Shantanu spells “traumatropism” at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Lauren Drell/MNS
I have a tendency to get attached.
The journalist within (or, more often, my editor) tells me I can’t do it, that I need to stay objective. But I wouldn’t be covering something unless I thought it was interesting.
I often submit three-minute stories, and my editor Mary tells me to cut. Sure enough, it’s a better and tighter story when it’s shorter, but I had become so wedded to those sound bites that I didn’t want to cut them. What if the people who ended up on the cutting room floor found the video? What would they think if they saw that I had omitted them? That I don’t like them? That I didn’t think their bite was worth five seconds of a viewer’s time?
I just can’t help it—I feel bad. I become invested in my subjects, in the stories they share, and though objective journalism would rather I didn’t, I become attached.
I covered the 83rd annual Scripps spelling bee last week. I chose to cover Shantanu Srivatsa during round two—Medill has a relationship with the Fox station in Fargo, Shantanu’s hometown. It was a shot in the dark.
Throughout the round, spellers dropped like flies. Shantanu was #180 out of 273 spellers, and I waited with anticipation and butterflies as he waited his turn.
I hoped he would get an “easy” word. My story would be better if he moved to the next round, right? Right.
Shantanu stepped up to the mic, and his fate was read aloud by the pronouncer, Dr. Bailly.
TRAUMATROPISM.
Ummmmm, what?
Shantanu repeated the word…and then spelled it without a hitch as I wondered if I had even heard it before.
After the round, I interviewed Shantanu and his father Sanjay, then hustled back to the newsroom to submit the story by 5 p.m., so it would be transmitted to Fargo in time for the broadcast.
I turned in the tape and found out that Shantanu had spelled floribunda correctly and made it to round three.
On Friday, I remained glued to the @ScrippsBee Twitter feed. He made it through round after round, nailing cossette, Brumalia and schlieren. On my lunch break, I stopped by a food court that had ESPN on TV, and I found out Shantanu had made it to the finals, as one of the nation’s top-ten spellers.
“That’s my kid!” I exclaimed. I sent his dad a congratulatory text.
On Friday night, I watched the bee with knots in my stomach as pre-pubescent awkwardness had its time in the spotlight. He aced infundibuliform.
He fell short on ochidore.
At the end of the night, Anamika Veeramandi won the bee, after spelling stromuhr, and Shantanu tied for 2nd place. His dad, Sanjay, called me on Saturday morning to thank me for shooting the video.
“My relatives in India found the video on YouTube and sent it to me and my wife, who is back in North Dakota. It was so kind of you to make the video,” he told me.
And that’s the beauty of being a reporter. You do stories on people who are interesting, people who challenge the status quo, people who have reeeeeally good vocabularies.
And you don’t forget about them once you make your deadline. You follow them on Twitter, “like” their organization on Facebook. They become a part of your lives, something in the fuzzy area between being an acquaintance and being a stranger. You hope for the best for them, and hope they succeed. Like Shantanu did.