• Carpenter Street fire

• Guns ablazin’

• Polar plunge

• The Yule Blog

• How to blog a state fair

House fire on Carpenter Street on Jan. 9, 2008.

After the city of Springfield hosted a gun buyback program in 2007, I started pestering the folks at the police department about following along to watch the guns get destroyed. After months of documenting, processing and background-checking all the guns, they finally invited me observe the process of getting rid of the more than 500 guns and other evidence.

This story was a ball to report. The officers on the police department’s evidence destruction team were fun and knowledgeable. Watching them go through all sorts of old evidence was interesting, but getting to go inside a Bartonville foundry to watch the guns as they were dumped into the white-hot flames of a furnace was a sight to behold.

Hundreds of city buyback guns fed to foundry’s furnace / Old paperwork and evidence, illegal drugs also destroyed
May 27, 2008

The idea of a gun buyback, during which Springfield residents could turn over their unwanted weapons to police, no questions asked, seemed like a good one last fall.

The offer turned out to be far more popular — and expensive — than expected. And it culminated last week when nearly 500 buyback guns — plus a variety of drugs, paperwork and other no longer needed crime evidence — went into a 3,000-degree furnace at the Keystone Steel and Wire foundry in Bartonville.

When the buyback was envisioned, the idea was to get guns off the street, cut down on [...] Read the rest of this entry »

I covered the local polar plunge in 2008 and shot video of the frigid fun. You’ll notice there was snow on the ground. This was a fun event to video and write about. I think this is my favorite video of the ones I’ve shot and edited.

I blogged Black Friday shopping in November 2008. I’m not sure who was up in the middle of the night reading about all the shoppers standing out in the freezing cold in anticipation of rock-bottom prices on DVDs and toys, but the blog was a hit the next morning once people got up.

You can read my black Friday blogging here.

Throughout the holiday season we posted various seasonal news items, videos, links, recipes and other tidbits at the Yule Blog. We also posted on the blog a fun little idea I came up with and executed with the help of photographer T.J. Salsman. The idea was to solicit from readers messages they might want Santa Claus to recite to their children on video. We dubbed the project “Santa Shout-outs.”

We asked parents to submit their children’s names, ages, hometowns and an item they had on their wish list for Christmas. We had dozens of replies — so many we had to break the video into three segments to make it easier for parents to find their child’s shout-out.

The response from parents was fantastic. Many wrote us to say their children were amazed or speechless when they watched the video and heard Santa with a personalized greeting for them.

Go here to watch the shout-outs, as well as an interview with Santa in The State Journal-Register press room.

I’ll admit it: I’m a state fair junkie. I love the state fair.

It’s a good thing, because that’s where I spent about two weeks straight in August 2008. I was the “fair reporter.” Each morning I donned a backpack with a laptop computer, a point-and-shoot camera, sunglasses and a good pair of sneakers and drove to the city’s north end to cover the fair. I stayed on the grounds until 5 or 6 p.m. each night, filing updates to the blog and rewriting blog entries for use in the newspaper.

Among the sights I saw at the fair: former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his family prior to his indictment; a senior spelling bee I thought would never end; several carnival rides you will never, ever, catch me on; an auctioneer contest; and a record-setting crowd.

The name of our blog was “In All Fairness.” You can check it out here. (By the way, other reporters contributed to the blog on weekends and at night.)