Story Behind the Story: Reporting from the Roller Derby

posted by David Kidd

Writer Rob Gurwitt and I were in Providence City Hall: he to gather information for an upcoming story, and I to take pictures of whomever and whatever Rob thought would be in his story. After a morning and early afternoon shadowing the mayor, it was time to branch out and talk to some other public servants. This doesn’t just happen. By the time we arrive at a given location, Rob has spent many hours alone with his telephone and laptop, making arrangements to meet with the people he thinks will give up the most and best information. The good thing about this is that we don’t waste much of what little time we have (usually two days). The bad thing is that there’s not much room in the schedule to wander around and get a feel for the place.

I have a friend, Ron, who lives just outside of Providence. At one time, I worked for him when he ran a weekly newspaper about education and a monthly magazine about teaching. Before he started both publications, he was a vice president at Brown University. He has often told me stories about sending photographers out for days, even weeks at a time, so that they could properly cover a story. This, of course, happened many years ago. Those days, I think, are probably over.

If I said that my friend Ron is a smart guy, I doubt anyone would want to argue the point. Rob (the writer) is a pretty smart guy too, and he dresses the part with his glasses and blue blazer. He looks like he’s always thinking. I’ve spent many hours trying to sit still and stay quiet while Rob asks meaningful questions and makes notes in his yellow legal pad. Like Ron, Rob is no dummy.

Ron and Rob are not the kinds of guys you would imagine would enjoy a roller derby. But you'd be wrong.

In order to draw people downtown, the city of Providence has created a large open space surrounded by tiered seating, perfect for basketball games, skate boarding, bike riding, or just hanging around. When it’s cold, they flood it and play hockey. The night Rob and I were there, the rink was being used for a roller derby practice. I learned this earlier that afternoon.

I immediately called my friend Ron, who had kindly offered to pick me up when I was through working for the day and drive me back to his house. I told him that I’d be staying later than planned so that Rob and I could take in the roller derby practice. I suggested he come and get me later than originally planned, or, if he was interested, he could join us at the practice.

He was definitely interested.

A few hours later, I was on my stomach in the middle of a ring of roller derby gurlz, trying to make artistic photos of color and motion. Ron and Rob watched safely on the other side of the barrier that surrounded the rink.

Later that night we enjoyed a delicious meal in town. The derby girls had done their job in keeping us downtown.

Story Behind the Story appears every Tuesday.

Colorado State Senator Sets New Bar in Calling-Obama-a-Terrorist Contest

posted by Zach Patton

President Obama's critics have accused him of being a Socialist, a Communist, a Fascist and, yes, a terrorist.

But in a recent Twitter post, Republican Colorado state Sen. David Schultheis has gone just a liiiiittle further:

Yeah...

Schultheis, for his part, wants you to know that you totally misunderstood him and he never intended to invoke United 93. From the Denver Post:

He said he was angry about the president's fiscal policies but didn't mean to compare him to the hijackers. The senator's reputation for strong speech gave readers the wrong idea, he said.

" 'Let's roll.' It's a comment people use all the time any more. 'Let's get going. Let's move on. Let's make major changes,' " Schultheis said. "I can see it now. But you're busy doing jillions of things during the day. You sometimes don't analyze every single word."

See?  He just meant that Obama has hijacked the metaphorical fiscal plane. And that's what he's running into the ground.

And since we're all passengers on this "plane," we should...storm the cockpit and...force the plane to...wait, I'm lost.

Story Behind the Story: Spending Election Night Online

posted by Alan Greenblatt

I have to admit that I'm a very late adopter.

I'm a big music fan, but all my friends had iPods before I did. I'm in a job that trades on communication, but I'm not on Facebook. While I've looked at Twitter, I don't tweet or follow. I've never paid for cable TV, and it's been well more than 10 years since I've lived with anyone who did.

Interestingly, when I'm forced for some reason to admit not having a BlackBerry or other smart phone, disbelief has given way to expressions of envy.

None of this seems to matter much, until election night. Even then, it doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Occasionally I've spent election nights providing live coverage to a broadcaster, such as NPR. And I've spent a couple in hotel ballrooms, waiting for the victory or concession speech in person.

But usually I've watched returns with friends. A few of you may remember the 1970s book and TV miniseries "The Last Convertible," which traced a group of lifelong friends through the years. They met up on presidential election nights, to mark the passage of time and lend a sense of changing eras.

For me, it hasn't been a social thing. In fact, the socializing is distracting. You go to an election night party and, well, people treat it like a party. They mingle and talk and root, root, root for their candidates. None of that has been helpful for me.

Usually, I'm just there for the cable hookup, unsocially sitting in front of the TV with a notebook in my lap. (At one time, that meant a paper notebook.) I well remember spending the night at the home of friends in 2000 -- weren't they surprised to find me still up and on their couch at 4:00 in the morning!

In the old days, when I was with a weekly magazine, it actually made no sense, professionally, to stay up to watch the returns. You would know just as much or more in the morning. It was the day after the election when I would have to write up results and profiles or new members of Congress or whoever. Staying up and getting tired was no use at all.

Now that's all changed. You have to stay up. You have to be on top of the results as they're coming in, because people are going to be looking for sources of information in real time. The news, as we well know, no longer waits.

But that works both ways. I get nearly all of my information on election nights now from other Web sites -- whether it's election returns from a secretary of state's portal or simply coverage from a newspaper's site.

If you're trying to stay on top of state and local races, cable is just about useless. My mandate last week was to look at mayoral contests. I'm sure that the cable shows kept an eye on Bloomberg's surprisingly weak showing and no doubt mentioned many times, as they had earlier in the day, that Houston might elect a gay mayor and Atlanta a white one.

But the days when I would stay up watching the crawl on CNN -- which would inevitably go to commercial just as the race I was waiting for would be coming around -- are over. And I don't borrow a cup of cable from neighbors or friends, either.

Spending election nights on the Internet is not the most fun way to go. Right now, at least, it's the most productive.

Story Behind the Story appears every Tuesday.

It's Between Maryland and Virginia

posted by John Martin

I just bought some software for my home computers, and all through the installation process the program urged me to go online to register it so I could receive valuable alerts about updates and bug fixes as well as exciting offers from the company's partners.

So I clicked on the "register now" button, only to find that the city where I live doesn't exist. You guessed it: I am a resident of that geo-jurisdictional curiosity known as Washington, D.C. Trying to fill out the online address form I was sent to by the software, I was thwarted when I got to the dropdown list containing state postal abbreviations. In between CT and DE was ... nothing. Down at the bottom, there was a WA, but of course that was the other Washington, the one between Oregon and Canada.

We District residents have learned that our town could end up anywhere in these lists — spelled out as "Washington, D.C." or "District of Columbia" — or the full treatment: "Washington, District of Columbia," typically appearing at the bottom of the state list, down there with American Samoa and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. But at least we're usually somewhere.

The perpetrator of this particular oversight is a company called Avanquest, which has offices in CA (the state located between Oregon and Mexico) but whose global headquarters is in Paris (France, not the one in Texas or the one in Missouri). If anybody reading this speaks French, could you let them know about this issue? Also let them know about American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S.V.I. They're not on the state dropdown either, but on one that lists them as separate, independent countries.

Postscript: Eventually, clicking around on the company's site, I found my way to another registration page where I encountered a completely different online form that did recognize the District's existence. Now, however, it appears I live in something called "Distr. Columbia." OK, it's a start.

Story Behind the Story: Finding the Right Spots to Chat

Some conversations tend to be of "high" priority. Photo by David Kidd

posted by David Kidd

As part of Governing’s 2009 Public Official of the Year coverage, I spent the better part of a day taking photographs of Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley. At first, it looked as though I would be limited to watching him promote flu vaccines at a suburban Maryland elementary school and later, as he participated in a ritual groundbreaking ceremony at Bowie State University. I did have him all to myself between events, but we were limited as to where we could go in search of an appropriate background.

I watched him stoop down to look first graders in the eye, and later as he posed with a golden shovel of new dirt. And in between I got some pictures of him in the school library which were not too bad but somehow didn’t exactly look worthy of a Public Official of the Year.

As we chatted afterward, he asked if I would like to follow him to Annapolis and take some shots around the Capitol building. A half hour later, I was in the Governor’s office getting a personal tour by the Governor himself. I was having a wonderful time, and it seemed as though he was having just as much fun as I was.

"Would you like to go up to the balcony?" he asked me. I thought he meant the balcony that overlooked the main floor of the Capitol. He meant the balcony up on the roof.

We made our way through the dusty darkness and up a few flights of ancient stairs, security men and assistants in tow, finally arriving at the door to the "balcony." It was a beautiful sunny October day and the Governor was clearly enjoying the view of Annapolis all around us.

Jefferson and Madison once locked themselves up here and spoke alone for three hours, Governor O'Malley told me. I wondered what they must have said to each other. But I did not wonder why they chose this spot to do it. It was wonderful to be up so high above the world and at the same time to be so alone. It was a perfect place for a private conversation.

A week later, I was in Greensburg Kansas, there to photograph another Public Official of the Year, Steve Hewitt. At one point during the day, Steve presided over a meeting of contractors as they discussed the progress they were making on rebuilding the town. Being rural Kansas, there was a tall grain elevator next to the train tracks at the edge of town. The meeting trailer wasn’t much more than a hundred yards from it.

I asked Steve if we could go up to the top and he said he’d ask the people in the office at its base. I learned that that office was the very first thing to be rebuilt after the tornado had leveled Greensburg. That’s how important that grain elevator is to the town. But first, we had to sign papers that released the company from any responsibility in case one of us happened to walk off the edge.

Steve Hewitt, Greensburg’s Assistant City Administrator Kim Alderfer, an electrical engineer whose name I don’t remember and I each took turns riding the self-operated one-man lift to the top. I went first and it was an experience unlike any other. The ride is made in near darkness. If I had wanted to, I could have reached out through the gate and touched the wall as it whizzed past. I chose not to.

Stepping through the door to the outside was not unlike my experience above the Capitol dome in Annapolis. Although the weather was misty and gray, I could see well past the town to the endless fields beyond. Steve told me that until recently, there was no railing around the top. He didn’t really like to be up there, but was nice enough to do it for me. After a few minutes of picture taking we headed back down, one at a time. I went last.

As I walked to the elevator I noticed two dusty chairs, close together, facing each other. Two people had been talking up here, far above the rest of the world. I wondered what they must have said to each other. But I did not wonder why they chose this spot to do it.

Check out photos from Annapolis and Greensburg here and all eight of this year's Public Officials of the Year here. Story Behind the Story appears every Tuesday.

Does Posting Calories Make a Difference?

posted by Zach Patton

You may recall that New York City began requiring fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts alongside all of their menu items. The city's thinking, obviously, is that you may re-think ordering that extra cheese if you know the burger you're ordering already has 800 calories.

But does the strategy work?

A few weeks ago, a study by New York University and Yale found that the calorie count of an average meal had actually increased since the law went into effect in July 2008. Prior to the labeling, the mean count of fast-food orders was 825 calories. Now, it's 846. And only about half the people even noticed the calorie counts at all.

But now the city has done its own survey, with more promising results.

It's much bigger (22,000 people versus the NYU/Yale study's 1,100), and it seems to indicated that calorie counts have gone down in the past year. From New York magazine:

Though only 15 percent of customers used the calorie information, they ended up ordering 152 fewer calories at hamburger chains and 73 fewer calories at sandwich chains compared to those who didn’t (56 percent of customers never saw the postings).

USA Today also notes that according to the study, the calories purchased dropped at nine chains, including significant drops at McDonald’s, KFC, and Starbucks (keep in mind, though, that chains like KFC have introduced lower-calorie options such as [...] grilled chicken [...].

Story Behind the Story: Accessing Kansas' Big Well with Greensburg's City Administrator

This stairway leads down tow the largest hand-dug well in the world. Photo by David Kidd

posted by David Kidd

I recently flew into Wichita on my way to Greensburg, Kansas. I was there to take pictures of Steve Hewitt, the City Administrator of Greensburg for a future profile. Greensburg had famously been leveled two years ago by a category 5 tornado. Steve is in charge of the rebuilding effort. I arrived a day early to give myself a little time to look around before I got down to the purpose of my visit.

I asked the kid behind the Avis counter if there was something special I should see while in Kansas--maybe the world’s largest ball of string, or something like that.

“No,” he said, “there’s nothing like that around here.” So I located my dark red Chevy Impala in the rental lot and headed west on U.S. Route 54.

As Greensburg got closer, I started noticing billboards imploring me to "See the world’s biggest hand-dug well." This was just the kind of thing I was hoping for. As it happened, I was headed right for it. The world’s biggest hand-dug well is, or at least was, the feature attraction in Greensburg, Kansas.

Greensburg is a small town and the terrain is so flat, that it is not hard at all to find anything if you just look around a bit. Within minutes of my arrival, I was looking at the Big Well through the windshield of my Impala.

I wasn’t actually looking at the well. That’s underground. I was looking at a small log cabin sort of building that serves as the Big Well welcome center. I found out later that this was just a temporary structure used to house the gift shop until money could be raised for a new building. The old one had been destroyed by the tornado.

Next to the building was a circular stone wall about a foot high and 30 or 40 feet in diameter. I could tell that this was in fact the top of the well which was capped with a small skylight that had at least one of its panes missing. Just outside the circle was a new-looking set of metal doors, the kind you would see outside someone’s house, allowing access to a cellar. This is how you enter the well. The cellar doors were locked.

I returned the next day and stepped into the log cabin where I met Big Well Manager Stacy Barnes who was keeping watch over the gift shop.

"Sorry," she said. "The well’s been closed since the tornado."

I knew she could see the disappointment on my face. I knew too that she was not going to let me see the Big Well. I looked at some tornado-damage pictures displayed on the wall and flipped through a few books before saying goodbye and heading out the door to my appointment with Mr. Hewitt.

I spent the next few hours with Steve and Assistant City Administrator Kim Alderfer on a driving tour of town. Naturally, we ended up at the Big Well.

“You want to see it?” Steve asked me, and I followed him inside to get the keys to the cellar door. I made sure to let Stacy know that I had not meant to go over her head to gain access to the well. It was, after all, Steve’s idea. "He’s the boss" she said cheerfully.

Steve fumbled with the lock for a good ten minutes. I was beginning to feel bad for him. “It’s OK” I lied, “I don’t need to see it.” But a man who will not be beaten by a class 5 tornado will not be beaten by a cheap little padlock. In the next minute he swung the door open. All I could see was a few metal steps leading into blackness.

I went first, expecting my new friends to follow behind. I should have known that Kim wouldn’t go with me. Her high heels would never work on the steps that I can only describe as similar to a very long fire escape. "These steps are as safe as they were when they were new” said Steve. “I’ll wait here. You go ahead." And Stacy couldn’t come with me either. Someone had to man the store.

I couldn’t really tell if the steps were safe or not because I couldn’t really see them. The only light came from the open door and the broken skylight. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could now see that there were four or five landings below me as the stairs zig zaged toward the bottom some 109 feet below.

I carefully made my way down, stepping over and around stray bricks, rocks and bits of debris that littered the steps and came to the conclusion that I might be the first person to be down there in quite some time. The very bottom was filled with water so dark that I could not tell if it was six feet or six inches deep. After taking a few minutes to enjoy being at the bottom of the world’s biggest hand-dug well, I took a few pictures and began the ascent. Every once in a while I could hear Steve say in a loud voice that "these steps are still very safe, as safe as the day they were built."

Those stairs were built in 1916.

Later that day I was informed that my flight home had been canceled, but the airline had a nice motel room waiting for me. Since I had returned the Impala, I was now stranded at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport Comfort Inn with nothing to do. I picked up one of the tourist guides in my room and thumbed through it.

"See the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Cawker, Kansas" read one of the many ads. But the ball of twine was 177 miles away. It would have to wait.

Story Behind the Story appears every Tuesday.

The United Not-States

posted by Alan Greenblatt

There's been a debate of sorts in recent days in the liberal blogosphere on the question of whether states should be eliminated.

Matthew Yglesias, in a post entitled "The Trouble With States," says that citizens have national concerns in common and certainly have issues in common with fellow residents of metro areas, but "we don’t really live our lives 'at the state level.'

And insofar as co-residents of a single state do have idiosyncratic issues in common that tends to be because important fiscal and regulatory powers have been allocated to state government rather than because it actually makes sense for them to have been allocated this way.

Ezra Klein, a blogger for washingtonpost.com, goes further. He posits that only low-population states such as Alaska and Montana are true communities of interest.

That arrangement might be good for Montanans, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for the country. I've occasionally argued for a more proportional Senate, only to be asked "what do you have against small states?" Well, nothing in particular. I just don't consider states to be a particularly useful political unit. Why not apportion Congress by race? Or population density? Or income? All of those options seem a bit nuts, but the only reason that states make any sense to us is because it's always been thus. All of those options make a lot more sense than organizing representation around the boundaries of Missouri.

And it's not as if there was some high-minded reason for state-based representation a few hundred years back. Rather, states were given a lot of power because that was the only way to entice them into joining a union. It was a coldly political compromise. It's good we got that done, but some of the structural concessions that were required don't make that much sense in the 21st century. Not that "does this make sense?" is a particularly powerful consideration in our system.

Josh Patashnik, at The New Republic's "The Plank" blog, rushes to states' defense in a high-minded way, quoting Madison and Sandra Day O'Connor. Although he's sympathetic to centralization of power in Washington, he's sensible about the states' role in our system:

Maybe it's just me, but the bait-and-switch Ezra apparently envisions seems pretty unconscionable.  Back in the day, states were concerned that at some point in the future the federal government would try to usurp their sovereignty, so they wrote very strong protections for themselves into the Constitution.  Now, in 2009, along comes a chorus of voices proclaiming that, from a national perspective, that arrangement doesn't "make sense," so we should consider changing it.  Well, of course!  That's precisely the concern the states had back then.  The underlying premise of our federal compact is that we're not concerned solely with what "makes sense" for the nation as a whole; the interests of each state deserve independent respect. On one level a Vermonter and a Californian are equal as Americans--but on a different level, a Vermonter and a Californian are qualitatively different, and we don't simply tally up which group has more people.

Story Behind the Story: Rebuilding Miami?

posted by Tina Trenkner

Photo courtesy of Jorge R. Perez/City of Miami

Updated November 3, 2009: This post has been corrected to show that the above image is an actual current photo and not a photo illustration. 13th Floor regrets the error.

When you think of Miami, do you think of sprawl and never-ending condo construction? That could halt in the future.

This photo is what Miami currently looks like, but an idealized vision of a pedestrian-friendly environment that may be possible if a new zoning code, Miami 21, is passed. The code aims to implement New Urbanist principles by encouraging pedestrian activity and discouraging dependence on cars.

In the November issue of Governing, Alan Greenblatt explores how Miami 21 could change the city -- for better or worse. The city commission originally voted against implementing the code, but days later reversed itself and approved the code. The code needs to be confirmed in a second reading, scheduled for this Thursday.

Alan's Observer article on Miami 21 will be posted on Governing.com on November 1.

Story Behind the Story appears every Tuesday.

Dayton Foreclosure Update

posted by Alan Greenblatt

I wrote a cover story early last year on foreclosures, looking at Dayton, Ohio, to give a sense of what the effects were like in the industrial Midwest, as well as Las Vegas as an example of Sunbelt/sprawl foreclosures. We also gave a Public Official of the Year award last year to John Carter, a Dayton housing inspector who had come up with a good way of communicating with mortgage holders about property upkeep.

At any rate, the Dayton Daily News ran a big package Saturday about how the foreclosure crisis continues to dog that city.

This story says that the number of foreclosures is starting to go down in Dayton, but only because of a scary new phenomenon -- banks aren't bothering to foreclose, instead leaving abandoned properties to rot in the original mortgage-holder's name. This story highlights the effects of this problem of mortgage lender or bank "walkaways," which leaves the owners, neighbors and the city to deal with declining properties.

This story looks at efforts to encourage owners to stay in their homes even after foreclosure, because it's best to have an occupant until the property's final status is determined. This story looks at Carter's work in tracking down the owner of a particular abandoned property.

Suburban Diversity

posted by Alan Greenblatt

The National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University on Long Island will be hosting a big academic conference later this week on the increasing demographic diversity of suburbs. In preparation for that event, the center has released its latest national poll of suburbanites.

You can examine the poll for suburban-eye views of the economy and Obama, but I found some of the racial attitude material more compelling.

Not surprisingly, given the fact that racial diversity in suburbs is a growing phenomenon, mobility among minorities shows up as greater than that for Anglos. Half of white suburbanites (49 percent) have lived in their neighborhoods for 11 years or more. By contrast, two-thirds of suburban Hispanics (66 percent) have lived in their neighborhoods for five years or less.

About half of suburbanites say that their communities are racially mixed -- 52 percent of whites say so and 45 percent of African Americans agree, as do 48 percent of Hispanics. Nonetheless, the survey says that fewer suburban respondents find racial tension to be a problem or a big problem than people who live in central cities.

Hyperlocal New Jersey

posted by Alan Greenblatt

If you're following the news about the news, you've probably heard that many media companies are hoping to find successful niches in so-called hyperlocal coverage -- obsessive Web-based coverage of particular towns or even neighborhoods.

Newsweek just ran a long article about this and suggests some big-money players are serious about competing with neighborhood bloggers:

As humble as it sounds, that coverage is making three New Jersey towns—Maplewood, South Orange, and Millburn (including its hamlet Short Hills)—a hotbed for cutting-edge ventures in hyper-local journalism. At last count, 10 different Web sites were focusing on the three communities—including the newly launched blogs Patch.com, funded by AOL; TheLocal, a New York Times–owned site; and Maplewoodian.com, run part-time by a Maplewood resident. Bloggers and media companies were drawn in part by the areas' affluent demographics and quaint, commercially vibrant downtowns filled with potential advertisers.

And New Jersey is merely a launchpad for the hyperlocal upstarts. The Times, for example, has pondered the idea of franchising TheLocal to various communities. Patch.com already is swiftly expanding. At stake is the $100 billion market for local advertising, typically extracted from merchants such as dry cleaners and pizza parlors. Even as the overall ad market has declined during the recession, forecasters at Borrell Associates estimate local online ad spending will rise from about $13 billion in 2008 to $14 billion in 2009. In New Jersey, the invasion of journo-bloggers has amazed local officials. "We've gone from being sleepy little news towns to being boomtowns," says Maplewood Mayor Victor DeLuca.