We’ll do a conference call interview on Monday with Scott Kraft, a senior correspondent and former national editor for the Los Angeles Times. See the attached bio for more detail.

Among other things, Scott is one of the nation’s best feature story writers. That’s what we’ll talk to him about.

Before class, please read the attached story by Scott about the life of a Haitian street kid after the earthquake. (I handed out copies early in the semester, but I doubt that you still have them.)

Here’s the link if you’d rather read it online:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-haiti-boy31-2010jan31,0,5017595.story

The street kid piece is a classic immersion story. Read it ahead of time and see if you can identify the live-action scenes. (I counted more than five.), the historical scenes recreated from interviews, the billboard section and any other blocks of material, such as biographical detail.

We’ll include a couple questions about Scott and the story in our Final Quiz.

During the interview, I’ll ask you to come up with one question to ask Scott.

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Scott Kraft, currently senior editor and roving correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has covered or directed coverage of many of the world’s top stories during more than two decades as an editor and reporter.

As National Editor of the LA Times from 1997 until 2008, Kraft oversaw a 75-person news department with bureaus in 10 cities. He directed the paper’s coverage of many major stories, including 9/11, Columbine, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 Florida recount and Hurricane Katrina. He ran the paper’s presidential campaign coverage in 2000, 2004 and 2008. Under Kraft, the National staff won four Pulitzer Prizes – two in Feature Writing, one for National Reporting and another for Investigative Reporting.

Kraft became an editor after a distinguished career as a national and foreign correspondent for The Times, with postings in Chicago and as bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. During a 6-year assignment in South Africa, he covered the release of Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratic elections and the war in Angola. He also reported on the ill-fated American military mission in Somalia and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Kraft has written more than 100 Column One stories, the LA Times’s signature front-page enterprise pieces, from more than two dozen countries. His report in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on the role of women in the AIDS epidemic in Zimbabwe won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for Foreign Correspondence in 1992.

Before coming to The Times, Kraft worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press in Missouri, Kansas and New York. While an AP National Writer, based in New York, he wrote a 6,000-word narrative story on a California woman who tracked down the man who molested her daughter. That piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1985.

Kraft has been a member of the visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and has been a featured speaker at three National Writers Workshops.

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latimes.com

Skilled at surviving on the edge

Even before the Haiti earthquake, life was a struggle for 11-year-old Clifford, one of Port-au-Prince’s thousands of street children. He spends his days hustling for coins and queuing for food.

By Scott Kraft

January 31, 2010

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti

Clifford Berrette, 11 years old and 4 feet tall, moved like a determined little man through the choking exhaust of the bus terminal in scuffed white sneakers, unnoticed in the crush of people hurrying to leave town.

He picked up a rag from the ground and began to wipe the dirt off a blue minibus, clambering up bumpers and tires to reach the high spots. A taller boy started to clean the vehicle too, but Clifford wasn’t going to let him horn in; he shoved him away. Then he extended a small palm to the driver.

“Pretty good job with just a rag,” driver Gilbert Pierre said, handing Clifford 25 gourdes, about 50 cents. Beaming with pride, Clifford retreated to the shade, removed one of his sneakers and put the money inside.

It would be safe there until he could give it to his mother. “She promised to cook food tonight if I brought her money,” he said.

A child made the man of the family too soon, Clifford works the margins of an urban landscape that’s all margins. He’s what Haitians call a kokorat, one of more than 4,000 children who work the streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital, hustling for coins and food, and sleeping wherever they grow tired.

In the nearly three weeks since a massive earthquake struck, Clifford has moved through the maze of ravaged streets — his streets — like a post-apocalyptic Oliver Twist. Following him over the last week, it was clear that Clifford was a skilled survivor in a hard, unforgiving city of survivors.

But something else was clear: He was just a little boy.

The massive earthquake strikes

Clifford was begging for loose change outside the presidential palace when the quake knocked him to the ground — five times, he said — and the palace crumbled behind him. He didn’t know it, but his mother and 5-year-old sister also were on the street, panhandling in front of the main cathedral, which also was toppling.

Begging probably saved their lives.

His mother, Natalie Pierre Charles, hurried back to their home, a one-room shack on St. Aude Road. She had left her younger daughter, who was 2, with a neighbor. The neighbor escaped with a broken leg, but Charles’ daughter didn’t make it out. Her body still hasn’t been recovered.

For nine days, Charles searched for her son in his usual begging haunts. She asked friends if they’d seen him, but they all said they thought he was dead. She went to stay with an uncle, sleeping in the open foyer of his collapsed home.

Clifford had spent that first night sleeping on a concrete wall in the Champs de Mars, a park across from the palace, where thousands had gathered. The next day, he panhandled some change, and then he did what any kid might do: He used the money to rent a bike for an hour.

“I didn’t have anything to do for fun,” he said.

He spotted his mother on the street a day later, but he hid. “I thought she’d be mad at me,” he said.

It wasn’t until a week later that his mother found Clifford, eating rice someone had given him. Her first words were: “Can I have some of what you’re eating?”

As they ate, she told him that his baby sister had died in the quake. For the first time in a week, he cried.

10 days after the quake

Clifford, wearing a tattered shirt, was at a Total gas station near the uncle’s house, begging for coins from a long line of motorists and passengers. He was barefoot; he had taken his shoes off and put them out of sight so he looked even more deprived. His usual sweet-faced smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of utter misery as he held out his hand.

The take, after an hour, was about 50 cents.

Then he walked to the national soccer stadium, where displaced people had gathered, now a brutally hot bowl smelling of cooking fires and urine. He joined a group of boys kicking a soccer ball and was soon racing nimbly up and down the field, his worries left behind.

Later, American troops arrived to give out packages of food, and a mass of people crushed toward them. Clifford scaled a gate and wormed his way along the ground, popping up along a fence in front of the troops. But the food was gone before it was his turn.

Clifford spent the night with the family of a friend he’d made on the soccer field. He didn’t know the boy’s name.

12 days after

Clifford decided he wanted his soccer ball, so he made his way home, to the shack on St. Aude Road.

“Everything’s crumbled,” he said, trying to absorb what he saw. Homes and businesses on the twisting dirt road had collapsed and left piles of broken cinder block on the road, which was slashed with deep gashes opened by the quake. Some buildings tilted precariously on their foundations, as if seen through a fun-house mirror.

Clifford climbed over the wreckage to a rocky ravine and the small room where he, his mother and two sisters had slept on a single piece of plywood covered with carpet. The shack’s rusted, corrugated-iron walls and roof were intact. Goats and pigs roamed nearby.

As he approached the door, Clifford saw something covered in blue plastic. Was it a body? He was too afraid to find out, soccer ball or no soccer ball. He fled.

That night, Clifford decided that he wanted to stay with his mother. He fell asleep on a sheet of cardboard with his sister, Bebe, and a friend.

13 days after

In the morning, a long queue formed near the palace, where United Nations troops from Brazil were handing out family packs of food.

Clifford, wearing a blue shirt that someone had given his mother, cut in line. But by the time he got to the front, the soldiers had run out of food packs and were handing out packages of crackers and two bottles of water. He didn’t mind — he had scored.

As he walked away, he ran into his mother and gave her some of his crackers and the water. Then he sneaked back into line for another handout.

Sitting in the shade of an almond tree, he shared his food and water with several passersby. “When he has, he gives,” his mother said. “He’s a good boy.”

Later, he tried to cut in line again. But this time people complained to one of the blue-helmeted soldiers, who gently shooed him away.

As the sun set, he walked back to the stadium, dodging pedestrians and the groaning, brightly painted buses known as tap-taps. He was tired, and all he wanted to do was play soccer.

14 days after

Clifford was back at the gas station. He hadn’t eaten since the day before at the stadium. (“A nice lady there gave me some rice and gravy,” he said.) And his mother had told him that she’d make him a meal if he brought her some money.

It was tough going. “Even when they have money, they won’t give,” he said. He took a break to watch with fascination as a woman skillfully used a knife to peel oranges, which she was selling from a plastic bucket. A young pastor driving a pickup took pity on him and gave him 50 gourdes — about $1.

The Creole word for begging is bwose, and the streets are filled with people doing it. “I sometimes feel really bad when I have to bwose,” Clifford said. He’d rather have a job, he said, but that’s not an option for a young boy.

He strolled a few blocks to Portail Leogane, the staging point for buses headed to the countryside south of Port-au-Prince. As he walked, he playfully twirled a long strip of sugar cane bark he had picked up from the road. A one-legged man struggling with crutches caught his eye, and he walked up for a closer look, staring unselfconsciously from a few feet away.

At the terminal, sweltering passengers were sitting inside large buses, awaiting departure. Looking up at the windows, Clifford called out, asking passengers if they needed anything. One said he wanted a cellphone case, so Clifford found a peddler. That got him a tip of about 10 cents.

As he roamed the station, he paused to write the word “police,” in English, on the dusty window of a minivan. He grinned impishly and looked around to see if he’d been seen. Then he rubbed it out with his hand.

Later, Clifford said he wants to be a policeman when he grows up, “because then no one will mess with me.”

Natalie Charles is a small, thin woman of 27. When Clifford was 9, she worked as a cleaning woman. She earned enough to pay the $14-a-month rent on the shack and had enough to put Clifford in school. The school fees were about $30 a year; she paid them what she had, $20.

Each night, she remembers, Clifford would come home from school and show her how he was learning to write his name. “He’s a very intelligent boy,” she said.

But she couldn’t pay the $10 she owed and, after three months, the school kicked him out.

She has relied on her son to support her since they were reunited after the quake. She’s tried to beg for money, she said, but “people tell me they are as bad off as I am.” A child, she knows, particularly one as cute as Clifford, has an easier time. And survival, not guilt, was foremost on her mind.

Charles never knows, from one night to the next, whether her son will be home.

“Clifford doesn’t like to be around a lot of people at night,” she said. “It’s difficult for him to share a bed.”

Her dream is that someday, someone “will help me take care of him, so he can do something good with his life, something better than he’s doing now.”

15 days after

In the afternoon, Clifford was back in front of the palace, where the U.N. soldiers were handing out large bags of rice to hundreds of people lined up in the sweltering heat.

Clifford sneaked into the line, made it to the front, and collected his rice. Struggling to hold the bag with both arms, he headed off to see his mother, but a man cut him off and demanded that he hand over the rice.

Frightened, Clifford gave him half the bag — but he made sure he got some money too, about $3.

That night, Clifford’s mother borrowed charcoal from a friend. She was going to make Clifford and his sister a proper dinner.

scott.kraft@latimes.com

Warren

I’ll give 10 bonus points of extra credit to anyone who attends both the Jason Riley presentation at 1:30 Monday and the Dan Stein presentation at 5:30 and then writes a 250-word analysis of which speaker seemed the most persuasive.

Both sessions will be held in the Gaylord Auditorium, Room 1140.

Please send me a message if you’d like to take me up on this.

Warren

Here is some biographical information on Riley:

JASON RILEY is a member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, where he’s worked for 15 years. He started at the paper six months after graduation from the University at Buffalo in upstate New York, where he was born and raised. Prior to joining the Journal, Riley worked at USA Today and his hometown paper, the Buffalo News. He’s primarily an editorialist, but he also writes op-eds and book reviews for the paper and appears regularly on the Journal’s TV show on Fox News to discuss current events. Riley writes on a wide range of topics, including economics, telecommunications, education and race. He also writes about politics in general at the federal, state and local level. Over the past nine years, one of the subjects he’s covered extensively for the paper is immigration. He’s written about its effects on the economy, the culture and the political debate in the United States. He’s written about both high-skill and low-skill immigrants. He’s reported from both Silicon Valley and the Mexican border. He is the author of a book on U.S. immigration policy, “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.”

See me or Darcy if you need to check out a Gaylord camera, unless you already have Cage privileges.

Sunday, April 11
Immersion Scene 4

Wednesday, April 14
Trend Story first draft

Sunday, April 18
Revised and BOLDFACED Immersion Scene 2

Sunday, April 25
Full Immersion Story first draft
(this will include Revised and BOLDFACED Scenes 3 & 4)

Sunday, May 2
Trend story final draft and PHOTO

Sunday, May 9
Full Immersion Story final draft and PHOTO

Warren

“Arkansas’s senator in middle, hit on all sides”

“Long lines at theme parks are for jobs”

“High-tech industry is powering up again”

“Safety is issue as budget cuts free prisoners”

“Rash of scandals tests Democrats at sensitive time”

“Plus-size furniture grows with America’s girth”

“This music is sponsored by…”

“Going to the mat over money”

“Fee hikes OK for some anti-tax govs”

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