I’ve had a busy couple of weeks at work!  The editors held an excellent FOIA/watchdog journalism workshop yesterday. Great momentum in the newsroom.

I’ve also started to half-heartedly embrace technologies I’ve long resisted, including the dreaded Twitter. I am using Twitter to follow tweets from Lynchburg’s colleges, business, organizations and prominent Lynchburgians. I myself rarely “Tweet.”  I believe Twitter, in moderation, does have some use for journalists, but the jury is still out on how big of a time-waster it is.

This story is big news for Liberty and the city of Lynchburg.

Liberty University announces purchase of Candlers Station shopping center

By Liz Barry

The News & Advance
Published: January 27, 2010
Updated: January 28, 2010 

Liberty University announced the purchase of Candlers Station shopping center for $16.3 million on Wednesday, an investment that Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said sets the stage for future campus growth.

“Someday, when that center becomes no longer financially viable, it will be an excellent place for our campus to expand,” Falwell said during student convocation Wednesday morning.

For now, Candlers Station — a 270,000-square-foot property located adjacent to Liberty across Candlers Mountain Road — will remain a shopping center. Current tenants include Cinemark Movies 10, Staples and T.J. Maxx.

Click here for the rest.

Certain stories that float around the newsroom are known as ”Liz Barry stories.” I didn’t coin the phrase but am flattered.  As we grow as reporters, we carve our niches. One of my strengths is my ability to relate to everyday people from diverse backgrounds. Right now I’m focusing on improving my beat management and investigative reporting skills, but I still love a good feature!

Poets create makeshift movement in Underground space

By Liz Barry on Jan. 27, 2010

The stage was a patch of concrete floor lit by Christmas lights and a lamp without a shade.

 Obscured by the shadows, a segment of Lynchburg’s young bohemians, twenty-somethings mostly, crammed into The Underground, a poetry reading in a rental home basement off Rivermont Avenue.

Cheap beer flowed, cigarettes burned on the back porch, but the focus was on spoken word.

About 14 readers took the stage, reading a mix of original works and poems by Whitman, Neruda, Poe and others.

“The idea is to share for catharsis and empathy,” said Glory Szabo, 23, a local college student from Hungary with raven-colored hair and red-painted lips.

The event grew from a simple connection between two friends. Last year, Szabo and 22-year-old Stacie Bergman — brokenhearted from failed relationships — read each other poems they had written about their ordeals. At the edge of loneliness, the friends realized they were not alone — they shared pain and poetry.

Last fall, Szabo and Bergman decided to organize a small reading for their friends. But word spread, through Facebook and word-of-mouth, to friends and friends of friends, and the intimate gathering ending up drawing a crowd up more than 60 people.
“It totally outgrew our expectations. It spread like wildfire,” said Szabo.

The Underground turns the solitary act of writing and reading poetry into a communal experience. The unconventional setting, outside of more established venues like coffeehouses or college campuses, provides a have for writers who might not otherwise dare to share their poems for an audience.

Click here to read the rest.

To give you a sense of how varied my beat is, here’s a profile on an LU law professor who is subpoened to testify in the high-profile murder case of the Kansas abortion doctor, Dr. George Tiller.

Abortion doctor’s slaying forces visiting Liberty professor back into spotlight

Before launching into the day’s lesson, Phillip Kline — a visiting professor at Liberty University’s law school — paced in front of his Evidence class, quoting Luke 19:38 from the first slide of his PowerPoint presentation.

“Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest …”

Kline called upon his students to use their Christian faith to guide them to a higher truth, God’s truth, in their journey as lawyers. Then, head bowed, he led them in prayer.

For Kline, the former Kansas Attorney General, the classroom is a haven from a career that thrust him into the national spotlight for his investigations of the late Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas-based doctor who specialized in late-term abortions.

“Political discourse, it’s all attack, it’s all trivial, it’s all tangential to what’s really happening,” he said.

“I love the honesty of a classroom.”

Earlier this month, Kline was subpoenaed to testify by defense attorneys in the trial of Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion activist accused of murdering Tiller last May. The trial began last week, and Kline said Wednesday his court date was still up in the air.

The case sparked national controversy following the judge’s decision to allow Roeder to build his defense around the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter on the grounds that he sincerely believed killing Tiller would save unborn children.

Kline condemns the murder but said he would not provide additional comment until after his testimony.

“My faith teaches me that we’re not to take a life from another, we’re to lay down a life for another. There’s a profound difference.”

Kline made headlines once again when an ethics complaint was released last week that accused him of making false statements and allowing subordinates to mislead other officials while investigating abortion providers, according to the Associated Press.

A public hearing is set for May, and the Kansas Supreme Court will make the final decision on any sanctions, such as censure or the loss of his law license.

The complaint will not affect Kline’s status at Liberty, said LU School of Law Dean Mat Staver.

Click here for rest of story.

Now that I’m on the news desk, I get to cover breaking news. This is a story with more than seven sources that I reported and wrote in just a few hours. I belive it’s important to localize stories like the earthquake in Haiti.  Though the images we see online and on TV are horrific, the extent of the tragedy becomes even clearer when we look at how people in our own community are affected.

Locals reach out to loved ones in Haiti as aid groups rush to help

As Haiti emerged from the rubble of its worst earthquake in more than 200 years, some members of the Lynchburg community struggled to reach loved ones, while others rushed to provide relief.

Liberty University currently has 17 Haitians enrolled on student visas, and three were suspected to be in Port-au-Prince, the capital, for Christmas break when the earthquake hit, said LU spokesman Johnnie Moore. By Wednesday evening, Liberty had accounted for all its Haitian students.

Liberty graduate student Wislaine Dormay, 29, is a native of Port-au-Prince and is still trying to reach her aunt, uncle and cousins.

“I’ve been trying to contact them but I can’t get a hold of anybody,” she said Wednesday. “The phone lines are not working and there is no power.”

Dormay has connected with other members of the Lynchburg’s Haitian community for prayer and support.

“It’s so hard to even watch the news because I’m looking at places that I know… To see how it is, I cannot put into words what I’m feeling.”

Click here for the rest of the story.

With the surge in Afghanistan, thousands of families will be sending their loved ones off to this dangerous conflict. We must not forget their sacrifices.

Photo: Kim Raff/The News & Advance

Close to his heart: A mom sends off her Marine (by Liz Barry)

On Sunday, Rustburg native Darlene Palmer snapped a photograph of her son Ethan Coleman, 19, as he slipped a pocket-sized Bible into the left breast pocket of his Marine uniform.

The Bible was tattered and dry-rotted, shielded in a plastic bag. It went to war with six of Coleman’s family members in five wars — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. Each man who carried it came home safely.

That night, Coleman left for Afghanistan.

Palmer didn’t say goodbye. She said, “See you later.”

Coleman is an infantry mortar man with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines Weapons Company. He will be on the front lines of the surge of 30,000 troops announced last month by President Barack Obama.

Click here for rest of the story.

A few bits of housekeeping.

1. Check out my new blog, run happy — my journey to the promise land (50k).   Weekly updates on my training with pics of the beautiful places where I run. The blog is a personal project to track my progress, but runners, friends and family might find it interesting.

2.   Redesign of this blog planned for 2010.

3.  Check back soon for journalism updates and miscellaneous ramblings about my life.