CU GRAD STUDENTS "SEND" GRASSROOTS CLIMBING MAG
—Emily Cooper
Sometimes, taking advantage of an opportunity is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. For Annie Burnett and Kasey Cordell, both climbers and students in CU's journalism program, Boulder was the right place, and last fall the right time, to become editors of a magazine that appealed to both of their interests.
Last fall the second-year master's students became editors of a two-year-old women-centered climbing magazine called She Sends. The women added their editing duties to their already crazy schedules as students, teaching assistants, and interns for other publications. But Burnett, who mountaineers, and Cordell, a sport climber and boulderer, are used to taking on huge challenges, and this is one they're happy to embrace.
"She Sends is always the fun work," Burnett said. "It's what I look forward to."
For non-climbers, the magazine's title might require a little explanation. Burnett said the word "send" is climbing lingo that means success.
"[T]o send something is to finish a problem, like, 'You sent that,' or 'She totally sent that,' like she just fired right up that, she finished it. She got through it," she said.
It's also an apt name for a magazine that's been fighting since its beginning to turn a spotlight on a growing segment of the climbing population. Lizzy Scully, a climber and journalist, said she started She Sends two years ago because she was tired of having her story ideas rejected by other magazines such as Rock and Ice and Climbing.
"They almost always said, 'No thanks,' when I suggested articles about women," she said.
From the very beginning She Sends was a grassroots effort. The first issue was a photocopied newsletter with a run of about 400. Volunteers have always been integral to keeping it going—Scully estimates she's had help from about 100 people over the past two years—but it was hard to keep people involved for no pay, and she found herself doing the bulk of the work. By last fall, she was burned out and thinking about letting the magazine go. That's when Cordell, Burnett and the rest of the staff stepped in.
Scully knew Cordell through the climbing community, and Cordell was friends and roomates with Burnett, whom she had met through the journalism school. Both were already interested in writing for She Sends, so when Scully started talking about moving on to other things, it seemed only natural that they would take over for her.
The women became editors of the magazine, working with Scully to put out the seventh issue in winter 2005, then taking off with it on their own. Scully is still involved in the publication, but mostly as mentor and visionary. The new staff, meanwhile, found themselves in charge of a quarterly magazine whose circulation had grown in two years from 400 to 10,000 and had changed from a free publication to one that sells for $3.95. Today it has a staff of eight, plus one intern, with writing and photographs provided by an enthusiastic group of freelancers.
"The only thing we don't have is offices," Burnett said. "[O]ur editorial meetings happen at the climbing gym in a conference room, or at our house."
Scully said she had no qualms about turning over control of her magazine to a new group, because she feels they share the same vision for the magazine that she does. Cordell agreed, but said that doesn't mean the magazine won't continue to evolve.
"My goal is to take the magazine in a new direction but to remain true to the original vision," Cordell said. That vision includes celebrating women climbers and helping build community.
Burnett said what makes the magazine different is that the articles focus not just on climbing trips, but what it's like for climbers to have real lives at the same time. And although it aims to celebrate women climbers, it's not just about women.
"It's got a ton of information about male climbers, female climbers, the hot climbers of the moment, and people that balance climbing with other things in their life like children and families and travel and jobs and things like that," she said.
The approach has hit a chord with the climbing community. Although right now its distribution is limited—it's sold predominently in climbing stores, and mostly in the Boulder area—many other stores, including R.E.I., have shown interest in carrying it. Cordell said she's even gotten requests for the magazine from as far away as Ireland and Canada. And it seems to turn up in the strangest places, Burnett added.
"It's kind of like that little magazine that somebody has in Joshua Tree, or someone's got a hold of it in Indian Creek, or Red Rocks, or someone has it in Yosemite," she said, naming some popular climbing locations. "[You] know about She Sends, if you're in the climbing community. It's just so cool."
But no one, perhaps, is as committed to the magazine as its staff, who often put in long hours for no pay. The editors plan to apply for non-profit status this summer, which would make them eligible for more grant money and maybe even make it possible to pay themselves a little bit for their time.
But Cordell said that for her, it's not really about money. She likes working on She Sends because it gives her the opportunity to do something she believes in, and to collaborate with a committed and talented staff.
"And I like laughing and giggling with them at our editorial meetings," she said.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM CLUB TAKES FLIGHT
—Emily Cooper
Although Christine Dell'Amore was born and raised in Maryland, the second-year master's student has a French father, an aunt in Paris and dual citizenship with the United States and France.
"That always interested me in international issues, and it's always been in the back of my mind that it's something that I wanted to do," she said.
It was only natural that when she decided to go into journalism, she would keep her international focus. So she was disappointed when she arrived at the CU campus and found the journalism school's international opportunities lacking.
Rather than postpone her dreams, Dell'Amore decided to do something about them. In January 2004, inspired by an upcoming conference on international journalism that would take place that spring in Paris, she and fellow student Amarely Quintinilla started the International Journalism Club. Founding the club and registering it with the university allowed them to raise some funds to help them get to the conference.
But the club has proven to be much longer-lived than that. In the year and a half since its birth, the club has twice hosted visiting reporters from Germany, co-sponsored talks by a regional AP reporter in South Africa and an Africa correspondent for the BBC, and, with the help of donations from the Tattered Cover bookstore and the Boulder Public Library, set up a small book collection in the student resource center for people interested in working or interning abroad.
The club has also found allies among the journalism school faculty. Associate Dean Meg Moritz and new Global Media Studies chair Bella Mody help keep club members informed about international opportunities and campus events. Moritz is also organizing the school's first-ever international reporting seminar, scheduled to take place this summer in Hungary. Dell'Amore said the club has helped raise awareness that good internship and work opportunities are available worldwide.
"I think now that [internship coordinators] Alan and Beth are very much more open to it than they were a year ago," she said.
Dell'Amore's international aspirations also extended into her schoolwork at CU. The "professional project" is a semester-long research and reporting project that all master's students must complete to graduate. For her project, Dell'Amore traveled to Jamaica to write a story about the country's experiences with ecotourism. She said Tom Yulsman, her project chair, was supportive but also cautious about her topic choice, warning her that it might be difficult to follow up on her reporting after she returned to Colorado.
"It turns out that of all the interviews that I did—which is over 20—all the people had phones, most of them had e-mail, [so] there was no problem clarifying things or checking with them" on facts or quotes, Dell'Amore said. Instead, the biggest challenge turned out to be cultural—"breaking through the formality that a lot of Jamaicans have in talking about their tourism company" and finding out how they really feel about tourism's impact on their country. She also said she wishes she'd been less intimidated by cultural differences and spoken more to people on the street.
Still, Dell'Amore said she's glad she decided to take on the challenge.
"It gave me valuable experience as an international reporter," she said.
By pushing herself to look beyond Colorado for a story, she learned how to approach reporting abroad, contacting people, figuring out how to get around once there, and all the other details that go into organizing a story from afar.
"I also think it will help saying that I took the initiative and did what most people in my program didn't do," she said, "and despite most people's doubts about my success, it still was successful."
GRAD STUDENT TAKES CLASS ASSIGNMENTS TO THE NEXT LEVEL
—Emily Cooper
For many students, journalism class assignments are a good way to practice the craft of journalism. For master's student Jennie Lay, however, they're also a way to see her name in print.
During her two years in CU's journalism program, Lay published every story she wrote for any of her journalism classes. Through a combination of solid reporting and writing on one end, and persistence in contacting editors on the other, she's seen her stories appear in a wide variety of publications including The Steamboat Pilot, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Steamboat Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, Ski and High Country News. Another story was recently accepted for publication by Westword.
Lay's first published story was an in-depth piece on Referendum A, a controversial initiative that would have authorized the sale of billions of dollars in bonds for water projects in Colorado. She wrote the story as her final assignment for Newsgathering I, one of the school's core course requirements. Sandra Fish, the class professor and an editor at the Boulder Daily Camera, encouraged Lay to submit it to the Camera, and a few days before the election, the story ran. Lay, a resident of Steamboat Springs on Colorado's Western Slope, said she thinks the Camera liked her story because it had a fresh angle—the effects of Referendum A on the Western Slope—and included a lot of sources from her side of the state.
Lay said her coup d'etat was her March 2005 cover story for High Country News. "Drilling Could Wake a Sleeping Giant" detailed the history of Project Rulison, a federal government experiment in using nuclear explosions to free up natural gas, and the effects it could have today on gas drilling in the area. But it wasn't the topic, or its front page placement, that made the story her favorite published piece.
"They were just cool to work with," Lay said of the High Country News editors.
Although they made her do a lot of extra research, much of which never went into the final story, she said it was a very collaborative editing process and it gave her confidence not just in her piece, but in the publication as a whole.
"Their stories have a lot of integrity behind them," she said.
Once Lay had had some stories published, it also became a lot easier for her to sell story ideas before she wrote them. She now freelances frequently for Steamboat Magazine and Ski, where she also worked as an intern.
"It's nice to mix it up between fun stuff and serious stuff," she said.
Lay credits her professors in the journalism program for encouraging her and her fellow students to publish what they'd written for class. She said it hadn't even occurred to her at first that all the work she put into her courses could end up in print. But she's also learned that to be a successful freelancer, you need persistence and a thick skin.
"You have to be not afraid to go back to someone after they've told you 'no' a whole bunch of times," she said.
CU SCIENCE WRITER CRACKS THE BIG TIME
—Wendy Worrall Redal
Most master’s students in environmental journalism might dream of one day writing for The New York Times science section or the esteemed British journal Nature, two publications that would mark the pinnacle of most freelance careers.
Amanda Haag already has clips from both.
Haag, a second-year master’s candidate who is one of two CU journalism students in the university’s Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative [Click here for the story], is still incredulous at her early success.
“It’s almost laughable,” she said, attributing her good fortune to a naïve sense of chutzpah when she opted to pitch freelance story ideas to editors at both publications. Only months before, she screamed at the thrill of seeing her first byline in the Boulder Daily Camera, a story on mining and water contamination in Colorado. But Haag quickly managed to parlay her science knowledge, writing ability and personal overtures into a synergy that has landed her two published features so far, with another story for Nature in the works.
Haag, 29, has a B.S. in biology and five years of lab experience. That background helped her land a four-week mini-internship at Nature’s London office in July 2004, which was the springboard to her freelance assignments for the journal. Typically Nature offers only six-month internships, but a fortuitous meeting between Haag and two Nature reporters at the 2004 AAAS conference provided her the abbreviated opportunity.
Haag traces her success at the Times to another face-to-face meeting. During a quick trip to New York, Haag introduced herself in person to Science Times editor David Corcoran. She’d written ahead, sent clips and asked for a meeting. Corcoran obliged. He told Haag not to get her hopes up, that he rarely used unsolicited freelance work, but said she could pitch unabashedly and faxed her the standard contract. She took that as a positive sign. Her third query was a success.
Haag had learned about the work of Morgan Keay, a 23-year-old biology graduate of the University of Colorado who founded a nonprofit foundation to aid the Tsaatan, Mongolia’s traditional reindeer herders, whose herds are suffering from inbreeding and are in need of genetic diversification through artificial insemination. Haag thought Keay’s project might interest the Times, and she was right. Her story, with reindeer as its focus, ran Dec. 21, 2004, strategically just before Christmas [“Future of Ancient Cultures Rides on Herd’s Little Hoofbeats”].
Haag thinks her story was picked up because it was unusual. “Obscurity and novelty are what work for them,” she said. When Science Times uses freelance stories, they tend to be more narrowly focused, “that you’d have a niche for, that maybe nobody else would find out about.” Haag said the big stories go to staff writers, while freelancers are drawn upon to “tell a smaller, manageable story,” perhaps focusing on the work of only one or two scientists.
Her story that appeared in the February 2005 issue of Nature, “Whale Fall,” featured an even more obscure animal twist and the scientists who study such phenomena. A whale fall is not unlike a fallen tree that becomes a nurse log in a rainforest ecosystem. Bone-devouring worms, bacteria and other scavengers live on whale carcasses at the bottom of the ocean, tunneling into the decaying body to suck fat, lipids and nutrients from the remains, in turn bringing a host of nutrients to the sea floor. Some species scientists have discovered appear to be uniquely adapted to live off whale falls. Haag’s story says scientists now estimate that a whale-fall community may survive for as long as a century.
While a subject like “Whale Fall” may sound pretty esoteric, Haag’s goal is to help readers understand the significance of scientific findings. That desire lies at the heart of her decision to leave the laboratory behind in favor of journalism.
She said she remembers “very clearly when I made the turning point” while a lab technician at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. She was working “ridiculous hours,” isolated with her samples and her equipment, wondering whether this was all there would be to her life as a scientist.
In the lab, Haag said, there is the “one-dimensional ‘doing the work,’” the task of scientific inquiry. “And then there’s translating it: Why would you want to know this? Why does this matter? Why should we care? What does this mean to society?” Those are the questions that animate Haag.
“Scientists think about these things, but it’s not the bulk of their work. As a scientist, your work keeps getting narrower and narrower, and my mind keeps getting broader and broader.”
As a journalist, Haag can indulge the bigger questions. And for someone not yet finished with her degree, she’s already doing it in a big way.
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