Don van Natta story

Looking at tool #25 : Learn the difference between reports and stories.

I used the Don van Natta “random story” link to find this story. This story talks about how nail products used in almost every nail salon can cause very serious health problems for the workers ingesting the fumes everyday.

This story could have easily been a report using data and facts, but instead it told the story of an Ecuadorian immigrant, Ms. Otavalo and the people she works with everyday. This story isn’t just about Ms. Otavalo and the people she works with but the thousands of people this is impacting. People are often concerned about the safety when they go into a nail salon for their manicures or pedicures but what they don’t realize is that they aren’t the ones really at risk but the workers are.

What makes this a story rather than a report is that there are characters and a setting and action. This story has a lot of characters and the writer interviewed a lot of nail salon workers / owners who have diagnosed with diseases or have children that have to live with the life long effects of their mom’s working in nail salons.

This story focuses on different sections: “‘They Cannot Breathe’”, “Miscarriages and Warnings”, “‘Fox Guarding the Henhouse’” &”Standing in the Breeze”.

Outline of The Things That Carried Him

Introduction – Introducing Don Collins, but other than that we don’t get much more information. The following paragraph introduces the Collins family and what they do.

Following paragraph is a descriptive one, the reader can imagine how hot it is and can see that he’s about to start digging in the grass.

The next paragraph we see more into what tools he’s using and can imagine ourselves in the cemetery with him as he’s digging this grave.

The next paragraph talks about the “honor guards” who were from Fort Knox that would perform the parts of the service. They were dressed in their uniforms and had their M16’s in hand. And the last serviceman was holding a trumpet instead of a gun.

The funeral processional through the town was only about a 5 minute drive from the church to the cemetery.

Then it describes what happens once the casket is out of the hearse and at the cemetery. Describing who made the vault that would lower the casket into the ground.

“Amazing Grace” was played by a group of bagpipers and then music was played over the loud speakers. The reverend then spoke a few words.

The soldiers shot their rounds into the air, making sure all seven guns sound like one — otherwise they would’ve been upset and disappointed in themselves.

The boy with the trumpet began to play and he’s a true “bugler” because he wet his lips and now most of the times the “bugler” use electronic trumpets that play the taps for a funeral service.

The next paragraph talks about how it doesn’t take much skill to perform the taps and there are only a few notes to the song, but the bugler could mess it up depending on how he felt that day.

Leatherbee discusses how he decides to keep his eyes open when he’s performing the taps because it’s the least you can do.

The soldiers discussing how they feel the emotions at the funeral also.

The three shells from the guns would be placed into the flag.

The flag was then folded and inspected and passed to a woman who wore the general’s star.

Brigadier General Belinda Pinckney was to attend all the funerals of someone who was killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The wife of the soldier didn’t seem to be dealing with the death of her husband so Pinckney approached her and told her it was ok to be upset and they embraced (this was before the service began).

Pinckney then approached the wife again (once the flag had been folded) and she is giving her the flag but also talking about how it needs to come from the heart, she tries to connect with them on a level so they know it’s real.

Then discussion of why the flag folding gets done.

Pinckney then gives a spiel about the flag and what it represents to the wife.

The service then ends and the Collins lower the casket into the ground and lock of the vault.

Don Jr. removed the extra dirt and placed the makeshift tombstone on top of the grave.

Gail Bond is extremely sad over the death of the first person who she baptized in her church in 1977. She remembers holding him and baptizing him.

Bond needed a smoke, so while sitting at her kitchen table, she pulled out of little “ladylike” bag that holds her cigarettes and her lighter.

Bond lost her one of her sons, her first husband (Joey’s father), her second husband and now Joey too.

The next paragraph introduces the people who were there for Joey, his siblings, his aunts and uncles, and his wife and kids.

The majority of the people who were at the funeral barely knew Joey, but were doing it because they knew the Mayor (his uncle) or his mom. There was no eulogy for Joey.

The next paragraph discusses the things that people could’ve learned about Joey from looking around the funeral and other things they wouldn’t have been able to know about him unless they really knew him.

The next paragraph talks about how Joey’s body was escorted from the airport to Seymour where he was from.

The procession from the airport to Seymour was going to be at least three miles long because of everyone waiting at the airport for Joey.

They would have to block off the highway for the procession and the state troopers would speed up to block the upcoming ramps.

Why the Patriot Guard was created (they were also at the airport to help escort Joey’s body home). Bond was worried about the protestors but once she saw the Patriot Guard she wasn’t anymore.

Sergeant Charles Dunaway fly in from Alaska to help escort his body home on the final stretch.

It was difficult for the Mayor to drive himself and Gail because he was crying so much.

Describing Joey’s job at the steel forge.

Ryan, Joey’s best friend was also having a hard time seeing while driving back from the airport.

Ryan describing his and Joey’s friendship.

Ryan is designing Joey’s tombstone.

The processional grew more and more attention as word had spread of it.

Gail kicked Joey out of the house, he was turning into a bad egg.

He moved down to Florida to be with his sister.

Joey was still going down the wrong path, until Ryan came and visited.

Gail said he could come home if he obeyed the rules and got a job.

Came home, returned to work at the steel mill and became a father.

He was tired of having to scrape around for money, so he joined the army.

The Army suited Joey and they had moved to Alaska – things were turning around for Joey.

Joey was home for Christmas in 2006 and got a final family photo of everyone.

Flashback to the procession of taking his body home from the airport.

The war changed him as they looked on to his body when they got it home from the airport.

Joey was missing his ring and when Micah tried to put his on his hand, they realized his finger was gone.

Open Records to Get

For your topic and your team’s topic, make lists of potential records you might need to explore your questions. Write up a blog post discussing those records and how you might go about retrieving them. Summarize in the individual storyboard linked above Post in the appropriate category using the tag “open records to get” by Oct. 5

Team Project:

Look for open records that have any information about transferring schools in GA. Hopefully to answer some of these questions:

-What are the rules

-how many kids are transferring a year

-Where are they coming from / which schools are they going to

-Are more girls or boys transferring?

Individual Project:

Look at different open records laws in different states and see how the laws differ from state to state and see how that impacts the SEC

Open Records Law Change in GA

explaining the new law and whether you believe it’s fair to journalists, other records requesters, and the public’s interest by Sept. 28.

I think it’s really interesting that there is a model request form, which I didn’t know about. I also didn’t know that you could have to pay to receive the open records (it makes sense why you would have to – I just never thought about that) and that some of them could cost up to $500.. what would be an example of an open records retrieval that costs $500?

I personally don’t understand why they changed the law…They changed it from 3 days to 90. Ninety days to ONLY respond to the requester, the requester could still then wait even longer to receive the open records. I think it should have stayed at three days or they could have made it three to 5 business days to respond back to the requester. Ninety days is entirely too long and I think it’s unfair to journalists and everyone else who uses open records because if you’re trying to right a story or whatever you’re doing with the open records, and you need information that can only be obtained through open records, you’re going to have to wait a long time to even hear back.

I think changing the law was fine, but I’m not sure why they decided on 90 days. I personally think three days to a week is enough time to decide if you’re going to accept or deny the request.

Reading the article about Fetty Wap’s performance here at UGA is very interesting to me, as I attended that concert. I personally think performer’s riders are insane. I would love to know how much of that food actually got eaten (I know there are a lot of crew members and what not that need to be fed).

Louisville Cardinals finish 23-8 in 2015/2016 Season

I used Sports Reference to look at how the Louisville Cardinals finished up last season. They went 23-8 in regular season and did not play in post season play due to NCAA violations that had happened. Most teams don’t even make it to the NCAA tournament, as only 68 get the chance to play in it. I wanted to look at UK but someone already did that so I thought I would take a look at UofL.

The majority of UofL’s losses were only by a few points but in a couple instances they lost by more than 15 points and both of those were to Virginia.

Looking at their FG, FGA, 2P, 2PA, 3p and 3PA – UofL was almost 50% for FG, more than 50% for 2P and below 50% for 3P. As strong of a team UofL is, I think they need to work more on the 3p.

I’ve also tried to upload my Tableau graphic multiple times and it won’t let me upload it or a screenshot of it. I’ve emailed it to you Professor Suggs.

Uploaded:

Story Memo

Following our meeting on Thursday, I’m still really interested in both of my story ideas but I’m worried about my personal connections in the horse business and that they might cause some interference. I think it could be a interesting story but I don’t want the lines to get blurred.

As for my other idea about the guarantees of the SEC with scheduling the big games. I obviously talked mostly about basketball and that’s what sparked my interest. But I could widen it to other sports or just focus on basketball. With this story, you said it would be a lot of phone work and I don’t mind doing that.

I want to focus on the pros and cons of scheduling these big games, but I want to address how a school decides to play another. Whether it’s for money reasons (Nichols State getting paid to come to here and play UGA football) or other reasons. With UNC / UK that’s been a long standing rivarly game in basketball and I’m interested why Roy Williams wanted to end that. I could try and contact UK and see how they feel about this change.

I think there will be a lot of numbers involved with this story and think I might need to use some graphics to help organize and show my facts more clearly.

Election Story with data and infographics

I used a story that I found on NYT’s Upshot vertical to examine how the story uses the principles that we read about. This story written by Josh Katz is examining who will win the election in November.

Tuft said these were the fundamental principles of analytical design:

Should compare something
Causality, mechanisms, structure, explanation
Multivariate
Integration of evidence
Documentation
Content matters most

By going down the list, lets look at this article… This article is comparing Hilary Clinton vs. Donald Trump and looking at different ways to come to an overall statement that they believe Clinton has an 83% chance of winning. They’re also comparing different charts and different ways to calculate this by looking at how states normally vote, how other sites post election predictions, different outcomes that could happen due to electoral votes, etc.

This story has structure and the infographics are explained well but the reasoning behind the statistics isn’t. That would change the whole purpose of this piece if everything in the political sphere was explained. This piece is multivariate (more than three variables), as mentioned before it looks at Clinton winning by state in different aspects. Evidence is present and as is documentation.

The most important is content. The graphics are visually appealing, but also easy to understand – this was an important made in last article we had to read for this assingment. I really like the interactive graphic at the end, showing how difficult it will be for Trump to win.

Organizing and keeping track of material

Every since class last week, I have downloaded the Pocket extension for Google Chrome and have already found that very useful. I plan to use that a lot to save stories that I find on the internet that I can use for research and help with the background of my story. If I’m just using an article or a google search to find a quick fact or piece of background information I’ll type it down in Word on the notepad formatted page. This type of format is where I take all my notes for class, I just find it’s super easy to use. All of the background information I need for the story I’ll have on one Word document. What I love about the notepad is that I can have different tabs on the document and different aspects of whatever I’m taking notes on will have its own tab.

I will create a folder for each piece I’m working on and within that specific folder there will be lots of documents and pictures and what not. It’s not the most organized but I will use very specific titles on the documents and can tell just through preview if they are a normal formatted Word doc or a notepad formatted one.

This summer at my internship whenever I’d get an email from my editor I’d read what he want me to write and copy and paste that into a Word document so I didn’t have to search through my email to find it and I could just refer to the document for specifics. I do like how Clark immediately writes down his goals for a story and how he wants to format the story. I also love the whole section of the chapter about procrastination because I find that to be very real.

Personally “saving string” in a plastic box overwhelms me, while I think it’s a good idea, I don’t know if it’s right for me. I don’t like clutter and having multiple boxes of information for stories that still need to be written, gives me a little bit of anxiety. I will definitely try it though because I’m not the professional writer and Clark is. He made a lot of useful tips throughout this section that I plan to incorporate into my organizing my material for stories.

Sayre School

I looked long and hard for a news story that’s about my small private school in downtown Lexington, KY and it took me a while to find a story I wanted to post. Most of the things I found while searching we’re just score updates or school reviews. My school for as long as I can remember was pretty drama free in the sense of newsworthy-ness. I did find this story (although it’s from 2010, it’s the only thing I could find that fit into the description of a new story about my school).

I think this story is very interesting because I was a sophomore when this story happened and it was a pretty huge deal among our little community. Dylan Newton, a senior at the time, was our soccer teams best player. He was a really special player to watch and was almost like a magician on the field. During a game he fell and broke his leg really badly. He had to be taken off the field by an ambulance and couldn’t finish the rest of his senior year. It was a huge deal to our small school because with him on our team we were going to have a chance to go further in the state championship than we had done in previous years. This is a big deal for a small academic school that, at the time, didn’t even have athletic tryouts for most teams because we needed all the players we could get.

I remember visiting Dylan in the hospital and his leg injury was much more serious than just a break. He had a horrible infection in his leg and the doctors found a way to treat it: maggots. That’s what this story is about. Dylan still has his leg and it is functioning just as well today even though he did not get to go on and further his soccer career in college.

Surprising

As y’all know I’m a huge Kentucky Wildcats Basketball fan, so what I find surprising is that Roy Williams wants to terminate the UNC/UK basketball games by 2018. How does one decide they want to stop a long coming rivalry? Is it a mutual agreement? do both of them have to agree on the subject or can one coach just say that enough is enough.

As far back as I can remember, my dad would always let my twin brother and I fight over who got to sit with him at the UNC/ UK game whenever it was at Rupp Arena. The Cats don’t play the Tarheels every year and in the off year that they don’t play each other, the Cats will usually play Duke or another top 25 team who is not in the SEC. Every year when they release the non conference schedule, I’m always eager to see who the Cats are playing. For instance, the Wildcats normally play the Louisville Cardinals right after Christmas, either the following day or three days after, but this year the game has been moved to December 21st.

The whole scheduling process confuses me in sports. How do they decide who plays who each year. As mentioned above, UNC and UK don’t play each other in basketball every year but when they do they alternate home courts. Why not just play every year?

Here is an article I found about Roy Williams wanting the UK/UNC games come to an end by 2018. And here is a second article about scheduling that addresses why the UK/UofL game has changed dates for the first time in years.