COMM 337: Storyline on Carl the cat

Please see also linked stories and in-class assignment below. -- pe

Posted to the Anchorage Daily News' website at 3:56 a.m. today was a wrapup on Alaska's martahon trial over custody of an orange tabby cat that lived in an insurance office.

Mat-Su borough correspondent Andrew Wellner opens what I'll bet he hopes is his last story on the trial with a crisp lede that looks ahead to something he hasn't reported yet. It's about the only thing he hasn't reported yet, in fact, since he posted a brief story on the verdict as soon as the jury came back at 3 p.m. yesterday:

PALMER -- Carl the cat is coming home to Palmer.

After deliberating nearly three days, a Palmer jury decided 11-1 Thursday to award ownership of the 7-year-old orange tabby to Catherine Fosselman, owner of a local accounting firm.

Then he uses the rest of the story to give a storyline of the case.

Important tangent: A storyline is not just a rehash of what happened. It's more like the plot of a short story. It's what Don Murray calls the "line." There's even a Wikipedia article that defines a storyline as the "narrative of a work, whether of fictional or nonfictional basis," and, more elaborately, as a set of "narrative threads experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction. In this sense, each narrative thread is the narrative portion of a work that pertains to the world view of the participating characters cognizant of their piece of the whole,and they may be the villains, the protagonists, a supporting character, or a relatively disinterested." While the Wikipedia article speaks only of fiction, it's pretty clear Murray has this kind of thing in mind when he speaks of "line" in a story.

Back to Carl the cat. Welner has a nice bit of scene-setting for the verdict: "The courtroom gallery was packed; the audience included two judges, court clerks, attorneys and others who'd been following the four-day trial." And he managed to find a juror who was willing to talk about the deliberations.

Also to give him what has to be one of the all-time great quotes on any courthouse beat anywhere:

"There was just so much stuff to sift through we needed a scoop ... like the kind you use to scoop out a litter box," said juror Carrie Wininger, squinting in the sunlight on the courthouse sidewalk.

She said the jury was split evenly after the first day of deliberations and by Thursday morning only one juror had switched sides. The votes of at least 10 of the 12 were needed for a decision.

Wininger said the jurors spent the three days primarily debating the law that applied to the case.

But to her, the choice was clear. She said she never changed her pro-Fosselman vote. The most convincing evidence, she said, was testimony that Carl lived at the office for six years and [plaintiff Debbie] Fosselman's company records that show expenses for taking care of the cat.

"You don't have something for six years and take care of it just because," Wininger said.

As to serving on a jury to decide who owns a cat, Wininger said it didn't seem too far-fetched to her.

"I've got four pugs and two cats and two rabbits," she said. "I know how attached you can get to animals and for me I thought that wasn't so unreasonable."

That last quote isn't half bad, either. Nor is the way he works in color and background without calling attention to himself. The juror squints in the sunlight, for example. And he's able to tuck away the procedure at the bottom of the graf announcing the 11-1 verdict. (He has to, too, because a 11-1 vote in a criminal court case would be a hung jury. Right?) There are other nice bits of detail further down in the story.