www.roanoke.com

Ellis

Valencia

Chittum

Cutright

Gangloff

Hammack

Harvey

Lowe

We’ve had a few beat changes among the reporters here in the newsroom in the past few months.

 Here’s a rundown of who is covering what:

Matt Chittum  is covering Salem, including its government, courts, police, neighborhoods and businesses. Matt’s number is 981-3331

Courtney Cutright has added coverage of the Salem school system to her beat covering K-12 education in Roanoke and Roanoke County. Here number is 981-3345. Follow her @courtcut on Twitter.

Mike Gangloff is covering Montgomery County out of our New River Bureau in Christiansburg. Mike’s phone number is 381-1669

Laurence Hammack is covering federal courts and agencies while also continuing to write enterprise and investigative stories. Laurence’s phone number remains 981-3239.

Neil Harvey is covering state courts, primarily in the city of Roanoke. Neil’s number is 981-3376.

Cody Lowe is covering economic development, manufacturing and utilities as a member of our business reporting team. His number is 981-3425.

 Katelyn Polantz is covering Roanoke County neighborhoods, government and courts. Her phone number is 981-3227.  On Twitter: @kpolantz

Jorge Valencia is our primary dayside  police reporter. His number is 981-3334. On Twitter: @jorgeavalencia

Sheila Ellis is our primary nightside police reporter. Her number is 981-3234. On Twitter: @sheilamae

Click here for a full list of our news staff.

Go here for a full listing of staffers with Twitter accounts.

I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C., recently and can recommend it as a cool place to spend a few hours, especially when it’s D.C.-steamy outside. The most amusing exhibit for me, and perhaps for other journalists of a certain vintage, was the display, behind glass, of a trusty Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. It’s the same tiny-screened laptop I used to transmit stories in my first reporting jobs in the 1980s.

We all have our Tandy tales of woe or triumph. My favorite was when an ice storm knocked out power to the New River Valley bureau in 1994, and the only way we had to file to Roanoke was taking the Trash-80 to a pay phone near the old Walmart at the Marketplace shopping center in Christiansburg. It took two to file that cold day: Madelyn Rosenberg, the assistant editor, attached the cumbersome suction cups to the handset of the phone while I held the laptop and punched in the commands to transmit our weather story.

– Brian Kelley

The Associated Press Managing Editors today honored two Roanoke Times efforts with its annual awards:

“Legacy of the Flood” won first place for Online Convergence  in the 40,000 to 150,000 circulation category. The story recalled the 25th anniversary of Roanoke’s deadly flood and reflected on how much has changed in the community since then.

“Haiti: Life and death in the time of cholera,” by reporter Beth Macy, won first place in the International Perspective category for mid-size papers. In the story, Macy recounted traveling to post-earthquake Haiti to cover a Roanoke-based mission. But her trip took a dramatic turn as she arrived in a country swept by cholera and chaos.

APME is a made up of editors at the Associated Press’ 1,400-member newspapers in the United States and Canada. The organization will present these awards and others at its annual conference Sept. 14-16 in Denver.

(Note: As an APME board member I was a judge in the Online Convergence category but recused myself from judging our circulation category.)

– Carole Tarrant

When the Newseum opened in its new building on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008, it included this video in an exhibit on multimedia journalism.

How did the video come about? Immediately after news of the April 16, 2007, shootings broke, Newseum producers called our newsroom and asked if they could observe us as we covered the story online and in print.

The video aimed to capture the then still-new idea of a “converged” newsroom, one where reporters might shoot video or photographers might collect audio — one where professional journalists expanded their skills to provide as rich a story as possible, in multiple mediums on a never-ending deadline cycle.

The video has never before been available publicly outside of the Newseum. (It is no longer on view at the museum, although the collection still includes our April 17 front page as well as the grad student’s cell phone highlighted in the video’s opening images.)

We hope the video represents a reminder of the dedication this newsroom devoted to an important and still ongoing story.