story we ran on Page One today about rising gasoline prices.
The story, if you haven't seen it, was that gas prices are going back up and will keep climbing probably until Memorial Day ... maybe hitting $3 a gallon for regular unleaded.
It was acknowledged that the issue was something that most everyone was aware of and talking about. But does that make newsworthy enough to put it on Page One?
The point was made by some editors that once you say the price of gas is going up, and that we're not really able to say precisely why, that there's nothing new to report. Put that in the paper ... either in the Local or Business section ... but not as a top story of the day on Page One.
The other argument (which proved to be the winning argument) was that one of our roles is to reflect what people are talking about, and what affects them most directly, and you can find no better subject than gas prices. The challenge in that is to provide as much information ... and new information ... as you can to make the story valuable and interesting. Luckily, we had veteran reporter Jim McLain on the story for today and he did his usual great job of layering the story with all the angles.
I think we played it correctly on Page One. But others disagree.
Posted by vcs-admin at 02:27 PM
April 07, 2006
Coming Sunday
Coming Sunday in The Star is the kickoff of an exciting, year-long project we are doing on farming in Ventura County.
Star senior writer John Krist is going to write about 1-2 stories a month over the rest of this year about the state of farming in our county. We'll talk about the weather. We'll talk about the crops. We'll talk about jobs ... and immigration. We'll talk about markets, old and new. We'll talk about impacts of technology. And we'll talk a lot about the creep of urbanism on the farms in the county.
He's going to do it through the eyes of four farm operations.
It's a project that we first intended to present to you two weeks ago. In fact, we had done some promotion (placing what we call rack cards, which are promotions in the boxes where we sell the paper) to announce its arrival on Sunday.
But, days before publication, we had to hold it. There was nothing wrong with John's work. But there were two key factors that made it not ready: One of the farmers who had agreed to work with us all year decided not to do that and so we needed to find a replacement; and the weather was preventing us from obtaining the quality video we wanted to present the online multimedia portion of the story.
That's a critical factor in how we are looking at telling news stories. You'll hear me talk more and more about this subject this year. In addition to reporting and writing and photography, we will tell stories in other medium (video, audio, online graphics, blogs, etc.). Whatever we think is the best way to get that message to you.
Take a look Sunday and let us know what you think. Read the story and then check out the online additions. We'd love to hear your views.
Posted by vcs-admin at 10:02 AM
April 06, 2006
On the road
Our Sports Department is just now reeling back in the sports writers who have been on the road covering events ... and have sent another one out this week.
David Lassen, our sports columnist, was in Italy in February to cover the Olympics. It's part of a partnership we have with the Scripps Howard News Service where a number of Scripps-owned papers (like the Star) offer writers who get together as a team and cover the Olympics. They also write for their own paper. So we get our guy at the Olympics and all Scripps papers (and subscribers to the news service) get full Olympics coverage.
David took some well-earned down time after the Olympics and barely got back here, before we packed him off to Indianapolis to cover UCLA in the men's Final Four.
Sports writer Rhiannon Potkey had covered UCLA on the first two weekends of the tournament, traveling to San Diego and then Oakland. But she was already committed to going to the women's Final Four in Boston.
And now Bob Buttitta is back in August, Ga., for the second year in a row covering the Masters golf tournament. The Masters is a fairly restricted press credential and after years of applying, last year was the first time The Star received one.
The newsroom hasn't been left out of our spring trips. We have a reporter and photographer on their way to Mexico next week accompanying a local church group that spends its spring break every year helping to rebuild a Mexican community. And then, in late May, another reporter-photographer team will jet to Washington D.C. to cover our local spelling bee champ who is the first three-time Ventura County Bee winner.
It shouldn't surprise you that our staff has lots of ideas on road trips. But they cost. And we do have a travel budget we must live within each year. It's a constant juggle to try to determine which stories are the ones that are best told (or can only be told) by sending out our staff to cover them.
In Sports, for instance, all those events were covered by the wire services and we easily could have printed their stories. But we believed that our reporters brought a special focus to make those stories of greater interest to you, our readers. The men's Final Four is a great example. Most of the stories of Monday's game talked about Florida and its success. David was able to focus on how UCLA, because of its storied history, just could not settle for second place. It's a story that gave us the perspective we wanted.
Posted by vcs-admin at 11:18 AM
April 04, 2006
Looking for angles in a straight line
Newspapers ... particularly community newspapers like we pride ourselves in being here at The Star ... have the annual conundrum of how to cover something that happens every year.
This week our dilemma is the annual Science Fair taking place at the county fairgrounds. We plan to write about it. We do every year. We look to bring something "fresh" to the coverage every year. Part of that (admitedly) is our own sense that we don't want to write the "same story" we wrote last year even though we're probably the only ones who remember that story. And we accept that quite often events like this have entirely new casts of characters each year, which is always fodder for new story angles.
But sometimes it just seems like the same story. Our challenge is to find whatever will make you want to read it ... even if you don't have a direct tie to the event.
So this year we sent staff writer Marjorie Hernandez is search of a story on what impact science fairs have on creating future scientists. The story's not finished yet. But it's planned for Page One tomorrow. We'll see, like you, what it's like.
Weather ... like annual events ... is an assignment that many reporters dread. How many ways can you write a story that says: "It's raining. And it may or may not rain some more tomorrow." But it's the topic that you mentioned among the first three things you said to co-workers this morning. Everybody talks about it. So should we. So we write about the weather and give you the info we can find.
And we'll write about the weather again for tomorrow's paper. I'm not sure yet who drew the lucky straw in the newsroom for that assignment.
Posted by vcs-admin at 10:02 AM
April 03, 2006
How big is a sports story?
UCLA is playing tonight in the men's college basketball championship game in Indianapolis.
If you're a UCLA alum or fan, it's a huge story.
If you're a college basketball afficianado, the Final Four championship is always the biggest night of the year.
If you follow Sports, it's one of the half-dozen or so "big moments" that come up every year like the Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby, Indy 500, World Series, etc.
And the rest of us will find this an interesting story. But how interesting? And how should we play it in tomorrow's Ventura County Star?
Those are some of the points we bounce back and forth when we talking about running a Sports story on Page One. Afterall, Sports has its own section of the newspaper. Isn't that enough, some ask? It's only a game, they say.
We'll it's more than that, particularly when there is heightened local interest, like when UCLA is playing in the game. But it's not such a big deal that we'll rush out a special section of the paper or take over Page One to cover the game.
Some will say it's not like this was coverage of the illegal immigration issue. But you have to temper that argument with the understanding that not everyone wants to read about illegal immigration either. So we try to balance what is important AND of interest to our readers. Here's what we're going to do:
What we'll do is look to our own sports columnist, David Lassen, who is in Indianapolis, to write a column for page one, run a photo from the game as the big "display" image on the page, and then let you go to the Sports section for the rest of your coverage. In Sports, we'll make it the big coverage on the front of the section (driving the opening day of baseball to inside the section).
How's that plan? Would you do it different?
Posted by vcs-admin at 09:47 AM
