They keep tabs on the mundanities of local government, attending council and commission meetings and reporting the events to readers who couldn’t be there. They go to the scenes of crimes, fires and accidents, to get accurate information on events that concern the whole community – events that often generate lurid rumors if no one is there to set the record straight.
And that’s the easy stuff. Meetings and police reports are a reporter’s bread and butter, but the real life of the community goes beyond what’s written in meeting minutes and court documents. To get the spirit of the times – the stories that give the year its shape – reporters have to go out and talk to people, dig through statistics, and take a step back to see what it all means.
We asked our reporters to pick their favorite work of 2011, be it a story that was fun to tell or one they thought was important to the community. Below are their thoughts about telling their favorite stories of the year.
Carless in Calhoun County: A reporter’s attempt to use public transportation and his bicycle to get to work
As an intern this summer for The Star, I was living without a car. It meant I spent a lot of time hanging out in the office, making phone calls, reading press releases and generally wondering what exactly was going on in that world outside I was supposed to be reporting on.
In what I can only assume was a last-ditch effort to get me out of my cubicle, my editor suggested I write a story about public transportation.
“Research?”
“Go out and use it.”
Of course, it wasn’t that easy. Between the planning of what bus routes I could take and when and how to get there by bike – not to mention the fact that I hadn’t got on a bicycle in well over a decade – I ended up coming face-to-face with the logistical nightmare of trying to maintain a steady job in this economy without access to car. A problem, I found in my research, which affects a significant portion of the population here in Calhoun County.
It’s a rare treat for a news reporter when they get the chance to write in first-person. So armed with an interesting premise, some self-deprecating humor, and a lot of facts on how our transportation system works, I got a chance to tell a story with a little bit of style, and hopefully some substance too.
- Brian Anderson
Click here to read Brian's story.
The jagged lines slashed into the Alabama countryside by a record 63 tornadoes in late April — at least two of which were EF-5 — will remain etched on the souls of those who survived.
Those swirling winds changed the landscape. Tore down trees that neither man nor nature had seen fit to move in a hundred years. Not to mention the 235 people killed in the state and the nine who lost their lives in Calhoun County.
Without question, I count the stories my colleagues and I wrote immediately after that deadly storm the most important work we did in 2011.
My favorite work, however, was the last chapter in the E.D. Phillips saga, which spanned nearly my entire time in Anniston.
It began with a call from a Cleburne County resident telling us there was going to be a heated meeting at the Edwardsville Town Hall one night. The path alternately widened and narrowed, grew hot and cold, as it took me to Centre, to Carrollton, Ga., and finally, after a call from Phillips’ cousin, the DeKalb County Courthouse in Atlanta.
Deep in the bowels of the courthouse (real estate records are in one of the bottom floors) over the course of several hours, I confirmed that Phillips had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had been using his illness to run real estate scams for years before crossing the border and trying to take over Cleburne County.
The whole story still makes my mind spin. And since the legal loophole he manipulated to seize all that land has not been closed and since Phillips himself remains at large, I consider it one of the most interesting and among the most important stories I wrote in 2011.
- Jason Bacaj, now of the Bozeman (Mont.) Daily Chronicle
Click here to read Jason's story.
As a reporter, I get to meet some interesting people that I would probably never be able to talk to otherwise. In May, I was able to meet and talk to some of the original 1961 Freedom Riders who set out to test the nation's desegregation laws and were met with violent opposition in Anniston.
Those Freedom Riders returned to Anniston on May 11 to meet college students who were following their route in a 50th-anniversary recreation of the Freedom Rides.
Having been born just after that tumultuous time in our country's history, many of the events had not been added to the history books that I studied in school and much of the history was new to me. I was struck by the stories the riders and the residents of Anniston who lived through that time told me that evening - their strength, their trials and their triumphs.
The story I wrote didn't include many of those stories - there just wasn't room - but they have stayed with me.
- Laura Camper
Click here to read Laura's story.
In 2011 Jacksonville State University’s board of trustees considered sweeping changes to the intuition’s student health care system and terminated a decade- old relationship with renowned orthopedic care physicians.
Faculty members expressed confusion and suspicion over the board’s decisions, prompting my reporting and several stories on student health care at JSU.
One story explored whether board members’ private business ventures with Lemak Sports Medicine influenced the board’s decision to end its relationship with Alabama Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center.
I spoke with players, educators and coaches who opposed the change. And I spoke board members and a representative with the Lemak group, who supported the change and said Lemak could better serve students in the future.
In another story I took a look at how another proposed change to the health care system would impact students. The second change would impact the entire student body, not just athletes.
That change would remove the burden of paying for health care from the university, which now pays for student health services, and pass the cost to individual students.
I spoke to collegiate health health professionals at other schools who said if the change was implemented fewer students would receive treatment and the campus would be more vulnerable to outbreaks. I also spoke to health professionals and board members who said a for-pay system can work.
Additionally, I talked to board members who said that the university had to seek alternative funding options to improve health services for students and who voiced concerns over the institution’s outdated medical office.
The story is not over. At the board’s January meeting, members are expected to once again consider requesting proposals from physicians.
- Laura Johnson
Click the links below to read Laura's stories:
Story 1 - Story 2 - Story 3 - Story 4
As a night editor for The Star, I go over the obituaries on a regular basis. You can’t help but be struck when you see a child in the obits, particularly when the age is listed as “infant.”
Infant mortality is a statistic social scientists use to measure the level of poverty in a community. But taken on a case-by-case basis, it’s a heartbreaking tragedy. It occurred to me that by talking to individual families affected by this problem, a reporter might be able to find causes of infant mortality that hadn’t already been discovered.
As it turns out, state officials had the same idea, years ago. They’ve been interviewing families affected by infant mortality, collecting data, and coming up with surprising new insights that could prevent future infant deaths. I don’t know if I told the tale well, but there’s a fascinating story here – a story about science and the very real impact it can have on human lives. It’s also a story with a particular connection to Alabama, a high-poverty state.
- Tim Lockette
Click here to read Tim's story.
Since 2010, I had written stories of the Anniston-based Sarrell Dental Clinic’s struggle with University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry and the Alabama Dental Association. For much of that time it was a he-said, she-said affair. Sarrell claimed UAB removed its students from training at the clinics in April 2010 due to pressure from alumni and the Alabama Dental Association upset about competition with the rapidly growing Sarrell.
Unlike typical dental clinics, Sarrell is a non-profit that treats mainly underprivileged children and uses Medicaid reimbursements as its main source of funding.
On the other hand, UAB claimed it removed the students from the Sarrell clinics because of a lack of proper faculty supervision.
There wasn’t much more to go on, until in March when I got my hands on an independent report of the UAB dental school’s education practices. The report, composed by the UAB School of Dentistry Alumni Association’s Dental Oversight Committee, stated that during the time after UAB ended its relationship with Sarrell, there had been an unacceptable amount of clinical training for junior and senior students.
The report did not mention Sarrell, however, it did mention other facilities students were sent to, where they received little to no proper dental training at all. It stated much of the training was irrelevant, non-productive and involved too much observation on the part of students, rather than “hands-on” clinical experience – just the type of training Sarrell had provided.
The news was exciting. The report helped give credence to Sarrell’s claims.
Sarrell has since settled its disputes and is helping all the kids it can handle.
It was great to be a part of that.
- Patrick McCreless
Click here to read Patrick's story.
In a year of favorite stories and important public safety issues, it's nearly impossible to pick just one story that I believe represented my best work or the most significant news item.
2011 was a year that saw 18 homicides, several police-suspect stand-offs, a video that showed the Calhoun County Sheriff using physical force against a young boy, the kidnapping and slaying of a popular Wellborn teacher, the end of chemical weapons in Anniston, the fatal shooting of an Anniston police officer and escalating tension between Anniston city leaders, the police department and West Anniston residents.
Whew. That's quite a list. And even when pressed, I cannot clearly work out in my mind whether I think coverage of Officer Justin Sollohub's death was more or less valuable to the community than coverage of the final days of the burn at the chemical weapons incinerator or the stories written following an Anniston boy's lawsuit against Sheriff Larry Amerson.
So, instead, I've named a story that touched me as I reported on it, published two days after Sollohub was shot. The prospect of interviewing Sollohub's closest family members so soon after his death was daunting. But the strength it took that family to share their grief with me has stayed close to my heart ever since. It was difficult to write, not because I lacked material or facts, but because I had been entrusted with writing about a lost future. Personally, it is one of the most important things I ever written.
- Cameron Steele
Click here to read Cameron's story.
