Remember way back when...

... I used to do podcasts?

I only just now realized I haven't blogged about the last few. Sorry, BYU football fans!

Here they are:

CougarCast: BYU vs. Idaho

CougarCast: BYU 42, Idaho 7

CougarCast: BYU vs. New Mexico State

CougarCast: BYU 42, New Mexico State 7

CougarCast: BYU vs. Hawaii

CougarCast: BYU 41, Hawaii 20 and the 2011 Season

In the Deseret News once again!

My BYU athletics budget story (parts one and two) was in the Deseret News and on KSL.com!

In the Des News:

BYU sports budget rundown shows what sports profit, cost (part one)
BYU's sports budget not seeing red ink financing smaller sports (part two)

At KSL.com:

Football key to BYU's athletic budget (part one)
BYU football brings athletic budget back to black in tough economy (part two)

I still don't know for sure if the story has appeared in the print edition of the Deseret News. I know it wasn't in Friday's paper, at least. But I'll have to get my hands on some copies as soon as it does.

I've gotten a few e-mails from readers, most of them saying: "Well, yeah, duh, but tell us about Title IX!" The Title IX aspect of university budgets is interesting, for sure. I just picked something else to talk about this time around.

If any of you want to do your own Title IX-themed investigation, or any investigation into athletics budget numbers, here's how:

1) Go to http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/WebsiteUpdatedMessage.aspx
2) Click on "Go to login page"
3) Then click on "Get data for one institution"
4) Then search for Brigham Young University (or any other college you're interested in looking at)

Cougar sports by the numbers

My story on the BYU athletics budget (the one I mentioned a while ago) made its grand debut today!


Cougar sports by the numbers

Brandon Judd at the copy desk had a cool way to turn my graphs into cool art to go on the front page. Here's a close-up of that:


Here are the other graphs I made myself (which were basically kept as is in the paper):





Look for part two tomorrow!

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Update (02/17/2011):

The second part of my BYU Athletics budget story came out today.

Budget healthy as Cougs set to enter WCC

And, once again, the front page looks great:

Is it football season yet?

Don't get me wrong. I am infested with Jimmer Fever and I can't wait to cover the MWC Tournament in Las Vegas and hopefully a few NCAA Tournament games.

But with National Signing Day, I'm starting to get excited for football again.

Since no reporters were available yesterday morning, I filled in and went to a Signing Day event at Rio Tinto Stadium, where a few of Utah's top recruits signed their letters of intent. There were six there who were headed to BYU, and I talked to Austin Heder, Kesni Tausinga and Baker Pritchard. They were a lot of fun to talk to, especially Kesni. He's going to be a lot of fun for reporters in the future.

Here's my story:

BYU football signs recruits

BYU had its own press conference yesterday afternoon, and again no reporters could go. So Alex and Sarah went to this one. From what Alex said, it looks like the press conference wasn't so much about the new recruits as it was about the future of BYU football generally. About going independent, exposure on ESPN...Bronco was actually excited. And that's saying something.

Here's Alex's story:

Mendenhall enthused about future of program

Our good friend at the copy desk Brandon put together a chart listing all the new recruits. Click here and go to page 7.

Crossed the finish line!

Whew.

I whipped up two COMMS 420 stories in one day. It's quite an achievement, but now my fatigue-induced nausea and ache is setting in. It was worth it though.

First, I put the finishing touches on a story about the BYU athletics budget on Tuesday. I interviewed Dallan Moody, the athletic director over finances, like two weeks ago. But I procrastinated with other interviews and stuff, without any real good reason. My professor, after seeing my rough draft with only the Moody interview, suggested writing the story as two parts. So I worked on dividing it up on Friday, and then planned on doing the rest of my interviews Monday.

It's a good thing, too, because Monday my second 420 story became suddenly urgent.


Professor Hughes gave me the assignment to write a story about former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, Jr.'s presidential prospects. Some Huntsman buzz came up after a Newsweek interview hit newsstands earlier this month, written by none other than McKay Coppins, a friend and a BYU grad. Pretty cool for McKay, I hope I follow those same footsteps somehow.

Anyway, I was thinking of writing just a general story on the buzz. But then on Monday, the news broke that Huntsman had submitted his resignation to the White House and would be leaving his ambassador post. Which is a pretty obvious sign that he's up to something.

In The Daily Universe front page meeting, someone asked if a 321 reporter could do a story on the Huntsman developments real quickly. I piped up and said I was going to do one for 420, but that it would probably be two or three days before I could finish it. But I realized that if I was really going to do this story, to do it quick enough after Huntsman's breaking news for it to be relevant, I would have to do it the next day.

I freaked out. But, Monday night I called McKay and he graciously gave me 15 minutes of his time on the day that he was "vindicated" (his word). That gave me a good start, and then the next morning I finished my last interview for the BYU athletics budget story and then rushed to find some more interviews for the Huntsman story. I talked to the president of the BYU College Republicans, the president of the BYU Democrats, a political science professor and two students from the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.

And I finished it that afternoon! I was 45 minutes late to my 4 p.m. class, but other than that it was pretty smooth.

Anyway, that's the story behind my story.

Here it is!

Huntsman to throw hat into ring?

The original story was 58 inches long! I decided to take out some secondary quotes for a shorter version (which was still 40 inches). Our fearless leader Natalie Crofts was kind enough to use both versions, the short one for the newspaper and the long one for the website.


(My BYU athletics budget story will be published sometime later.)

Rivalry Week!

The special Rivalry 2010 section of The Daily Universe is out today!

BYU-Utah Football 2010: End of an Era

Everything looks beautiful. And we are so lucky to have such great writers on the sports desk. They had unique ideas and their stories covered a wide variety of topics.

I feel bad for David, because he contributed much more than I did! He gathered old photos from the Special Collections Archive, and edited all the stories, came into work on Sunday and wrote a viewpoint. And Brandon and the copy desk did tons of work to make this section look so good. All I did was write a viewpoint and draw a cartoon.

Here are all the stories in our glorious Rivalry section!

Let the hype begin: Utes up next for BYU, by Alex Hairston and Sarah Gambles
Edwards, McBride reminisce, by Morgan Jones
'Red Blood, Blue Blood' documents the rivalry, by Natalie Barrett
Cosmo, Swoop keep rivalry alive, by Holland Davis
Enjoy it, Cougar fans, viewpoint by David Mortimer (and a cartoon by me!)


Spring forward, fall back? by Josh Bolding
Rivalry affects relationships, by Kirsten Bowe
I can be your hero, baby, by Matt Livingston*
Keeping the rivalry under wraps, by Sarah Sanders
An outsider's guide to the rivalry, by Michael McKinlay
Bringing out the sibling rivalry, by Sarah Gambles
5 things to remember for facing the 'formidable' red team, by Yours Truly
Head games, by Alex Hairston

*For some reason, Matt's story isn't posted on the website. But you can read the PDF version by clicking on the link and going to page 11.

Five Black & White Movies You Must See - Even in 2010

I haven't had a cartoon in the paper for a long time, so it was nice to get this in there on Tuesday's opinion page:


If 2010 is tough for the BYU Cougars, wait until next year when we go independent.

Then today, I had one of my articles from my feature writing class on the front page, as part of The Daily Universe's new "FYI" column. The "FYI" is going to be a weekly front page column that will be not so much hard news, but interesting, sometimes humorous, things like profiles or how-to articles.

Anyway, my "Five Black & White Movies You Should See - Even in 2010" was the first installment of the new column. Pretty cool.

Five black and white movies you must see

I collected a lot of art to go with the story, knowing that the copy desk couldn't use all of it but I figured the more I give them to work with the happier they'll be with me. :) I decided to get a movie poster and a still photo for each of the five movies. They ended up only using the Casablanca poster. But for you lucky blog readers, you get to see all of them!

It Happened One Night (1934)




Dr. Strangelove (1964)




Some Like It Hot (1959)




All About Eve (1950)




Casablanca (1942)

First Week as a Sports Editor

This week could not have been much crazier.

First off: last Tuesday I became a dad! Our little girl was born at 3:16 a.m. She was 6 lbs. 3 oz. and 19 1/2 inches. And we named her Allisyn Leila.



For being such a little person, she sure keeps us busy. All we have to do is change her and feed her, but it still takes up all our free time! Including our "free" time between bedtime and time to wake up. Of course, it's totally worth it. Allisyn makes us so happy and we just love her so much.

Over at the newsroom, things have been crazy too. There's the normal hectic environment of bringing in brand new COMMS 321 students and getting them to work right away. Then there's the planning between David, Brandon and me in writing football stories on both the first game of the year and a preview of the season in general.

Then ... this happened.

With BYU football independence being official, it pushed everything out of the way and took over. We had viewpoints to write, a story about Wednesday's press conference and a story about all the BYU sports other than football and how they are affected. And a lot of our Washington preview and season preview stuff was cut out.

Here's the viewpoint I wrote:

We love BYU's independence (My original headline: "Happy Independence Day!")

I like this one a lot, I think it turned out well.

But now, I feel like things have calmed down a bit. Now, I can just get excited for the game. (This Saturday I don't have to work at the game, I can just go as a fan.)

We have some great sports writers this semester. I have been very impressed with their enthusiasm and willingness to learn. We gave the official beat assignments today and I think it's all going to go very well.

Whew! Time to get ready for the weekend. Now, all I have to think about is homework, enjoying the Washington game ... and, of course, my little baby. :)

BYU Shaking Things Up ... Plus Education Week

My level of journalistic activity this week has been inversely proportional to this week's blog activity. Time to catch up.

It's a break between semesters, but The Daily Universe has still been published every day of Education Week. Without any COMMS 321 reporters available, four or five of us have been going to Education Week classes and writing stories about them. The rest of the paper was filled with AP stories.

Getting to go to Education Week classes for free was even more fun than I thought. Here are the stories I did:

Lessons from Lehi's dream a source of hope
by Ron Bartholomew

When I saw that Brother Bartholomew was teaching a class at Education Week, I immediately assigned myself to it. I've had two classes with Brother Bartholomew, and he is one of my favorite BYU professors. He is amazingly personal and touching, and has a gift for speaking to college students. A lot of my post-mission spiritual growth came thanks to him and his lessons. (My second class with Brother Bartholomew I took after being married, and Erin had the class with me. So we both love Brother Bartholomew and the blessings that have come from his influence.)

The eternal perspective: being the best parents in the world
by Richard Eyre

Bythway: The hazards of criticism in marriages
by John Bytheway

I used to be in love with John Bytheway as a teenager, but I think I based my young testimony too much on his talks and not on my own scripture study and personal revelation. And I know many LDS youth are doing the same thing. But it's not necessarily John Bytheway's fault, and he is a good, inspirational speaker and he is very funny.

It's sort of interesting to hear him give a talk about marriage, because I remember listening to talks he gave back when he was famous for his perpetual bachelorhood.

One strange moment ... in John Bytheway's talk, he interrupted himself to say he hoped there were no reporters there from The Daily Universe or anything, because he's never read an article about him that he liked. I have no idea how that thought connected to anything else he was saying. I took it as a challenge, to write the first article about John Bytheway that he would like. I wonder if he read it.

Second Coming unknown but not scary
by Randall Bird

Understanding our pre-mortal existence
by Craig Ostler

It's really strange discussing subjects like Lehi's dream, the Second Coming and pre-mortality in a journalistic setting! But it was pretty fun and I think I did a good job with it.

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I would have gone to more Education Week classes, but some breaking news took precedence.

On Wednesday, rumors of BYU football going independent and other sports participating in the WAC became more legitimate. And, BYU fired its men's volleyball coach, likely because of some NCAA violations.

So I skipped a class to write about the volleyball coach leaving:

Volleyball coach fired; BYU investigating program

And, I spent all afternoon yesterday gathering reactions and quotes from students on campus about the changes in BYU sports:

Students react to possible BYU football independence

And a viewpoint on the subject:

BYU appears ready to venture into great unknown

My viewpoint may make me sound like I don't approve of football independence, but I do. I do think every other sport will suffer, which is unfortunate. But that doesn't outweigh my hopes for Cougar football. I think I maybe focused more on the plight of other BYU sports in my viewpoint just because that was easier to write.

Whew! Well there's a week's worth of journalism in one blog post.

Next week, David and I will be preparing for fall semester, especially writing about the football team. Stay tuned!