I got a last minute assignment this morning to cover the Indiana state superintendent, who was visiting an Evansville high school to check out the school corporation's new netbook program. Beginning this year, all high school students were rented the small laptops and will use them in class for various interactive assignments.

It made for a busy morning: I wrote the story, shot and edited a short video and also took a few photos. The one on the left and one more I took were used as the centerpiece art on A4.

I've brying to do more videos lately. I recently filed one on a local kid who dropped a message in a bottle off the coast of Florida and then, a year-and-a-half later, got a letter from a boy in the Netherlands who found it. And last week, when a delegation of residents from Evansville's Japanese sister city came to town, I did a video and story on them.

I had to rush out this morning to cover a massive fire that destroyed the Tin Fish restaurant at Marina Pointe overnight.

I always check the TV station Web sites as soon as I get up and I immediately knew I'd have to rush out to get on scene. By the time I did, the fire was mostly extinguished, but they were still fighting lingering hot spots. I shot the above photo and also shot and edited a quick video.

Luckily, no one was inside when the fire started and there were no injuries. It felt strange to see the building in ruins, though, as I had just eaten there for the first time when family came to visit a few weeks back. I guess it's good we did so while we had the chance.

A story I've been working on for about two weeks appears in today's paper. It focuses on Paul Marvel, an Evansville Police Department officer who resigned shortly before a hearing to consider a recommendation he be fired. The details of his alleged misconduct haven't been released, but police say it generally involves failing to perform his job and isn't criminal in nature.

I started getting curious about Marvel when his hearing date was delayed for months by his lawyer and the merit board. Pending the hearing, he was on suspension with pay. So delaying it meant he would earn extra money in the interim. And, ultimately, he didn't even go forward with the hearing and resigned instead.

As I investigated how much money he made during that span, another element developed: the city actually agreed to give him a fairly significant buyout in exchange for the resignation.

It all made for a very fascinating story that revealed taxpayers forked over more than $30,000 in salary for Marvel for time he spent not working.

An Evansville Police Department officer who was not charged in a sexual assault case weeks ago was arrested on a separate, similar case today.

Martin Montgomery is facing a preliminary charge of criminal deviate conduct with a preliminary court appearance scheduled later this week.

I broke the story on courierpress.com early in the afternoon and followed up with two stories for the print edition. One offered more detail on the allegations and included an interview with the assistant chief of police, who called Montgomery an embarassment to the force.

In the other, I tracked down and spoke to the woman who filed the first sexual assault complaint. Her case went to a grand jury, which ultimately decided not to file any charges.

I wrote a follow-up story in today's paper about Jessica Brooks, an 18-year-old local girl who suffered serious burns to more than half her body a couple weeks ago when she doused her hair in gasoline. She was trying to kill lice.

Brooks is now being treated at the University of Louisville hospital burn unit. After contacting relatives for a story when the accident first happened, I got in touch with Brooks' mother. She graciously agreed to allow me to drive out to Louisville for the follow-up.

After an interview with the mom (which you can see in this video), I got to go into the burn unit and see Brooks in person. She was completely immobilized and covered from the waist up in bandages. But it was incredibly emotional to be there and see the interaction between mom and daughter first-hand. Hopefully, it came across in the story.

The photo at left is me speaking with a journalism class at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. The editor-in-chief of the Courier & Press graduated from there and, as part of a relationship between the paper and the school, I went there for a week speaking to classes.
For the most part, I talked about the multimedia aspects of my job: explaining how I report for the paper but also shoot video, edit audio, create PDFs and work with a Web-first mentality as much as possible.
The students seemed to really enjoy the presentation, which included the following examples of recent video work.








And Bowling Green is a great little town. They've got a charming Downtown with an old-fashioned dime store and a huge record store, among all sorts of other shops, coffee shops and restaurants. There's also a number of renowned pizza places - and I can report the two I tried lived up to their reputation.

I also had the pleasure of staying in the University president's guest house during my visit and got a write-up and photos in the department newsletter.

The Evansville Fire Department earlier this year acknowledged problems with its vehicle repair program and instituted a series of changes ranging from new reporting software to a new semiannual, independent inspection.

Those developments, though, came largely in response to the department's handling of repairs - fixing problems submitted by firefighters who work with equipment each day.

Following up on that story, I began an investigation into the department's routine maintenance program. The work - which includes all the normal maintenance you do for a car as well as tests of firefighting-specific equipment - is supposed to be done annually.

But after scouring a sizable stack of handwritten records detailing the maintenance history of all the department vehicles, I found that the work was often happening with much less frequency.

The resulting story ran on the front page of a recent Sunday edition. It's the first in a series of stories we plan on the fire department and some of the problems surrounding its vehicle maintenance program. Work on the next will begin this week.

In other news, I did some more video work when a major fire sparked at a horse stable in Henderson, the Kentucky city just across the river from Evansville. More than 25 horses were killed in the blaze, which quickly consumed the structure.

I shot the video with just my Flip camera and a monopod and then quickly edited it together using Moviemaker.

We're increasingly focusing on video across the newsroom - all reporters will be getting point-and-shoot cameras soon and I hope to receive a new camera capable of shooting widescreen HD video and some software with a little more editing options soon. One of my goals over the next year is to train additional staffers to be comfortable shooting and editing video from beginning to end.

Sort of in that vein, I recently had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at High School Media Day at the University of Southern Indiana. I shared a presentation I put together called "Journalism in the 21st Century" in which I showed examples of all the multimedia and Web work we're doing and talked about how important it will be in the coming years.

Lastly, I've been hard at work updating and redesigning the clips section on this site. It now has PDFs of select stories - complete with text and design - as well as embedded videos, photos I've taken, links to databases I created and examples from college and internships. I'm still working out a few kinks and trying to make it look normal in all different browsers, but I think it's coming along nicely. Check it out.