My grandpa called right before I left for work today to notify me of a fire downtown near the Spokesman building. Nick was giving me a ride, so he grabbed his video camera gear and told me to ask whether they needed him. The smoke was looking white when we drove by, as if the fire were almost out, but then as I entered the newsroom the whole building went up in flames again. So I called Nick back to send him over and recorded scanner chatter at his request.

It was enough to get my adrenaline going, and I earned a new speed record for my morning task of sorting and distributing newspapers. Then I paced around awhile because there was nothing else I could do. My heart rate is still high.

Print forces us to do a lot of stupid things in journalism. I’ve done plenty of design and I greatly admire talented designers, but the fact remains: The pages of a print newspaper often end up being the proverbial “box” we’re supposed to be thinking outside of. Print forces us to cut stories that could be longer, or put a insignificant story on the front page because it’s the one with a photo, or use an imprecise headline because, well, it has to fit. We end up trying to make brownies in a bundt pan.

The internet changes all of that. We’ll still have the concept of “dominant art” on the web, and there’s still value in keeping stories concise — but so many of those news judgment decisions will be freed from the influence of print limitations. It’s really exciting.

There are two main breakthroughs:
1. Freedom of the internet (choose your medium, any medium)
2. Freedom from print (goodbye, newshole)

Also, I apologize for all this essay stuff. Without school I have to be earnest about things on my own time.

I was reminded at a staff discussion today that the constant newspaper industry downer news often makes us all forget what an exciting time this is. The internet means unprecedented storytelling freedom in journalism. It also requires a paradigm shift for pretty much everyone. In this case I’m lucky to have only been in the industry for three years. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve tried to learn pretty much every medium newsrooms are using so far.

So I’ve always seen the basic purpose of journalism — telling the community’s stories in a compelling and informative way — as intrinsically linked to a choice in medium. A story about a meeting or a court ruling is often best told with text, because it’s the best way to sum up what happened in a way people can understand and use. Same with a standard next-day crime story.

For many other stories, what we now call “multimedia” is far superior. Nick’s video about those boats is a good example. There was no way to tell the story well with just text. My blog entry used a combination of text and photos, which was better. But the video is clearly the best way of telling that story.

If the story is about fire damage to a forest, I will never glean any meaning from the paragraph about how many acres, blah blah. The same information told in a map might make me gape at the extent of the damage.

So all this requires a shift in the way we think as journalists. You can now pick whatever you want! Or rather, what is best for the story. With freedom from print, we’re no longer talking in imperatives like “We have to get a photo for this story” or “We have to choose between these three photos” or “We can’t put that story on the front because we need it for the inside section.”

With freedom from medium tyranny, the story is always the highest priority. Specialization is the hallmark of civilization and quality work, so it’s not like every journalist needs to be equals parts writer, photographer, videographer, graphics designer and so forth. Knowing the fundamentals doesn’t hurt, though. I am not a great photographer, but I am a better storyteller if I know enough about picture taking to point a better photographer in the right direction. I am not a great videographer, but sometimes a fantastic written story is still inferior to a decent video.

Writers and editors are always submitting photo requests; why don’t photographers even submit story requests? Of the stories I’ve written, one of my favorites started as I was innocently shopping at the Moscow farmers’ market one Saturday morning when two Evergreen photographers snuck up on me and said, “Hey, you’re a writer, right?” They’d been doing a photo story for weeks about the people who grow produce to sell at the market, and it occurred to them some words might be nice to go with it. I happened to have a notebook with me.

Anyway, those of us in the news industry can no longer be defined by our favorite medium. Not personally, and not as news organizations. But it’s not a burden unless you’re so scared or resentful of the media available that you’re willing to sacrifice good storytelling. It is scary. For so long we’ve had constraints, and now they’re gone whenever we want it.

Seeing your own haunts and hometowns in national television documentaries is a very modern mirror. It’s a warped mirror and we know it, but we can’t shake the atavistic vanity and giddiness of seeing a piece of our own lives on television. Or the internet, such as it is now, which is how Nick and I watched Dateline’s “Death on the Palouse” (about Frederick Russell) and “The Case of the South Hill Rapist” (about Kevin Coe).

One last aside before I get to the point of all this: I know the car crash was very serious and tragic and all that — I’ve been a part of it as newspaper editor, after all — but I can’t read the title “Death on the Palouse” without saying it aloud in an overwrought dramatic voice.

And now, the point: I’m reading “Son: A Psychopath and His Victims” by Jack Olsen. Some of the attacks happened just blocks from where I live, on the same sidewalks where I run and walk to work every morning. It’s really, really creepy.

This is hardly the first time I’ve read something with a familiar setting. In the past year I’ve read “In the Lake of the Woods” and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian,” and liked them all the better because I know what northern Minnesota mosquitoes are like and I know what Eastern Washington feels like. I made a point of reading part of “All the President’s Men” while in Washington D.C. and, in the most coincidentally weird situation, I read “Survivor” while on the plane from Minneapolis to Spokane. My favorite book when I was young, “Walk Two Moons,” involves a road trip that passes through Minnesota and Glacier National Park on the way to Lewiston, Idaho — a familiar route.

But reading “Son” bring this “sense of place” familiarity to a new level. Books are kind of like people in that you feel instantly closer with them if you share a certain setting. When I first came to Washington for college, it would actually make my day if I met someone from Minnesota. It was something in common that made strangers less strange, same as if you meet someone who has the same birthday as you. It’s a strange instinct, really, because you can be from the same block and still have nothing in common. But that doesn’t matter much and even now I have the “old friend” reaction if I meet someone who’s from Minneapolis or worked at one of the newsrooms I’ve worked in.

So back to the book, reading “Son” is like meeting someone who grew up on the same street as you did and then finding out they’re a convicted murderer. It’s a very creepy feeling, because you still have that instinct of closeness, only it’s just bringing you closer to something you’d prefer to keep thousands of miles away. The first chapter of the book is devoted to describing Spokane, which was both vainly enjoyable and instructive to read. Vain because it’s neat to see your city in a book, even if I’ve lived here only a couple months and have no strong attachments to the city whatsoever. Instructive because it is the city as I never knew it, though many of the elements are the same and eerily familiar. All of this happened years before I was born, but the newspaper is the same newspaper where I work and the streets are the same streets where I walk.

And the case is the same case I read about in that same newspaper Saturday morning. Coe is going on trial again this September, and the judge just declined the request for the trial to be moved out of the county. This time it’s a civil commitment trial to see if he should be locked up for the rest of his life as a dangerous criminal likely to reoffend, or set free. A week ago it seemed like another boring trial; tonight I locked the front door while I read.

I just got done writing the post below when I got a birth announcement fax for a baby boy with two mothers. I’m not sure if it will be a first for the paper, but it’s a first for me while I’ve been doing this job.

The birth announcement will probably be printed Tuesday, possibly this weekend.

Just as a matter of explaining the method on this one: I get faxes from local hospitals that are basically release forms with all the necessary information about the baby. There’s a space for each parent’s name and then a separate signature spot at the bottom. If the parents are married with the same last name, we only need one signature. If they don’t have the same last name and dad didn’t sign, I either have to check with the hospital to see if they’re married or we just don’t include his name (it’s a liability issue). In this case, the parents don’t have the same last name, but they both signed so we’ll print them both.

Yesterday the Spokesman published a same-sex couple’s wedding announcement for the first time. Some editors were concerned about the possibility of angry calls, and I’m glad there’s been discussion about it, but really the response was negligible. Libby dealt with one irate woman who called yesterday morning and there were a few emails, but that’s nothing compared to a mixed-up crossword puzzle or mislabeling a WWII airplane in a photo cutline.

Today we have an engagement announcement for another lesbian couple and no one’s even mentioned it.

Wedding announcements work like this: After a couple gets married, they download a form from our website, fill it out and send it back to us by mail or email. Libby enters the information and makes calls to clear up any questions. We need written permission from the photographer to use their photos, so sometimes Libby tracks that down, too. We don’t publish announcements if neither person getting married has lived in Spokane. Once finished, they get put into the system and used whenever the designers have space available.

Following the court ruling in California that made same-sex marriages legal there, it was obviously only a matter of time until it came up. Libby and I have known for a while that this one would be published, and I think it’s really encouraging it wasn’t a big deal at any of the steps toward publishing. It was pretty much the assumption we’d treat them like any other newlyweds, as we should. Except for the opinion sections, newspapers just concern themselves with reporting what happened, not making moral or political judgments.

Now I’m curious to see what happens next. It takes a certain amount of courage to publicly celebrate love in general, let alone love that many people in this county still see as fundamentally wrong. Maybe we’ll see an influx of other same-sex marriage announcements, or maybe we’ll have to turn people away because their “marriage” isn’t the official kind now offered in California. Maybe people who didn’t care too much about one announcement will get upset when it’s a regular occurrence.

More likely, we’ll start seeing same-sex couples in birth announcements and divorce listings, too.

Recently I’ve been wanting a kitten (or a cat, age isn’t a big deal) enough to make a habit of perusing the adorable furry faces on Craigslist. Still, I don’t really want the commitment. So we’ve been pining for a transient cat that would come around and purr sometimes without needing expensive care like vet visits. This evening I got my wish! Vagabond kitten came over near the back deck, and he got over his skittishness pretty quickly. Pretty soon he was inviting himself in through the back door. Here are more pictures where he’s batting at my camera strap.

I’ve been half-waiting for my stimulus check for a while. I don’t do my taxes or have any clue what’s going on, but a check sounded nice. So when my mom came to visit I asked if I got a check at home. I figured it could have been something like my diploma that she didn’t mention when it arrived.

My mom suggested I check my bank account, because apparently I was signed up for direct deposit. I keep track of my finances the way I always kept track of my grades: Just do your best and assume you’ll be fine without ever bothering to check.

Flashback: Last week, walking out of the bank with Nick during my lunch break. “I have more money than I thought,” I said to him. “Neat.”

Okay, back to this weekend. Yep, I checked my account online and there was my $300 stimulus check, deposited a while ago while I slept. Also my tax rebate.

So that was dumb. It’s less fun getting money if you don’t properly notice.

Really, though, I think it’s pretty interesting how people have been buying into the stimulus check idea. (UPDATE: Oh, wow, I really didn’t intend that pun.) There’s just no reason not to, though the whole things still seems like a fishy government scheme. Give people money so they go spend it. What? Well ha. I thwarted the government by not noticing the money it gave me. Now it doesn’t feel like free money anymore and I probably won’t spend it on anything fun. I can’t think of anything fun anyway that fits $300. Everything I want is apparently very expensive or not that expensive. I could not buy a plane ticket or round-trip train fare or a better video camera. I could buy way too much Tofutti (75 pints) or … I was going to make this a list but I can’t even think of any other frivolous things I want. Mechanical pencils? Adorable small notebooks? Everything I actually want to buy is boring, like dental floss and Ziploc baggies and socks.

Best bets would be a couple magazine subscriptions and the rest on books. Maybe a kitten.

Thinking a lot about newsroom work flow recently, mostly in connection with this reorganization think tank project going on at my paper, I just wanted to map out the most basic of work flow models. It’s nothing new, but it seems like every conversation about newsroom operation would be easier if we all had our basics straight.

For example, everyone always talks like the internet makes things so much more confusing. It’s really the exact same flow, just with different tasks at the Producer step. The roles here are the basic archetypes, the essential components of getting news content to the public. Each role is not necessarily designated to one person, as the Position example illustrates. Five or six different people may be involved in the editor role for a single piece of content; conversely, a single person could fill all the roles, like when I publish something journalism-like here on my blog.

This chart is hardly comprehensive. It doesn’t even indicate deadlines, let alone all the decisions and routines established in a newsroom work flow. The point is to get everyone thinking in the same framework to further discussion about how newsrooms can be more efficient and integrate multiple platforms.

I first started reading about photojournalism ethics when I was doing my thesis, and despite thesis burnout I’ve maintained an interest because how we choose to believe in pictures is just so darn fascinating.

Digital manipulation and “Photoshop” as a verb are recent innovations, but the concept has been around as long as we’ve had photography. (That’s why some of the most confusing Photoshop tools to young digital-age users are the ones like dodge and burn that are based on old darkroom techniques.) There are two main ways to make a photo lie: 1) Change the photo after its been taken or 2) say it shows something other than what it actually shows.

Example from both angles have been in the news recently, so here’s a roundup of good stuff:

• Errol Morris (he’s awesome) on the purpose of Iran’s missile manipulation, also including vintage Soviet comrade erasure photos. Back story. Morris’ awesome NYT blog. His original post that got me hooked.
• Poynter’s Kenny Irby interviews the NYT picture editor about how they chose to run a photo of a hurt child from Zimbabwe that ended up being mispresented. The child has club feet, but his mother lied with a more poignant account, depserate to get her son care. Original correction.
• Finally, this one isn’t about lies. It’s about repercussions of the truth, and basically what my thesis was about. Warren Zinn writes about wondering whether the picture he took of Army medic Joseph Dwyer at the beginning of the Iraq War contributed to Dwyer’s PTSD-related suicide.

This, from an article about catching rides on friends’ private jets in the NYT Sunday Styles section:

In fact, [socialite Marjorie Gubelmann] Raein added, more often it is just a matter of friendly convenience. “It’s not like you’re some moocher,” she said. “You’re going somewhere and someone happens to have a plane.”

Green that formulation is not, and yet it does possess a kind of poetry for its beneficiaries.

The important paragraph there is the second one. Congratulations if you, like me, recognized it as an allusion to one of Federico Garcia Lorca’s more famous poems, “Romance Sonambulo.” I mean, it’s so subtle it could be accidental except that it’s so clever.

People who don’t read The New York Times think it’s stodgy and elitist. It’s actually quite playful, and while I wouldn’t rule out elitist it seems to me like a bunch of writers who’ve learned to have fun with what they do without worrying that every reader will catch every little thing. As for the readers, they catch a reference here and there and feel clever about it like they’re in on some smart-people joke. I get paranoid thinking about how much I probably miss.