Electoral aftermath 2012

Today I had the intro news writing class go to the Virginia State Board of Elections website and look up the election results for our college town (a small independent city, actually), then compare the results back in their hometowns and post short blog entries about the differences…

First complication — while the electionresults.virginia.gov page has a menu on the left, the actual link for local results in the national election is floating over on the right. (I added the red arrow to this snapshot.)

At first glance, I didn’t see the Local Results button on the right.  The similarly named “Local Contest Results” item in the main menu is just for communities that had municipal elections on the same ballot.

(Some students preferred to let Google lead them to national news organizations’ versions of the results. We’ll compare those sources on Wednesday.)

I’d also like everyone to add links to the official sites for those communities so that we can see any characteristics of the communities that might have contributed to the voting total.

We were a little pressed for time Monday and will wrap that up on Wednesday. We’ll also look at U.S. Census Bureau data on the state and its communities (particularly Radford), and the Radford results by precinct.

Something looks interesting on that precinct display, and I’m going to ask the students whether they think there might be a story in it. In preparation, I wrote to Tracy Howard, the city’s registrar of voters, and asked for precinct boundaries or a map… Here’s some of the information he sent, starting with a link to the city’s Geographical Information System page:

http://radfordgis.radford.va.us/RadfordMap/

They are buried in the Governmental layers, and may be accessed there.
Turn on Govt. layer, then check voting districts.
If you have problems with access or can’t make it work:

• The East precinct is Everything in the City East of Connelly’s Run creek, from Rock Rd to the River.
•  The Central precinct lies between Connelly’s Run and Staples St. along Staples to Rock Rd, then West along Rock Rd 700’ South up the mountain to include all  of Charmont Dr.  and Wild Partridge Lane. Then South to the Interstate.
•  The west precinct is the remainder of the city west and south to the interstate.

As food for thought, here’s a pre-election New York Times blog post by election statistics whiz Nate Silver, who interviewed Geoffrey Skelley (@geoffreyvs), a political analyst at the UVa Center for Politics.

You also can zoom into this state election results map at Politico. (When you get there, click on the small blue dot that is Roanoke, the tinier blue dot that is Radford, and compare the neighboring Montgomery County, which includes Blacksburg.) There’s a similar map on The New York Times politics page, zoomed in to Virginia here.

Click to zoom at Politico’s site

Spotting not-a-summary news leads

Today’s assignment in my news writing class is to find some good examples of news story leads that are not simple who-what-when-why-where summaries.

Tim Harrower’s textbook gives names to seven categories that fit the bill:

• Anecdotal/narrative
• Scene-setter
• Direct address
• Blind lead
• Roundup
• Startling statement
• Wordplay leads

In Cyprus, New Cheese Edict Gets the Goat of Dairy Farmers

NICOSIA, Cyprus—A battle is raging on this Mediterranean island, where civilizations have clashed for centuries. Roman, Ottoman and British forces have occupied it, and Turkey still controls almost half the country. This time, the turf war is over cheese.

This is a Wall Street Journal story, one of the page one features the paper’s editors call “A-Hed” stories.

While it is a summary lead, it includes a startling statement and is a “blind” lead in as far as the word “cheese” doesn’t appear until the second sentence.

From Tim Harrower’s Morgue

The last 100 pages of Tim Harrower’s Inside Reporting textbook are “The Morgue,” an anthology of news and feature stories illustrating topics discussed throughout the textbook.

Contributing authors range from Mark Twain “covering” a murder scene in 1863 (a hoax, it turns out) to a St. Petersburg Times reporter covering a strange case of attack-by-rooster, and David Simon (creator of TV’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The  Wire”) criticizing present-day police reporting.  Some are news stories, some are editorials or opinion columns.

As a “news reading” assignment, I’ve asked students to pick three news or feature stories from the collection and add summaries of those stories to their blogs. (Skip the editorials and personal opinion pieces, such as H.L. Mencken’s essay on The Constitution or Simon on Baltimore police coverage. The selections between pages 220 and 281 will be a better match for this assignment, although you may try others if you want.)

For each of the three stories, include:

• The headline
• The original publication and date, followed by the book and page
• The original first paragraph of the story, in quotes.
• A summary sentence in your own words. (The first paragraph is not always a summary.)
• A short paragraph saying what “newsworthiness” values apply to the story, and why.

For example:

Old Man Sat, Stared
Until a Child
Happened to Pass

The Charlotte News, Oct. 11, 1956  (Harrower, Inside Reporting, p. 288)

“It was five o’clock in the afternoon, that was part of the reason. The elegant lady in the fur cape, the four businessmen and the two young housewives stood at the Tryon St. bus stop with the vacant look of people thinking about their own affairs, tired of working, tired of shopping and eager to get home.”

Summary: Busy shoppers ignored an old man selling pencils on the street until a small girl took notice and inspired others to help.

News value: This feature column by Charles Kuralt is pure “human interest.” It’s a small human drama, carefully observed and described, and appealing to the reader’s emotions. Some might even cry at the end. (Notice how much better Kuralt’s scene-setting descriptive lead works than a bare summary for this kind of read-to-the-end feature.)

Hello COMS104 news writing students!

This is a quickly made in-class demo to show the kind of information you should be posting at your new WordPress blogs —  evidence that you really are reading the news and learning from it. The original assignment sheet said to read a week’s news, pick three stories, and write a report including the headline, link, lead paragraph, and a short paragraph saying why you liked the story.

I’m only posting one here as a demo, while showing the class how to turn the original headline into an active link, and how to use the “blockquote” widget on the menu bar to indent quoted material. (Use quote marks, too.)

You may use any WordPress theme that you like, just make it clear what you are quoting and what you are writing in your own words.

“You think of heroin as seedy street slums,
but that’s not at all how it started“

“The night Scott Roth showed up at Spencer Mumpower’s Grandin Village apartment in April 2010, it had been a while since the former schoolmates had seen each other — at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.” http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/damagedone/part2/

This story by Beth Macy is the second installment in a Roanoke Times series that began Sunday about heroin and two young men — one died, the other is in prison. I think Beth does an amazing job of getting to know people in terrible circumstances, and getting them to share their stories — all in hopes of doing some good for other families.

Categories: WordPress lets you “tag” each post with one or more categories. The only one it creates for you is “uncategorized,” but a prominent “Add New Category” link on the dashboard makes it pretty obvious. I’ve created categories for newspapers I read and types of news stories. This story fits in more than one category.

Meanwhile, I hope more of you bought Sunday’s Roanoke Times, because it was full of good stories:
The first installment of the heroin series.
A Labor Day parade story from a city that still celebrates workers.
A column about badly edited grade school history books. (Already corrected once, now they have a fake “Thomas Jefferson quote” popular on Tea Party Web sites.)
And more.