In the last of a series on lessons from the Stry.us Springfield bureau, founder Dan Oshinsky explains why putting together a great team — and giving them a support system — matters most.

story by Dan Oshinsky
published September 6, 2012

About six months ago, I put a job posting online for reporters for Stry.us. I had already locked down the housing for the entire team, even though at that point only Jordan and I had committed to Springfield. I had four reporting slots — and four bedrooms — to fill.

The very first person to apply for a job at Stry.us was a jazz singer. She was from Arkansas, and she knew the region, and she was interested in writing.

I got very nervous. I had committed to hiring four reporters, and I was suddenly very worried that I was going to be putting together a team that knew more about musical scales than paragraph structure.

Luckily for me — and for Springfield — we ended up finding a truly capable team. I owe so much to them: To Jordan, for being the first on board, and to Bari, Roman, Sarah and Zach for coming along for the ride.

A project like this cannot happen on paper. All the planning in the world doesn’t matter if your team isn’t any good. To pull together great stories and projects, you need a great team.

Yes, ideas matter. Yes, funding matters.

But foremost, your team matters. Exceptional projects don’t come from average teams.

The success of this project this summer stems entirely from this team, and from the work and energy they threw into it. This summer, I learned:

When Hiring a Great Team, Be Specific — The job posting for Stry.us was pretty ambiguous, and for a good reason: I wanted a team that was adventurous and curious. This job wasn’t for everyone. I wanted people with a background in storytelling — specifically in long-form narratives. I was looking for great listeners and for certain skills, like data reporting or editing backgrounds experience. All of that helped us immediately weed out reporters who simply wouldn’t have been a good fit for the type of reporting we did this summer.

Support Your Team — And do it in three ways:

1. With tools: They’ll need the right technology and equipment to do the work. We had four DLSR cameras, a long list of tech resources and the full Adobe suite at our disposal. Pretty much anything we wanted to do, we could do.

2. With time: Reporting projects don’t happen immediately. Jordan and I had to be patient enough to let the reporters find and deliver on stories.

3. With opportunities: They needed the freedom to investigate big stories, and they needed to be comfortable enough with Jordan and I to actually pitch them. That required us to create a culture at Stry.us that welcomed ambitious and unusual stories.

Let Them Try, Try Again — When something went wrong, we tried to give our reporters as many opportunities as we could to make it right. Stories got weird. Stories got complex. But wanted them to try and try again until we did the story as best we could.

I’m only now starting to take a look back on the summer and to figure out what we just accomplished. Whatever I find, I know this: It’ll be thanks to this incredible band of reporters that gave everything they had to Stry.us this summer.

Over the next month, we’ll be spotlighting big lessons from the Stry.us team. Next up: Reporter Sarah Elms shares what she learned from her experience in Joplin, Mo.

story by Sarah Elms
published August 26, 2012

I think all six of us at Stry.us would agree that this summer in Springfield, Mo., has been an incredible experience, something different from anything any of us has done before. We came from all over — Illinois, Maryland, Montana and Virginia — to this place in this country where the Midwest and the South overlap, on the hunt for great stories along the theme of an interconnected America.

I’d never been to Springfield before, so my only expectations came from the city’s website and Wikipedia page. I sat down at my desk in my Milwaukee apartment and Googled Springfield, Mo. I learned that it would be hot, there would be country music and there would be cashew chicken. Lots of cashew chicken. Living in Springfield would be a bit of an adjustment.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much this city truly has to offer, and more importantly, that there would be an endless stream of stories here just waiting to be told. There is a lot more to Springfield than meets the eye, and I feel extremely lucky to have been able to experience so much of it.

There is no way I would have discovered all of this, however, if it weren’t for my editors pushing me to get out and explore, to talk to strangers, to dig. The first week in Springfield not only allowed me to get to know the city, but it taught me a thing or two about reporting as well.

I’ve learned a lot working for Stry.us this summer. I’ve learned how to ask better questions, how to uncover stories and how to get close to people when I take photos, and I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my writing.

What stands out the most, however, was something less tangible than those. It was a matter of learning the importance of patience and persistence, and how to balance the two.

The experience that brought this home for me was during Stry.us’ weeklong series on Joplin’s recovery efforts when I reported a story on families still living in FEMA trailers on the outskirts of Joplin. On a sweltering July day, reporter Roman Stubbs and I found ourselves standing on the rickety steps of several FEMA trailers, hidden away in a park surrounded by corn fields.

The families living in the park had all been displaced by the catastrophic tornado more than a year earlier, and the trailers were set up to be their temporary homes while they search for permanent housing. We wanted to tell the story of a family’s long road to recovery, and what it’s like to be living in a constant state of flux.

One family, a single mother and her two children, answered the door and agreed to speak with us. But today wasn’t a good day for them — their house was a mess, they had errands to run — could we come back tomorrow afternoon? They’d never shared their story before, they said. No one had asked.

Tomorrow came and went, and they never answered their door. Most of the families at the park didn’t have phones, and all were without Internet. The only way we could get a hold of them was by showing up. The next day we went back at 11, and again at 2, and again at 4, and again at 6. We worried they had changed their minds, that they no longer wanted to speak to reporters.

It was getting late, and half of our team had to head back to Springfield, an hour away, to start writing. I stayed, because there was nothing for me to write without my key interview. Finally, a little after 8 p.m., someone answered my knock on the door. They still wanted to talk. They invited me in, and over the course of two hours I listened about the family’s rollercoaster of a year.

By the end of the night, I had my story. I drove home, relieved that it had worked out and grateful that the family was so willing to trust me and let me into its life. I realized that this story, like so many others, needed the perfect combination of patience and persistence in order for it to happen.

The lack of technology at the trailer park made it extremely difficult to keep in contact with my source, and for them to get in contact with me. There was no way for them to inform me that their plans had changed, unless they borrowed a neighbor’s phone or drove into town, and there was no way for me to check in other than driving out there and knocking on their door.

It was necessary for me to be patient and wait for the family to return home, but if I waited too long without getting an answer, the story would have to drop. Along those same lines, it was necessary for me to keep pushing — to talk with their neighbors, to keep showing up and knocking on their door — otherwise, the story wouldn’t have happened.

You need to have the perfect combination of patience and persistence with anything you’re reporting — if you wait too long to make something happen, the story can get away from you, but if you push too hard, people will often shut you out.

This summer I’ve learned that great stories come together once you find that balance. Once you learn how to do that, you’ll start telling stories you won’t forget.

Three months ago, our Jordan Hickey stumbled upon the story of Tommy “Bo” Ray Bryant, who had been killed in April — allegedly by his own cousin. Here’s how he reported this story.

story by Jordan Hickey / photos by Dan Oshinsky
published August 21, 2012

The Mobile Library, essentially a library on wheels, is part of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s outreach initiative to provide disadvantaged and distant communities with easier access to books. It makes the rounds to assisted living facilities and small towns on the fringes of the county. When I first arrived in Springfield and heard about all of places that it visited, it occurred to me that it might be a means of meeting people I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to meet.

And that is how, on a Tuesday afternoon in early May, I found myself on the Mobile Library in Walnut Grove, Mo., striking up a conversation with a woman named Debbie. I was interested in doing a story about larger families in rural areas, the reasons that people stay in the Ozarks, how families stay together — or something along those lines. At that point, it was little more than an abstract idea.

But it wasn’t too long into our conversation that she took a folded slip of paper from her purse — it was a funeral announcement for Bo. She told me that he was her nephew and that he had been killed just a week before.

That chance meeting led to “The Life, Death and Mourning of Tommy “Bo” Ray Bryant,” a story we published on Saturday. The story was reported over the course of three months.

It evolved over the summer. After that first meeting, I told Debbie that I would be coming up the following week, and I asked if maybe we could talk a bit more then. The next time that I came, she asked if I might be interested in coming by her mom and dad’s place. The family was going to have a barbecue, a tradition that had faded in recent years but was being revived in an effort to bring the family together after Bo’s death.

Over the course of the next several months, I went to several of those monthly barbecues. (In the photo at top, I’m at center, seated and wearing a light blue shirt.) “WaGro” became my second home for the summer. And it seemed that every time I came back, a new element of the story had been introduced or an existing one altered. After the first, I came back talking about the Hill, vigilantism and the Lost Boys. After the second, I came back talking about the nature of mourning, what Bo had been like as a kid, how he and Lee had eaten ChapStick.

The story changed when I first met Teresa and Drew and Kevin — who live on the Hill — the day of the preliminary hearing for the man accused in Bo’s death. It changed when I went to the Hill for the first time and realized just how much Bo had meant to the people living up there. It changed when I spoke to James, when I spoke to Debbie, when I spoke to Angie, and each time that I spoke with Dee. But there was one thing that struck me: I realized the only reason I was able to write the piece was because he had meant so much to so many people.

It was also the reason that reporting this story presented the challenge it did. This was a story that required an enormous amount of time and trust.

When I went to Ken and Mary Ann’s house for the first barbecue, for as many family members who were happy to speak with me, there were just as many who didn’t — I remember more than a few eyeing me warily from a distance. It was for that reason that the first few times I went up there, I did not use a notepad or a recorder. I just sat outside and spoke to people as they cycled in and out of the seats. When I left a few hours later, I immediately went to a nearby McDonald’s and wrote a few thousand words on what I’d seen throughout the course of the afternoon, who I needed to speak with and in what order I wanted to speak with them.

When it actually came to sitting down with people for the one-on-one interviews, I realized pretty early on that the sight of a tape recorder or a notepad could be somewhat unnerving, especially when some of the more sensitive material was being discussed. It was the reason I made a point of reading my questions beforehand, storing them in the bag and guiding the conversation toward them when possible. It was also the reason that I tried to put the recorder off to one side, out of the line of sight during the conversation.

This was a story that presented a very specific set of challenges. But there was one that never appeared. The people in Walnut Grove and the surrounding area are very well spoken — there were more than a few occasions when I had to struggle to suppress excitement after hearing a quote. Granted, it took some little amount of trust before the people I spoke with would speak freely, but once they did, there was no shortage of stories or revelations.

When I set out to write the piece, I wanted the narrative arc to reflect the experience that I had had in reporting the piece: How the Hill was initially an abstraction. How meeting the people who lived up there had changed it. What the place meant to this family. What the place meant to Dee.

You won’t see all of the reporting in the final product. I conducted dozens of hours of interviews over the course of the summer. I interviewed nearly everyone associated with the family — somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 sources in all, a fair number of which were very in-depth, lengthy endeavors. I went to the court in Bolivar, Mo., on three occasions.

I hope the final story reflects all of that. I hope it does justice to a great story. It’s their story, and I’m glad to have known it.