#newspapers

Election night is always tense in a newsroom - even when, as the case with the Pennysylvania governor's race, the outcome isn't in doubt, there are still so many moving parts and so many things that can change. Whether it's a late-reporting county/precinct or trying to design a front page you've been thinking about for weeks, there's always something that can go wrong. That's why, this year, I tried to prep my part of the election coverage with as few manual moving parts as possible. Though (as ever) things did not go according to plan, it definitely provided a glimpse at how things might run — more smoothly — in the future.

I set out in the middle of October with two aspects of the coverage. The first, live election results, was something I've been in charge of since the first election after I arrived at the York Daily Record in 2012. I've always used some combination of Google Docs (the multi-user editing is crucial for this part, since our results are always scattered around various web pages and rarely scrape-able) and PHP to display the results, but this year I had my GElex framework to start from (even if I modified it heavily and now probably need to rewrite it for another release).

The results actually went incredibly smoothly and (as far as I know) encountered no problems. Everything showed up the way it was supposed to, we had no downtime and the interface is as easy I can conceivably make it. You can take a gander at the public-facing page here, and the Sheet itself here. The one big improvement I made this time around was on embeds. Though there's always been the ability to embed the full results (example), this year — thanks to the move to separate sheets per race — it was possible to do so on a race-by-race basis.

This helps especially in consideration with our print flow, which has always been that election stories get written so the exact vote totals can be inserted later via a breakout box. By embedding the vote totals into the story, this meant we didn't have to go back in and manually add them on the web.

The governor's race stole pretty much all the of the headlines (/front pages) in York County owing to its status as Tom Wolf's home county. For us, this meant we'd be doing twice as many live maps as usual. The county-by-county heat map is relatively cliché as political indicators go, but it's still a nice way to visually represent a state's voters.

Since he's a native, we also decided this year to include a map of just York County, coding the various boroughs and townships according to their gubernatorial preferences. My first concern was online — we've done both of those maps in print before, so worse case scenario we'd be coloring them in Illustrator before sending them to press.

I wanted interactivity, fidelity, reusability and (if at all possible) automation in my maps. When it came to reusability and fidelity, SVG emerged as the clear front-runner. It's supported in most major browsers (older flavors of IE excepted, of course), on mobile and scales well.

The other options (Raphael, etc.) locked us down paths I wasn't really comfortable with looking ahead. I don't want to be reliant on Sencha Labs to a) keep developing it and b) keep it free when it comes to things like elections and maps. I would have been perfectly fine with a Fusion Table or the like, but I also wanted to look at something that could be used for things other than geocoded data if the need arose.

Manipulating SVGs isn't terribly difficult ... sometimes. If the SVG code is directly injected into the page (I used PHP includes), it's manipulable using the normal document DOM. If you're including it as an external file (the way most probably would), there are options like JQuery SVG (which hadn't been updated in TWO YEARS until he updated it less than a week before the election, or too late for me to use) or this method (which I was unable to get to work). (Again, I just cheated and put it directly on the page.)

Manipulating fills and strokes with plain colors is fairly easy using jQuery, just change the attributes and include CSS transitions for animations. The problems arises when you try to do patterns, which are much different.

I wrote a tiny jQuery plugin (pluglet?) called SVGLite to assist with this, which you can read more about here. When backfilling older browsers, I figured the easiest thing to do was serve up PNG images of the files as they existed. Using everyone's favorite PHP library for ImageMagick, imagick, this was trivial. Simply running a few PREG_REPLACEs on the SVG file before serving it to Imagick helped me get the colors I needed.

It turns out there aren't a lot of free options for scraping data live, and as I've mentioned before, free is pretty much my budget for these sorts of things. But there is one. Import.io, which has the classic engineer's design problem of making things more difficult by trying to make them easier, turned out to be just what we needed when it came to pulling down governor's data.

Working off the results site for each county, I set up a scraper API that trolled all 67 pages and compiled the data for Wolf and Corbett. This was then downloaded into a JSON file that was served to the live Javascript and PHP/ImageMagick/PNG maps. Given that I didn't want to abuse the election results server (or melt ours), I built a small dashboard that allowed me to control when to re-scrape everything.

This part actually went almost as well as the live results, with one MASSIVE EXCEPTION I'll get to after the next part. The boroughs/townships data presented its own problems, in the form of only being released by PDF.

Now, running data analysis on a PDF is not terribly difficult — if you're not time-constrained, I'd definitely recommend looking into Tabula, which did an excellent job of parsing my test data tables (2013 elections), as well as the final sheet when it was all said and done.

Unfortunately, processing each one took about 45 minutes, which wasn't really quick enough for what we needed. So we turned to the journalist's Mechanical Turk: freelancers and staff. Thanks to the blood, tears, sweat and math of Sam Dellinger, Kara Eberle and Angie Mason, we were able to convert a static PDF of numbers into this every 20 minutes or so.

It's always a good idea to test your code — and I did. I swear.

My problem did not lie in a lack of testing, but rather a lack of testing using real numbers or real data. For readability purposes, the election results data numbers are formatted with a comma separating every 3 numbers, much in the way numbers always are in non-financial or -computer contexts (e.g., 1,000, 3,334,332).

UNFORTUNATELY, when I did all my testing, none of the numbers I used went above 1,000. Even when I was scraping the test data the counties were putting up to test their election results uploading capabilities, the numbers never went above 500 or so — or, if they did, they were tied (1,300 for Wolf, 1,300 for Corbett).

The problem lies in how the scraper worked. It was pulling all of the data as a string, because it didn't know (or care) that they were votes. Thus, it wasn't 83000, it was '83,000'. That's fine for display purposes, but it's murder on mathematical operations.

About an hour after our first results, the ever-intrepid and knowledgeable Joan Concilio pointed out that my individual county numbers were far too low - like, single or double digits, when the total vote count was somewhere north of 200,000. After walking all of my numbers back to import.io, I realized that I needed to be removing the commas and getting the intVal() (or parseInt(), where appropriate).

(I also originally intended to provide the agate data using the same method, but the time it took to quash the number bug meant it was safer/wiser to go with the AP's data.)

Conclusion:

1. Always test your data.

2. Always make sure your data matches the type you're looking for.

3. Sometimes the overhead of statically typed languages is worth the trouble.

Overall, everything went fairly well, with the exception of the aforementioned bug report (which also made us double- and triple-check the print graphic). The advantage of SVG, aside from its digital flexibility, was that after a quick Save-As and conversion in Illustrator, we had a working print file ready to go.

Another election, in the books.

As I've mentioned before, we're moving away from Caspio as our database provider to the extent that it makes sense (not out of utility, it's a function of cost). While we've managed to get some things migrated over, one of the biggest stumbling blocks are the things we use Caspio for the most — simple databases that need to be viewable and searchable online.

We have a number of semi-complex databases (read: more than a single-sheet XLS file) that we're not moving anytime soon (deed transfers database, among others, simply because of how we ingest the data), but there are a number that are little more than spreadsheets that we need to be able to view and search.

We investigated a number of vendor alternatives, but most featured pricing problems similar to Caspio, or had records limits absurdly lower than what we need. (Example: One such service offered 100,000 rows of data for $149/month. For comparison, one of our more popular databases, listing Pennsylvania teachers' salaries, has well over 2 million rows alone.) So, once again, Project Time™.

There is one thing that any aspiring programmer must realize when they set out to replace a tool: YOU CAN'T REPLACE A TOOL AT THE HEART OF A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION ON YOUR OWN. I knew this academically but, as is often the case when setting out on these adventures, my brain chose to heed that advice only when it was convenient to do so.

I often live by the mantra, "If someone else can do it, that means it's possible." It works well something like 75 percent of the time — it prevents me from feeling daunted when facing large projects, but it can be turned around as well.

My favorite caveat is, "Technically, I could build you a reasonable facsimile of Facebook — it just wouldn't be as good, fast or as useful as the real thing."

It's true in that somebody built Facebook, but (more accurately) thousands of somebodies built Facebook. It's doable, it's just not feasible for one person to replicate it completely on their own.

That being said, Past Me was convinced it couldn't be THAT difficult to take a spreadsheet and present it online, despite the fact that people routinely pay up to and including hundreds/thousands of dollars per month to companies to be able do exactly that.

Ah, hubris.

The first priority involved figuring out how to store the data. The reason the York Daily Record likes Caspio so much is not just its versatility and usefulness, it's how easy it is to use. Caspio spent a lot of time and money into figuring out an interface that, while not everyone can use it and even fewer can take full advantage of all its features, it's easy enough that most people can do basic things with little training. This actually posed the greatest challenge — the data needed to be able to be input and edited in such a way that your average reporter (think 35-year-old metro reporter, not 23-year-old working at The Verge) would be able to do so without having to email/call me every five minutes. That ruled traditional databases out right away. (Which is not to say that you can't build an edit-friendly MySQL frontend, but I didn't have that kind of build time for this project.)

The easiest and cheapest way forward seemed to be (as ever) through Google. Though I'm becoming more wary of Google Docs' live-editing capabilities, for the purpose of "storing data and being able to edit it directly," Sheets fit the bill.

Because our CMS does not allow for server-side code inclusion (another story for another time), inserting the data into articles needs to be accomplished via JavaScript drop-in. Since we're going to be building it in JS anyway (and I'm a firm believer on not doing the same work twice unless I forget to commit something to the repository), I figured we'd just use one codebase for both the widget version and the standalone.

After a little bit of searching (I got burned out going through a dozen different Caspio alternatives), I settled on DataTables as our jQuery plugin of choice.

Here's the part where I always have trouble when trying to relate the struggles of the average newspaper's newsroom to the more digital-focused newsrooms who have multiple app developers and coders on staff — most newspaper reporters do not have the coding ability beyond making a link or typing into the TinyMCE in WordPress.

You can get them to do things like a YouTube embed using a tag interface [Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvqfEeuRhLY], but only after some heavy-duty brainwashing (and we still struggle with getting Excerpts right).

So while I and probably three or four in our newsroom have no problem using Quartz's excellent ChartBuilder, it's not something we can just send out to the general population with a "use this!" subject line and expect results.

While some might be content with a simple "Use DataTables!" and inserting some code to auto-activate the tables when people set them up properly, asking your average journalist to use JavaScript parameters is a fool's errand, and we're not even within driving distance of, "Oh yeah, and get your Sheet into JSON for DataTables to use."

Which is not to call them stupid — far from it. It's just that these are people who spent a bunch of time (and, likely, money) to learn how to write stories properly. Then they got to work anytime after 2005 and discovered that it wasn't enough — they have to learn Twitter, Facebook, an ever-increasing number of content managements systems and (oh yeah!) they still have to do it while writing their stories. All of this is doable, of course, but to ask them to learn HTML and JavaScript and every new thing someone invents (which even I have given up all hope of keeping up with; there are just too many new things out there) is simply untenable.

Thus, I consider it my number one job to make their jobs easier for them, not just give them something complicated they have to learn just because it does a new thing (or an old thing in a cooler/cheaper way).

For the first version, it's about as simple as can be. People work on their data using their own preferred Google accounts (work or personal), leaving them with a document they can play around with. Once they're to a point where they're ready to present the data to the public, we copy the data into a separate account. This has the advantage of a) keeping the data under our control, in case the reporter quits/leaves/dies/deletes their account, and b) allows the reporter to keep their own copy of the data with the fields they don't want shown to the public (internal notes, personally identifying information, that sort of thing). The reporter then grabs the sheet ID from the URL and puts it in the tool.

Assuming the data passes some very basic tests (every column has a header, only one header row, etc.), they're presented with a list of fields. Because our CMS frontend does not allow for responsive design, all our information lives in 600 pixel-wide boxes. So with a little help from jQuery Modal, I added some functionality to DataTables using the standard hidden fields that hides some columns in the standard presentation, but shows the entire entry's information in a modal if a row is clicked.

For version 1, search is pretty simple: If there's a field, it's searchable. We're hoping to expand on that in later iterations to not search certain fields, as well as create some method of specifically searching fields (as seen in this Caspio implementation). Users then add a title (shown only in the full version; we're assuming wherever the widget drop-in goes, there's already a headline on the article) and customized search text.

They're then taken back to the main screen, where they can find links to the full data page (like this, which we use for our mobile implementation (neither our apps nor our mobile site executes JavaScript, so we always have to include links to a place off our main domain for our mobile readers to view) as well as the drop-in widget code.

Eventually, we hope to add some things like the extended search functionality, a "download data" option and other enhancements. But for now, we feel like we have a tool for basic database work.

It all started with FlappyArms.sexy. For those not in the know, it’s an experiment by the NYTimes’ Alastair Coote to clone FlappyBird — the twist being that, instead of using arrow keys or swipes on a phone, you load the game in a desktop/laptop browser, then connect to it with your phone.

Using the sensors in your phone, it detecs when you flap your arms and moves the bird accordingly. I came across it when he tweeted out a link, and immediately played it for an hour.

About a week later, Managing Editor Randy Parker dropped by to ask what I was going to do at our booth at the 2014 edition of the York County Fair. Previously, reporters and editors used their time at the booth to connect with the community in their own ways. Politics reporters might interview a politician live, our graphic artist offered up sketches one year, and this year our photo editor planned a photo walk, taking members of the public around the fair and explaining some of the basic concepts of photojournalism (and helping them compose great shots). Parker specifically said he wanted to make sure that people were doing something that really spoke to what they did/their interests.

I wasn’t lying when I replied with, “Well, the only thing I can think of doing is throwing up FlappyBird and showing people the possibilities of technology.” He even would have let me go along with it, too, I bet.

Then Community News Coordinator Joan Concilio told me about an idea they had for the fair. They envisioned a setup whereby people could tell us the things they thought that made York County special, then display them on a big screen throughout the fair.

Show people what journalism is, what interactive journalism can be. Show them it’s not all “a reporter shows up, talks to people, goes away and later something appears on the website/in the paper.” Show them that journalism can be curation from the public, soliciting input and feedback instanteously, that comes together in a package with our deep knowledge and library of photos of the area.

And I thought, “Damn. That sounds like FlappyArms.sexy, except actually relevant to journalism. I gotta get in on that.”

Together on a Tuesday, we worked out that we’d need a submission form and a display (pictured above and below) for the answers, a curated set of photos from our archives and the #yorkfair feed from Instagram. They also wanted to incorporate it long-term into their blog, Only in York County, which we did here. Oh, and the Fair started Friday morning.

Everything actually went fairly quickly. After looking at a number of jQuery image slider plugins, I ultimately wound up building my own owing to the fact that a) none of them did full-screen very well, since the plugins were by and large designed to work on actual sites, not what amounts to a display, and b) I wanted to be able to insert the newest answers immediately, if I had time to build the feature.

We could have done a quick-and-dirty build that was tech-heavy in operation, but we wanted to leave the display/capture running even when we weren’t there, and that required making things a little more user-friendly. The data was stored in Google Sheets (something we’re likely to move away from in the future, as I ran into a number of problems with Google Apps Scripts’ ability to work with selected cells on a sheet. That bug in and of itself isn’t a huge problem, but that it hasn’t been addressed in so long is worrisome in the extreme), with a custom function for updating or deleting entries (since we were using push and not refreshing the page).

The Instagram API was, as ever, a dream to work with, and a cinch to pull stuff in (cited and referenced back to Instagram properly, of course). Even the part I was worried about, the Push notification, was a cinch to institute thanks to Pusher. Highly recommended, if you can afford it — we could, because this required a relatively small number of push clients open (just the display computer + anything I was testing on at a given time, so we used the sandbox plan). There are a number of self-hosted open-source options — though, if we have need of one and I can’t convince them to pay for Pusher, I’m going to consider Slanger, which uses the Pusher libraries. (Seriously, cannot push Pusher enough).

In fact, the biggest challenge of the buildout was how to handle multiple push notifications that came in either at the same time or relatively close to each other. The easiest route was to just have the second message override the first, the third push out the second, etc. But the entire point of the exercise was to show people that they could be a part of the journalism immediately, and we didn’t want to discourage multiple people from submitting at once.

Thus, the dequeue() function was born — on the first submission, set a timeout that will restart the interval that was paging through the extant items. If a push comes in while that timeout is set, queue the data, get the time remaining, set a new timer (same variable) for the time remaining to fire dequeue again. If no new pushes come before then, take the item out of the queue, use it, and set a new timer to dequeue again (if there’s anything else in it) or restart your main action if there’s not.

It was what you’d call a “hard-and-fast” deadline: Our contract with Caspio for database and data services was changing on July 1. On that day, our account — which to that point had been averaging something like 17GB transferred per month — would have to use no more than 5GB of data per month, or else we’d pay to the tune of $50/GB.

Our biggest data ab/user by far was our user-submitted photo galleries. A popular feature among our readers, it allowed them to both upload photos for us (at print quality) to use in the paper as well as see them online instanteously. Caspio stored and displayed them as a database: Here’s a page of a bunch of photos, click one to get the larger version.

We had to come up with something to replace it — and, as ever, without incurring m/any charges, because we don’t have any money to spend.

Requirements

• Allow readers to upload photos (bonus: from any device, previously limited to desktop)

• Store photos and accompanying metadata (name, address, contact info, caption, etc.)

• Display photos and selected metadata (name, caption) on multiple platforms

• Allow for editing/deletion after upload

• Low/no startup or ongoing costs

• Support multiple news properties without much cost for scaling

• DO NOT create additional work

Research

There are a number of image hosts out there, of course, but the terms of use on their accounts vary wildly. The two main hosts we looked into were Flickr and Photobucket. Photobucket had the advantage of being Not Yahoo, which was a plus in my eyes, but their variable pricing structure (not conducive to multiple accounts, difficult to budget for the future) and lack of apparent developer support (the page you’re directed toward to set up an account no longer exists) made that seem unwise.

Flickr offers 1 TB of storage for reasonable pricing, but a hard request limit (3600/hour) and reasonable usage request (“You shall not use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com”) kind of limited its appeal to use a gallery host. Well, there went that idea. Then we started looking at resources we already had.

A few years ago, Digital First Media provided its news organizations with the nifty MediaCenter installations developed at the Denver Post. MediaCenter is an SEO-friendly, easy-to-use WordPress theme/plugin combo that stores its data in SmugMug, another photo storage site we’d looked at but abandoned based on price. But, you see, we already had an account. An in. (A cheap in, to the delight of my editor.) Once we clarified that we were free to use the API access, we decided to do what the pros do: Build what you need, and partner for the rest. Rather than build out the gallery functionality, we’d just create SmugMug galleries and MediaCenter posts, and direct uploaded photos there.

Challenges

The official SmugMug API is comprehensive, though … somewhat lacking in terms of ease of use. Luckily, someone created a PHP wrapper (PHPSmug), which works, more or less. (There are a few pitfalls, in terms of values not corresponding and some weirdness involving the OAuth procedure, but it’s all work-through-able.)

The whole point of user-generated photos is that you want to have the content live forever on the web, but keeping 400 “Fourth of July”-esque-specific categories around in the upload list is going to frustrate the user. We decided to treat categories in two ways: Active and Inactive. Once you create a gallery, it never goes away (so it can live on in search), but you can hide it so it doesn’t necessarily jump in the user’s face all the time.

Print workflow was especially important to us, as one of the major goals of the system was to not create additional work. Due to circumstances out of my control, the server we have to work with does not have email functionality. Using a combination of Google Scripts and some PHP, we weaseled around that limitation and email the original uploaded photo to our normal inbox for photo submissions, thus not forcing the print workflow to require using the web interface.

Allowing uploads from mobile devices is almost a cinch since both Android and the later flavors of iOS support in-browser uploads. The whole thing was built off responsive Bootstrap, so that was the easiest part of the whole project.

One of the biggest reasons we have a photo uploader and web gallery in the first place is to reassure people that when they submit a photo to us, we received it. This helps to prevent a deluge of phone calls or emails inquiring whether we in fact received the photo and when we plan to run it. Having the web gallery gives the user instant notification/gratification, and allows us to remind them gently that we don't have the space to print every photo we receive — but you can certainly view them online.

Method

On the backend, we have one database containing three cross-indexed tables — one to hold authentication info (per property), one for the category info and one for the photos themselves. Because we're using SmugMug as the storage system, there's no need to hold the actual photo ourselves (which helps with data usage from both a storage and transfer perspective). All the photo storage table has to hold is the information for retrieving it from SmugMug.

The user navigates to a specific property's upload form, fills it out and uploads the photo. The component parts of the form are stored separately as well as combined into our standard user-caption format. The caption is used when we send the photo to SmugMug, but we also store it locally so we can sync them up if changes need to be made. The photos are directed to the gallery specified by the user.

After a certain amount of time (about 5 minutes on SmugMug's end, and anywhere from 15-30 minutes on our gallery's end because of the massive caching it was designed with), the photo automatically appears on our photo gallery site. From the backend, users are able to create or retire categories, edit photo caption information and delete photos.

There's hope that we'll be able to do things like move photos around or create archive galleries, but that's down the road, if we have the time.

Results

You can view the final product here, here, here or here (spoiler alert: They’re almost exactly the same). There are still features we’d like to add, but there were more fires to put out and we had to move on. Hopefully we can come back to it when things settle down.

It’s disdainful in some circles to come out and say this, but there are places in journalism for automatic writing. Not the Miss Cleo kind, mind you, the kind done by computers. This is not a new trend (though news organizations, as ever, think things are invented only when they notice), but it’s received increasing notice given the continued decline of the economic status of most news organizations coupled with some high-profile examples.

The most recent was for the Shamrock Shake in LA, when an LA Times “quakebot” generated a story on the quake three minutes after it happened.

Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.

Where many can (and did) look upon this story only to gasp in horror and pull their hair out in despairing hunks, I saw this and thought, “Huh. That sounds like a pretty perfect system.” Imagine no quakebot existed, and an earthquake happened. The first thing a modern news organization does is get a blurb on their site that says something to the effect of “An earthquake happened.” This then gets shared on social media.

Meanwhile (if the organization is doing it right — if not, this happens in sequence), a reporter is calling the USGS or surfing over to the web page, trying to dig up the relevant information. They will then plug it in to a fairly formulaic story (“The quake was x.x on the Richter scale, with an epicenter there about 2 miles deep. It was felt …”.) If they can get ahold of a geologist who isn’t busy (either geologisting [as we would hope, given that an earthquake just happened] or on the phone with other media outlets), you might get a quote along the lines of, “Yup, there definitely was an earthquake. There will probably be aftershocks because there usually are, although we have absolutely no way of knowing for certain.”

What’s the difference between the two stories, aside from the fact that one showed up much faster? Data-based reporting absolutely falls into my crusade to automate all tasks that don’t actually require a human. The non-computer method of initial reporting on the quake is completely identical to the automated method, except it a) takes less time and b) frees up a reporter to go do actual reporting that a computer can’t do.

The computer can’t make a qualitative assessment on how it’s affecting peoples’ moods, or how anxious people are about aftershocks. Reporters should be out talking to people, rather than querying a computer to get data that another computer can easily understand and process.

Perhaps the most cogent argument against computer-generated stories is the potential proliferation of such content. After all, one might argue, if every California news outlet had a quakebot, we’d have dozens of stories that all said the same thing without reporting anything new.

(This is me laughing quietly to myself. This is the sound of everyone waking up to the current problem with media when you no longer have a geographic monopoly thanks to the internet.)

No one is saying that all stories, or even most will be written by computers, but it’s not difficult to imagine that a good number of them will be simply because most stories today have significant chunks that aren’t deeply reported. They’re cribbed from press releases, interpreted from box scores or condensed from the wire. If we leave the drudge work to the computers, we can free up reporters to do things that computers can’t, and actually producing more, better content. It’s quite literally win-win. The primary losers are those companies who will buy too deeply into the idea that they can generate all their content automatically.

In the darkest corner of the newsroom, bounded on one wall by library-style bookshelves and a long cubicle on the other, there sit two computers. They’re stacked vertically, attached to the same LCD (how fancy!) monitor via a KVM switch.

They sit and hum, silently when they’re first booted up and much louder after any length of time, and one of them grinds horrendously when it tries to seek information from the deepest recesses of its brain, much like me when someone asks a question during WWE RAW. They are vestiges. Relics. Antiquated reminders of the 20-plus-year old system we recently dumped in favor of a new (CLOUD-BASED, we’re so hip!) publishing system.

Together, they jointly ran the vast majority of our automated processes, barely doing together what even a relatively modern machine could do with ease all on its own. Make no mistake, automation is our mantra at the York Daily Record. We don’t want to make people do what robots (/machines) could and/or should be doing. To that end, we have a couple big projects in the hopper in addition to a seemingly endless series of smaller ones that crop up and are dealt with in the course of a day or two.

But the loud, imminent demise of Automator (the name of the program we used to schedule and task) meant that the project was getting pushed to the front of the line. Since we were replacing, we wanted to at least modernize the computer (running Windows 2000 since the old client could go no higher), and hopefully the program.

Since most of the work is now handled in the cloud, filing photos served as the big workflow we wanted to tackle. With the advent of mobile journalism, it’s not uncommon to want photos from the photographers at the scene. Unfortunately, our current setup required a VPN into our local server, then an upload to a drop folder that got pushed to the server. All that effort only took care of the print end, and required a laptop to get the particular flavor of VPN working properly.

What we wanted was an easy way to get photos from any device (photographers frequently work using only their phones or tablets, because it’s one less and/or lighter piece of equipment they have to lug around versus a laptop) and push it to three places — the web, print and our archive. The simplest solution seemed to be getting the file into our system and then moving it around from there.

Enter Dropbox. It’s extraordinary how even free services can do what used to require expensive services that were frequently more unreliable. Using the free 2GB Dropbox plan, we made sure that all of the devices were syncing to the same account, as well as to the “new” automater machine.

(Since a new AutoMate license is somewhere between $995–1495, we grabbed an old 10.6.8 iMac that was lying around and pressed it into service.)

After spending the better part of a day getting Apple’s Automator program to do all of the steps I wanted, four hours of testing proved enough to determine that Folder Actions, succinctly, suck. They were frequently skipping files and then just letting them sit, or worse yet failing and still moving them on. Luckily, a $28 program called Hazel is like Folder Actions, except it actually works. Highly recommended. That, plus the $5 Yummy FTP Watcher, resulted in us having a robust system for filing from the field that’s a) easy for photogs to use, and b) results in us getting the quality of photos we need in the places we want.

We need structure. We need rules, we need frameworks, we (for the love of God) need grammar. We, in this instance, are writers, and the things I refer to are often the crutches we employ in order to quickly impart whatever it is we're trying to get across.

But there's support a difference between support and constraint. One is there for you to fall back on, allowing you the opportunity to test your wings while still giving you a safe fall. The other informs your actions strictly, restricting your abilities and motion to the point where you've almost lost agency.

Guess which category I'm talking about with regard to journalism.

There's a reason the inverted pyramid exists and has been adopted by the journalism profession as the general template for telling a story: It makes sense for a lot of them. You start out with a very specific idea and then go broad the more you write. It keeps young writers from getting too bogged down in specifics, while also making sure they're not taking the 10,000-foot view on everything.

It's a guideline ... And that's all it should be: a guide. It's not inviolate, and it's by no means the best format for every story out there. Even more so than the idea that each story should be expressed in the best format possible, there are almost zero stories where a strict inverted pyramid is called for.

I get why it's taught — it's much easier to both instruct/grade according to a strict rubric rather than arbitrarily [and arduously] reading and weighing the subjective value of every piece of writing. But the problem is there's no point where, after the young journalist is instructed in the use of the inverted pyramid, permission is given to leave it behind when necessary.

I'll use for emphasis the story on a federal judge ruling against one of the NSA's data-collection policies, from Reuters. For starters, like most stories nowadays, it's overly long for its ostensible purpose: To inform readers about the specific case. Indeed, all of the actual data from today is imparted before the "Leaks" subheader, which isn't even halfway through the story. The rest of the story comprises reactionary quotes ("Snowden, in a statement sent by journalist Glenn Greenwald, applauded the ruling"), unnecessary (peculiarly editorialized) background ("Judge Leon has issued headline-making rulings before.") and the wire service staple, tangential information recycled from other stories:

A committee of experts appointed by the Obama Administration to review NSA activities is expected to recommend that the spy agency give up collection of masses of metadata and instead require telephone companies to hold onto it so it can be searched. But intelligence officials and the phone companies themselves are said to oppose such a plan.

Now, you might be able to argue that were this in print, it might be necessary to include some of this information to give readers background. But, since the information is being sent across something literally called the "Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol" (where hypertext is defined as a "format in which information related to that on a display can be accessed directly from the display"), there's absolutely no reason for that information to be there on its own.

Maybe — maybe — you could leave the lines about the judge's past rulings and the NSA review if you linked to relevant stories, as that might be of use to the readers. On their own, though, the lines appear to be nothing more than inch-count padding.

At best, journalists only gradually break away when they feel they can get away with it, either on low- or extremely high-profile stories. This, coupled with the mathematical truth that most stories are not situated on either extreme but rather complacently down the middle, means a majority of news comes across in an outdated, unnecessary and (above all) congenitally boring format. It's a trap that young reporters get ensnared in quite easily, and it goes beyond just the structure.

In the AP story, while the structure isn't quite so rigid, it still includes drop-ins like "The collection program was disclosed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, provoking a heated national and international debate." This sentence underwhelms so utterly as to be entirely pointless. Reading it contributes absolutely nothing to the understanding of the story unless you've already retained a fairly exhaustive knowledge of the context. It's the equivalent of a series tag, a sort of textual cue to let people know, "Oh, this is part of the Snowden story." It doesn't actually impart any information. I'll resort to a David Foster Wallace quote to drive my point home:

I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities — where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline — pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one's own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. ... people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won't be taken seriously, and their ideas won't be taken seriously.

In this case it's more style than jargon, but both manifest themselves eminently on a daily (often hourly) basis, online and in print. Even specific words can easily be overused — and, though they accurately depict something, their frequency of use lessens the impact and clarity.

The standard caveat: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the technique. Just don't become beholden to it. Be willing to take risks. Explore and discover the best way for letting people know (Ibid.) the story you're trying to tell. You can use the inverted pyramid, and the intertextual dog whistle, but you should only do so when you must.

With the advent of the popular internet, there are many literary, journalistic and writerly types who lament the reclassifying of writing as "content." I would think the best way to fight that trend is to stop treating your own output as content, and start reconceptualizing it (even in your own mind) as true writing.

The whistle sounds, the kick is up and, just like that, football season is upon us. Most newspapers throughout the years produced some kind of high school football preview, which pretty perfectly meets the sweet spot of subscriber interest coupled with advertising dollars. Moving that over to the digital realm has been a bit more difficult, at least for us.

Our (corporately homegrown) CMS doesn't really do well with one-off tabs short of creating a brand-new section, so previously the only items making the jump from print to digital were the tab stories, as stories. Last year we changed that trend with an iPad-only app we produced using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite.

With help from a corporate deal, we wanted to explore the ways that an app could help us present our content. At the time of creation, there were options for more device-agnostic profiles, but the way the DPS deal was set up we could produce the iPad app for free; anything else incurred a per-download charge (being a free download, we weren't ready to lose money on the basis of popularity). We were all pretty happy with the way the product turned out, but were disappointed by the limitations. The iPad-only specification severely limited its potential audience, and the fact that none of it was indexable or easily importable made it feel more like producing an interactive PDF than a true digital product. Though we were satisfied with the app, we determined in the future we'd likely steer clear of the app-only route.

Planning

When we decided we wanted to do the preview again for this year, everyone was in favor of going with a responsive design — it allowed for the maximum possible audience as well as the smallest amount of work to hit said audience. The only problem was that our CMS doesn't support responsive design, so we'd have to go around it.

This problem was compounded when we decided on the scope of the project. Our high school football coverage is run by GameTimePA, which consists of the sports journalists from the York Daily Record, Hanover Evening Sun, Chambersburg Public Opinion and Lebanon Daily News. The four newsrooms are considered a "cluster," which means that we're relatively close geographically and tend to work together. Since the last preview, however, GameTimePA had expanded to include our corporate siblings in the Philadelphia area, meaning we now encompassed something like 10 newsrooms stretching from Central Pennsylvania to the New Jersey border.

And we're all on different CMSes.

One of the few commonalities we do share are Google corporate accounts. Though our corporate policy does not allow for publishing to the web or sharing publicly (another rant for another time), it at least gives us an authentication system to work with.

By now, there's a fairly defined set of content that goes into the tab.

There are league-specific items (preview, review, players to watch) and team-specific ones (story, photo, writeup, etc.). Starting to sound like a data table to you yet? By the time we finished, we actually ended up with some fairly robust sheets/tables for things that would generally fall under the category of "administration." But the content was only half the problem. Translating it into the final product still loomed ahead of us. Because we only have one server we can use, ever (thanks, zero dollars to spend on tech!), it couldn't be too resource-intensive — I honestly worried that even using PHP includes to power that many pageviews would overtax it.

Since the site is a preview, it's not going to be updated that often, negating the primary downside of a flat-file build system (longer time to publish). I've mentioned before that we've previously built off of Bootstrap, but the limitations we kept hitting in terms of templating (many elements require specific, one-off classes and styles to work right on all devices) drove us looking in another direction.

The framework that seemed most complete and contained the elements we were looking for was Zurb's Foundation. Though it was not without its own headaches (Foundation 5 is built off an old version of SASS, which can play hell with your compiler — the solution is to replace the deprecated global variables, specifically replacing !default; with !global; and replacing if === false statements with if not statements, as outlined in an answer here. Zurb says they're rewriting the SASS for F6), it ultimately worked out for us.

Build

The basic method for extracting data from the Google Docs turned out both easier and more difficult than expected. The original plan was to query the two main admin sheets (that described the league structures as well as the league pages) and go from there.

That much was easy — I wrote a Google Apps script that I granted access to my Docs that outputs some customized JSON based on which pages are queried.

A PHP build script (which can be set to rebuild the whole thing, a whole league, or a league's teams or league pages) grabs that info, then goes back and grabs the data for the queried pages. It's a lot of calls (hence why each update is referred to as a "build," so that the content desk would understand that this is not a WordPress post they're updating), but the most important thing was to keep the content creation and updating as easy possible — I can convince editors to go back and edit their typos in a Google Doc, whereas it's much more difficult to convince them to dig into an HTML file to find their errors without creating more problems. The PHP script outputs partial templates based on the type of page — again, in the interest of not wanting to have to rebuild the whole app every time a small change is made, I didn't want to rely on the PHP scripts to build everything — they're strictly for extracting data in a sensible manner.

The PHP script outputs a combination of JSON and .kit files. .kit is the file extension for CodeKit 2's .kit language (I heartily recommend CodeKit2 for web devs, by the way), which is essentially PHP includes for HTML. This worked perfectly for our plans, since it allowed the major parts of the templates to be kept in a single location without having to literally regenerate the whole site (the PHP build script takes, on average, about 3-5 minutes to output the site — the .kit compile takes about 20 seconds). Dropping the .kit files into the build folder automatically generates the static HTML files in a different directory, and the site is ready to go.

Challenges

Aside from the obvious challenges of just getting things to work, the biggest challenge was extracting the text from the Google Docs with formatting intact. There are methods using the getAttributes method of the text class, but I could not get it to work reliably. (Of course, when I went to Google the partial answers I saw before I found a Markdown converter script that can email you the document that could be easily adapted. Damnit.)

We did not even look at, much less open the can of worms that is embedded images.

Epilogue

We're beyond happy in our decision to forego the app route in favor of responsive design — we had more visitors to the site in the first hour of its going live than we did downloads of the app to that point (more than a year later). The larger potential audience, the ability to deep-link into the site and the ease of access (get it wherever you are!) combined to make it a much bigger success. There are still a few updates we're going to get in before the start of the season, though — more teams, full rosters and some videos are still to come.

GameTimePA HS Football Preview — The actual site

Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children tweeting?" This question is likely nonexistent in journalism schools, which currently provide the means for 95+ percent of aspiring journalists to so reach said aspirations. Leaving aside the relative "duh" factor (one imagines someone who walks into J101 without a Twitter handle is the same kind of person who scrunches up his nose and furrows his brow at the thought of a "smart ... phone?"), simple (slightly old) statistics tell us that 15% of Americans on the Internet use Twitter.

(This is probably an important statistic for newsrooms in general to be aware of vis-a-vis how much time they devote to it, but that's another matter.)

For most journalism students, Twitter is very likely already a part of life. Every introduction they're given to Twitter during a class is probably time better spent doing anything else, like learning about reporting. Or actually reporting. Or learning HTML.

I know this idea is not a popular one. The allure and promise of every new CMS or web service that comes out almost always includes a line similar to, "Requires no coding!" or "No design experience necessary!" And they're right, for the most part. If all you're looking to do is make words appear on the internet, or be able to embed whatever the latest Storify/NewHive/GeoFeedia widget they came out with, you probably don't need to know HTML.

Until your embed breaks. Or you get a call from a reader who's looking at your latest Spundge on an iPad app and can't read a word. Or someone goes into edit your story and accidentally kills off a closing

tag, or adds an open , and everything disappears.

Suddenly it's "find the three people in the newsroom who know HTML," or even worse, try to track down someone in IT who's willing to listen. Not exactly attractive prospects.

Heck, having knowledge of how the web works would probably even help them use these other technologies. Not just in troubleshooting, but in basic setup and implementation. In the same way we expect a basic competence in journalists to produce their stories in Word (complete with whatever styles or code your antiquated pagination system might prescribe), so too should we expect the same on digital.

Especially in a news climate where reporters are expected as a matter of routine to file their own stories to the web, it's ludicrous that they're not expected to know that an tag self-closes, or even the basic theory behind open and closed tags. No one ever did their job worse because they knew how to use their tools properly.

I'm not saying everyone needs to be able to code his or her own blog, but everyone should have a basic command of their most prominent platform. It's time we shifted the expectations for reporters from "not focused entirely on print" to "actually focused on digital."

There's always a van. The Scooby gang, ghost hunters by trade if not specifically by design, rolled around in the Mystery Machine. The Ghost Hunters from SyFy flit from haunt to haunt in their souped-up van — black, of course, with "TAPS" stenciled in yellow "COPS" lettering on the side. Even the land boat the Ghostbusters tore through New York City with bears far more resemblance to a modern-day van than a car.

Though you may question whether the contemporary investigators are aping the ghost hunters of their youth, the Whispering Spirits Paranormal Research Society pulled up to Farmington Daily Times building in the quiet northwest New Mexico hamlet in their very own van. It was (appropriately enough) Friday the 13th, with a nice big moon hanging in the sky to perfectly illuminate the aging but still functioning newspaper. It's spooky business, poking around decaying buildings in the dark.

The motley crew that piled out for a night's work wasn't what you'd expect a group of ghost chasers to look like. They come in all shapes and sizes, all manner of hair colors and lack thereof, and range in age from 18 to well into Boomer territory.

Then again, if you really think about what real-life ghost hunting entails — a steadfast belief in the supernatural with an accompanying willingness to sacrifice your nights and weekends in pursuit of proving said logical improbability — they're exactly what you should expect them to look like.

They began unloading their hard plastic cases filled with all sorts of electrical gizmos, some recognizable and some not, around 11 p.m. To a person, the only thing they had in common other than the uniform black T-shirts was a determination, a sense of purpose. They exuded a clear sense of order and efficiency as they transferred the boxes first to the ground, then inside. It almost bordered on urgency — though, since the investigation wasn't set to begin until after midnight, it wasn't quite clear why.

They all wore matching black T-shirts with the name of the society and a very pixelated vortex plastered on the back, but it was rare you'd confuse any of them for another.

Mel, the undisputed leader of the group — who never was referred to as such by the rest except in their complete obedience to his every order — stood distinguishable by his stocky, muscular stature, his reddish-blond beard and accompanying (though thinning) hair. He got started right away.

"We expect to find whatever we can," he said, unpacking one of the six night-vision video cameras from where they lay in their custom-cut foam holes. He hands one of them to his wife, Krystal, one of the group's co-founders, and has her run it from the flat-screen monitor they brought with to a prearranged point in the other room. "We're doing a small investigation here, it'll be about an hour, an hour and a half."

The sheer amount of electronics the group carries along is somewhat staggering, especially considering the rather small area they're investigating on this trip. A lunchroom and a small bullpen seem like fairly easy ground to cover, but Mel says the total cost of the equipment they have is pushing $4,000. It's not hard to believe how expensive the equipment is. It's just a little hard to believe that the people who run this nonprofit (they're adamant about their IRS status) have nothing better to do with that kind of money.

Of course, it's a little hard to understand what drives a person to do this sort of work in the first place. As people who believe in ghosts, they're actually somewhat less equipped to deal with coming face-to-face with a spirit than a nonbeliever. A nonbeliever would be just as scared at a startling noise or a freaky coincidence, but logically they'd attribute it to just that — a coincidence. True believers, though, are prone to seeing specters around every corner. To them, that hard, bristly thing that brushes lightly against their left arm in the darkened room is out to get them — there's no chance it's just an upturned broom.

It all started with a cellphone. A smartphone, actually, the marvel of modern technology that carries a staggering amount of computing power in your hand. More than enough to solve the most intractable mathematical mysteries that stymied humans for generations. And it finds ghosts, apparently. Sometimes?

"We were messing around with an app on my phone, and it turned out to be fake, and we started wondering kind of a little bit more about the paranormal," says the other co-founder, Natasha. By day Natasha works at a deli, but nighttime is when she can bring out her spiritual, supernatural side.

"We found another app on the Droid called the Ghost Radar, and I was curious as to how it worked because I couldn't find anything on the Internet that said it was either fake or real," chimed in Krystal, interrupting slightly. The two went to a local cemetery to test out the app, which instructed them to look for "Paul."

It's worth noting that, on the website for Ghost Radar, the company's only comment on the app's veracity is that it's "as effective as an EMF detector or a KII." Which is to say they either believe in it wholeheartedly, or think it's a great way to transfer money from the gullible to their bank account.

Krystal, however, seemed to be convincing herself she believed.

"It was like leading us to it, I want to say, because we were looking for this person’s name and we couldn't find a Paul, and it said, 'Beyond,' so we're like, OK, so it's on the other side. It wasn't actually on the wall itself, it was on the ground, so we just kind of went from there and invested ..."

"They were playing, basically," interrupts Judy.

Judy is Mel's mother, something of a skeptic and an utterly devout Christian. She got into the ghost-chasing game after Mel and Krystal kept out all hours of the night and asked her to babysit the kids. Judy doesn't actually believe in ghosts, per se. She mostly tags along to help protect Mel and Krystal from the spirits they face, which Judy believes are all demons. She started asking to help them analyze the recorded evidence, and eventually worked her way up to a starting spot on the squad.

The investigation itself is actually the easiest part of the whole thing, if you can get over the whole "actively seeking out haunted places" thing. The part that Judy broke in through, the analyzing, is actually the most difficult piece — mostly because of the tedium. Hour upon hour of straining to look at grainy, black-and-white footage of something you just witnessed firsthand, all to find some — any — evidence of the supernatural. Since just about anything unusual can be ascribed to the supernatural, just about everything that happens has to be double-checked to rule out the presence of other beings.

Mel couldn't give me a definite estimate as to the man-hours involved, but what he did come up with sounded exhaustively time-consuming.

"Probably two hours for every hour, reviewing just video," he said. "It takes probably a couple of weeks to go over four hours worth of audio and video."

The cameras, recorders and what can only be described as gadgets they carry with them could stun a small herd of high school AV nerds. Each investigative "team" of two people carries at least one personal digital audio recorder. There are also various electromagnetic field readers, something called a "ghost box" (an AM/FM radio that continually scans through frequencies, so as to create "white noise" that spirits can use to make themselves heard more easily) and of course the Ghost TiVo, the digital video recorder that captures of every frame of freaky footage they shoot on their stationary night-vision cameras.

Between the expense, the late hours, the hours (and days and weeks) annihilated by analyzing and the cringe factor that accompanies an adult describing his or herself unironically as a "ghost hunter," it's somewhat bewildering to comprehend why this dedicated — and any group of people that willfully sacrifices this kind of time and money deserves the designation "dedicated," among others — group of people would do this kind of thing. From the variety of their answers, it's clear there's no category they can be slotted into, no on explanation that covers all of them.

Except, maybe — simply — that they like to do it.

"This is probably the best hobby we could ever come up with," says one.

It's time for the investigation to begin. First the entire group clears out to the back door, most to smoke, but ostensibly for the purpose of getting a neutral reading, of sorts. The sensors and video cameras can get a control reading — and maybe pick up some stray ghost bloopers before the spirits see the "ON AIR" light switch on.

The group also needs to let off some steam (slash smoke). This is the part of the play before the play, when the cast gathers backstage to let out the giggles, stretch and warm up their vocal chords. And, of course, pray for a good show.

Religion and ghost hunting don't mix together well when you first throw them in the blender. Though you can (and Mel does) point to the Bible for evidence of evil entities on Earth, the prescribed method for dealing with them involves commanding them into the bodies of pigs and running them off the cliff.

Not only are there no big drop-offs present, we're fresh out of pigs as well. This, however, does not deter the group.

"Basically, we stay in God's word. If I have to take a Bible with me, I'll take a bible with me. I preach God's word," says Mel. "There's no guarantee that we can get rid of what's there, but we do our best."

Mel, Krystal, Judy and Shane (he's the oil worker in his mid-20s with the tattoos and the leather vest that plunk him square in a moderate-to-rough motorcycle gang) are adamant about religion playing a huge role. Shane takes the same demonological hard line about spirits that Judy does, while both Krystal and Mel believe God protects them and their children against the spirits they counter. It might be the couple's biggest worry, actually — unknowingly bringing a ghost home for a spooky reenactment of "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?"

Mel's even had a sit-down with his pastor. Or two.

"He does not agree. He has an issue with me doing what I'm doing and my wife doing what she's doing," Mel recalls.

"He's just real concerned with the Bible and what it says," offers Krystal. "In there it says not to seek the spirits."

After the invocation, the group heads back in and picks up their gear. Each two-person team has the aforementioned voice recorder as well as a walkie-talkie to facilitate to communication and rule out false positives. If one of the teams hears a weird noise, they'll try to ascertain whether another group's nearby before maintaining radio silence in the hopes of hearing it again. Similarly, if the group leader back at base sees something on the camera, he can instruct a team in the field to take a closer look.

The audio devices seem to be the easiest way to catch a ghost, though the reason is never fully explained. Mel tells me he can just sit in his backyard with the recorder and hear plenty of voices. This for some reason makes him think the method is more, as opposed to less, reliable.

In addition to the audio devices, Judy's carrying around a garden-variety digital camera with the flash set to "accidentally staring directly at the porch light when your parents flip it on after the sun goes down." The hope is that you can catch a spirit by surprise? Or something. That was never really spelled out to me, though Mel assured me 35mm film cameras do a much better job than the new-fangled digital ones.

Even ghosts can be Instamatic hipster snobs.

Natasha and Shane are exploring the lunchroom, where unspecified paranormal activity is rumored to have taken place. They carry both an EMF reader and the ghost box. Shane takes the EMF reader and basically runs it over every square inch of the cabinets, walls and as much of the ceiling he can reach, interrupting every so often with a desultory, "Are you there?"

Natasha, on the other hand, immediately takes a seat at the table, lays her cellphone and the ghost box down on the table, and turns on the squawk.

"Are you there?" she asks, though it's more of a demand than a question. "Show yourself. Prove to me that you exist."

This goes on for longer than you'd think tolerable. In the corner of the room sits one of the tethered night-vision cameras, its presence notable for the circle of small red LED lights that ring the lens, staring directly at us. It's watching Natasha decry whatever spirits may be there as "cowards," challenging them to prove her wrong.

One obliges.

As the ghost box flips through the frequencies, every so often you'll be able to make out a word or a partial sentence that slips through a broadcaster's lips.

"Did it say 'press room'?" I ask at one point, pointing at the device even though we can't really see each other.

Natasha confirms she heard it too. Her aggressive patter picks up in volume and intensity, but we don't get much more in terms of aural confirmation.

But there is something strange going on. For some reason, every time the ghost box rolls through the 1300 AM range, you can hear a whine cycle up through different pitches. And when it gets to 1380 AM, it just ... stops.

It stops scanning and hunkers down on some random Latin music station. Natasha says it's never done that before. Shane agrees. When we set it to start scanning again, everything continues as normal. At least, until we hear the whine in the 1300s. And it stops. Again.

The group line is that they're debunkers. Sometimes it's the house settling, other times it's simply in your imagination. They say their job is to go in, gather all the information possible and announce that the ghost was actually just Mr. Jenkins, the creepy real estate developer, all along.

"The main purpose of the group is to go in and debunk, to make sure that people aren't seeing or hearing things that are naturally occurring," says Judy.

That's the spin on natural occurrences. When it comes to the supernatural — that no one spoke out against during the powwow we had before the investigation began — there are no human spirits wandering in search of a loved one or a great burger or a long-lost childhood sled.

Everything is demons. If you hear a voice that sounds like Grandma Lil or knows something only Uncle Jerry could know, that's just a particularly crafty demon trying to trick you. Judy also believes in demonic possession — but they're spirits of Hell, not spirits of people. Tricksy demons.

There's a lot to debunk in this creaky old newspaper office, though one can't really rule out the notion that one or more demons has passed through its halls posing as an editor or a sales rep. But there are plenty of clunks and groans when the air conditioner kicks on, at least twice an hour at random. And since the gigantic printing press used to be just on the other side of the wall, there's a drop-basement that holds the leads and connections to enough juice to power at least one good-size Vegas hotel.

This is where some of the science comes in, the debunking. They're a research society, see. It's right in the name. And their studying is not limited to extraterrestrials and ghost stories; they also read up on common phenomena, and I'm sure the electrician-in-his-other-life has gotten through a technical manual or two. That, the technology and the scientific method the group applies to their investigations (two people to a team, so they have verification; constant communication to rule out false positives; and making sure everyone knows where everyone else is for the same reason) are the values the group holds highest.

But the power plant only explains the crazy readings we're getting on one section of the wall with the EMF reader. We've still got this ghost box that's spooking us all just a little bit with its whine and random-but-not-at-all-random stoppages. We run it through some tests.

"Try stopping it manually once we start hearing the whine," I suggest. Natasha does so, and we both hear the whine skip up through the scale on each of the 1310, 1320 and 1330 AM stations.

"So the octave's not tied to the frequency," I offer, which sounds scientific-ish, at least to my ears.

Natasha nods. She then turns the scan back on, only to have it stop a few seconds later on the same station as before.

"OK, this is pretty weird."

Natasha nods again.

We sit in silence as we let the box run through the same cycle two or three more times. Then we decide to experiment again, so Natasha picks up her phone and hits a button so we can get a better view at the ghost box.

Which proceeds to skip right on by 1380. No whine, either. The ghost is gone.

We're both a little disappointed. She sets her phone back down so we can continue the hunt in darkness, which is apparently the group's guess at spirits' preferred mood lighting. When the whine comes back and the box stops abruptly at 1380, Natasha gasps.

"Dammit. It's my phone."

She moves it away from the box, and we resume the investigation in silence.

Some level of skepticism should be present. As debunking performs a fairly vital part of paranormal investigating, at least for Whispering Spirits, you'd expect the group to be somewhat wary of what it finds. You'd expect each of them (or at least some of them) to examine things with a critical eye, always naysaying each other and operating on a basis of "normal until proven not."

You'd also be wrong. Most of the debunking, it seems, falls to one man — Bobby.

"Bobby is very skeptical," Natasha had told me earlier. "He is the one who does not believe."

The concept was boggling. Why would a paranormal group carry around a skeptic on its roster? More to the point, who joins a group for the expressed purpose of not believing a word it says?

"I think it's curiosity," Bobby says. "I just like to prove 'em wrong. Until they can prove me wrong."

Bobby's proved 'em wrong on more than one occasion. Despite being very hard of hearing, the first thing he does when the group shows up on site is to check for any mitigating evidence — do the lights hum, is there a power plant behind that wall, what noises do you hear?

"Bobby's very observant," says Mel. "He'll note everything in his head, and when it comes time to go over evidence, he remembers. He tries to debunk everything that we come up with, because we get excited. He tries to explain everything."

Once, the group set up in an old graveyard. (Despite the ready abundance of dead bodies, nobody ever seems to haunt a new graveyard. Wrong atmosphere, maybe. Not the right aesthetics.) They had been wandering among the tombstones for a while, in the oldest section, running the ghost box.

"We were walking through there, and the radio come off with, 'Scared,'" Mel recalls. "And we stopped and we said, 'Don't be scared of us, we're here to help you' ... The girls come off with, 'What do you have to be scared of?' And it came through, 'Reaper.'"

The electromagnetic spook set the scene perfectly. Armed with their digital camera, the group took a steady succession of pictures of some spooky-looking trees.

"We were shooting pictures, and you see the dark images of trees, and there's the really dark image that looked really tall," says Mel. "It looked like the Reaper."

That one wound up being pretty easy for Bobby to debunk.

"It turned out to be me," he says.

Bobby's disbelief isn't really disbelief, though — more like the suspension of belief. He says he truly wants to believe in ghosts and spirits — he just hasn't had the opportunity yet.

At the very least, Bobby has to be a believer in belief, then, right? He's actually had a spooky experience he couldn't explain — a recorder he set down in a haunted basement recorded a disembodied voice growling, "Lucifer" about 10 seconds after he left a room. He has no explanation for it. But still he doesn't believe.

"Every investigation, though, I go in hoping to find something that I can't (explain) — that's not me. And so far, I've been let down," he says. "I wanna be a believer. And someday, I will be."

The dark is scary, regardless of whether ghosts are present. By far the spookiest occurrence took place in the press building, where the team finished up after scouring the main building. There are no windows in the building's deepest recesses, so the area where huge mountains of five-foot paper rolls are stored dims to the blackest of black with the lights off. So black you can't even discern the movement of your hand as you wave it in front of your face.

Stephen seems like the most normal guy in the bunch. His partner, 18-year-old Kim, isn't the opposite, but she's closer to the other side of the spectrum than to his.

Stephen and Kim set up in a paper-roll canyon that stretched back to the cinderblock wall, towering some 20 feet overhead. Stephen aimed a red laser pointer at the wall opposite, down the length of the chasm, explaining it would be much easier for a spirit to cause a small, weak light flicker than to manifest into a form visible by flashlight or camera flash.

So we waited. In absolute darkness, with only the tiniest, most anemic of red beams shimmering along our sides, barely even visible on the far wall. Your mind starts to play tricks at that point, combining the extraordinarily low light with the sleep deprivation that comes from ghost hunting until well into the 4 a.m. hour.

Then I heard shuffling.

Officially, I was along as an observer, not an investigator. And yet, much like when I asked if anyone heard "press room" on the ghost box, I felt compelled to speak up when no one else did.

For I knew the stories of the press building. Of the suicidal press operator who jumped into the baler (which compresses plastic barrels, cardboard or human flesh and bones, if you ask it, into much smaller and compacter versions of those things) in order to commit suicide. He failed to notice that the baler had been emptied and wound up just being stuck for the weekend, but it's still a bummer vibe to put out there.

I had heard of the full-bodied apparition of the '70s press operator, still dressed in the proper garb, standing watch at the control panel one late night. And the barking dogs and growls heard over by the ink tanks when no other soul, man or beast, was supposed to be in the building.

"I hear feet shuffling," I announced.

"You do?" asked Kim, surprised.

"Is anyone there?" I asked, directing my question toward the tiny point of light on the wall.

"Check the radio," I instructed Stephen.

He did. "No," came the response.

So we waited. Silence can seem oppressive in any situation, but in absolute darkness it's downright suffocating. I strained my eyes, trying to see anything.

Then I noticed the slightest waver in my peripheral vision, right along the left wall of the canyon. The laser beam streamed down almost directly along the right side, so the movement I noticed was so slight I almost missed it.

"I see something," I announced again, this time a little bit louder. I was, I admit, slightly scared. I scooted back away from the light, toward the cinderblocks. And I knew it wasn't Bobby this time, because I had heard him breathing heavily and walking away a few minutes earlier.

"You hear shuffling?" asked Kim.

"No, I definitely see something. Turn on the light, turn on the light!" I finished, my voice getting slightly louder, higher and faster on every word. Stephen fumbled for the laser pointer, which was attached to a flashlight, flipped the light on and shone it on whatever was coming for us. I gaped at what I saw lurching out of the darkness.

I don't know if Judy is right to be keeping an eye out for demons, or if Krystal's prayers do keep the evil away from her home and family. I don't know if Bobby's skepticism is well founded, or if Shane is correct in his adamant belief of evil spirits trying to fool us. I don't know what's on the other side, reaching out to make a connection to the land of the living.

But that time, it was Mel.

In the end, it turned out the newspaper wasn't terribly haunted. In the bullpen, where most of the spooky happenings had been reported, there were only two things to note before they went back to the tapes for analysis.

Judy managed to snap a photo of an "orb," a large globe of light that appears in one frame of a photograph and doesn't appear in any taken just before or just after. On the small screen of the digital camera, it definitely looks like an orb.

This was confirmed by one of the press workers, who exclaimed (multiple times) while looking at it, "Damn! You caught an orb!"

It's not as interesting as expected, given their recitations of other investigations. In fact, their very first time out they visited a location they refer to only as "The Basement," a literal hole-in-the-ground Mel had been told was haunted since he was a little kid.

"Growing up, all the kids used to talk about a lady that lived there that kidnapped kids back in the '40s," Mel recalled. After kidnapping them, locking them in cages and starving them for weeks, "she would take 'em down to the pond and drown 'em, if they were still alive. And she'd throw their bodies down a shaft."

Of course, after a full investigation the team found there was no truth to this story. The woman merely had several citations for cruelty to animals to her name before she was "taken away."

"She lit a horse on fire," according to a neighbor Mel spoke with.

Then the house was demolished and some homeless guy took up residence, kicking all the drunken teenagers out and scaring them by re-enacting "The Blair Witch Project" (back when people would have gotten the reference) before himself getting taken away by police.

Despite the attempted suicide-by-crushing in the press room story, this was no basement. Yes, one team did have a strange encounter with a table in the bullpen area. They sat the recorder and themselves down at one of the tables in a corner of the room where a lot of disturbances (both spectrally and in the flesh) took place. There, when Stephen (Kim's partner) knocked, a distinct rapping sound knocked right back.

"It's very interesting. It was almost like it answered me, so that's what makes me think it's not coincidental," Stephen recalls. "It knocked several times. I think it's something more. I'm hoping."

Kim, however, has no qualms about believing. Ghosts, spirits, demons, she'll root for the existence of everything. And she's even extra religious — though she grew up with her grandmother's Christianity, the deli-worker-by-day also got to hear about the traditional Navajo creation story and myths.

"Yeah, I believe there's a God, but I don't believe, 'Oh, you have to do this and be good,'" she says. "Traditional, they come from four worlds, and it's ... confusing, mainly. They talk about skin-walkers, bigfoots ..."

Of course, as much as religions differ, they also come together in surprising ways. In the same way that Mel and Krystal worry about ghost hitchhikers, Kim's dad employs his own religious cleansing for her ghostly doings.

"He believes that if I do something like this, then something's going to follow me home," she says. "He has to do a prayer with me, medicine man."

Kim's purpose for joining the group is the simplest, which is why it seems like the most honest.

"I just wanna find answers. To know if there really is another side," she says. "You have to find something to believe in, and I want to believe in something."

That may be why Kim appears to the most in tune with the supernatural. For the group's recent (and as of yet, only) UFO outing, Kim was the only one it communicated with, it "only lik[ed]" her. And this investigation — which was her "first big one," according to Krystal, as Kim is still technically training — she got a response in two different places, as opposed to most of the group's none.

Did Kim's search for answers influence her perceptions? Perhaps. Then again, it's possible she's just more attuned to the other side. Her grandmother told her the story of her grandfather, who was murdered before Kim was born. Every few years, her grandfather would visit her grandmother, telling her, "Good job."

"And he's telling her the next time he comes back, he's going to take my grandma with him," she says.

Kim also believes her grandfather is the voice in her head that restrains her from getting too angry or too upset, the voice that tells her, "Stop," or "Don't."

"My grandma says that's him protecting me. And that's what I want to know, I want the answer to it," she says. "I'm not all crazy about the idea of demons."

The intricate weave of belief in ghosts and religion seems to at once make both perfect sense and none at all. Kim's makes more sense than most, as she's already trying to tie together two beliefs that don't have any common threads — in fact, Christianity explicitly refutes much of traditional Navajo religion, If she can make those work, adding in ghosts just requires tweaking a few names.

The rest of the group, the devoutly religious, seems just as out of place on a paranormal investigative team as Bobby does. Are they just on the lookout for exorcism opportunities? Do they actually expect to see something? Do they really not see the parallelism of not believing in earthly spirits lingering after their physical life, but giving full credence to the notion that a heavenly spirit has total dominion over all?

"There's proof that there's a God. In history, and in the Bible itself," Judy says. "So we're guessing about spirits, we're not guessing about God. We believe in God."

In the end, if you ignore the somewhat muddled philosophies and jury-rigged beliefs, the group really does have one motivating idea. Kim is looking for answers. I don't know if she's finding any, but she's found a group of people that give her something to do after work — breaking her out of a rut that she says started when she finished school. Bobby is looking for evidence that will permit him to believe. He hasn't found it yet, but he still keeps coming along on investigations, sure that this one could actually provide the concrete solidity he needs. Mel, Krystal, Natasha, and who knows how many others are really just trying to find out what's out there — and they find something, every investigation, whether the origin of the phenomenon is supernatural or perfectly ordinary.

And when you think about it, that's pretty much what they've done so far. When they piled in and drove away that morning, they weren't trying desperately to convince anyone they'd encountered the supernatural. They had a few things they were going to check, sure, but that's just diligence — much like their other investigations. Despite the few "unexplained" occurrences such as the "Lucifer" recording, the group primarily spends its time finding weird stuff and then coming up with normal explanations for it.

Overall, their catalyzing agent is actually the same one that drives the original Scooby gang — getting to the truth. Demystifying the previously inexplicable.

Or, to use Judy's words, "To help people. So they're not afraid."

Poems for our "bureau" reporter in Santa Fe, whose stories I'm always left waiting for when I'm laying out:

Sitting at my desk wondering if you're still alive unmoved either way.

Four stories at noon two out, two new by midday; none ever find me.

He's slaving away Interviewing, contacting; AP filed at 5.

A blank page, staring waiting to be filled with news ... Angry Birds high score!

INT. HOUSE

MARGE: Mail call! [The rest of the family comes down the stairs in the same manner and with the same sound effect as in "The Brady Bunch," before lining up according to height]

MARGE: Let's see here ... Here's Pacifier Monthly, for Maggie. [Maggie makes a sucking sound, takes out her pacifier and starts sucking on the magazine]. For Lisa, there's The Weekly Nerdlington.

LISA: Ooh, I hear this issue has Dennis Miller referring to Christopher Hitchens like he's Sarah Shelton circa 1773. [Cut to the family staring blankly at Lisa]

LISA: [joylessly] Yay, Justin Bieber, woo.

MARGE: Oooh look, Ricky Gervais' How to Win Friends and Influence People for me! [cover shows Ricky Gervais painted to look like an Oscar statue, but flashing both middle fingers at the camera.] Bart, you got another letter from that Dick Cheney person.

BART: All right! [opens letter] Aw, man. This says I'm still six years too young to join the Dastardly League of Evil.

MARGE: Well, at least he sent you a neat button! [Marge takes the envelope, shakes out a button into her hand and puts it on his shirt. The button's face has Mt. Rushmore, with Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly's visages on it. The flag serves as the sky, Glenn Beck is crying tiny dollar signs and the inscription at the bottom reads, "REMEMBER WHAT OUR COUNTRY STANDS FOR".]

MARGE: And for Homer ... Oh lord, it's another letter from ABSTNES.

HOMER: Abstinence? Marge, you said it's OK if I drink as long as other people are around.

MARGE: Not alcoholism, ABSTNES — the Association for Businesses of Springfield for Tourism and Negating the Effect of the Simpsons. Besides, drawing a face on your hand doesn't count as having other people around.

HOMER: Quiet, Marge! [in an undertone] He knows things. [talking with his right hand in a crude British accent] Yeee-es. You chaps won't be rid of me that easy.

LISA: What's it say, Mom?

MARGE: (reading the letter) Dear Simpson Family: Because of the many instances of indecent blah blah blah ... Given the prestigious nature of Founding Day and your husband's propensity for intoxication, we've decided it's in the town's best interests to send you ... [gasps] They're giving us a free trip to Albuquerque!

LISA: I want to visit a Pueblo settlement!

BART: I want to go to a cactus factory!

HOMER: Pssh, stupid kid. Cactuses aren't made in a factory, they grow on trees, like money. And candy. [Drools] Mmm, candy tree.

MARGE: Well, we'd better hurry up! The plane leaves in half an hour.

LISA: The Simpsons are going to New Mexico!

In the 20-odd years The Simpsons have been on the air, they've had some ... shall we say, flimsy premises for episodes that see them jetting off to exotic locales like Africa, Brazil or Japan. At one point, back when the writers still had a modicum of integrity, they made nods to the eccentricity of the plot setups somewhat akin to the parody above.

At this point, facing my third move (to a third state) in a year and a half, my life is starting to feel like a Simpsons episode.

Rest assured — or be disappointed, for that matter — my next stint does not involve starting my own snowplow company or buying an old ambulance and renting myself out as a medic for hire. I've managed to snag myself a gig as an online editor for the Farmington Daily Times, a small outfit in northwest New Mexico that produces some darn good journalism ... but could use some help on their interwebs (and, hopefully, I'll get to do a little copy editing and page design while I'm at it).

It's not the only option I had, but it was the best. I was recruited for a copy editing position in Chicago for Groupon, the online-local-coupon dealer. But I decided to stick with journalism, at least for one more go-round, for several reasons. One, I still have that hankering to have a new product to deliver constantly. Straight-up website copy editing, like the stuff at Groupon, is so intangible — even the deliverables are at best one page that looks pretty much the same as the rest. Two, the chance to get into the web stuff and mess around with it, figuring out how to better to tell a story or keep readers informed, is a much greater (and infinitely more interesting) challenge — interesting and challenge being my two favorite words when it comes to finding something to do.

Once again, I'm moving to a new place where I don't know anybody outside of work, essentially the same situation I was in when I moved to Coeur d'Alene. But I muddled through it once, I figure I can survive again. What disappoints me the most is reading this post, with lines like "The hope is to keep this apartment for quite some time, to break the moving cycle. At least long enough so that the next time I have to move, it actually means something again" ... only six months after I wrote it.

In the most technical of terms, I did accomplish what I set out in that post: Moving this time will mean something to me. It's perhaps not for the reasons I would like (having spent a number of years setting down roots in a place, both professionally and personally, meeting people and creating lasting relationships), but it's there. I also take more than a little solace in the idea behind the sentiment: To create enough of a home base that it feels like an upheaval when I moved. It happened a little this time, the roots tugging when I tried to pull them up, but there's every hope and opportunity that this next move might be the one that gets it right, for however brief or long I might be there.

Am I sad Spokane didn't work out? Of course I am. There are tons of people I'm going to miss; unique opportunities I missed that I'll regret, and ones I experienced I'll treasure. Does it mean I'll give up when I try the next place? Hardly. And though my moves are at this point reaching the level of fodder for a past-its-prime animated sitcom, it doesn't mean it won't wrap up with a nice, sentimental (sometimes bordering on the verge of sappy) wrap-up. Episodes from the early seasons of The Simpsons prove you can have fun, slapstick-y humor with an emotionally uplifting conclusion. The first, funny part is already on the books. All I have to do now is figure out how to write the ending.

"When I ask 'What's next?', it means I'm ready to move on to other things. So, what's next?" — Jed Bartlett, The West Wing

Six months ago, I quit my job as a "Web Publications Specialist." The hours were absurdly long (overtime was expected and uncompensated), and even herculean efforts — like the time I put in a 25-hour day in order to help finish a website for launch — went unnoticed, save to be exploited for publicity purposes later. I enjoyed my co-workers, but I didn't really enjoy the work, didn't really get anything out of selling overpriced things to people who really didn't need them in the first place.

So I started looking around. I regularly surfed journalismjobs.com, trying to find something that suited my skill set. I mostly applied for sports editing, copy editing and page design positions, though I would occasionally branch out if it was in Washington state somewhere. For the first few months it never really went anywhere, but around February/March I started to get responses.

Some were in-state, others were from elsewhere. I had set up a few phone interviews a couple weeks in advance when all of a sudden I got an email from The Inlander, which had the tripartite advantage of a) being close, b) being snarky and c) being a copy editing position, which is where I've often felt I can do some of my best work.

I was actually on vacation in British Columbia when I got an email asking me to come in for an interview later that week. I had no problem with this, as I really wanted the job, so I cut it a day short and drove back across the state on Friday morning in anticipation for an interview that afternoon. When I got the job, I just couldn't stop smiling. It felt like one of those perfect moments — I was just coming off vacation, I was happy, and to celebrate I went to a friend's barbecue and got completely black-out drunk and passed out around 10 pm.

When I woke up at 2 am, my mind was clear and I immediately started figuring out what I had to do: resign, find a place to live, figure out how I was going to move everything. I had one thought, derived from an episode of The West Wing I always enjoyed. It's partially encapsulated by the epigraph above, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The idea behind is that there are things you can change and there are things you cannot. Oftentimes, when circumstances come at you, the best thing to do is not to whinge about how bad everything else and how unfair life is treating you. When the variables change, all you can do is survey the situation and figure out: What's next?

Six months ago, I plunked down in a low-slung chair, facing a brilliantly sunlit window the Inlander's publisher sat in front of. After asking the traditional "Why do you want to do this?" and "What are you hoping to get out of this?" questions, he turned to a topic intimately dear to my heart: loyalty.

"How long are you planning on staying in Spokane?" he asked. "We're looking for somebody who's in this for the long haul, five or 10 years."

Loyalty describes almost everything I've ever done in a professional setting. It's why I always worked so hard, both at the Evergreen and later at my former job. At the Ev, the loyalty was to the paper, to the profession, to the ideal that the news was a vital cog in society's machinery, but mostly it was to my friends. My friends, who toiled tirelessly day in and day out, trying to put out the best newspaper they possibly could. It was why I didn't mind staying late or taking on extra tasks: Out of loyalty. Even later, at a job I didn't feel any particular respect for, I was more than happy to stay late or help other people out because I knew they'd do the same for me if asked.

One month ago, I was called into the publisher's office for a meeting with him and the managing editor. As I sat down, I was told we were there to "talk about my position" — more specifically, the lack thereof. Due to budgetary constraints for 2011, they said they couldn't afford to keep me on. I could either take my leave then, with one week's severance, or continue to work through the end of December. I chose the latter, figuring that a week's pay ("completely fucked") was inferior to a month's pay ("mostly fucked").

When I went home, I did as any self-respecting Coug would: I drank. Heavily. I started when I got home at 4:30 pm and finished around 11 (when I passed out), taking most of a bottle of Scotch and a goodly portion of a bottle of Everclear with me. (This was actually a few days before Apple Cup, which I originally intended to attend but decided that — given my financial and emotional state — was probably not in the best interests of either my liver or my wallet.)

When I awoke the next morning (a Friday, which meant work), I stumbled out of bed and into the shower. I fashioned myself into the closest approximation of a functioning human being I could muster, put on my coat and marched out the door to work.

What next?

I gave myself one night to bask in self-pity, and then I started to get to work. I updated my resume, started rooting through my computer to find my portfolio website, couldn't, got three-quarters of the way through making a new one before I found the old one, ditched the new one and updated the old one. I started crawling JJobs again, firing off resumes and cover letters.

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in blaming people. Lord knows there's enough to go around. I could angrily denounce the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers for fucking over our generation so royally, leaving us with an endless carousel of education, internships, jobs that we get thrown off of well before the ride ends. Or to start scrutinizing and finding those tiny little things that don't seem like much when everything's going along swimmingly, but blow up to gigantic proportions when everything's going to hell. Things simply are what they are.

But none of that does any good. I know that's a tough prescription to take (much akin to a "Tough shit" offered when an accusation of unfairness is raised), but it's true. I struggled with it myself in those first few minutes after I went back to my desk after the meeting. I kept flashing back to that first meeting with the publisher, with the thoughts of loyalty running through my head: "I moved to Spokane, I quit my job, I gave my word that I wouldn't jump at the next incrementally better job ... You, on the other hand, laid me off/let me go/fired me six months in."

(These phrases sound like they're different, but only if you're not on the receiving end.)

It would have been easy (believe me) to level an accusation of hypocrisy, but that would have been intellectually lazy of me — and not changed a damn thing, besides. They looked at the numbers and decided what was best for them moving forward, what was best for the company. Obviously it's not the outcome I would have preferred, but it does me no good to carry bitterness for their ensuring the paper's continued existence. And, again, such vituperation can't help me; they can only function as distractions.

I enjoyed my time at the Inlander. I'm immensely fond of all the writers, production people and even some of the advertising folks (no, really!), and take great pride in a few of the stories I wrote (and had a great time writing sarcastic, cynical comments on just about every cultural product imaginable).

Though nothing's certain yet, I'm fairly deep into the interview process for one job, and I'm sure the hiring machinery for others will kick into a higher gear once the holidays are over. I would have preferred to have a gig lined up by now (as I tend to get all twitchy and stabby when I have nothing to do), but there's nothing I can do about other peoples' decisions — I can only influence my own. And however this interview or the next turns out, it's not that big of a deal. I'll simply do what I can: Examine what I did, try to figure out what I can do better next time, and ask myself the only question that matters ... What's next?

Note: This story was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

15:00, Q1 – 156 yards to go

It's an inauspicious setting to set a record. At opening kickoff at Joe Albi Stadium, the home team’s student section (Mead), celebrating Senior Night, looks anemic. The visiting team’s side is even worse.

Besides the actual game itself, the running subplot involves Gonzaga Prep’s standout running back Bishop Sankey, who entered the game with 3,782 career rushing yards, 155 behind the all-time Greater Spokane League record of 3,937. One could safely assume that Sankey, averaging 253 yards per game, would be able to surpass it.

Sankey runs it up the middle following a G-Prep interception on the first play of the game, spins to avoid a defender, keeps churning, breaks free and sprints down the field for a 56-yard touchdown.

14:32, Q1 • 100 yards to go

Sankey says he knew about the record before the game, but it wasn’t the most important thing on his mind.

“Each game, I just try to help my team as much as I can,” he says. “I’m just trying to get the longest runs I can, trying to score every time.”

It’s pretty clear to everyone — people in the stands, his coaches on the sidelines, the other team’s defense — that the best way for G-Prep to win is to put the ball in his hands. Even if you know what’s coming (and since Sankey had 41 carries en route to 359 yards, it wasn’t exactly a secret), it’s still really hard to bring him down.

Sankey’s picked up gains of four yards here, six yards there, in between giving the ball to other backs a few times and G-Prep airing it out. His second TD comes after he runs right, head-fakes and dips in and out of the defense before finding the goal line.

1:46, Q1 • 49 yards to go

It’s difficult to ascertain at first glance what exactly makes Sankey such a great runner. He’s fast, but not the fastest; he’s not particularly tall, at 5-foot-9, but he’s solidly built. Really, it’s a combination of things.

“His vision is great, his explosiveness, his power, is phenomenal. He’s got great balance,” says G-Prep’s head coach Dave McKenna. “I mean, everything’s pretty good.”

Sankey keeps whittling down the magic number: pounding it up the middle for 12 yards; dragging a player who’s caught his jersey for five yards before going down. Then, needing 7 yards to break the record, he sees a hole and dives through for an 8-yard gain.

5:21, Q2 • -1 yards to go

The record is announced over the PA system, and the fans give him a standing ovation. McKenna calls a timeout to talk things over.

“I just wanted to congratulate him and tell him it was a huge achievement, but it wasn’t about him — it was about his teammates as well. He understood that, and wanted to get the W,” McKenna says.

Sankey proves it by going out and scoring his third TD of the game on the next play. He got the next two yards, the score and another 201 yards, to boot. G-Prep won the game, and a spot in the playoffs, 35-21.

Even though Sankey’s on the verge of setting more marks, for most rushing yards in a single season at the GSL and state levels, he says he’s focused on something else: next week’s game against Ferris, ranked No. 4 in the state (G-Prep is No. 6). About setting records, he has one philosophy.

“I was just trying to take it each game, each carry at a time,” he says. “If it happens, it happens.”

This piece was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

Minor league baseball. Even the name sounds so ... inferior.“Minor league” has that connotation in today’s parlance: cut-rate. Second-fiddle.

Not good enough.

Most often, when people refer to something as “minor league,” it’s with the assumption that things aren’t ever going to get any better: a permanent state of mediocrity. When you’re actually referring to minor league baseball, though, there’s another word you should add to the end of the last definition: not good enough yet.

It’s an expression that certainly applies to this year’s Spokane Indians, both as individual players and the team as a whole. The Indians opened their season with a pair of four-game losing streaks split by an 8-1 win against the redundantly named Vancouver Canadians.

The reason for their struggles isn’t readily apparent, at least not after watching just one game. No one’s throwing the ball into the stands instead of hitting the cutoff man; the first baseman isn’t striding out to the batter’s box with his helmet on backwards. The troubles start and end with consistency.

“One night you’ll get pitching, but you don’t get hitting. The next night you’ll get defense, but we don’t get great pitching,” Manager Tim Hulett says. “You’ve got to put those things together.”

The Indians certainly have the roster to contend on any given night. Shortstop Jurickson Profar, a 17-year-old prospect out of Curacao, can hit, field and throw — but then, he wouldn’t be playing professional baseball if he couldn’t do that. Hulett says what sticks out are Profar’s game awareness and highly tuned instincts. Especially when you consider he’s only a teenager.

Big 6-foot-2 third baseman Mike Olt provides some power at the plate, says hitting coach Brian Dayette, and Olt backed that up by knocking in a double and a triple in his first three games. In addition to his offensive prowess, he’s also an asset in the field. “For a big guy, he’s got some great feet, some good hands, and he can make some really good plays,” Hulett says.

Pitching coach Justin Thompson mentions Chad Bell, Zack Osborne and Jimmy Reyes as promising arms to watch. Though the trio has combined for zero wins and two losses thus far, Thompson still sees their upside.

“Once we get those guys stretched out and get their pitch count up, I think we’re going to contend,” says Thompson.

Whether pitcher or position player, the most important thing a minor-league player (assuming there are no gaping flaws in their fundamentals) gets out of a season is experience. The more innings they play, the more chances they have to further their development. But when looking at the feeder-system nature of the minor leagues, there would seem to be two conflicting forces driving a given team: getting wins and developing players.

Hulett doesn’t see it that way. “Our focus is on developing winning players, because I think [winning and developing players] go hand-in-hand,” he says. “It’s hard to develop a player who goes through your whole system [and who] loses at every level and then say, ‘Go win at the big-league level.’”

To a certain extent, using the term “minor league” in a derogatory tone makes sense even in a baseball context: As a whole, the team’s never really going to get all that much better. But that’s only because when the end of the season rolls around, the best players will be moving another rung up the ladder. The worst will find a different career.

And those who need a little more time will be back next year, ready to mix with another crop of guys starting out from scratch. They probably won’t be that good. At least, not yet.

As I sat down in the dark, empty newsroom, I was suddenly hit by a realization. I wasn't going to blog about it, but I figure you've got to have some milestones in life.

As of right now, I will be starting on my second year of employment at the Evergreen.

Wow, it feels really weird to say that. I'm honestly shocked I'm still working here. Last summer, I was only working one job (computer repair, 20 hours a week), and was getting really bored. I saw a house ad looking for columnists, and seeing as how I love the sound of my own voice (figuratively, of course [or should I say, literarily]), I ventured down to the Murrow dungeon and grabbed an application.

It wasn't the first time I considered working for the Evergreen (I had picked an app that spring but never bothered to fill it out), but it was the first time I actually turned my application in. I filled it out and turned it in on June 17th, and promptly thought nothing else about it.

On the 19th, I got a call from Kellie, the opinion editor at the time. She said to come on in for an interview on the 20th (a Wednesday). I was somewhat surprised it was so quick, but I figured I should have a sample ready to show her in case she wanted to see how I wrote. I did some research, looked up some quotes about WSU in the press recently, and wrote up a quick column.

When I went in, Kellie went over the basics with me, told me I was hired and asked when I could have my first column in by. It literally took about that long. I showed her my sample column, to which she made a few suggestions/edits and printed it. I remember walking between Murrow East & West staring at my watch around 4:30. Damn, I thought, I'm gonna be in the newspaper. And I didn't have to get arrested or anything.

I didn't even know columnists got paid at that point. I was perfectly willing to do it for funsies so I wouldn't be so bored. I wrote about half a dozen columns, submitted my name at the end of the summer as someone willing to do it again in the fall, and dismissed it when I didn't hear anything.

Then, on the Tuesday of Work Week (the week before school starts when all the sororities and fraternities clean/repair their houses), I got a call on my phone. It was Lisa, telling me the Evergreen needed an opinion editor and someone (I'm assuming it was Mel) had mentioned me as someone who was capable of handling it (translation to my ears: Your copy didn't require too much work during the summer ... but I showed them!).

I called her back and was invited to visit the newsroom the next day.

Well, I dutifully turned up and was immediately intimidated by all the people who were busily and purposefully going about their work. Clearly, these were people who knew what the hell they were doing. Being far too nervous to speak, I was lucky Lisa happened to be coming out of her office and introduced herself to me. She (along with Tor) pulled me into the office and closed the door, with Lisa behind the desk and Tor seated in the pink comfy chair. I don't think Victor said much beyond quizzing me on some InDesign stuff, and it mostly consisted of Lisa couching everything in terms of language that implied I was taking the job, or else (it was a masterful job of persuasion). That was pretty much it. The next thing I knew Lisa led me outside the office, announced I was the opinion editor (I specifically remember Kaci yelling, "Finally!" or "Thank God!"), and off I went.

That was 10 months ago.

I still feel a little foolish typing in "deeditor" at the login screen every day, but I've mostly gotten over it. And ... I'm in charge? I still haven't stopped looking over at the editor's office, expecting Brian or Lisa or Tor or somebody to walk out and tell me what to do or pointing out how to do something better. It's always a bit of a jolt to realize how far away Tacoma, Spokane and the 'Couv really are.

I won't say every day working at the Ev is fun, because God knows there are those ridiculously frustrating days that make you feel all stabby. But I almost always feel better walking into the newsroom than I do any place else, and there aren't many other locales that I can say that about.

And even though this summer's provided its own set of ridiculous happenstance, I still feel we're able to take whatever comes at us and keep on rolling. As long as there's a passionate core group, this paper's never going under. Thank god for the summer staff, by the way. They freaking rock, even if I never bother to tell them (because there's always more work to be done).

I didn't ever think I'd end up working as an editor (hell, I barely knew what an editor did) when I first applied for the Ev, and I certainly didn't think I'd ever move out of opinion. Regardless, I can confidently say I've never once regretted any decision I made regarding working here.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure and thank everybody who helped me out along the way. Of course, by those people I mean all the other editors I've worked with (even including some who I never served under/with, but now wish I had) and even some of my writers (shudder), all of whom have helped me to get better at this thing as I go along, and I only hope I can help carry on the tradition. I'd list everybody individually, but the worst thing I can imagine is forgetting someone, so it's gotta be a group thang.

In short, it's been quite an eventful year for me. But as the saying goes, tomorrow's another day. And damn, the day after that's Sunday, which means another paper.

Better get to work.