News team lives up to challenges

News team lives up to challenges
August 10, 2003 - Portland Press Herald
By Jeannine Guttman

There is a truism about news coverage: You plan and then plan some more for the events that you know are going to happen. Creating a strategic coverage plan ensures that the reportage will be aggressive and complete, and that readers' interests and concerns will be met and addressed. Behind any successful coverage of a major news event is a precise, often painstaking plan.
That may sound simple, but as we all know, the devil is in the details.
Last weekend, our newsroom took on two major stories - the Phish concert and the Peoples Beach to Beacon 10K race. Hopefully, readers found that coverage thorough, compelling and newsy, providing insight into each event.
Today I want to show you what you didn't see, a behind-the-scenes look at how that coverage was planned and carried out, and how raw news events get translated into cogent, next-day coverage.
As Managing Editor Eric Conrad notes, "Even when the events are scheduled, as both the Phish concert and Beach to Beacon race were, extensive live coverage is not easy." There are always unexpected bumps and potholes on the road to news coverage. And the best news plan must build in time and space for these kinds of obstacles.
Let's examine the Phish concert first. The music festival began Friday and hit high gear Saturday and Sunday, unfolding in Limestone, on the grounds of the former Loring Air Force Base. Some 60,000 to 70,000 fans converged in this northern region of Maine to hear the popular band perform at the It Festival.
Our challenge: cover this event from afar and use technology to bring the story home for our readers. We had two sets of readers to keep in mind: our regular Maine readers, and the out-of-state Phish fans who traveled here for the festival.
Our news team consisted of three staffers: feature writer Bob Keyes, metro reporter Mark Peters and photographer Shawn Patrick Ouellette. As Conrad notes, they were "working a chaotic scene, six hours from Portland. Cell phone transmission was difficult. Traffic was intense. There were lines at media phones where photographers needed to send (digital) pictures," via the Internet. "And our employees stayed at a B&B 25 miles from the concert."
On Saturday night, we were on an urgent deadline schedule, with our crew filing for the statewide Maine Sunday Telegram. "I thought we did well, very well, with our coverage," Conrad said. "Our stories had plenty of detail and really gave readers a taste of what happened up there. Our photos, both feature and 'action' photos, did that as well."
What was it like to be on the ground, reporting this mega music event? "I have told anybody who has asked that I had fun and was glad to go," said Keyes. "It was a lot of work and challenging in a logistical sense, but it was fun." As a journalist, Keyes has covered festivals for years, enabling him to bring experience and perspective to his Phish reports, which included a review of the band that ran last Monday.
"Traffic and parking aside, I thought the Limestone festival was very well organized," he said. "The band and the festival producer, Great Northeast Productions, did a good job organizing the site and managing the mass of people. And while I was shocked at the blatant flouting of laws by many who attended, I was equally surprised how well everybody got along. I saw one argument but not a single fight. . . . To paraphrase a cop I interviewed, 'These are good kids.' They are, and they behaved well."
Another item of interest to Keyes: community reaction. "Virtually every town along the way from Houlton to Limestone had signs welcoming fans. Obviously, the economic benefits are very real, but I sensed something more than sheer greed at play. I think the people in this section of northern Maine, who were rocked by the New Sweden story earlier this year and its mass-media coverage, were genuinely glad to welcome strangers for a positive experience. They were clearly proud of their homes and surroundings and happy to show them off."
Andrea Nemitz, assistant managing editor for photo, graphics and design, said the concert coverage "was an endurance test and a jugging act for both Shawn and the page designers - at least on Saturday," as the news team in Portland awaited the stories and photos that would be used to build the Telegram.
"On Friday, Shawn found some wonderful images on the long, slow ride to Limestone - a kid napping on top of a car stopped in traffic, and a local woman holding her homemade fish sign in one hand and waving a peace sign to concertgoers with the other.
"When he arrived at the concert scene, he found his parking spot was about a half-hour from the media center," Nemitz said. "Every time he needed to transmit photos he'd first have to retrieve his laptop from the car, then hike back to the media center, wait in line to transmit, then hike back to the car to stash the computer.
"He transmitted some photos mid-afternoon Saturday, but discovered he had to be in place to shoot the band by 3:45 p.m. That limited his transmission time, so the copy desk used his early photos and Associated Press photos in our first edition. Later Saturday, they added more of his photos for subsequent editions. It was a very long day for Shawn: 14 1/2 hours.
"On Sunday, he was back at it again, shooting photos for Monday's paper and then driving home very late at night."
With one news team deployed in northern Maine, we fielded a second crew to cover a major news event closer to home: the Beach to Beacon road race, held annually in Cape Elizabeth.
Saturday, Aug. 2, was the sixth annual 10K race, founded by Joan Benoit Samuelson, Olympic gold medalist and Maine sports icon. Each year, the race has drawn elite runners from around the world, and provided top-name Maine runners and just regular folks, too, a chance to participate. The event garners national and international attention.
A number of factors made coverage of the race "a little less daunting" than the Phish concert, Conrad said. First, it was an early morning event, which gave us time to develop our report and meet deadlines for the Sunday Telegram. Second, it was happening in a community that we cover regularly in our newspaper. Third, we have reported on this race each year since its inception, so we have experience in capturing this event.
This year, because of that experience, we decided to expand our coverage. On Saturday, on deadline, our sports department produced a live, eight-page race section, featuring stories on the winners, a column, a notebook and highlights. All this, plus pages of results for 4,273 participants.
Dan Dinsmore, sports editor, had the idea of producing the race section. In order to make room for it in the Telegram press run, we had to print one section in advance; we chose Insight. Printing Insight earlier in the cycle opened up a spot on the press to run the live Beach to Beacon section.
It was, in Conrad's words, "quite a feat. The section looked good, right down to spelling of the runners' names and their chip and gun times."
Dinsmore said the sports department feels a strong commitment each year to cover the Beach to Beacon in a way that matches the gravity of the event. "Because the Beach to Beacon is the largest participatory sporting event in Maine each year and because it attracts some of the world's top athletes, we feel an obligation to provide a little extra oomph with our coverage," he said.
"I had five reporters covering the event this year - Glenn Jordan, Jerry Lauzon, Jenn Menendez, Steve Solloway and Mike Lowe. Each reporter was assigned an angle or coverage of a certain race," such as the elite race and the Maine race.
"While five reporters is a lot to devote to an event, the stress on our copy desk is even bigger," Dinsmore said. "To put out both the normal sports section and last Sunday's eight-page Beach to Beacon section, we had three section-front editors, five copy editors and three sports assistants working on Saturday.
"Section-front editor Mike Spath was in charge of the design and production of the section. C.J. Betit, one of our sports assistants, was in charge of the results. He worked for eight hours to make sure all the results were correct, correctly formatted and would look good on the page. The efforts of Mike and C.J. were very important to the production end of the Beach to Beacon section."
Photo-wise, Nemitz assigned shooters John Ewing and Jill Brady, both of whom have covered the race before.
"Probably the best shot of the race day, featured prominently on the (Sunday special section) sports cover, showed the men's winner and other elite runners breaking away from the field," Nemitz said.
"John shot the photo from the media truck, which he rode from the start of the race, part way to the finish. One of Jill's more memorable photos, in addition to the Page 1 shot of the men's winner, was the wheelchair winner finishing the race, his arms raised, with spectators cheering him in the background."
Hours after the race, officials sent chip time results to our newsroom and to the newsroom of MaineToday, our online newspaper. At MaineToday, the times were posted by early Saturday afternoon, giving participants and race enthusiasts a chance to get the final standings.
Scott Hersey, MaineToday editor, said the results site recorded nearly 39,000 page views from readers accessing the data. The numbers were even higher for the Phish coverage, which has accumulated more than 102,000 page views since a special online section was posted July 28.
The Phish online coverage includes the newspaper's spot coverage, along with photo galleries from the 1997 and 1998 shows and sound samples of some Phish songs.
"The interesting thing I take from this is the readership that's been happening after the concert," Hersey said. "There was certainly strong readership up to and during the event," but the tidal wave of page views came last week, after the concert.
"What happened here, we believe, is that Phish fans came home from the show, logged on to the Phish boards, and saw links that had been put up to our special site," he said. "In terms of newspaper/Web cooperation, this definitely extended both the reach and the availability of the original newspaper content."
As you can see, major news event coverage places hefty demands on the news staff - and on the rest of the newspaper team as well. Witness the role of MaineToday. And the role of our circulation department, which trucked the Telegram to Limestone so that concertgoers would have it starting at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, an impressive achievement considering the newspapers had just rolled off the presses a few hours earlier. And consider, too, the role of our pressroom, which worked with us to move Sunday sections so that we could print the special race section.
The newsroom is responsible for producing the journalism, but it takes a team of dedicated professionals in all departments to ensure that a superior newspaper is delivered promptly to our readers. At the heart of any newspaper enterprise is a very strong team. Last week, the strength of our team enabled us to pull off this dual coverage.
Let me know your thoughts on that coverage, and on any other areas of the newspaper that you have questions about.

Copyright � 2003 Portland Maine Press Herald