Photo by Cory Myers
| School of Journalism | The University of Montana |
March 2001
Archives: October 2000 November 2000, December 2000, February 2001, Issues before 10/2000
LINDA TRACY WINS
Judge upholds her status
as journalist; quashes subpoena
Linda Tracy is a journalist
protected by Montana's shield law and won't have to surrender unedited film
to Missoula police, a Missoula district judge has decided.
In his decision, Judge Douglas G. Harkin wrote that Tracy is protected by the
Montana Media Confidentiality Act because it protects people "connected"
with news outlets.
When Tracy filmed violent confrontations between Missoula police and bystanders
last summer, she was "gathering and editing news within the meaning of
the Montana Media Confidentiality Act," Harkin wrote.
"The act applies to Tracy and grants her the right to refuse to disclose
information and material sought by subpoenas," he wrote in his decision,
released two days following the case's evidentiary hearing.
Tracy, a senior in broadcast production at the University of Montana, had filmed
last July's early-morning violence between Missoulians and Missoula police and
later provided her footage to local television news programs. She also produced
a documentary called "Missoula, Montana." Police subpoenaed her unedited
film in October.
Gary Henricks of the Missoula City Attorney's office told the Montana Kaimin
that it was unlikely his office would appeal Harkin's decision. Henricks' main
argument was Tracy’s documentary was not objective journalism and therefore,
she should not be protected.
But Harkin noted that the shield law does not require any test of a journalist's
work. He refused to even look at the video. "This Court respectfully declines
the invitation," he wrote, "to . . . practice judicial activism by
a tortured interpretation of the Act that would require the Court to decide
if the person has produced a 'responsible' work product."
Harkin's decision came two days after a hearing in which he heard testimony
from UM faculty regarding Tracy's work as a journalist. Dean Jerry Brown said
on the stand that a journalist is "any person interested in news or opinion
and presenting that to the public." Tracy "is a journalist from every
perspective that I can examine," he said.
"By the time she worked through the curriculum and reached the point of
being an intern, she was focusing in every sense on being a journalist,"
he said.
During his testimony, Brown said that Tracy was right not to hand over her footage.
"It interferes with public trust," he said. Newspaper aren’t
law enforcement, he said. They gather news for the public.
All witnesses brought to the stand by Tracy’s lawyer, Rick Sherwood, agreed
that Tracy is a journalist and should be protected under the shield law. Gary
Henricks, an assistant city attorney, didn’t call anyone to the stand.
But William Knowles, UM’s radio-television department chair, said on the
stand that it’s impossible to be objective. "We all bring to a situation
personal views," he said. "But we can all be fair. The key is fairness
in the situation."
Harkin said he saw
what Tracy did as a chance "to make a little money and do a little for
public service."
Montana’s shield law protects "any person connected with or employed
by a newspaper, magazine, press association, news agency, news service, radio
station, television station or community antenna television service … for
the purposes of gathering, writing, editing or disseminating news."
People who are interested in helping pay for Tracy's legal defense can send tax-deductable donations in care of the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline, P.O. Box 5810, Helena, 59604. Checks should be made out to the hotline. John Kuglin, chairman of the board of the hotline, has said that any leftover money will be returned to donors, so donors should be sure to identify themselves.
A record!
Five Grizzlies win
Dow Jones internships
Five UM
students received prestigious Dow Jones copy editing internships this year,
outnumbering last year’s record of four.
Internship recipients are placed throughout the country at newspapers and financial
news wires owned by Dow Jones.
The internships
include a one- to two-week training period, a 10-week paid internship, and a
$1,000 scholarship for students returning to school in the fall.
The fund
awards the internships to about 100 students a year based on an editing exam
and a lengthy application.
In the 2000
academic year, the School of Journalism changed its internship policy to require
off-campus internships. Previously, students could work for the Montana Kaimin
and fulfill their internship requirement. Since that change, more students have
sought and received Dow Jones internships, said professor Sharon Barrett, who
oversees the school's interns.
"We’re
making people more eager to look for internships," she said. "Good
internships are a good stepping stone to a good job."
Internship
recipients are first-year graduate students Eva Dunn-Froebig and Anne Sundberg,
and undergraduates Adam Brock, Michael Quinn and Tracy Whitehair.
Dunn-Froebig
will spend the summer in Middletown, N.Y., to work on the online version of
the Middletown Times Herald-Record. Sundberg will work in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
at the Dow Jones New Wires; Brock will work in Deseret, Utah, at the Deseret
News; Quinn will work at the San Jose Mercury News, and Whitehair will spend
the summer in San Luis Osbispo, Calif., working for The Tribune.
Whitehair
said she’s excited for the experience, which she hopes will help her realize
which profession she wants to enter: reporting or copy editing. She said she’s
most nervous about writing headlines because they’re the first thing everybody
reads.
"I’ll
actually experience real deadline pressure," she said, "and real responsibility."
Sundberg, who will work at the Dow Jones New Wires, is interested in the business aspect of her internship.
"A
lot of it’s going to be editing," she said. "But I really hope
to learn about the hot companies."
"I hope to learn pretty much the ins and outs of business reporting,"
she added.
UM photojournalist wins
3rd place in Hearst;
next stop: contest semifinals
Photographs of cowboys, boxers and wildland firefighters won for Cory Myers third place in the Hearst Journalism Awards program and pushed him into the competitions semifinals.
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That means
Myers, along with seven other photojournalism students from across the country,
will compete for Hearst’s highest photojournalism honor. Myers will be
able to submit additional photos for the semifinal judging in June. Following
that judging, six students will be chosen to compete in the program’s national
championships in San Francisco.
Myers placed third in the most recent Hearst category competition: sports and
news. He previously placed eighth in Hearst’s competition in portrait/personality
and feature photography.
For his third-place award, Myers will receive $1,000.
His placing helped Montana in Hearst’s Intercollegiate Photojournalism
Competition, a contest between journalism schools. The University of Montana
is third nationwide, following Western Kentucky University and Ball State University.
Ohio University and the University of Missouri round out the top five.
Devlin wins Scripps-Howard
environmental reporting award
for Big Burn series
While riding her bike on a trail
along the Old Milwaukee railroad bed near Wallace, Idaho, Missoulian reporter
Sherry Devlin came across a story idea that would win her a Scripps-Howard Foundation
Award for environmental reporting two and a half years later.
It was the grave of a man who died in the 1910 fires of Montana and Idaho that
gave Devlin – also a visiting professor at UM – the idea for what
would later turn into a four-article, three-day series about the impact of the
1910 fires on the United States’ fire fighting philosophy.
 Sherry Devlin |
The story of the man goes like this:
As the train was traveling through fire-laden forests, engineers stopped to
rescue people along the way. When the train approached some train trestles,
one of the rescued men noticed them burning. He leapt in fear from the moving
train. The train made it through the burning trestles, but the man who jumped
died.
Devlin's ability to link human-interest stories like these to how the 1910 fires
affected the United States' fire fighting policies helped her win the award.
The contest judges said: "Sherry Devlin’s gripping two-part series
combines the best features of narrative writing and explanatory journalism."
The award comes with $2,500 and an April 6 trip to Washington D.C., where Devlin
will receive her trophy and meet other winners during a banquet at the National
Press Club.
The four stories have two parts: First, the human-interest stories that illustrate
the terrifying events associated with the 1910 fires. And second, how the events
changed the way the nation approached forest fire fighting.
Devlin’s articles show how the fires scared policy-makers into an attitude
that demanded fire be stopped at all costs. They instituted the 10 a.m. rule,
which ordered that all wildfires had to be put out by that time the day after
wildfires were reported.
As a consequence, the United States became adept at fighting fires.
Almost too good, according to Devlin's articles. The loss of 3 million acres
in 48 hours in 1910 made policy-makers look past the fact that fires are natural
and necessary to maintain healthy forests. The articles suggested that the fires
of 2000 may have been caused by decades of the U.S. Forest Service fighting
fires too aggressively and making forests too thick and easy to burn.
When Devlin learned about the devastation of the 1910 fires on her trip to Wallace
in 1998, she made a note to herself that the 90-year anniversary would be on
Aug. 20, 2000. She planned to write the story in two years, doing a little research
along the way, she said.
It was just a coincidence that the story ran while forests were burning in many
Montanans’ backyards. But Devlin said that connection made her think she
was doing a service for many readers. "It was an opportunity to really
grab people’s attention," she said. "We (the Missoulian) had
a chance to explain what was going on."
For the three weeks before the stories ran, Devlin stayed inside researching
and writing the articles, she said. She said it was difficult for her to stay
at her desk while there were fires to report.
But she said she enjoyed writing the articles. "All stories were representative
of what I love to work on – human being stories and science writing,"
Devlin said.
Everyone involved in the 1910 fires is dead, so Devlin researched letters, newspaper
clippings, accident reports and journals kept by the U.S. Forest Service.
Devlin said she received
hundreds of emails and hand-written notes from people throughout the country
and all over the world in response to the articles. "I have never gotten
so much response from something I wrote," she said.
Energy
deregulation is starting to have a negative effect on everyone in the West,
but for Modesto Bee Capital Bureau reporter Jim Miller the California
energy crisis is part of what makes his job interesting. "It’s a real
mess," Miller recently told a public affairs reporting class at UM. "But
it makes for good copy." Miller also took time to speak to a beginning
reporting class during a vacation from Modesto, Calif., where he’s a reporter
for the Bee, a 90,000 daily paper. Miller explained the history of the energy
deregulation issue, a complicated story that he says he sometimes doesn’t
even understand. "It’s a difficult story to cover; it’s not like
a flood, earthquake or other natural disaster," he said. Because the energy
crisis is so complicated, he said, the best way to convey the message to readers
is to show its impact on the people. "Don’t just regurgitate what
happened in a meeting," he said. "Talk to people at the ground level."
Miller also said getting information becomes easier as you start meeting people
on your beat. "If people see you start working and getting the real story,
they’ll start being more honest with you," he said. And, he said,
that’s what reporters are for. "Public affairs reporting is a great
way to keep government agencies honest," he said. Miller also told the
students that public affairs reporters need "thick skin." Don’t
get defensive when people criticize your coverage, he said. "It doesn’t
make the paper look good if you get mad." . . .
Dan Vichorek, an alumnus of the journalism school who is best known for
his witty books and columns in Montana Magazine, died over Presidents Day weekend
of natural causes at his home in Helena. Vichorek graduated from UM in 1969,
according to UM records, and went on to work as a reporter in Billings, Butte
and Chicago where he worked for the Chicago Tribune. He later became a technical
writer for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, according to the
Associated Press, and worked there until his death. He contributed articles
to magazines and wrote four books about Montana, along with his humor column
for Montana Magazine. "I always thought of him as sort of Montana’s Mark Twain,
a guy who could regale a few friends with stories for most of the night," wrote
Charles Johnson, a classmate of Vichorek’s and the head of Lee Newspapers’
Montana state bureau. Vichorek is survived by his former wife; brother, Patrick;
sister, Vicki Anne Gale; a niece, Valerie; and nephew, Michael Scott. . . .
Ray Ekness, assistant professor in Radio-Television, was recently selected
for a two-week 2001 Faculty Development Grant from the National Association
of Television Program Executives (NATPE). Ekness will spend two weeks at
Fox Sports Northwest in Seattle this summer, observing how things work in the
play-by-play booth and in the television production truck during Seattle Mariner
games. He will also watch how four regional sportscasts are put together out
of the Seattle studios. And will learn how much planning goes into the 150-plus
live productions that Fox Sports Northwest produce each year.
J-School News
| School of Journalism | The University of Montana |
March 2001
Editor: Michael Downs, visiting assistant professor
Reporter: Eva Dunn-Froebig