Investigation Flat, Police Sharp, Damage Minor

Count the ways in which the writer had fun with this story!

Mystery piano in woods perplexes police

By Josh Levs, CNN

(CNN) -- Was it a theft? A prank? A roundabout effort to bring some holiday cheer to the police? Authorities in Harwich, Massachusetts, are probing the mysterious appearance of a piano, in good working condition, in the middle of the woods.

Discovered by a woman who was walking a trail, the Baldwin Acrosonic piano, model number 987, is intact -- and, apparently, in key.

Sgt. Adam Hutton of the Harwich Police Department said information has been broadcast to all the other police departments in the Cape Cod area in hopes of drumming up a clue, however minor it may be.

But so far, the investigation is flat.

Also of note: Near the mystery piano -- serial number 733746 -- was a bench, positioned as though someone was about to play.

The piano was at the end of a dirt road, near a walking path to a footbridge in the middle of conservation land near the Cape.

It took a handful of police to move the piano into a vehicle to transport it to storage, so it would appear that putting it into the woods took more than one person.

Asked whether Harwich police will be holding a holiday party in the storage bay -- tickling the ivories, pouring eggnog -- while they await word of the piano's origin and fate, Hutton said with a laugh. No such plans.

Harwich police have had some fun, though. Among the photos they sent to the news media is one of Officer Derek Dutra examining the piano in the woods. The police entitled the photo "Liberace."

Traits of a Good Reporter-- WashPost

Here's a very stimulating piece by the ombudsman of the Washington Post. View the original (many live links) by clicking here.

The Traits of a Good Reporter

By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B06

Good reporters are the heart of news gathering. If it's news, they have to know it. Without them, the public wouldn't have the news and information essential to running a democracy -- or our lives. Whether the story is local, national or foreign, it has to be gathered on the ground by a reporter.

What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. Then, the ability to hear a small clue and follow it. When Post reporter Dana Priest first heard "a tiny, tiny piece" of what turned out to be the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, she couldn't ignore it.

She and colleague Anne Hull methodically followed the story until Army officials were shamed and did something about the poor care of many Iraq war veterans. Hull and Priest also have a quality essential to good reporting: empathy. They cared about those soldiers and had the ability to tell the story in a way that touched readers.

Retired Post executive editor Ben Bradlee thinks a reporter's most important quality is energy: "They've got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you. It's part of your soul."

Reporters go where the story is -- even if it's over a mountain pass in Afghanistan on horseback in a blinding blizzard. That's what Post reporter Keith B. Richburg and photographer Lucian Perkins did in late 2001 to find the front lines of a war between the Taliban and its enemies.

When dark smoke was billowing out of the telephone company building in downtown Minneapolis -- 10 minutes before deadline -- Minneapolis Star reporter Randy Furst was on the story. He ran to the building and burst into a board of directors' meeting and asked the company president what was going on. The company flack called me the next day to complain about Furst's behavior; I thought it was great.

Good reporters are committed to telling the story. Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson ignored his boss's advice to leave war-torn Lebanon; he felt that he had to stay. He was kidnapped in 1985 and spent 6 1/2 years in brutal captivity.

Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is a veteran of armed conflict in the Middle East; he was wounded by gunfire while working for the Boston Globe. What drives him? During wars, "work is all there is. I struggle with how you get beyond the pain of what you see to say something more. For me, every few months I try to figure how I could leave the profession, if for no other reason than to salvage soul and sanity."

But he hasn't, and he will go back to Iraq soon. "If you don't do it, the story might not be covered. Or it might not be covered the way you think it should be. Maybe it's equal parts responsibility, curiosity and ambition, hopefully more of the former than the latter. It's obligation, too. We're one of the few newspapers with the resources and ambition to still cover the story. And if we don't do it -- as the story recedes from the front page, as staffing dwindles, as money dries up -- no one else will."

Bob Woodward, The Post's most renowned reporter, believes that good reporters do not let speed and impatience hinder them. They have the discipline to go to multiple sources at all levels of a story and get meticulous documentation -- notes, calendars, memos. "You go down lots of holes that don't lead anywhere," but "in the end, what always matters is information that is authentic and can be analyzed and documented."

Most reporters don't go to Afghanistan or get shot at. But it often takes the same mental toughness to cover the police or hold local government officials accountable. District police reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose puts it this way: "I think what makes a good reporter is the dogged, unshaken belief that there is some way to obtain a seemingly impossible piece of information."

Good reporters are savvy enough to find sources they can trust -- think Deep Throat -- and, as Ernest Hemingway said, they have built-in b.s. detectors. Don't lie to a reporter; you'll be caught. Say you can't answer.

Woe to officials who want to make public decisions in private. Jim Shoop, a reporter on the old Minneapolis Star, found out about a secret meeting of Twin Cities mayors who were discussing setting up a metropolitan sales tax; he arrived early and curled up inside a portable bar in a corner of the room. He got the story.

Sometimes it's important just to hang out and build trust. Post Metro reporter Josh White was trying to find a stripper with drug problems befriended by the rogue FBI agent Robert Hanssen before he was caught spying. White visited most of the strip joints in town and got a lead that sent him to Columbus, Ohio, where he knocked, unannounced, and met her mother and toddler. After three days, the stripper came home to find White on her couch with her son in his lap watching TV. She gave him the story.

Good reporters know how to get access to people and documents; in the old days, a fifth of whiskey to the right janitor could get you a report lying on a city hall desk. Now a cadre of Post database and investigative reporters plows through mounds of hard-to-obtain government documents, looking for stories of fraud, patronage, waste and wrongdoing; they create spreadsheets and do the painstaking work of looking for patterns. The ability to sort out conflicting information is one of the hallmarks of good reporting.

Metro reporter Keith Alexander, reporting on the case of two girls who were found murdered and stuffed in a freezer in their home, spent days going over court files to find why their mother, accused of killing them, had been allowed to adopt them. The files told him the sad stories of their biological families; he was able to track them down and tell a deeper story of the tragedy.

A reporter's first commitment is getting the story for readers; it trumps almost everything. That's the reason they sometimes miss their wedding anniversaries or their children's birthday parties and keep on reporting until they are wheeled into surgery (see Shadid) or delivery rooms.

Reporting is a calling. If reporters didn't have it (along with good editors), how would you know what was going on in your communities, the nation and the world?

Young Evangelicals -- Videos Invited

Young Evangelicals: We Want Your Videos

In connection with our recent national survey of young evangelicals, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly invites evangelicals ages 18-29 to send us 1-2 minute videos http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1207/evangelicalvideos.html about their attitudes on religion, politics, and America's role in the world.

Jerry Jenkins Reveals 'Writing Cave'

Are you interested in seeing the "cave" where Jerry Jenkins (pictured) goes to write when he's on deadline for a book or an article?

For an "inside look" at Jerry's working environment, click here.

Focus on the Family Folds Four Print Publications

From CTI:

Focus on the Family Folding Four Print Publications

Brio, Brio and Beyond, Breakaway, and Plugged In will turn into online magazines.

Sarah Pulliam

Focus on the Family will stop publishing four of its eight magazines, the ministry told Religion News Service.

The ministry, founded by James Dobson, announced earlier this week that it will cut around 200 positions on it's staff of about 1,150.

Adelle M. Banks writes:

The print edition of "Plugged In," an entertainment review guide for parents, will continue through its online version, Schneeberger said. Three other publications, Breakaway, Brio, and Brio and Beyond, which were aimed at teenagers, will be revamped into online content.

"The content that was found in those publications will still be available online, but it will be targeted not at teens but at parents," he said.

One of the four remaining magazines, Citizen, will be reduced from 12 issues to 10 issues a year. Earlier this fall, the ministry cut 46 other staff positions by outsourcing the department that filled orders and distributed books.

Flight Attendant Helps Land Plane

Every once in a while, a news story appears with such an eye-popping news value it seems unbelievable. I think this is one of those stories.

Air Canada flight attendant helped land plane

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - An Air Canada co-pilot having a mental breakdown had to be forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated, and a stewardess with flying skills helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing, an Irish investigation concluded Wednesday.

The report by the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit into an incident in January applauded the decision-making of the pilot and the cockpit skills of the flight attendant, who stepped into the co-pilot's seat for the emergency diversion to Shannon Airport in western Ireland.

None of the 146 passengers or other nine crew members on board the Boeing 767 bound from Toronto to London was injured after the 58-year-old co-pilot had to be removed by attendants and sedated by two doctors on board.

The report did not identify any of the Air Canada crew by name. Nor did it specify the psychiatric diagnosis for the co-pilot, who was hospitalized for 11 days in Irish mental wards before being flown by air ambulance back to Canada.

It said the co-pilot was a licensed veteran with more than 6,500 hours' flying time, about half on board Boeing 767s, and had recently passed a medical examination.

But it said the pilot noticed immediately that his co-pilot was not in good professional shape on the day of the flight, arriving late to the cockpit after all the safety checks and paperwork had been completed. He reported that the co-pilot's behavior worsened once they were airborne, and the co-pilot advised him to take a lengthy break for naps and a meal.

As the aircraft reached the middle of the Atlantic, the report said, the co-pilot began talking in a ``rambling and disjointed'' manner, took another nap, and then refused to buckle his seat belt or observe other safety procedures when he returned to the cockpit.

The pilot concluded that his colleague was now so ``belligerent and uncooperative'' that he couldn't do his job.

The report said the pilot summoned several flight attendants to remove the co-pilot from the cockpit, and one flight attendant suffered an injured wrist in the struggle. Doctors from Britain and Canada on board determined that the co-pilot was confused and disoriented.

The report did not mention how the co-pilot was restrained. Departing passengers at the time said his arms and legs had been tied up to keep him under control.

The pilot then asked flight attendants to find out if any passenger was a qualified pilot. When none was found, one stewardess admitted she held a current commercial pilot's license but said her license for reading cockpit instruments had expired.

``The flight attendant provided useful assistance to the commander, who remarked in a statement to the investigation that she was `not out of place' while occupying the right-hand seat,'' the report said.

Web Journalists Emerge, Plan to Organize

Here's something very intriguing to think about. The original is at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/18voice.php

A new type of journalism outlet is gaining prominence in some cities. Small, non-profit sites run by professional journalists are breaking big stories.

Web journalists' bark grows louder

By Richard Pérez-Peña

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, and misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As American newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.

"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism.' "

That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.

And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.

New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.

But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.

"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."

The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.

"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."

Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.

The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the St. Louis Beacon in Missouri, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.

VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.

But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.

VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.

A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.

"I kept thinking, 'Who's paying attention?' " Woolley recalled. "Why don't we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?' "

In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.

Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.

MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.

The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.

If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.

In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.

With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Bass says would be impractical.

"There's room for a whole range of approaches, and we're living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply," Bass said.

Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.

VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Donohue and Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego IRS filings.

On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.

"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."