The coffee in question.

Every once in a while, I’m wrong about something. I know you probably don’t believe me, so I’ve even dredged up an example.

I accidentally took another customer’s latte at a coffee shop recently, then insisted it hadn’t happened when my friend pointed it out. In the brief moment between seizing the paper cup realizing my wrongness, I really had it all: An inflated sense of rightness and a cup of coffee that tasted about 200 percent better than anything I’d ever order. (Soy milk? That sounds pretty expensive. Could you substitute water instead?)

Writer Kathryn Schulz has made a career out of studying that kind of resilient indignation — wrongness, if you will. Humans, she says, suffer from “error blindness.” Schulz recently gave a TED talk about the nature of human error that struck me as especially poignant.

Schulz, a journalist by background, had something interesting to say about how our inherent tendency to be wrong effects how we construct and interpret stories. Wrongness, she said, is part of the reason plot twists and literary red herrings are so effective in stories — it’s the pattern we go through in our own lives without realizing what’s happening.

“When it comes to stories, we love being wrong,” she says. “Our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think the one thing happens, and something else happens instead.”

I produced a collection of video interviews with Seattle-area religious and spiritual leaders as part of my work in the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. They were an attempt to gain a fresh perspective on effective leadership by talking with people who are several steps removed from the corporate world.

Dzogchen Ponlop Riponche – Buddhist scholar and meditation master (www.dpr.info)

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche on leadership from Amy Rolph on Vimeo.

Pen Cook – Pastor at Paradox Bible Church (www.paradoxbiblechurch.org)

Pen Cook on leadership from Amy Rolph on Vimeo.

Then I’ll drive south on Highway 99 to a place that’s familiar and new all at once.

I start work at Seattlepi.com today, 16 months after its newspaper predecessor was shuttered.  I’ll be covering general Seattle news and helping with site production. More details about the gig will follow.

Now for some stale knock-off-brand breakfast. Mmmm.

Losing a home isn’t one of those things. At least, not anymore.

I wrote extensively on the topic of home foreclosures and mortgage modifications during my last few months at The Daily Herald, mostly because the sheer volume of homeowners in trouble has skyrocketed during the last year.

For me, foreclosure reporting started with one family: the Lemkes. They applied to modify their home loan with Bank of America, but got caught up in a tangled and confusing process marked with mixed signals and dead ends. I first talked with Gregory Lemke in the Herald break room while his seven-year-old daughter sat quietly drawing with markers.

After that, there were more interviews with other homeowners — on the phone, at kitchen tables, during lunch breaks. They all had one thing in common: An unexpected change in circumstances. Usually, it was a job loss.

When each story about foreclosures ran, I’d arrive at work to the same scene: phone messages and email from readers worried about losing their homes. They reported frustration with the loan-modification process, usually centered around mountains of paperwork, unresponsive bank representatives and confusing communications.

The frustrating modification process has caught the attention of reporters across the country, maybe in part because of efforts from ProPublica, a non-profit journalism project. The organization launched a matchmaking service earlier this year, offering to pair troubled homeowners with journalists in their area.

“Journalists, sign up here and we’ll put you in contact with struggling homeowners in your area who want to talk with local journalists,” ProPublica wrote in March.

I took the bait, submitting my contact information and specifying what region I covered. They matched me with two homeowners.

But when I contacted them, both homeowners had changed their minds about talking to the media.

Other journalists had different experiences with the project. ProPublica reported making 140 matches by mid-April, with stories appearing in news sources around the country.


Photos are by Herald photographers and taken in 2009 and 2010. For photo credits and links to stories, click through to Picasa.

Filed under: Stories, Storytelling, The Herald ]]> http://amyrolph.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/favorite-small-business-stories/feed/ 0 amyrolph http://amyrolph.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/in-which-i-say-goodbye-to-everett/ http://amyrolph.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/in-which-i-say-goodbye-to-everett/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:09:14 +0000 amyrolph http://amyrolph.wordpress.com/?p=467 ]]> I started working at the Everett Herald less than a week after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped publishing.

Almost 16 months and a few speeding tickets later, I’m making another change. Today is my last day at the scrappy community newspaper that’s been part of Snohomish County’s fabric for nearly 110 years.

It doesn’t feel like this is really a goodbye. The truth is, Everett and I go way back. Way, way back.

That’s John Krause, my great-great-grandfather, on the job in Everett during the early 20th century. He was a conductor on the Interurban Rail.

I like to think he would have been pleased that I worked for his hometown paper.

I’ve worked with a fantastic team of journalists at the Herald. Maybe the most notable is Mike Benbow, an editor who does his best to uphold traditional journalistic values while encouraging non-traditional storytelling and innovation.

He’s also pretty entertaining. I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll miss having my afternoon interrupted by an over-the-top rendition of Pure Prairie League’s “Amie” being belted out two desks away.

But I won’t miss the drive.

I spend about eight hours a week driving from Seattle to Everett. That’s more than 17 days a year — about two and a half weeks.

I’ll make the drive for the last time today, but not before I say this: Thanks for letting me tell your stories, Snohomish County. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you.

I’ll start my new job at Seattlepi.com on July 12.

It’s fast. It’s secretive. But it’s a process that often makes perfect sense in retrospect. Looking back, it’s clear that banks don’t fail fast. They languish for months — even years — before finally dying.

I covered two bank closures last month. First, Lynnwood-based City Bank was shut down and immediately sold to another small bank headquartered in Washington state.

Two weeks later, Frontier Bank of Everett was closed and sold to a California-based bank with international ties.

For both banks, the writing was on the wall long before before they landed on the FDIC’s list of failed banks.

This timeline on Dipity.com tracks the slow demise of Frontier Bank, a long-time Everett institution that lost a long battle with bad real estate loans on April 30. Note: At the time this post was published, WordPress.com didn’t support <iframe> tags, which Dipity utilizes. If you’d like to interact with the timeline, just click on the image below.

For a look at City Bank news, see this timeline.

The “everything else” beat works just fine for me. In the news industry, we tend to divide and categorize:  consumer news,  finance, technology, real estate, retail. But outside the newsroom, things are  never that easy to label — especially when it comes to the economy.

A two-part series I wrote for the Herald is a good example of that. Dubbed “Banking Blues, the series examines how several economic factors came together to create a perfect storm for the nation’s community banking industry.

Two questions I set out to answer: What really happened, and who’s impacted most by the crisis?

The first story details how a high concentration of real estate loans and the worst recession in recent history were devastating blows to small banks. The second story looks at what the industry’s troubles means for small businesses, the group economists believe will lead the country out of recession by generating jobs.

So what happens if community banks aren’t lending to small businesses? Some believe that means a slower economic recovery and prolonged high unemployment.

And there you have it: Finance, real estate, small business and employment — all under the banking umbrella.  Banking Blues is fast becoming one of my favorite examples of how the “everything else” beat works.

Want to know more? Listen to me talk about the series on KUOW.

Here’s how the first story starts:

The roadside signs advertise village life, a quiet hamlet painted in muted shades of gray, green and brown. The driveways slope down from two-car garages, and basketball hoops and satellite dishes show that people call this place home.

Just not enough people.

Cars crawl slowly down the streets as twilight creeps across trimmed lawns and tended flower beds. The drivers are home from work for the weekend; there’s no need to rush. The garage doors open, cars drive in. The doors shut. Lights turn on. All seems well at Tambark Village, a compact neighborhood built on a soggy stretch of land near the heart of Mill Creek.

Developments like this one brought the community banking sector to its knees. (Read the rest here.)

I spent a few mornings with Mary last week, and she told me it’s the big guys — the Amazons and the Barnes & Nobles — that make things hard for small stores like The Bookworks. But it’s the recession that makes things impossible.

Here’s footage of Mary telling her last story at The Bookworks.

After eleven years, Mary is ready to let go.

“My customers are so sad, and I feel so bad,” she told me one morning. “I’m ready to go, and they’re not ready to let me go.”

For more about why she’s ready to move on, read the full story. It starts like this:

MARYSVILLE — The music drifts out of Mary Burns’ storefront and down Third Street, eventually losing its way amid rumbling engines.

Ding, ding, ding ding. The silvery chimes sound like a line from a storybook, enchanted music that casts a spell over Burns’ customers and draws them through the open door of her bookstore.

The song is ending. The music box won’t be a heard on Third Street much longer; Burns is closing The Bookworks, which she’s owned for 11 years.

She’s selling the books, the shelves — even the music box that has long been a fixture in her front window.

Like many other independent bookstore owners, Burns was driven to extinction by a perfect storm of variables, the most damning of which come as no surprise: online book retailers and the harshest recession in recent history. Read more here.

I remember one year ago like it was one week ago.

I woke up early. And for once, I wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t have anywhere to be, anyone to meet, anything to write. I wouldn’t start at the Everett Herald for six more days, and I was at a loss for what to do with myself.

I ended up about a mile away at a Tully’s Coffee, trying to make a cup of tea last long past the point of cooling. A newspaper rack stood next to the coffee bar, and a headline on the cover of the New York Times read:  “Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web.” I remember that two older gentlemen seated in big chairs near a window were talking about the P-I. They speculated about what went wrong, what the closure meant — if anything.

One year later, I don’t have many answers. But I believe in journalism more than ever. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that persistence can be a powerful force.

As far as I can tell, envisioning the future of the news industry is a lot like driving without my glasses. I know we’re moving forward. And I can read the signs as they flash past the windshield. They say to speed up, slow down, turn left, turn right. They say to respond quickly, think faster and merge when one lane ends. But as for the destination — that’s a blur. I know it’s out there, but it’s hard to see that far down the road.

Some might say that’s shortsighted (nearsighted, to be precise), but I think it has more to do with flexibility. We don’t know what the future looks like, and we have to adjust our route in accordance with signposts along the way.