By Daniel Victor

When I had an internship at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, my life was turned upside down: Jeopardy was on at 6:00 p.m., and Wheel of Fortune was on at 6:30 p.m. Back home in Pennsylvania it was the other way around: Wheel of Fortune was on first, then Jeopardy.

They were the same two episodes countrywide, just presented in a different order. This presented a rare opportunity for my friend back home: I could tell her the answers before they aired in her time zone, and she’d look much smarter to her roommates.

I know you want to call it cheating, but I’m going to go ahead and call it resourcefulness.

AND NOW, THE AWFUL ANALOGY

I picture a similar scene when I look at what’s happening to journalism in cities bigger than mine.

I see people – they were formerly called an audience – who are so fractured that their thousands of niches will almost certainly never again be assembled into one. I see mobile news as the lifeline in commuter cultures. I see tech-savvy crowds feeling empowered by tools like Ning, Wordpress and their own start-up sites.

Then I look back at Harrisburg, my own city. We have comparatively lower broadband penetration and a smaller population, so print still unites us all. Few people use public transportation, a big reason why mobile news isn’t in high demand. We have a spattering of bloggers and phpBB message boards, but you can’t find many active communities built around them.

The temptation is to look at those facts and decide our market has different demands than the bigger cities. But I think they’re just showing Jeopardy a half-hour earlier in the bigger cities – and it’s about to come on here.

We’d be foolish if we didn’t listen to the answers ahead of time.

OUR LUCKY PREVIEW

Outside of the bigger cities, we’ve been handed an opportunity they never had.

We’re seeing exactly what’s coming our way. We’re getting a step-by-step guide to what will happen should we choose a path of inaction. First, your audience will fragment. Second, they will expand their demands for news delivery. Third, they will take it upon themselves to meet those demands. This is already happening, but not to the extent we’ve seen elsewhere.

It need not be that way. And though the purely grassroots model has its virtues, I’m a believer that the community is best off if an organization of talented professionals is at the center of the local news ecosystem, and I say that not just as the employee of one of those organizations. The expanding and necessary role of bloggers and independent organizations can continue, but they’d prefer to work in tandem with a resource-heavy news organization that excels at its investigative role. Few readers or non-readers actually wish for our destruction; everyone applauds when we do our job right, and everyone in the community is better served when that happens.

I don’t think it’s too late for a nimble news organization in a small- to mid-sized city to place itself at the center of that ecosystem. Don’t let the audience fragment itself away from you – become the platform where their niche exists. As rail, buses and carpooling find more riders – and there’s a lot of evidence that says it will – have a scannable, feature-rich mobile site already running.

When readers realize their news demand is changing, they shouldn’t have reason to create the solution themselves. We can have it ready for them.

SHOWING DIGITAL LEADERSHIP

Digital leadership is about getting ahead of future demand, and it’s not something news organizations have been known for. That can change now.

My favorite compliment as a journalist came when Josh Karns, a local blogger, traced to me the initial tipping point in local Twitter use. He argued it was my use of it, and my blogging that followed, that gained the attention of others in the area and prompted a wave of sign-ups.

So if a single journalist with a sparsely-read blog can launch a small-scale movement, what could a large news organization with tens of thousands of readers accomplish? I think it could change the news consumption habits of an entire region. I think it could shape those habits in a way that encourages productive participation, involves every reader in the news process and ensures that those readers still value the professional product.

But that’s only if they get out ahead, using the lessons of the bigger cities. If they lag, the same story will play out over and over again.

Journalism

I intend to always keep this blog on-topic. I created a side blog in case I felt the need to write about non-journalism stuff, though I haven’t been good about writing in it.

But I’ve been tagged by Sara Bozich to participate in this trendy meme, and I planned to ignore it. Then I thought: Why not keep it on-topic, but still let you all learn a little more about your beloved author?

So here are seven journalism-related things you may not know about me:

1) My passion for journalism was ignited when a news article I wrote for my high school newspaper was censored. It was about condom distribution in schools, and our principal decided that it and another story about birth control options were inappropriate for the audience. Some brought the paper home, and it would be read by smaller children, he argued.

In the process of a lengthy and painful back-and-forth with the school administration, I did a lot of research and thinking about the value of journalism. I wrote a research paper about the chilling effect of the Hazelwood court case on high school journalists (that was the first Web site I ever made, so forgive the crappiness). I learned why journalism matters.

2) At the same time, my high school newspaper was really freaking good. During my senior year we were named the Most Outstanding Newspaper for 2002 by the American Scholastic Press Association. Our state association graded us at 985/1000 (and 5 of those points were deducted because of a printing problem that wasn’t our fault, and I remember disputing the other two deductions, too). One judge wrote that “There is nothing I can think of to improve this paper.”

3) At Penn State, I was widely known as “Dan the Fan.” I wrote a weekly column for Blue, a youth tabloid produced by the Centre Daily Times that was geared toward college students, from the passionate perspective of a blue-blooded football and basketball fan. It was occasionally good, occasionally juvenile. I’m really not too proud of it. The many, many times I had a blank Word document staring at me an hour before deadline made me realize I’m not cut out to be a columnist. I couldn’t keep up with my own demand to be proud of everything I put my name on every single week.

4) I’m very, very critical of my own writing. Whenever I read a story the next morning I usually find a few things that I wish I would have done differently, and this causes me to rarely read my story the next morning. This also makes it very difficult to choose my best clips, because I dwell on that which I could have done better rather than that which I had done well.

5) To counter that negativity: Since I started at The Patriot-News in May 2006, I’ve had the most A1 stories of any reporter on staff outside of the D.C. and Capitol bureaus. Seeing my byline on the front page, unless it’s a story I really like, hasn’t carried any feeling for me in a long time.

6) The most fun I’ve ever had on assignment came during my internship for The Wichita Eagle when I had the honor of chasing tornadoes with staff photographer Travis Heying. We dangerously sped through unmarked country roads and slammed on the brakes when we ended up on a road that was full of cows. The grave disappointment was that I didn’t actually get to see a tornado land — it was forecast to be one of the bigger storms in years, and ended up being very tame — but chasing the clouds that looked like they’d develop into tornadoes was an adrenaline junkie’s dream.

7) I have the second-messiest desk at The Patriot-News, behind only John Luciew, who is running away with the title. I usually have a large stack of newspapers, way too many notebooks, as many as a dozen bottled waters or other soda bottles, a little Dilbert guy, and several Philadelphia and Penn State bobbleheads, including a hilariously misspelled “Donavan McNabb.” The best thing on the wall is easily the New York Post cover featuring a crying little Mets fan from the peak of their wonderful 2007 collapse.

Visual evidence:

Cleaner than usual

Journalism

BY DANIEL VICTOR
The Wichita Eagle

Independence Day was supposed to be a day of fishing and grilling at Cheney Reservoir, but the state park was closed Monday as officials searched for a missing boater and started clearing damage caused by Sunday night’s violent storm.

The missing man’s name has not been released, but Park Ranger Jeff Ostlund said he was 38 years old and from Wichita.

Officials found the man’s capsized boat in about 3 feet of water off the reservoir’s eastern shore, near the area called Refuge Point. The ignition key was on, leading officials to believe the man was in the boat during the storm.

Search dogs examined about a mile of shoreline and nearby wilderness, in hopes that the man was alive but unable to move or summon help.

“There is the potential that he could still be missing and stuck in the debris somewhere, and just can’t get out,” Ostlund said. “The trees in that area are toppled on top of each other like pick-up sticks.”

Park officials originally thought three people were missing, but one man showed up at a gate Monday morning, and the other two on the list turned out to be conflicting reports on the same person - the missing man.

Six other people sustained minor injuries, and three of them were released Monday from Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Francis Campus.

Cleanup continued all day Monday, as owners of boats and campers worked to salvage their property and snap pictures of the destruction. Personal property was damaged significantly at perhaps 75 camp sites, Ostlund said, as were at least 50 boats at the east marina.

Roads throughout the park were littered with tree branches. Ostlund estimated that more than 1,000 large trees were damaged in the storm.

It will take park officials a few days to fix broken electrical hookups and water systems, Ostlund said. Sections of the park will open as they are cleaned up, and officials hope to have some campsites available this weekend.

In the meantime, people who have friends or property in the park have been allowed to enter and pick them up.

There were about 30,000 visitors to the park Sunday before the storm, and Schmidt said he had expected as many as 35,000 on July 4, if not for the storm. The 1,900-acre state park is about 20 miles west of Wichita. The reservoir covers more than 9,500 acres.

Witnesses said they saw a tornado touch down on the lake. Emergency officials called the National Weather Service to report a couple of tornadoes in the area, said meteorologist Chris Jakub, including a waterspout going across the lake.

Jakub, who visited the park Monday, said the damage he saw indicated that wind gusts between 80 and 100 mph could have hit the area. An F-1 tornado has wind speeds of 73 to 112 mph.

Winds, hail and rain from this and other holiday weekend storms led Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to declare a state of disaster emergency for eight counties, including Sedgwick, Butler and Reno.

About 1,700 Wichita-area Westar customers lost power Sunday, spokesman Mark Schreiber said. Workers brought that number down to less than 800 by evening, and all residents are expected to have power by this afternoon.

The storm ruined the holiday weekend for many families camping at Cheney; some took shelter in Goddard motels Sunday night.

Tom Schisler, 61, visiting from Grand Island, Neb., was able to evacuate in time but returned Monday morning to find his camper flipped upside down. The inside was a mess of leaves, rainwater, overturned couch cushions and spilled Dr Pepper and Coors Light. An American flag was soaked in the mess.

But Schisler remained in good spirits as his sons began salvaging what they could, such as a sopping-wet sleeping bag. Dealing with the weather is part of the experience of camping, he said.

“Not a whole lot you can do about it,” he said.

At the east marina, three docks holding at least 50 boats were overturned, creating a pile of mostly ruined boats.

Gathered along the banks Monday morning, boat owners swapped stories of destruction and just-misses.

“They found my boat,” Bill Garrison reported to Randy Hardy, whose boats had been docked next to each other.

“Where?” Hardy asked.

“At the bottom of the pile,” Harrison responded.

Hardy’s boat, though, had somehow traveled 300 yards east and landed on rocks. It had only slight damage, and Hardy was able to pull it off and safely sail it away.

Hardy’s good fortune matched the name of his boat: “Hope It Floats.”

Contributing: Dana Strongin of The Eagle

Clips