High Country News writer meets with students
Barrett book review lands NPR interview
Students learn about New Deal photographs
Alum wins award for debut novel
McGiffert lies on the floor one more time
Missoulian photo editor visits J-School
FBI takes on Servo case

High Country News writer meets with students

photo by Sarah Galbraith

Ray Ring spoke to a public affairs reporting class Nov. 14 about his work with High Country News. Ring's passion for what he does keeps him curious and asking questions.

Journalism students should look forward to low pay, long nights and loads of stress, says High Country News Editor Ray Ring.

But, hey, good news — there’s an upside, too.

“I get paid to learn about the world and exercise my curiosity,” Ring said. “I’m not doing the same thing every day.”

Ring, a former reporter for the Arizona Daily Star and current editor in the field for the biweekly environmental newspaper High Country News, told public affairs reporting students how his work in investigative environmental and immersion journalism has allowed him to step outside of what he calls “template” journalism. Investigative reporting allows him to explore the depth and effect of topics, rather than just report opinions from elites on either side of an issue.

Ring isn’t kidding when he says “in-depth.” Students read clips of Ring’s work, including articles investigating asbestos illness in Libby and a report Ring got by going undercover as an inmate in Arizona’s prisons.

It’s acceptable for journalists to create an issue, as long as it’s “accurate and doesn’t hurt people who shouldn’t be hurt,” Ring said.

Ring spoke to two classes during his Nov. 14 visit to the J-School: Dennis Swibold’s public affairs reporting class for undergraduates and Michael Downs’ public affairs class for graduate students. Downs, who worked with Ring at the Arizona Daily Star in the late 1980s, arranged the visit.

 - Keriann Lynch

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Barrett book review lands NPR interview

A School of Journalism professor appeared on National Public Radio last month after writing a book review that caught the attention of the book’s author.

Professor Sharon Barrett’s review of novelist Amy Tan’s latest book, “Saving Fish from Drowning,” noted something that most other reviews of the same work missed.

Barrett wrote that although Tan “purports” to base the book on nonfiction, the narrative actually is entirely fictitious. Tan’s technique is merely a “sly variation on the old ‘finding-a-manuscript-in-an-attic’ ploy,” Barrett wrote in the review, which was published Oct. 16 in the Chicago Sun-Times. 

That the book is fictitious apparently was a fact most other reviewers missed, and it landed Barrett a short spot on NPR. Tan told NPR that Barrett’s review was one of the only ones to recognize that the work was made up, Barrett said, and resulted in Barrett being interviewed by NPR’s Lynn Neary. 

The interview appeared in a piece that aired about Tan’s book on “Weekend Edition” on Nov. 20.

-Anne Pettinger

Students learn about New Deal photographs

photo by Sarah Galbraith

Montana State University history professor Mary Murphy spoke to beginning photojournalism students about her book and exhibition "Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942," at Fort Missoula on Nov. 3. The book is based on the mass documentary photography project in the 1930s sponsored by the federal Farm Security Administration.

Murphy selected the photographs on display and in her book as the best representation of Montana from the collection.

"As a historian I look at them as historical documents," Murphy said. Two Montana photos from the thousands taken as part of the FSA project are at left (click on photos for larger view).

All photos from the government project are also online. (Photos from Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection)

-Sarah Galbraith

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Alum wins award for debut novel

photo by Stacey Glaser

A School of Journalism alum won a prestigious award this fall with a $40,000 check attached for his debut novel, “Ordinary Wolves.”

Seth Kantner, ’91, was one of 10 recipients of this year’s Whiting Writers Award, established in 1985 by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. The award honors exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays.

Since its inception, the program has awarded more than $5 million to approximately 200 writers. Previous award winners include UM School of Journalism alum Judy Blunt, ‘91; Jonathan Franzen; Jeffrey Eugenides; Gretel Ehrlich and Ian Frazier.

Kantner, who was born and reared in the wilderness of northern Alaska and who now lives in Kotzebue, Alaska, also won the 2004 Milkweed National Fiction Prize for “Ordinary Wolves.”

“Ordinary Wolves” has been a national bestseller. Louise Erdrich calls it “painful and beautiful,” and Barbara Kingsolver said, “Once in a great while a novel comes along that can shiver right down your bones and show you the world was always larger than you knew. This is just such an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”

- Anne Pettinger

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McGiffert lies on the floor one more time

photo by Ryan Brennecke

Professor emeritus Bob McGiffert regaled students in Dean Brown's Editing I class with stories of his adventures as a copy editor and teacher.

Bob McGiffert may have been out of the full-time teaching loop for the last 14 years, but he has lost none of his ability to hold students’ attention for an hour and a half.

On Nov. 10, McGiffert, professor emeritus at the University of Montana School of Journalism, taught a section of Editing I for Dean Jerry Brown.

“I haven’t taught a class or done an honest day’s work in a newsroom for 10 years,” McGiffert told the class.

Despite being out of practice, McGiffert easily filled his 90 minutes of class time with stories of his career as a copy editor and educator. He even resurrected an illustration that past students have never forgotten.

“One student told me he’d never forget the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie,’” McGiffert said, throwing himself on the floor. “He told me, ‘I’ll never forget the sight of you laying on the floor.’”

McGiffert rolled his eyes and groaned, picked himself up and reminded the class that he had, in fact, been lying on the floor.

In addition to his stories, McGiffert urged students to consider copy editing as a career, although not directly out of college. He believes people should experience the reporting side of the field first, so they can learn the types of mistakes people commonly make.

“Here’s a copy editing maxim: all writers err,” McGiffert told the class, paraphrasing journalist I. F. Stone’s observation that all governments lie. “Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody needs a copy editor.”

- Kristi Albertson

Missoulian photo editor visits J-School

photo by Sarah Galbraith

Missoulian photo editor, Kurt Wilson, spoke to photojournalism seniors and shared some of his picture stories on Nov. 15. Wilson began the presentation with a picture story he shot for the Missoulian in 1984 about smokejumper training.

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FBI takes on Servo case

Jennifer Servo

A little over three years after the murder of a promising young journalist, the police department in Abilene, Texas, is joining forces with the FBI to find her killer.

Jennifer Servo, a 2002 graduate of the University of Montana’s broadcast program, was strangled in her apartment on Sept. 16, 2002, just one week before her 23rd birthday. Now, after three years of following many leads and making no arrests, the Abilene Police Department is going to team up with the FBI.

“We’re going to send it in to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and see if they can give us any direction,” Sgt. Roger Barry of the Abilene Police Department said.

But Servo’s murder is not the nation’s only unsolved violent crime, and it may take some time until the FBI begins looking into it.

The Abilene Police Department already submitted the case to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which is also run by the FBI. This program will compare the circumstances of Servo’s murder to other murders around the country.

If similarities are found, it may be evidence of a serial killer, although Barry thinks this is unlikely.

In the meantime, Abilene police are approaching the case from square one.

“We started over,” Barry said. “We’re reinterviewing everybody. We’re making sure everything that needed to go to the lab got to the lab. We’re making sure we didn’t miss anything.

“We do have leads,” he added. “We’re pursuing active leads right now.”

Barry hopes that the FBI will provide fresh perspective on the case. “I hope that they can give us a new look, a new direction, give us some things to work on,” he said.

- Kristi Albertson

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