Stories on the run

I’ve been bounced around so much this past year that I’m somehow reminiscing about a beat I never even had. How does that work?

Lisa posted about running into Aron Baynes and Caleb Forrest at Hoopfest, so I won’t delve into that, though it was cool to talk to those guys again. I was once again reminded that I’m not tall.

The big Cougars news this week, of course, was the Charlotte Bobcats drafting Kyle Weaver. Here’s a press conference video from The Charlotte Observer in which we see Weaver all dressed up (something I’ve never seen before), holding a No. 25 Bobcats uniform and smiling that smile we all know. It’s great to see someone who’s worked so hard be recognized in such a huge way as playing in the NBA.

The background: Tony Bennett said he is not going to go to Indiana, has many reasons to like Pullman, and has not considered other open coaching positions.

The misrepresentation: Tony Bennett is staying at WSU.

I must be foreword by saying I had absolutely no hand in the Spokesman’s (read: Vince’s) breaking this story. But what concerned me was the Spokesman’s headline on its front page much of the day Sunday that said Bennett is staying at WSU.

I’m fairly certain this came about because of the built-in gap between reporter and copy editor. A reporter writes one thing that is very specific and carefully worded — i.e. Bennett says no to Indiana, says there are many reasons to stay in Pullman, but doesn’t specifically say he’s staying at WSU — and a copy editor posts the story online with a headline that jumps to a conclusion.

I’m glad the Spokesman (and other papers that made this error Sunday evening) had fixed the discrepancy this morning. But if you look closely, both versions of the headline are still on the website, as illustrated below.

Oh, and for those of you who might think this is dangerous to write about because it’s commentary on the company I work for, let me tell you something about the journalism industry: Skepticism is the name of the game. Don’t fret.

CHICAGO — That’s right, a Chicago dateline. I’m sitting at O’Hare International waiting for a flight to Seattle.

I’m heading home because the Cougars lost Thursday night. In fact, they got whooped by North Carolina. 68-47? That was WSU’s lowest point total of the year. And I think what has everyone bummed is not that Washington State lost — we expected that — but that it played so poorly.

Nevertheless, the Spokesman-Review crew — we put together quite the report on the loss, as evidenced by the screen shot above I took Thursday night (Friday morning?) before I got to sleep. That’s a picture, however, so you’ll have to follow the following links to find my stuff.

Here’s my quick post-game article, which I had plenty of time to write during the game because it was so obvious the Cougars were tanking. And here, after some worrisome technical difficulties (my computer didn’t originally capture the WSU press conference — you know, the biggest one of the year — so I had to capture it from a beta tape a few hours later), is my post-game interview video.

That technical delay explains why I got to sleep at 2:45 a.m. I woke up three hours later so we could leave the Charlotte Marriott at 6:20 to get to the Greensboro airport. Our flight left at 9:50 a.m., and now I’m here in Chicago.

UPDATED: 7:05 p.m. EDT

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — These have been some of the longest two hours of my life, rivaled only by the homestretch on Highway 26 from Othello to Pullman. In one more hour, the Cougars will take on the Tar Heels in what is probably the biggest game in Washington State basketball history.

It’s the Sweet 16, and the No. 21 Cougars are playing the No. 1 team in the nation. What’s getting to me? The fact WSU has a chance. At least one better than a snowball’s in hell. The second-best defensive team in the nation against the second-best offensive team in the nation. Like Tony Bennett said Wednesday, it will be quite the “collision” of styles.

Lisa texted me a while ago and asked if I was nervous. I started typing no, then I realized my left leg was bouncing up and down — and had been for 30 minutes. I suppose I am nervous.

Ethical? You be the judge. I’ve overhead other journalists here say they’re nervous. It’s a big game. I can’t imagine how the Cougars themselves are feeling right now, getting dressed in their locker room down the labyrinthian hall 100 feet away from me. Bennett probably has quite the motivational speech planned.

My next post will be after the game, which starts at 7:27 p.m. EDT. By my next post, we’ll know what happened. We’ll know if I’m staying in Charlotte two more days or trying to catch the 7:30 a.m. flight from Charlotte to Denver, then Denver to Spokane. (We’ve been eyeing that already.)

Happy television viewing.

UPDATE: Twenty minutes until game time. I ventured up into the concessions area to buy some event T-shirts, and all the WSU Sweet 16 shirts were sold-out. The other three teams’ shirts were there in abundance.

The Cougars fan section is fairly strong, and I’ve seen a lot of WSU fans walking around the arena. Lots of athletes’ families, and just general fans. Andy Katz, from ESPN, is currently talking with Dick Bennett, Laurel Bennett (Tony’s wife) and Derrick Low’s dad.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Once again, I worked quite a lot on Wednesday. It makes for a long day after a day-long trip and six hours of sleep (4 to 10 a.m.), but it’s 1:20 a.m. now and I’m still not asleep (time change).

So this will be quick and dirty, because I really should get plenty of rest before the No. 4 (or No. 21, depending on your preference: NCAA tourney seeding or national ranking) Washington State Cougars take on the No. 1 (both in seeding and ranking) North Carolina Tar Heels in their Sweet 16 game Thursday evening.

I checked in with my editor this morning and was assigned the A1 story I expected. The final product, about WSU coach Tony Bennett’s return to Charlotte (where he played in the NBA in the early ’90s), can be found here.

I also did the obligatory press conference video at Bobcats Arena, the edited version of which can be found here (now with horrible sound!). Once again, I used my amazing video-capture contraption I bought at the Apple Store in Denver.

The game is at 7:27 p.m. EDT, and the Tar Heels are favored by eight. But who knows? Maybe the Cougars can continue their NCAA dominance over Winthrop and Notre Dame, and make a serious statement. The Cougs are here to play ball.

By the way, Bobcats Arena is nice, though the depths where the media stuff lives is a complete maze. I’ll write more soon, and once again I can’t guarantee a Where I Work video from Charlotte. In Denver, I just didn’t have the time. And it might be just the same here.

Perhaps it’s old news by now….

Who cares? The Cougs are in the Sweet 16!

And that means I have fewer than 48 hours back at home in Pullman — where I am now — before we fly out to Charlotte, N.C.

But who cares? The Cougs are in the Sweet 16! And I get to cover it! (Though it would be nice to be home for a little longer, for a couple of reasons.)

Not objective of me? It’s not that. It’s not that I’m rooting rooting for the Cougs. It’s that I’m covering a basketball team that advanced to the Sweet 16. After following them all season, knowing how hard they’ve worked, knowing they deserve it. They’re good.

Anyway, I was there in Denver last night when the Cougars whooped Notre Dame, 61-41. They limited the Fighting Irish to just about half their average point total (80). That’s defense. That’s unbelievable.

Here’s my quick gamer on the SportsLink blog, and here’s my post-game video. Take note that, the last time I checked, there were 69 comments on my blog entry. Anyone excited?

Got to bed last night at midnight Denver time. Got up at 4 a.m. Grabbed the 30-minute-late 7 a.m. flight to Seattle. Made the 10 a.m. PDT connection to Spokane. Drove 1 1/2 hours south to Pullman. Got home at 12:45 p.m.

Long day, and it’s barely half over.

So I’m going to watch the UNC-Arkansas game (the winner of which the Cougs will play Thursday in Charlotte), though I can’t guarantee I’ll make it all the way through. It might be nap time.

DENVER — So, a lot has happened since my last real post.

On Wednesday, we had a “free day” without any basketball games. That didn’t mean we didn’t work. Assigned an A1 (front-page) story for the general audience to be printed in Thursday’s paper, I wrote this feature on Daven Harmeling and Caleb Forrest, two junior guards who grew up in Colorado (and the only Colorado natives playing in Denver this week).

Of course, I already posted about that — and my troubles with the NCAA’s video policy.

The next day, the Cougars whooped Winthrop in their first-round game here at the Pepsi Center. The first half was a little dicey (the teams were tied at 29 going into the locker room), but the second half was a WSU blowout.

Links: Quick gamer. Post-game video.

If you look, the video solution worked beautifully. The audio came in a bit hot (and, for some reason, I can’t turn down the incoming audio in Final Cut Express), but that problem seemed to be fixed Friday (I’ll get to that in a bit). (more…)

DENVER — For as little as I did today, it seemed like a lot. Mostly because my main purpose for being here — video — was threatened big-time.

Of course, I packed my camcorder (plus accessories) and my tripod down to Denver. I need it, right? I’m doing post-game video and whatever other random multimedia stuff I decide to do. (more…)

DENVER — So, I was home for two days but I only just found enough free time — on my second night in Denver — to update my blog. I’ll link to what I did back in Pullman.

I flew back to Spokane, and hence Pullman, after a drive, on Saturday. And on Sunday, I had to do a preview story for WSU spring football, which started Monday. Access was going to be a large problem — access to coaches and players. I wrote a temporary brief for Monday’s paper with the assumption I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone, and sent it in to the Spokesman.

Sunday afternoon was the WSU basketball team’s NCAA selection party at Bohler Gym on campus, a larger extravaganza than I had anticipated. With limited battery life (I was charging it on the court in between shooting), I took enough footage to piece together this video (also linked from the picture to the left) on the party and the Cougars’ reactions to their surprise No. 4 seeding in the NCAA tournament (which is why I’m now in Denver).

As luck would have it, while I was there I spotted football coach Paul Wulff and grabbed him, knowing I wouldn’t otherwise be able to talk to him for my spring football story. He was very pleasant, and invited me with his family into the football office, where I did a quick (8.5-minute) interview. The results are this story.

On Monday, I headed over to campus at 2 p.m. in anticipation of Wulff’s 2:30 press conference, which went off without a hitch. Then I strolled over to Rogers Field (the practice field below the WSU library) to watch the first day of practice. All three hours of it. Standing up, in my dress shoes, as the weather got steadily colder. There, I interviewed a few players and got enough to put together this story on the first day of spring ball.

Of course, it was St. Patrick’s Day (I spent an hour — yes, one full hour — ironing my only green dress shirt, which I hadn’t worn since last spring precisely because it was wrinkled beyond recognition as a shirt), so that night I met up with the Evergreen crew for some celebration. Not too late, though, because I had my 12:30 p.m. flight to catch out of Spokane en route for Denver. (Noon doesn’t sound very early, but I had to leave Pullman at 9:30 to get to the airport, which required a 7:30 wake-up time — which is early for me.)

Anyway, now I’m in Denver, one day after arriving, updating from my 10th-floor room in the downtown Marriott. A nice hotel, to say the least.

I said I’d post about this yesterday, but I didn’t post at all during my travels back to Pullman. So here’s a quick post about how we — well, Vince — got his WSU-Stanford story in by deadline Friday night.

We knew it’d be tight with an 8:30 p.m. start. Deadline was 11, giving Vince an estimated 30 minutes after the game to get quotes and finish up his game story for the newspaper’s first edition. Vince asked me to help him out by getting quotes from the Cougars while he wrote, then he could add them in and give me contributor credit.

But the game started 20 minutes late, thanks to a longer-than-average UCLA-USC game that started at 6 p.m.

Vince wrote about important stretches of the game while they happened, writing on the go from the press table. By the time the game was over at about 10:45 p.m., he had a good chunk of copy.  By the time post-game interviews rolled around, he had enough time to grab a few quotes himself and add them in, sending a rough article for first edition and cleaning it up for the next.

That gave me plenty of time to do all the interviewing I wanted, and I ended up with a pretty good post-game video.

In fact, I got enough footage to edit a second video on the plane yesterday from LAX to Seattle (my first leg before connecting in Seattle to Spokane). It’s the Cougars talking about the upcoming NCAA tournament.