IN THE HIGH COUNTRY: CRAFTING LONG-FORM STORIES ON RECREATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT by PAIGE BLANKENBUEHLER Bill Allen, project chair Mark Horvit Sara Shipley-Hiles Scott Swafford December 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the guidance of my High Country News editors. In particular, I owe a great debt to Brian Calvert, the magazine’s managing editor, for his remarkable insights into the big picture of every story. He taught me the art of journalistic analysis — what it means! — and that, in and of itself, is a powerful gift. A special thanks is also owed to Tay Wiles, HCN’s web editor, who graciously gave me the real estate to publish the articles online, and continually helped me realistically achieve my goals. Bill Allen, the project chair, deserves a long list of gratitude, I’d like to give specific thanks for his careful guidance through this project and numerous others, an analytical eye in the snake-filled swards of Costa Rica, and always making sure I wasn’t venturing into the field without a flashlight. ii DEDICATION This behemoth of my graduate work is dedicated with love to Michael Koboldt, who patiently lent his ears to my gripes. Further, with the encouragement from my parents, Roger and Christine, I followed a dream to pursue journalism. My passion for this craft is a fruit of their support, and I hope the completion of this project serves as a token of my appreciation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………ii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………...iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………….………..…1 2. FIELD NOTES……………………………………….…………...6 3. EVALUATION………………………………………………….56 4. PHYSICAL EVIDENCE………………………………………..61 5. ANALYSIS…………………………………………………….108 APPENDIX 1. MODIFICATIONS TO PROPOSAL………………………..…118 2. ORIGINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL……………………..….....120 3. “CHASING BAYLA”…………………………………….…….142 4. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS………………………………....159 5. SUPERVISOR AGREEMENT AND EVALUATIONS…….....187 REFERENCES……………………………………………………….……..194 iv Chapter One: Introduction In late April of 2015, I was a homeless journalist. I had a project proposal with many, many words and a few redundant paragraphs, a committee at the Missouri School of Journalism with inquisitive eyes and thoughtful questions and several edits to do, but I didn’t have a publication to seed my project. It was a tense time. But before too long, my telephone rang with good news — an offer from High Country News, a magazine headquartered in Paonia, a tiny town on Colorado’s western slope — and my worried thoughts subsided. The publication is a regional-national magazine that covers the environment, natural resources, public lands, wildlife and people of the 11-state territory of the American West. As a westerner and environmental journalist myself, HCN was a logical place for me to land. As such, it’s very fortunate that I did. At the Missouri School of Journalism, I didn’t follow any of the tracks offered by the graduate school. Instead, I cherry-picked the courses that fit my needs and goals. Although the individually structured major is how my time at the j-school will be documented in history, I took a blend of environmental, investigative and magazine journalism classes. Perhaps with the most conviction, I saw myself as an environmental reporter before all else. My investigative reporting classes opened my eye to meatier, deeper projects that I enjoyed very much, and once I made it through Jennifer Rowe’s editing class, I knew that magazines were the medium I wanted to place my work. Magazines afford the luxury of time to a journalist, but in turn demand much from them, and I found I enjoyed the balance of spending more time on the research and writing to produce better stories. As this project will show, my personal evolution for telling stories 1 was front-and-center throughout my internship at HCN and throughout my development as a journalist at the Missouri School of Journalism and the intrepid days at daily newspapers that prepared me for this project. When I enrolled in graduate school, it was partly to have an excuse to run frantically away from the daily journalism grind (with my hands flailing in the air, a hardly legible reporter’s notebook tucked into my pocket and ink all over my fingertips) to pursue more meaningful work at a renowned journalism school. Now in the twilight of this experience, I can say with pride that I indeed found myself in some very special circumstances and produced content of a higher quality. The professional component of this work, like many of my experiences at the j- school, was a bit of a diversion from the typical master’s project structure. My project was a hybrid between an individual investigation and a professional experience at a magazine. The investigation was supported by HCN, and between my daily work for the publication and my personal investigation, the hybrid served my career goals well. My investigation originally sought to examine ski resorts’ snowmaking practices amid drought conditions, taking a strong focus on California, but as this project will show, my editors and I worked together to develop a series of articles that took a broader view of a changing ski industry amid climate and economic challenges. The evolution of the original pitch to what was eventually published in HCN was a great professional experience, because I went through the process of pitching my stories to the entire magazine staff and updating the coverage to fit within the magazine’s purview. Professionally, this trained me to know my publication well and to do the necessary preliminary reporting to know what a story is before pitching it. The magazine’s rigorous pitching process has, no doubt, put me in a better position as a freelancer when I will 2 eventually be pitching stories to run in different publications. HCN has a reputation as a publication that’s extremely difficult to break into as a freelancer. That was undoubtedly true; the ratio of pitches received and pitches by freelancers that eventually get into the magazine is very, very small. Frequently, the freelancers that did successfully pitch the magazine were either previous interns, staff or writers specifically recruited by the magazine’s editors. Each week, the staff gathers for what we call the “What’s Hot” meeting, where we plan for upcoming issues and review pitches. It’s a cruel process that can squash the confidence of even the most gregarious reporter, but the experience of sitting in those meetings week after week trained me to produce better pitches, bring better ideas and do my homework. To get a story past the astute jury of editors, you must be inside the minds of your sources, and if you’re not, no doubt Senior Editor Jodi Peterson will call you out for it. “Next!” The past six months have been crucial to my professional development and have strengthened my reporting and writing skills by leaps and bounds. The analytical component of this project, a case study of an environmental feature to assess industry best practices for sourcing, developing story arcs and avoiding cliché, similarly complemented my career goals and contributed to my professional development as a journalist and successful storyteller. I examined the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize finalist “Chasing Baya” by Sarah Schweitzer because it successfully communicated an endangered species story about whales that didn’t feel trite or overdone. I took a thorough look at the article through a deep reading of the piece and in-depth interviews with the writer, the editor, the primary source of the feature and an outside media expert who has written extensively about crafting narratives and the dangers of cliché. The four 3 interviews took several hours to complete but offered a complete picture of how this story came to be. It was particularly interesting to hear about the process from the perspective of the main source, a biologist named Michael Moore. As journalists, we can sometimes be insensitive to the time a source invests helping with a story and how very strange it must be to have another person inside your mind, picking away and filling in the gaps — for the sake of story. Through my interviews, I gained a lot of insight on the journalistic process. The blended perspectives of writer, editor, source and expert layered the foundation of my understanding of crafting narratives and began to change the way I would approach my own interviews and stories. In journalism, there’s no One Way to write a narrative feature, and in talking with more professionals, I cherry-picked my favorite strategies. The analysis, in that regard, complemented my professional component in perfect pitch. In November, HCN’s managing editor, Brian Calvert, offered me the senior fellowship that extends my contract by one year. It’s a full-time position and requires more front-of-book and feature story pitching and writing, and lobs on a mentorship role for incoming interns. It’s a prestigious position that the magazine began offering in 2009, and previous fellows have gone on to forge successful careers as freelancers, work as editors for the magazine or produce content for national, environmental publications. I accepted the offer and will take the opportunity to finish many projects that I’ve been researching over the past few months. Staying with the magazine will continue to help me develop as a journalist, as I still have much to learn about HCN’s coverage. The magazine is going through a transition in trying to better serve a western audience by covering more minorities and environmental justice issues, and I hope to help turn the 4 ship toward this new direction. Additionally, Calvert has been a great mentor, and I’ve only just begun to glean his lessons.