8.30.2000
Getting grounded outside your own territory

Related story: Hillary running neck and neck with an unknown

       When I inherited the assignment of covering the New York Senate campaign, it was still a clash of Titans, Hillary vs. Rudy. Then Giuliani crashed amid the debris of his messy personal life (mistress, divorce) and his rough medical prospects (prostate cancer).
    Rudy and Hillary were made for each other and for the New York City tabloids. That story pretty much told itself. Then Rudy was out, along came Rick Lazio, and suddenly things were all scrambled.
    One of the keys to political reporting outside your area of geographic expertise is preparation, preparation and more prep work. For the New York race, I read everything I could get my hands on, starting with the Almanac of American Politics and some studies of New York politics. I pestered the Journal's Washington bureau chief John Mulligan, who has a wealth of political contacts in various states, and Dan Barry, former Journal staffer now at The New York Times, for some good people to talk to. Dan, especially, led me to some very knowledgable New York political types, some of whom helped me on background and others who were willing to speak for the record.
    Newsday has a very good Web site that has up-to-the-minute Senate-race clips. Journal news librarian Linda Henderson helped with clips from the Times and other New York papers. I absorbed as much as I could before leaving and packed a satchel full of stuff for those lonely nights in such hot destinations as Glens Fall and Lake George.
    One of the problems of being The Providence Journal is this race is self-evident; it's The Providence Journal, not the Buffalo or Binghamton Journal. So nobody in New York cares about you or your readers, always a difficult position to be in. So there will be no easy access to candidates, no "heads-up" tips from campaign flacks, no early "previews" of campaign commercials.
    Hillary Clinton's campaign is especially difficult to deal with for reporters from outside New York who want to spend a few days in the state for a campaign snapshot. The Clinton campaign does not make schdedules public much in advance of the events and generally makes it difficult to get what you need. (Lazio is new to this game, but the "Where is Providence?" question was starting to get to them also.)
    I focused on upstate in this story, the second one I have done from New York, because my first report concentrated on New York City and because Mrs. Clinton was campaigning there. I was lucky to have a news "hook": a run of polls measuring Lazio vs. Clinton after three weeks were becoming public.
    So I built the story around the news that Mrs. Clinton and this guy (Lazio) nobody knew were running even. I also talked with a lot of just folks. When I do this, I try to look for a demographic balance -- old, young, racial, ethnic, gender -- and generally tape-record the interviews.
    I wrote the story in one long burst, coming in at about 7 a.m. and just cranking until I go it done about 4 p.m. Many thanks to assistant city editor Jean Plunkett, who acted as therapist and editor.