Writing – Accolades

In June 2011, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD took 1st place in The Sandy Writing Contest’s thriller/suspense/mystery category. The contest is associated with the Crested Butte Writers.

Here is a bit what the final judge, an editor at a respected publishing house, had to say:

“I felt this was the most commercially viable of the 5 books based on the quality of the writing and voice. I liked Gabriella and wanted to spend time with her. I also thought the author did a good job establishing character, plot, AND building suspense within a short period of time. This reminded me of Sue Grafton or Jan Burke.”

And here is what one of my favorite editors had to say about my and my colleagues newspaper coverage of the Laci Peterson story.

GRUESOME DISCOVERY PROMPTS NEWS COVERAGE ISSUES

Author: CHRIS LOPEZ, TIMES ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

THE DISCOVERY of human remains along Richmond’s Point Isabel Regional Shoreline opened a whole host of issues for our newsroom this week.

By now you know the story. The decomposed remains of a full-term baby discovered one day, then the skeletal remains of a woman found a mile away the next.

Put two and two together, and you’ve possibly solved the disappearance of Laci Peterson.

Everyone leaped to that conclusion — it was hard not to. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story for us was the secondary story: We led the journalism pack to the story and became a recipient of the national spotlight.

Here’s how it happened. The Times first reported Monday the discovery of a dead baby along the Richmond shoreline.

Unless you read the entire local news section carefully, you probably didn’t even see the news brief. I didn’t see it myself until halfway through my second cup of coffee Monday morning.

Reading it, I looked up at my colleague next to me and told him, “I hope someone is looking into this for a follow for tomorrow’s paper.” That’s what Metro Editors do.

He assured me our police reporter was on it, and I went back to reading.

Of course, that was the end to our normal Monday. What followed was a day of snap decisions that ultimately put the pressure on the very essence of news gathering: trusting sources.

At about noon reports began coming in from East Bay Regional Park District police about human remains found near Point Isabel, and by mid-afternoon three of our reporters, Kristi Belcamino, Brian Anderson and Karl Fischer, had mobilized and were reporting on what became the story of the week.

Then the challenges came, and the first decision.

Belcamino, Anderson and Fischer are all criminal justice reporters — the cops beat — who work out of three separate newsrooms.

On this story, they’re each reporting through normal channels: Belcamino from the county coroner’s office, Anderson from the East Bay Regional Parks police where he has contacts, and Fischer with Richmond police.

As they talk to their contacts and report back to the newsroom, we’re figuring out they’re all hearing similar information.

Badly decomposed remains. Petite female body. Full-term baby. Pieces of undergarments.

The reporters are getting this information because they’re talking to people who know them, and as a result feel comfortable with them and trust their reporting.

That’s why we encourage our reporters to get out into the communities, their beats. They talk to people, cultivate “sources” and develop trust.

That’s the heart of a reporter’s job, day after day. Many times they talk to the same people, but that’s how they develop relationships.

This practice allows reporters to develop background information and not quotes for attribution.

That’s the condition of the conversations. The reporters can trust the information they’re being given because they’re getting it from people they know.

But then we have to decide whether the information we’re getting is credible enough to put out in the public domain. That’s when editors come into play.

We ask questions like, “Tell me who your source is of information?” “Tell me why you trust them?” Sometimes, it’s not enough.

In the case of the human remains, because of its high-profile nature and the damage it can do if we’re wrong, we must be extra careful. So to use the information in a story, we want it corroborated by at least two people, preferably three.

That’s the standard. If you’re hearing it from one person, that’s interesting; it gives us something to go on. If you hear it from two, it must be true. If you’re hearing it from a third, then the information should be golden. We have two, and on some of the details we have three. We’re golden.

Now the next decision. In the age of Internet, the rules of reporting information have changed.

We don’t have to wait for the morning paper to print what we’ve got. We can post a story on our Web site almost immediately.

So the decision we’re faced with is should we hold back, keep reporting and develop what we have for the morning edition? Or, take what we have, mold it into a story that is laced with information that is still developing, and post a story on the Contra Costa Times Web site, pronto?

We decided to go the route of the Web site, and the phone didn’t stop ringing for two days.

First the “Today Show” called. Then The Washington Post. Then the New York Post, CBS radio out of Boston, WOR radio out of New York, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News. You name it, we heard from them.

The Web site gave the Times a competitive advantage on the story. We were first with it. We had the best inside information. From here, all the other media work it for themselves.

The other media outlets requested photographs we had taken. They requested interviews with our reporters who had the inside information.

Our Walnut Creek newsroom appeared on national television. And through it all, our reporters kept working their beats.

That’s how it went this week. The sad thing is that regardless of whether it’s Laci Peterson and her unborn son, or whether it’s two other people altogether, to have human remains washed ashore like this is tragic.

That’s why we have to be careful and responsible with the information. We owe that much to the lives that have been lost here.

Lopez is assistant managing editor/metro editor of Contra Costa Newspapers.