Dan D'Ambrosio

Nontraditional student
covers Legislature
in nontraditional way

By Adam Weinacker
J-School Web Reporter

While the Montana Legislature struggled to balance the budget or tried to dip into the coal tax trust fund, journalism graduate student Dan D’Ambrosio spent spring semester chronicling the dominant political themes from week to week.

But D’Ambrosio is not your ordinary graduate student. He isn’t a 20-something planning to launch his first career or start a family. He already has two daughters, ages 19 and 16, and is well into his second marriage.

“I’m going to be 45 years old in a couple months,” he said.

For more than 20 years D’Ambrosio has worked full-time for the same company, and he said reporting, particularly in Helena, has allowed him to start a new career.

But that meant leaving his family in Missoula while he lived in the capital for most of the work week and then commuting back home to work at Adventure Cycling, the not-for-profit organization to which he’s dedicated two decades of his life. On Sundays he relaxed, spending time with his family.

“You kind of need one day a week,” he said.

The cycle would start again when he drove back to Helena to start his next weekly story.

D’Ambrosio reported in Helena for his final graduate project as part of the Montana News Service class led by professor Dennis Swibold. His stories had a weekly theme – one week it could be coal mining, the next it might be a view of the Legislature from observers and pundits – and weekly papers that are part of the Montana Newspaper Association published his work.

But when J- School professor Michael Downs first told D’Ambrosio he’d be great for the position, it seemed like a distant possibility.

“Michael said, ‘You’d really be good at this, but of course you’d lose your marriage and your job,’” D’Ambrosio recalled. “He literally said that. He was joking, but he wasn’t joking.”

But it was D’Ambrosio’s wife, Missoula County public defender Alice Kennedy, who urged him to take a chance on another career.

“It’s hard,” he said, “but fortunately I have a wonderfully supportive wife who is indulging me in this career change.”

D’Ambrosio is currently director of publications for Adventure Cyclist, the magazine issued to Adventure Cycling’s more than 30,000 members. For 24 years he has helped assemble the magazine, which goes out nine times each year. It is full of stories written by cycling enthusiasts and photographs of the landscapes seen by way of bicycle.

“I’m proud of it,” D’Ambrosio said. “It’s a magazine that I would put out there on the newsstand next to any other cycling magazine.”

But publishing a cycling magazine is not quite like reporting about politics. Before accepting the position in Helena, D’Ambrosio said, reporting on Missoula City Council was his only foray into political reporting. He said he didn’t pay much attention over the years to what happened in the state’s capital, and he couldn’t have cared less.

“But I won’t be like that anymore,” he said. Reporting on the Legislature is more interesting than listening to City Council members, he said. The players are bigger and the stakes are higher.

“It’s been amazing,” he said. “I actually have a lot of respect for these people. I think they work hard to get things done.”

D’Ambrosio is a second-year graduate student whose tuition is being covered by Adventure Cycling based on an agreement where the company pays for an employee to obtain a degree related to the business.

But he has told his boss, Bill Sawyer, he will be leaving Adventure Cycling for good this summer. While he was able to work on the magazine and report in Helena this semester, that kind of time allocation won’t work when he starts his new summer internship with The Associated Press in Helena. After the internship, he hopes to get a job offer if his work has been good.

“It’s like I told Bill, my boss,” D’Ambrosio recounted, “I said, ‘You know, Bill, I’m going to be 45 years old in a month. I’ve been doing this since I was 24. If I’m going to do something different, now’s the time.”

D’Ambrosio said his boss has supported his career change. The two have, after all, known each other for a long time.

Easing himself into his new career, D’Ambrosio sharpened his reporting skills at the Legislature. He learned through embarrassment that he must keep his cell phone on vibrate while in meetings, and he has weaned himself of using a recorder, he said. He now knows legislators by their first names, filling more than 25 reporter’s notebooks with their quotes and information. Finding sources at the Legislature is like riding a carousel, he was told by a fellow reporter. “If you miss it the first time, you can always get it the second time,” D’Ambrosio said. “And that’s true of stories and it’s true of people.”

But not everything about legislative reporting is smooth, he said. D’Ambrosio admits that the language of bills still eludes him. “I still can’t read a bill and figure out what the hell it means,” he said. “They’re ridiculous.”

He said he had someone explain what a bill said so he could translate it into plain English for the stories he wrote. About 10 weekly newspapers regularly ran D’Ambrosio’s stories.

Because he wrote for weeklies, D’Ambrosio had to provide background for the issues he reported on, summing up how the issues evolved in the Legislature. This type of reporting set him apart from others at the Capitol. Competition to scoop other newspapers didn’t apply, he said. He wasn’t reporting the daily story, and he liked it that way. He reported from the comfort of his Helena apartment – not the windowless “bunker” in the Capitol basement he was offered.

In the future, he said, he would like to write lengthy, in-depth stories about environmental or social issues. While political reporting interests him, he said, he doesn’t see it as his calling and would rather write features of up to 4,000 words.

D’Ambrosio said his wife does not yet regret nudging him into the reporting job in Helena, despite his time spent away from Missoula and the jobs he may be offered in other places. And Downs’ prognostication about D’Ambrosio losing his job and wife has so far proven false.

“I figured losing my marriage and my job was probably not an exaggeration,” D’Ambrosio said. “Luckily, for me, it turned out I could do it, and I didn’t lose either one.

“At least not yet,” he joked.

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