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The value of “thank you” (with help from Bill Plaschke)

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The expression is as old as time (or at least as old as “How I Met Your Mother”):

Nothing good happens after 2 AM.

Allow me to offer an exception, starring a budding TV reporter, a veteran newspaper writer, last month’s Winter Olympics, and an easy expression of gratitude.

It is the result — but, I hope, not the end result — of an action I took ten years ago.

In 2004, I had not yet received my current job as a reporter in a major city. I had not yet covered an Olympics, a Democratic Convention, or any major news event. I had not yet achieved many of the successes to which I aspired.

I had barely passed my first year as a professional.

And I was struggling.

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MY OLYMPICS JOURNEY: No shame in silver for Elana Meyers

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The Olympic spotlight is extremely bright but cruelly brief.

It shines on an event, and that event’s mostly anonymous athletes, for a few days before zooming to the next.

Win a gold medal? You might earn another day before the spotlight leaves you dark.

Win a silver, and you fade even faster. And the viewing public will have barely learned your name, let alone everything you have battled to reach the Olympic Games.

In the case of Elana Meyers, that is truly a shame.

The Douglasville, Ga. native is an inspiration, someone who may not have won a gold medal, but is so worthy of the golden spotlight.

Meyers, despite standing on gold’s doorstep, took silver Wednesday night. The 29-year-old, alongside partner Lauryn Williams held the lead in women’s bobsled through three of four heats. Only in their final run did they make one costly mistake – bumping a wall on an early curve – to fall into second place. The headline, for some, may read: “USA Women’s Bobsledder Loses Lead, Misses Out on Gold”.

That may be a correct headline, but it is not the right one.

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The underdog beauty of The Basketball Jones, er, The Starters

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Five springs ago, I stumbled on a pot of audio gold.

I was living in Buffalo, N.Y. and needed good listening material to accompany my 20-mile bike rides along the Niagara River (yes, you can absolutely ride a bike in Buffalo … during the spring and summer.) I started listening to podcasts and downloaded a handful for my rides; I loved the NBA (and still do), so I searched whatever podcasts I could find on the sport.

That is how I discovered The Basketball Jones.

Everything about it screamed “well-kept secret”. The hosts, J.E. Skeets and Tas Melas, followed a familiar path in terms of topics — recapping the previous day’s action and offering their respective takes — but they did it in such a unique way. They were conversational yet intelligent, relaxed yet witty; they were, to borrow an oft-used expression, the types of people with whom you would want to watch a game.

In short, they did what every professional studio show tried — and usually failed — to do.

On top of that, they both lived in Canada. This fact made them even more endearing to me, for two reasons. First, I had grown quite fond of the Canadian spirit after living in Buffalo, five minutes from the border.

The second reason? It made them seem like even more of a long shot to break their “well-kept secret” status.

Five years later, that status has been shattered.

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Tad and Mary, and the quest to capture emotion on camera

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It’s a sad but true hurdle about working as a TV news reporter:

People act differently — often way so — when they know they are being recorded.

Generally, this rears its head when trying to gather information on touchy subjects. Sources and contacts will often divulge far more after an interview than during it, and they feel much freer to provide information when they know they will not be taped saying it.

(This happens before interviews as well. Journalists everywhere can recall countless times when they spoke with someone on the phone, received valuable insight or information, and then asked that person to say the same thing in an on-camera interview, only to be told, “Whoa, whoa … I can’t say that on camera.”)

But the gaze of the lens does not just affect a story’s flow of information. It affects a story’s flow of emotion.

People get nervous or hesitant for a whole host of reasons once they know they will be recorded. For the most part, they simply do not have experience with having their actions documented, and often they respond by behaving how they feel they “should” behave, instead of how they genuinely want to behave.

For storytellers like myself who specialize in emotional stories, this creates a giant challenge.

But when you surmount that challenge and capture genuine emotion — and put your viewers in a position to appreciate that emotion — you feel tremendous about what you can achieve in this business.

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JFK, MLK, and the crafting of a Civil Rights documentary

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Rarely, as a local TV news reporter, do I get to spend two weeks on one story.

Rarely does that story get to be eight minutes long.

And rarely do those eight minutes contain an arsenal of powerful interviews from iconic figures.

So, when I received the opportunity to work on such a story earlier this month, I knew it would be special.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With that anniversary comes a documentary from my station in Atlanta, WXIA-TV, called “50 Years of Change”, which looks back on not just the famous march but the other major civil rights events of 1963:

  • the declaration, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” from Alabama governor George Wallace
  • the child protests in Birmingham
  • the nationally televised speech on civil rights from President Kennedy
  • the murder of Medgar Evers a day later
  • the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham
  • the assassination of President Kennedy

It’s an impressive list. (Last week we screened the documentary for local Atlanta leaders, and roughly three-quarters of the way through, one of the attendees turned around in his chair and remarked, “Man, a lot happened in ’63!”)

I was assigned the final story on the above list: the killing of John F. Kennedy, and what that meant for the civil rights movement. I went down to Dallas for a few days to get footage of the famous spots from the assassination (the book depository building, Dealey Plaza). I also interviewed several people who had been in Dallas that day, one of whom was a radio reporter at the time and stood a half-block away from Kennedy when the assassination occurred. Following that trip, I spent several days simply cobbling together old footage and photos — a difficult task, since most of the footage I wanted came with a price tag that exceeded our budget. Finally, I required two days to edit the whole thing, which included several hours reformatting all the old footage so that it looked consistent.

The process was exhaustive — and absorbing. But of all those arduous tasks, the most important thing I did was seemingly the simplest:

Listening.

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Beep baseball, and my two minutes of blindness

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It had been a frustrating morning.

Back in May I was made aware of a baseball team in my home city of Atlanta that played every Saturday during the spring. The team was special for a powerful reason: each of its players was deeply visually impaired, if not completely blind.

At the time I anticipated a tremendously moving story, but I could not find a day to shoot it before their season ended. However, I was told, the team — named the Atlanta Eclipse — would be a part of a truly special event in late July: the World Series of beep baseball.

(The sport is called “beep baseball” because the ball beeps, so that the players can hear it.)

I then learned that the World Series would feature 19 teams from around the country, as well as the defending world champions from Taiwan. Beyond that, it would be held in Columbus, Ga., a mere 90-minute drive from Atlanta.

I got excited. The story, I felt, had great potential; I would simply have to cool my heels for two months until the Series arrived.

But now, nearly two months later, I was frustrated.

I had arranged to shoot a practice several weeks before the Series, but the day beforehand I learned that a majority of the players would be unable to attend, for various reasons. I showed up on a rainy Saturday morning to find just three players — along with their aides and the team’s volunteers and coaches.

Because of that, and because of the weather, I did not have much to shoot. I got whatever video I could, but I knew it would pale in comparison to what I would see at the World Series.

Hence the frustration. No one was to blame, but I found myself spending valuable weekend hours on a shoot that had produced disappointingly little.

So I decided to play.

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Appreciating the English language, thanks to an Austrian funk band

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I have been away for a bit on vacation, hiking the spectacular Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy and seeing views like that in the above photo.

(Not bad, huh?)

Of course, as apparently is my penchant when I go away, I came back with great inspiration for a blog entry.

And, much like the last time, the inspiration came from an unlikely source. On my last trip I was inspired by an article in an in-flight magazine. This time, it came from an Austrian funk band.

This band.

P1050036

After the hike, my travel buddy and I stopped for a day in Innsbruck, Austria, a vibrant city whose Old Town blends ornate architecture with youthful verve. Part of that verve, during the summer anyway, comes from a series of outdoor concerts such as this one, which I passed on the way to dinner.

By “passed”, I must admit, I mean “stopped at for 30 minutes”.

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The Emily Bowman story, and finding honesty amidst heartbreak

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It was pitched to me as a heart-warming story.

When I walked in the door last Thursday at WXIA-TV, I learned my producers had already lined up my assignment. I would head out to Woodstock, Ga. — roughly 40 minutes northwest of Atlanta — and cover the homecoming of 19-year-old Emily Bowman, who had spent the last four months in the hospital.

Bowman, a student at nearby Kennesaw State University, spent three weeks in a coma after being hit by a drunk driver back in February. She made small improvements in the following months, while police arrested the young man who they believe crashed into her.

Now, she was coming home — and we would be there to document it.

In the morning meeting, producers described the story with words like “great”, “beautiful”, and “uplifting”. On the surface, these words seemed to be accurate; Emily’s friends and family had been eagerly awaiting her return, and a local charity had even remodeled her home to make it wheelchair-accessible. We pictured all the wonderful potential moments that would touch our viewers’ hearts.

And then, one of my fellow reporters raised her hand and interjected.

“You guys know she can’t walk or talk, right?”

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ESSAY: The search for Evan Gattis, and the journey of journalism

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In May 2013 I was assigned to tell the story of Atlanta Braves’ slugger Evan Gattis. It took me on a two-day journey across the state of Texas.

This is Part 1 of the story of that journey. To read the entire story on a single page, CLICK HERE.

*****

Snooze.

I woke up to the sound of muffled radio static on the alarm clock in my hotel room. I had not bothered to find a station before I went to sleep the previous night; I was exhausted, and I doubted I would miss much by scanning the AM dial for Abilene, Texas’ finest. Plus, I knew I would not be listening for very long when I awoke.

Instead, I did the first thing I could think of: reach over and hit the button on top of the radio.

Snooze.

I did not intend to go back to sleep, of course. I couldn’t. I was up for a reason: to drive ten hours, in one day, to interview two people, both of whom were integral to the life of Atlanta Braves catcher Evan Gattis. A month earlier, Gattis made the Braves’ Opening Day roster as a 26-year-old rookie. Two weeks after that, he was named National League Rookie of the Month.

But that was not what sent me to Texas. I had arrived in America’s second-largest state to shine the spotlight on Gattis’ other claim to fame, the story that had captivated Braves fans in Atlanta and baseball fans across the country. After completing high school and committing to Texas A&M as a highly-touted prospect, Gattis left the game and did not return for half a decade. In the meantime, he traveled the state and the country, working odd jobs at golf courses, ski resorts, and even Yellowstone National Park. He followed a spiritual advisor to New Mexico, and he lived like a nomad, on a search for purpose and identity. Gattis had gone on a journey, to be sure, and came out of it a Major League baseball player.

How fitting, then, that I would have to take a journey of my own to properly tell his story.

I got up out of bed in that Abilene hotel room and took a shower. When I got out, I heard those muffled AM sounds again. I walked over, looked at the clock on the radio, and saw a time I generally only saw during the daytime.

4:44.

I wanted to hit Snooze again. But not this time. It was time to hit the road.

*****

A day earlier I had awoken at technically the exact same time. In this case I had gotten up at 5:44, but I was still on the Eastern Time Zone, at my apartment in Atlanta preparing to leave for the airport. This in itself felt like a big step. My trip to Texas was the culmination of roughly a month’s worth of planning – and nearly an equal amount of frustration – with Gattis’ story.

The news managers at my TV station, Atlanta’s NBC affiliate WXIA-TV, had decided back in April they wanted me to do an in-depth story about Gattis. It was a no-brainer, really; they had heard about Gattis’ improbable journey, watched his hot start for the Braves, and believed his story would be great for our big ratings period in May. I reached out to the Braves’ media relations team multiple times but did not hear back; finally I decided to meet Gattis myself, heading to the clubhouse for post-game interviews and introducing myself to the slugger at his locker. I told him we wanted to tell his story and even head to Texas to talk with his dad Jo, who played a huge role in Gattis’ growth both personally and professionally. Gattis gave the OK and simply asked that we go through the Braves’ media relations folks to reach his father.

Done, I said.

Over the next few weeks I sent roughly a dozen e-mails to the Braves’ PR person assigned to these types of requests. I found I could not even secure an interview with Gattis, let alone his dad. The Braves were only home for a week in late April, and numerous national media outlets had come knocking with a similar request to interview the catcher, who by this point had developed a Jack Bauer/Chuck Norris-like mystique among the team’s fans. I would have to wait until their next homestand, I was told. And what of Gattis’ dad? I heard very little.

Finally, my managers and I got tired of waiting. We wanted to tell Gattis’ story, and we no longer wanted to delay until the Braves’ media folks got around to us. “Head down to Dallas,” I was told. “Set up whatever interviews you can, and we’ll make it work.”

I spent last Monday and Tuesday making calls and developing contacts with people who had watched Gattis grow. I called his youth coach in Dallas and his college coach in Odessa; they jumped at the chance to talk about someone for whom they held great admiration. I connected with the Texas-based scout who recommended Gattis to the Braves; I got a hold of the machine shop owner who briefly hired Gattis during his time away from the game.

I even found his spiritual advisor in New Mexico. She declined my request.

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5 lessons from the NPPA’S best video stories of 2012

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Last week was a national celebration of storytelling … and you may have missed it.

The National Press Photographers Association, or NPPA, announced the winners in its annual Best of Photojournalism video and editing competitions. This year’s judges selected breathtaking stories from some of the finest video journalists in the country. Most of the winning pieces are timeless; you could watch them two months from now or two years from now and be just as moved as if you watched them today.

Watching the winners this week, I felt one thing above all: I wish I had done better.

I don’t mean “better” in the sense of winning or losing. I have fared very well in past NPPA competitions, finishing in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place in the past three years in their standings for solo video journalists, or reporters who shoot their own stories. Since I joined in 2010, I have picked up an outstanding amount of photojournalistic techniques, gotten to know some talented colleagues, and found myself inspired by those colleagues’ stories.

No, what I mean is more insular: I wish I had done better work this past year.

I take great pride in the work I produced in 2012, but as I watched this year’s NPPA winners, I could not help but think about how much further I can grow as a photojournalist.

I should mention that I do not always prioritize the NPPA way in my daily work. As a solo video journalist, I must focus on every part of the reporting process: interviewing, researching, writing, shooting video, and editing. The NPPA tends to reward, I find, a certain style of story: one that emphasizes shooting and editing first while still valuing the other elements. They typically exalt the more stylistic, emotional stories above the investigative, information-heavy ones. This, of course, makes sense: the NPPA, after all, is an association of visual journalists, and they should not feel compelled to give out awards for writing and researching. But the NPPA philosophy does not always mesh with a newsroom’s philosophy or a particular day’s assignment.

That disclaimer aside, I greatly value the association for what it does so well: provide visual journalists a resource to continually improve their visual skills.

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