Attention Everyone!

Here is Sarah and I at the doctor's office last week when we thought I had the flu! Luckily I didn't but we had fun there.

This is a two-fold post. First, and most important, today is my girlfriend’s birthday. She is turning…you never tell a lady’s age! But I did want to let everyone know that I love her dearly and if you would like to know 24 reasons why, check it out!

The second part of this post is inspired by Sarah. She has inspired me to dream big and do things I truly will enjoy, even if it won’t bring money immediately. With that, BryanRothamel.com and HeRaisesTheBar.com will be changing soon.

I will make a more formal announcement in a week or two so stay tuned. It will be the biggest news in the history of my website. I owe Sarah for the reason I am making the change. She inspires me to dream when I think dreaming is overrated and a waste of time.

On this special day, I just have to announce that I love my birthday girlfriend!

For my second anniversary

This is us on a late night, college run to Wal-Mart with Domenique, our best friend. Domenique took the picture.

Today, Sept. 13, 2009, is my second anniversary with my lovely girlfriend, Sarah.  She is quite special to me.  She does take a quite special interest in this website and frequently comments how she is not the subject of many posts.  Here is a post dedicated purely to her and only her!

She did notice my reasons I love my brother that I posted for his birthday. For our anniversary she recommended I do the same for our anniversary! Easy enough, we have been together two years, so I just need to do two reasons I love Sarah?!

I could do that, but again, we know this website is for raising the bar.

Here are 24 reasons I love my girlfriend (one for every month):

1. She is one of the only people that will let me make fun of her then she responds with, “I love you.”
2. Whenever I am in trouble, there is ALWAYS a way out. It might be as simple as telling her my love or as complex as taking her to Jersey Mike’s or Jimmy John’s.
3. She loves sandwiches, which rubbed off on me. Nothing like stopping in to pick up a good sandwich.
4. She is from Boston. While I always said I wanted to fall in love with a Southerner, she took my heart.
5. My family loves her, more than they love me.
6. She thought SD in our football pool meant South Dakota and not San Diego.
7. She asked me how to make a stall shower get the water to come out of the shower head while water was flowing out of the shower head.
8. She was convinced that “instopped” was the opposite of “outgoing.” I couldn’t stop laughing for weeks. In fact, that makes me smile still.
9. She loves baseball, although she is a Red Sox fan, it could be worse. She could be a Yankee fan.
10. She takes things in stride. While she only has one eye, she plays tricks with me on our friends! It is so funny watching their faces when she hits her finger nail against the fake eye!
11. She cares as much about my best friend as I do.
12. Even though I was really busy in college, she never held it against me, even when it did cause some scheduling problems.
13. She likes weird music. Sometimes it is really, really annoying. Other times she has shown me some really great music.
14. She thinks her stuffed animals are real and have feelings. When I hang them, it causes many problems. (Refer back to number two)
15. One time I hung her stuffed animal from a hook in her room. When she went to break it, I told her it cost me $10. She reluctantly didn’t break it. The next day, she noticed I had 10 of those same hooks. She thought I spent over $100 on hooks! “Bry, those hooks can’t be $10.” “No kidding kid, why would you think…nevermind.”
16. For her birthday last year, she let me buy “her” an iPod Touch [for me] while she got my three year old iPod. She just wanted the storage space and loved that it holds all of her weird songs.
17. She calls her house and leaves messages for her dog. She also tells me that the dog talks to her. I don’t doubt it does.
18. After I started calling her, “kid,” she didn’t know what to call me. She went through, “adult, big kid, etc.”
19. After I started calling her, “Sar Bear,” she again didn’t know what to call me. Convinced that the only thing rhyming with “Bry” was fly. She also said it was a good fit because I annoyed her.
20. One time when I made her mad, I said, “Sar, remember a time when we were in love and you were nice to me?” She responded, “Bry, you keep talking about this love thing. I can’t ever remember that in our relationship.”
21. In the car she leans her head on my shoulder. I always give her a kiss on her forehead. She promptly raises her head. She said once, “Whenever I want a kiss I put my head on your shoulder.” I responded, “Whenever I want you to get your head off of my shoulder I give you a kiss.” She laughed harder than I did!
22. She is super tickleish. When I tickle her, she makes up excuses why I can’t, “I just ate…I’m about to eat…it is late…it is early…I don’t feel well…this will wind me up…it hurts and I laugh when I’m in pain…etc.” None of them are true.
23. She knows how to get anything out of me. “Bry…” works every time. Sadly, she knows of this power.
24. She is her, unique. If you ever met her, you know she is quite unique. If you ever met me, you know she is perfect for me. I just try to be perfect for her.

There you go. There are 24 reasons I love my girlfriend. There are many more, but here is a few that come to mind frequently. She is special to me and I love her dearly. I’ll see her this week for the first time since the first week in July!

So this is to year two complete. I’ll see you, Web 2.0, Sept. 13, 2010 to celebrate another year down.

Thanks, Tom

Tom Berry, 48 of High Point, NC, died last Sunday after battling a serious infection. Berry wrote for the High Point Enterprise for over 20 years as a beat writer and columnist.

The reason I bring this to attention is because I learned a few things here and there from Berry. He was the beat writer for High Point University sports. We bumped into each other here and there. Sometimes we were fighting over interviewing players after games, other times we were sharing a table as we ate in the hospitality room of a tournament.

I really never spent a lot of time talking to Berry. Sure I knew who he was. He always got first pick of players and coaches after games. By the time I got to the head coach, the gym had cleared out and Berry probably had written half of his copy.

When I learned of Berry’s death, I remember two instances of interaction with Tom, the reporter.

The first was after HPU played Winthrop at the Millis Center. This was the second time High Point had beaten Winthrop this year and second time in a row at home. The series record stands with HPU only winning four games.

Earlier in the week Gene Harris, active career points leader, was suspended from the team for the game. The whole school population knew why. Harris was mad he lost the starting job to a freshman. Still, a reporter had to ask head coach Bart Lundy for the reason.

After the game, Tom and the beat reporter for the Rock Hill, SC newspaper grabbed the star players from the game. I really lucked out because that left Lundy available. I got the first crack at asking the burning question, “You won without Harris, why?”

I started with the basic questions about how he felt about the game, what were his thoughts down the stretch, etc. Then when I got to the burning question, the other reporters all were done with the players. So there I was, conducting the impromptu press conference.

“Coach, what is your comment on Gene Harris? Why did he not dress?”

Tom stood on my left, the Rock Hill Herald reporter on my right. They quickly jot down the answer. When I was done, I stood nearby to hear if they asked any follow-ups that I missed. Tom didn’t. He had the answers he needed. It was like he gave me a pat on the back. A vet in the industry thought I did the job well. (Read my article here)

The second instance of Tom putting a mark on my journalism career came at the Big South Tournament Quarterfinals. HPU, the last seed, played at Radford, the first seed. It was a blow out. (Read my article here) I think Tom, me and a few fans could have put up that performance. While High Point fell 20 points behind, Tom started writing his column for the paper.

We struck up small talk about the season. We discussed the problems the team had. The Harris incident came up along with a few other player problems during the year. I would add a thing or two that Tom didn’t know. He asked, “What happened with [player x]?” I asked him, “You want the story the team says or what I heard through the grapevine?”
“The grapevine.”

I told him all the dirty secrets that weren’t supposed to get out. I just thought we were having general talk. I am a moron!

The next day I went to compare how Tom’s article was to mine. I noticed his column in this search. The “grapevine” suddenly extended to the High Point Enterprise readership. (Read Tom’s column here)

I learned something, “When you speak to a reporter, he is always a reporter. It never turns off.” I used that same logic when a sandwich maker made small talk with me about the Oak Hollow Mall being for sale. She told me insider information. I broke the story, a week before any daily had it. I sat on the story for two weeks before that too.

When I was writing it all I thought about was Tom and mine “grapevine” talk. It gave me the ok to write the article.

Thanks, Tom. May God give comfort to his wife and daughters along with the many professionals that remember Tom Berry, 48 of High Point, NC.

What a community newspaper needs to change

My last post was a bit of a dig towards my local newspaper, the Fluvanna Review.  Since that post, the writing hasn’t changed.  The same poor choice of chronological order still occurs.

I could show another post of the same poor writing, but I’m moving on.  I’ve thought about how I could make a community newspaper better.  What would I do if I were editor for three months?  Could I change the way a community newspaper operates?

Of course I could!  Would they listen?  That’s the million-dollar question.  The advantage I have is I worked on a “community newspaper.”  Working on the Campus Chronicle is like working on a community newspaper.  We came out biweekly (which is every two weeks incase you want to argue, look it up).  We had to deliver news that was old, that people most of the time already knew.  With those problems, we still grew readership this past year.

What we did was study the paper.  We studied how people consumed the news.  We studied our readership.  We studied how we worked.  We kept studying until we figured out a way to correct our ills and continue our strengths.

If I were in charge of a paper like the Fluvanna Review I would implement some changes that would grow the paper.

1. Stop reporting news two weeks old acting like it is still fresh.
When reporting a community event two weeks after later, it isn’t news.  No one cares because they were there or know someone that was there.  Readers don’t care what amusement rides were there.  Do you have a responsibility to report it?  Yes.  It isn’t that you report it, but how you report it.

Why not use the power of a feature article?  Follow a family at the event.  What did they like?  Why did they like it?  What didn’t they like and why?  Answer those questions.  Everyone knows it happened.  Tell me why we should care that it happened.

2.  Report news online unless it is a big story that is timely.
You have a website!  The website doesn’t need to be a static page that changes every time your paper comes out.  At the October Associate Collegiate Press convention a presenter said something that really stuck with our news staff.
“If you have a website you no longer come out every time a paper comes out.  You come out everyday, every minute, every second.”

That is something that seems much more simple than it is.  The mindset to understand this concept is hard to achieve.  It took us the whole year and the Chronicle doesn’t still use all of the capabilities it can.  It is a transition with definite progress.

The easiest way to transition is to remembering your paper comes out every second.  We started with the sports section.  Game reports take an hour to write after the contest is completed.  Grab two players and the coach of the team you are following.  Bam.  Upload and you just had a new issue of your paper.

Small changes in the sports section, leads to small changes in the rest of your newsroom and big changes at your paper.  Every reporter wants to be published.  Seeing your name in print whether online or paper is a rush.  Other writers will want to be published more often on the web.

3. Make the website easy to use.
Because some community websites think, “We want a website like other news organizations.  We just don’t want to pay a lot so we will find the cheapest, easiest [for us] way to do it.”

That ain’t working folks.  You don’t have to spend a lot to have an easy to use website.  $150 per year and one time fee of $100-200 can get you an easy to use website.  Go to WordPress, find a good theme from a developer and get a server.  Most bloggers pay this and they get a lot less exposure than a community newspaper.

4. Always be willing to evolve.
Times are a changing.  That means so is a newspaper.  Do you have to get a Twitter account?  No.  Should you?  Yes.  Do you have to get a Facebook fan page?  No.  Should you?  Yes.  Should your website have RSS?  Yes, that was a stupid question.  Should your website have internal AND external links in EACH story?  Yes.

I believe I conveyed the idea.  Just because it has always been done doesn’t mean it is still correct now.  I use to always call my parents if I were out past 9 pm.  It doesn’t matter now because I’m 21.  Newspapers need to grow up too.

I only suggest four changes, four rather easy changes. At the Chronicle, our website grew hits and we became meaningful every week instead of every issue.   Everyone thought I was crazy when I suggested a Twitter page.  We got one in February and by April our advisor said that was a really smart move.  He said, “Man, you were right.  This Twitter thing is huge now.  We had one before everyone and their mom showed their Twitter URL on everything they could.

These changes did effect our paper edition.  Instead of our papers sitting on the stands for months, they disappeared, in a good way.  Our stories were interesting because they went in depth to the news item.  Students actually cared about what they read when six months prior they could careless if our paper even existed.

Don’t make your paper be a waste of time and money.  Make it meaningful.

Here are a few examples of my changes displayed at the Campus Chronicle.  Of course, the examples are all my work because this is my blog and I’m a shameless self-promoter.

Sorority recruitment.  We ran two stories, the news item and a feature.  The feature had about 100 more reads online and the paper disappeared quicker than any paper we ever had.  We think it was this story, but who knows.

Game Reports.  Here is a game report that came out the same night as the game.  We tried to get all reports out by midnight of the same day.  People wake up and read the story.

Website.  Here is the Campus Chronicle website.  Pretty easy considering it is College Publisher.  The biggest problem I have with CP is the backend is incredibily difficult to navigate.

Twitter.  Here is a Twitter account.  For the Student Government Association Presidential Debate, which we hosted and moderated, we live tweeted the whole thing.  We also live tweeted during basketball games.  Guess who did that…

Go inverted, community newspapers!

Here is the cover of the July 3, 2009 Fluvanna Review

Community newspapers are vital to many neighborhoods across our great land.  If it were not for community newspapers, some locales would never be covered.  People love reading what is happening not only across the country but also across the street.

Community newspapers are also important for journalists.  One of my favorite reporters started at a small community newspaper in Queens.  Mitch Albom’s first article was about a parking tickets hearing for the Queen’s Tribune.  I once read, which I can’t find currently, he went there looking for the who, what, when, where, and/or how of his story.  And he reported it, even if it was just parking tickets.

The reason I bring this up is because my favorite newspaper comes every Thursday.  I get my community newspaper, the Fluvanna Review, from my cubbyhole and read it cover to cover.  I love reading what is happening “across the street.”

The thing that pains me the most from my community paper, as well as other community newspapers, where did the journalism go?  Where was the who, what, when, where, and/or how?

An article this past week violated the same rule I violated the first time I wrote an article.  Instead of a parking ticket hearing, this story was covering a school board meeting.  The writer took the logical writing style but the illogical reading style.  The dreadful style is telling the meeting chronologically instead of by importance.

By reading the article (full disclosure: I did not attend the meeting) I would say the most important issue talked about was the last thing in the article.  The district superintendent and two citizens discussed the International Baccalaureate program.

The article’s headline has the IB program listed first in it!  This proves one of two possible problems.  Either the editor incorrectly identified the most important subject or the writer buried the subject.  I think the latter.

The second most important subject, employee salaries, has played itself out for at least a month in the public interest.  It led the story because it happened first in the meeting.  I only think it should be second because it seemed pushed into the meeting, not planned for.  The board has discussed salaries at previous meetings and this was just “beating a dead horse,” for lack of a better term.

It could go either way though.  The salaries could go first and the IB program elimination second.  Either way, they are the two most important subjects and deserved “top of the fold” treatment.  (Unfortunately, the Fluvanna Review doesn’t have a cross fold in it, but you get what I mean.)

The problem of the chronological style is it doesn’t keep interest.  Readers don’t want to feel like they were at the meeting.  Readers would read the meeting notes and agenda if they wanted to know what transpired or they would just have attended the meeting.  You read the article to know what you missed.

The simplest way to think of it is to imagine you run home to tell someone the story.  What do you tell them first to make it seem interesting?  Are you going to lead with the meeting started promptly at 7 pm, like this article did, or are you going to talk about how eliminating the IB program is welcomed by many?  Will you talk about how the school board is defending the salaries of many employees?

There is a reason why the inverted pyramid has survived millions of articles.  Use it.  You think Mitch Albom went to the parking tickets hearing thinking he would receive more sports writing awards than anyone else?  You could become him too.

Here's to you Little Zebra

The biggest announcement in the history of the Real Estate Zebra came a week ago.  Incase you were not on Twitter, my brother and sister(-in-law) are having their first child due to arrive mid January.