Good Reporting: Still Making His Pitch, originally uploaded by Utter East.

In his final year, he was the spot starter and long reliever on the team that won the AAA World Series, competing for starts with Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Kevin Gregg. All four went on to become top-tier MLB players. An injury from a wicked line drive in Edmonton didn’t help King’s prospects.

With a year left on his contract after the 1999 season, he began weighing other options. He had seen the danger in following baseball dreams and not quite attaining them. He didn’t want to end up like one of the minor-leaguers who refused to face reality.

“There are guys in the minors 40, 42, 43,” King said, “still hanging on trying to play, and it was not going to happen. They needed to move on with their lives.”

–”Still Making His Pitch,” Don Kramer, Joint Base Lewis-McChord

Hard not to use a baseball analogy to describe this story — but what you do when life tosses you the perfect pitch says a lot about your capabilities as a writer. This could have been a simple profile, but the writer stepped up with an in-depth feature that handled the subject perfectly. Over the fence? You read and decide.

The piece might have written itself, based on the subject’s life story. But Rodewig used pace and variety to drive the reader from lede to conclusion. She found a quote strong enough to capture the reader’s interest at the top:

FORT BENNING, Ga. — “It was one of the coldest Decembers on record for Cincinnati in 1943. Money was tight, we were at war, and I was needed at home,” said Dorothy Hunter Davis, one of the first African-American women to enlist in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

She had just finished her freshman year at Wilberforce University when she applied for a position in the secretarial pool at The Kroger Company headquarters.

It’s a story her daughter, Army Community Service marketing manager Carmen Davis, has heard more than once.

Interaction with the daughter is one of the strong points of the piece.

“She took the examination for the secretarial pool, and she got a 100,” Carmen said. “The test giver at the time came out and said, ‘Well, Miss Hunter you did excellent on the test … however, you may want to look for a job elsewhere because you will be the only colored girl here.’ And she was crushed, absolutely devastated.”

Leaving the building to catch a streetcar home, Dorothy passed the window of a local post office, and everything changed for her.

“They had a poster of a woman in a uniform inviting women to join the military service – ‘We need you.’ And my mother said she stopped and dried her eyes, and she walked in,” Carmen said.

Note how each paragraph answers the previous one’s question, then raises an issue for the next graf to answer?

Click here to read on (betcha can’t help it) …

Capt. Emily Stehr enjoys a little downtime during her deployment to Iraq with the 2nd Stryker Calvary Regiment in Vilseck, Germany. Stehr battled with suicidal thoughts, but was able to cope after seeking assistance at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

In researching “Breaking the silence: Soldier conquers suicidal thoughts,”  Rolle did more than get her subject to talk about her feelings – Capt. Stehr was looking for a platform – she told the story of the story. 

We meet two characters, Stehr and Armed Forces Network reporter Michelle Michael. We follow (in a well-constructed narrative) the development, the obstacles, the reactions – what affected subject, reporter and audience before and after Michael helped Stehr make her story known.

The chief weakness to this strong story is, oddly, point of view. We only hear from the two subjects. It would have been interesting to hear from someone else affected by Michael’s broadcasts or Stehr’s other outreach efforts. I’d like to see quotes from a supervisor in AFN Europe describing the decision to go ahead, or someone in the medical or counseling fields commenting on the effects of Stehr’s brave act. 

But overall, the piece stands high for craft, readability, relevancy and honesty. It doesn’t sugarcoat the queasy feeling some in the military still feel about covering suicide within the ranks. It might beat the suicide prevention drum again (should we stop?), but the new point of view makes it fresh, freshness catches attention and catching attention could save lives.

BTW: this story is available on IMCOM’s new IReport page as well as Army.mil