Do you need church to be a Christian?
A recent Pew study suggests that, increasingly, Americans who identify themselves as Christians but don’t affiliate themselves with organized religion say no.
Here’s the story I wrote for this week’s faith section in The Anniston Star : To Go or not to go: More Americans than ever don’t attend church
Photo by Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star
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On this blog, I tend to highlight my enterprise work — those big investigative pieces that come to fruition after weeks and sometimes months of culling statistics, interviewing official sources, comparing their comments to those affected by whatever law or problem or situation I’m writing about at the time.
The mother of slain Anniston police officer Justin Sollohub, hugs President Barack Obama as her youngest Blake stands by at a national fallen officer memorial in Washington D.C. Photo by Byron Morris.
It’s rewarding but perhaps not as refreshing as those other stories I write — the features, the one that tell people’s stories, develop with a (seemingly) more natural narrative. The features I’ve written over the past year for The Star have been some of the best to work on. Favorite to write, to report. Favorite stories to have told to me, to pass on to others.
A few of those stories below:
Heart of slain Anniston police officer gives grateful Florida man a new chance at life
Mamre Baptist and Motes family recover after storm
Lipscomb family holds on to lessons from parents lost in storm
Siblings’ lives changed with loss of parents on April 27
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How do you “take back” a neighborhood? Is it possible for neighbors, city leaders and police to work together to reverse crime trends in a historic but declining part of town?
Those are some the questions residents near Rocky Hollow Road in Anniston are trying to answer, as the area where they live is threatened by rising drug problems, gun violence and abandoned, unsafe properties.
Here’s enterprise piece I wrote for The Star; it ran this past Sunday: http://annistonstar.com/view/full_story/20246003/article-Rocky-road–Good-neighbors-try-to-remove-blight-from-old-Anniston-street?
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After two months of research, gathering FOIA-ed military documents and interviews with more than 60 people, my feature profile on Anniston’s most polarizing city leader finally ran. Check out this past Sunday’s edition of The Anniston Star or click here to read the story.
Anniston City Councilman Ben Little's senior picture from 1975 Hemingway, (S.C.), High School yearbook.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Benjamin Little arrived in Anniston in 1984, driving a silver Chevrolet Chevette and sporting the close-cropped haircut of an Army man.
He drove alone. His wife of one year, pregnant with their son, followed in another car.
Little took exit 185 off Interstate 20, drove straight through Oxford and Anniston without noticing much of anything and stopped only once he reached “the woods.”
Back then, Anniston was nothing more than another “regular Army assignment” to the man who has years later become its most polarizing city figure.
“I had no idea I would be staying here,” Little said in a recent interview.
He would stay. More than that, he would come to see himself as a leader for black residents, a champion of individual rights, a whistleblower on political wrongdoing.
It’s a vision of himself that overlooks what his political foes frequently point out: his inability to compromise, use of intimidation to get what he wants, racial rhetoric when he does not.
But before all of this — before the councilman, before the pastor, before the drill sergeant — there was the boy. The boy running wide open down a dirt road, swinging up onto his aunt’s porch, sneaking bites of sweet homemade preserves. The boy cropping tobacco and hitching a mule cart to the family dog. Going to church on Sundays, basketball practice in the afternoons. Dreaming at nights about seeing the world.”
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Pulitzer winner Connie Schultz recently visited Jacksonville State University to talk journalism, writing, politics and story-telling. I was lucky enough to interview her before she arrived and even luckier to listen to her speak as part of the Ayers Lecture Series at JSU.
Schultz sticks with me, as a female journalist, because of her strength, her no-nonsense attitude and her ability to connect with audience (whether she’s speaking or writing.)
During our phone conversation, we talked about (what felt like) everything — from starting out in journalism, to the disgust we felt towards Rush Limbaugh for his recent misogynistic comments to our favorite novels.
Her top two works of fiction?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill A Mockingbird.
I’ve never read the former but will now. She told me I’d love it. And after listening to her talk at JSU, I’m pretty sure she knows a good story. Anyway, here are my stories about her recent visit:
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What happens when a judge’s faulty order violates a defendant’s due process rights?
Debra Jones, a circuit judge in Calhoun County, Ala., says that kind of judicial misbehavior undermines local residents’ ability to trust that elected court officials will uphold the law and protect them from miscarriages of justice.
And Jones said she couldn’t blame Anniston resident Kelley Tyson if her trust in the local court system was gone.
Anniston resident Kelley Tyson sits outside the home where she was arrested last week. Photo Credit: Trent Penny, The Anniston Star
That’s because Tyson was thrown in jail last week for failing to meet her probation officer for the
past six months. The problem is this: Tyson never knew she was granted probation after she pleaded guilty to stealing copper last August, court officials recently testified.
Former Circuit Judge Joel Laird never notified Tyson or her defense attorney about her Sept. 16 probation hearing, held the hearing without either defendant or her attorney being present and ordered Tyson to three months probation, those officials testified in Jones’ courtroom Friday. But, in the last of a series of missteps, Laird didn’t file that probation order until four months after the fact – on Jan. 18, 2011, the day Laird left office after Jones beat him in the November elections.
That raised flags with workers at the local probation office, who received notification of Tyson’s probation and restitution requirements in early February.
“We got a letter February … the order saying Tyson was placed on probation Sept. 9,” said Jeff Cobb, Tyson’s probation officer. “That was odd … this was the first order I’d seen.”
So neither Tyson nor her probation officer had known they were supposed to be meeting regularly for the past five months, Cobb said.
He said he waited until March 1 to file a delinquency report on Tyson, in case she hadn’t received notice about the probation arrangement until February, either.
Tyson hadn’t. So when police arrived at her Anniston home last week and arrested her for a probation violation, she was shocked. Her husband was angry. When Jones found out from Tyson’s husband what had happened, she was angry, too.
Jones held an emergency hearing Friday, where prosecutors and probation officers testified that blame for Tyson’s unlawful arrest rested squarely on Laird’s shoulders.
Attempts to reach Laird for the story were unsuccessful. But Jones had plenty to say about Tyson’s treatment.
“I hereby find there has been a great miscarriage of justice here; I apologize to you,” Jones said to Tyson at the end of the hearing. “I cannot make it right. All I can do is recognize that this…order entered by Judge Laird is in error.”
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…but is the real problem how much the city relies on the military sector, how the local economy here in Calhoun County, Ala. isn’t nearly as diverse as it should be?
That’s what one Calhoun County economist said to me for a recent Anniston Star story I wrote about proposed cuts for federal workers.
Republican-led proposals to cut benefits and freeze pay for federal workers in 2011 and beyond has local Anniston Army Depot employees and their union representatives worried.
But community leaders in Anniston and Calhoun County say they’re concerned about the recent proposals, too. That’s because the depot – and it’s 4,000 federal workers – is the engine that keeps the Anniston-Calhoun area running. And cuts in services, pay freezes and mandatory furloughs for those workers is kind of like trading in that $1.3 billion, top-of-the-line engine for a cheaper, less dependable one, Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce President Sherri Sumners said.
“Not a day goes by that I haven’t been thinking about jobs at the depot…even things like (depot employees) going back to regular shifts with no overtime reduces the amount of disposable income that is available,” Sumners told me during a recent interview.
And then I heard this from Ray Van Schoubroek, a consultant for the local union chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees:
“It’s economics. It has to do with the revenue that goes back into the community over a year’s time. If one worker is losing $12,000 a year, multiply that by 4,000; that could mean there’s $4,800,000 not going back into the community.”
The cuts federal workers are worried about stem from legislation recently proposed by GOP members of Congress that calls for a series of cuts for federal workers for the rest of fiscal 2011, including two-week furloughs, one-year pay freezes, hiring freezes and greater employee contribution to pensions. (To read the legislation, click here, here and here).
But Jacksonville State University Economics Professor Christopher Westley said the real problem isn’t the cuts. It’s Anniston’s reliance on the depot as that economic engine. Westley blames local leaders like Sumners for their inattention to other industries and their inability to attract a variety of businesses to the Anniston-Calhoun area. That’s worked for a while, Westley said, but won’t anymore.
“Normally, politicians want to throw money at the depot…and the fed’s been very accommodating of those types of policies,” he told me during a Thursday interview. “And now it looks like those are not working anymore.”
To read the full story I wrote about proposed cuts for federal workers and Anniston’s reliance on the depot, click here.
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Calhoun County taxpayers shell out a lot of money each year to provide a range of medical services – from routine check-ups to prescription allergy medicine to more expensive treatments like pre-natal care and cancer medicine – for the more than 400 inmates at the local jail.
A lot of money but not that much money compared to what they used to pay and compared to what the average American spends on health care each year. ($2,976 according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Calhoun County commissioners and jail officials say they’ve been able to help local taxpayers save on jail medical costs for a number of reasons.
1) Seven years ago, the commission realized that it needed to have a better understanding of who was in the jail at all times. So it appointed a court liaison – a person dedicated to knowing every inmate’s charge, bond situation and, most importantly, medical requirements. That way, officials could better monitor who was costing taxpayers the most in medical expenses and seek alternatives to incarceration if that person was a non-violent, non-repeat offender.
2) Around the same time, jail officials began requiring a $10 co-pay from all inmates who needed medical assistance.
3) Most recently, the head nurse at the jail received his nurse practitioner’s license. He passed the exam Monday, meaning the commission can cut doctor’s fees in half for fiscal year 2011.
In addition to these specific saving techniques, Calhoun County Administrator Ken Joiner said the commission has been diligent about seeking out reduced-cost contracts with local pharmacies for prescriptions and Regional Medical Hospital in Anniston for in-patient and emergency care.
But how are these cost-cutting measures affecting inmates? What’s being said by opponents of judges who allow non-violent and non-repeat offenders out of jail early based on medical costs? And what happens when one inmate – who absolutely must stay in jail – breaks the bank with a serious chronic illness or emergency health problem?
To learn more about what inmate health care costs Calhoun County taxpayers and how that cost is being further reduced for FY 2011, read my article, tentatively set to run in this Sunday’s Anniston Star.
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…actually, I really should change that headline to say, “Hello from The Anniston Star public safety beat, which includes three police departments, a sheriff’s office, a courthouse and an army installation the size of Manhattan.”
Does it sound exhausting?
It is.
Overwhelming?
Yep, check that one, too.
But here’s the thing about my first real journalism job. By “real” I mean full-time, post-college job. I wake up every day, and I am thrilled to come to work. As I told one of my Washington and Lee journalism professors in a recent Facebook message, Anniston is an awesome news town. Every day, I’m covering something new, something crazy, something I’ve never thought about before.
Just last Sunday, The Star ran a 2,800-word enterprise story I wrote about the area unsolved homicides and how local police here excel at clearing (solving) cases. But do you know what clearance really means and what factors play a part in it? I didn’t
Check out the story on my newly updated Clips page.
Yes, this job is exhausting, but – in the words of the crime reporter I recently replaced – it’s also exhilarating. Part of that is because each day on the job as a beat reporter is completely different from the day before it. Part of the holy-crap-this-is-so-cool feeling comes from working in a newsroom, surrounded by people who care about the community they are covering. Part of it comes from feeling like all those late nights reporting for the Rockbridge Report actually did prepare me for a “real” newsroom.
I never thought I’d end up in Alabama. I certainly never thought I’d end up Anniston, Alabama – covering drugs and unsolved homicides and army changes of command ceremonies. But at this point – more than two months in – I’m so glad I did.
It sounds cheesy, but I love my job. OK, ending dorkiness now…if possible.
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So I am posting this in bed from my (relatively) new Droid phone. It’s 12:21 a.m. I’m officially done with Rockbridge Report preparations for the show tomorrow. I should go to bed.
But the producer in me – the journalist in me – won’t shut off.
I keep thinking about all the big news headlines this sleepy little mountain town keeps churning out – school budget crises, drug busts, burglary problems, controversial noise ordinances, and of course we can’t forget our new Lexington police chief.
There’s such a desire to make it “big” in the news biz – to report on the national and international stories that impact the largest audiences. And for good reason – those are the stories that keep the job interesting, dynamic and challenging. But now more than ever I’ve been experiencing first-hand how local news coverage matters just as much. Need proof? Just check out the emotion that charges everything the school board members are saying right now.
Nerdy as it may be for a college senior to be blogging on her smartphone about how much she loves the news biz, that’s exactly what I want to be doing.
That’s exactly what producing the only local news station has made me want to be doing when I really should be catching some Z’s….err…I mean, partying.
Filed under Reverie of a reporter
Reporter and editor for an Alabama daily. See my "Clips" page or http://annistonstar.com for news articles. This is my personal blog.
