Day 13: Crime data, Fire kid

When I got into the Gazette, Jessica gave me some information about my next story. I would be doing a story about a Seguin teen who help when a trailer was on fire, while he was on vacation in Rockport, Texas. The teen helped remove items from the trailer and tried to help put it out. The teen’s brother contacted the Facebook page about the story, so Jessica floated his contact information to me I would need to call and interview him.

After preparing my questions, I gave him a call. I didn’t get him immediately, so I left a voicemail. I also sent a message to the Rockport Fire Department Facebook page, and asked for someone to call me back. Jessica said that would probably be faster than calling their listed number. I did almost immediately get someone, it was their Public Relations person, who said they would call me back in a little while that day.

While I waited for the brother and Rockport FD to return my call, Derek sent me a press release from Morgan Ash about the decrease in crime in Seguin, and asked me to write a story for the Staff Reports. I wrote up a decent story about it and sent it along to Derek.

A little while later, the brother of the teen called back. His interview went extremely well. The story that he was telling about his younger brother was very incredible, and I felt kind of honored to be writing a story about this.

The brother gave me the contact information for the teen’s father. So I called up the father and interviewed him as well. The father’s interview went okay. He didn’t give long responses, so I had to push various questions a little. At the end of his interview I tried to see if I could talk to the teen, but the Dad didn’t really seem like he wanted me to. He said that the teen was shy and wouldn’t like to talk on the phone. I offered to give my number in case he changed his mind, but he was pretty adamant. I didn’t push though, because I didn’t think that would be right after two fairly certain no’s.

It took me a little bit to transcribe the interviews. While I was doing so, I heard Derek and Jessica talking about the Staff Reports article. Derek was looking at a chart that was at the bottom of the press release and it showed that while overall crime was down, some of the heavier crimes like theft, rape and such had actually increased. Unfortunately, the computer I work on at the Gazette does not have Microsoft Word, so I have to write all my articles in Text Edit. Text Edit did not display the graph, which is why I didn’t see it. It wasn’t a bad thing though, Derek took over the article from there. He made some edits to it and contacted Morgan Ash. He kind of panicked her about his questioning of the stats and she passed him off to the SPD’s Captain of Operations to speak with.

The article that I had written remained mostly intact, but Derek added a few things about the crimes that were up.

After my Fire Kid interviews were transcribed, I wrote up my story. It came out really good! Rockport FD never called me back though, and I really wanted their interview. The day was starting to come to a wrap. I emailed Derek what I had, as it could run with how it was and be okay. But both of us really felt that the Rockport FD voice needed to be in there. I told him that I would try to call them Monday and update the story and send it to him, if they call back (the story was slated to run the following Tuesday).

With that done, I packed up and headed home for the day.