TEMPLE: Team effort builds Dream House

Published October 1, 2005 at midnight

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Question: When is producing a newspaper series like building a new house?

Answer: When it takes 17 months from start to finish.

That's right, reporter Jay Dedrick and photographer Ellen Jaskol labored 17 months on our Dream House series, which debuts today in Home Front. And that doesn't include the couple of months they prepared for the project or the time they still need to spend before we publish our 13th and final installment on Christmas Eve.

The result for Ellen and Jay isn't anything as concrete as the new house outside Boulder that Christopher Herr and Tina Galgon-Herr now call home. But they have created a treat for you unlike anything we've offered before.

Their series is a newspaper version of reality TV. I know that might sound terrible to print purists. We used to call such reporting documentary journalism. And that's truly what it is.

But I call it a newspaper version of reality TV because today everybody knows what reality TV is. And in this case it's also true.

Jay and Ellen worked alongside a crew from HGTV filming their own 13-part series that will air on Monday nights at 6:30 p.m.

Dream House is an experiment in what's known as convergence, journalists working in different mediums on the same story. HGTV and the Rocky Mountain News are both owned by the E.W. Scripps Co. We helped HGTV find Christopher and Tina by printing a small announcement on the cover of Home Front. HGTV helped us by agreeing to share the story.

This might sound like a no-brainer. But it's a first for the Rocky, and we've been partnering with TV folks for at least a decade. Print and TV make for an uneasy marriage. The click of our still cameras can make TV sound unusable.

And when a videographer has his camera tight against the face of one of the story's main characters, it blocks us from capturing the moment.

Both organizations compromised to make the partnership work, believing that the story would have more impact if you could experience it more than one way, with sound and motion on television and with dramatic photography and prose in print.

Of course, in the end, the decision whether we could share this story was Christopher's and Tina's. They were under no obligation to let the Rocky chronicle their adventure after they had agreed to expose themselves to HGTV's cameras.

I want to thank them for their patience and their willingness to open their lives to us - and you. As you'll see, they're a good-natured couple who are as open as the Colorado skies.

I believe they gave us all a gift. (Of course, it shouldn't hurt the budding architect that his work will gain a huge audience on television and in a local newspaper.)

By sharing their story, they let us all live vicariously through them. Building a house, a house just the way we think we want it, is an American dream.

But it's my experience that it's a lot easier to watch than to do. (Before I became a journalist - and I know this might sound hard to believe - I was a log house builder and studied architecture.)

Building a dream house can involve huge risks, as it did for Christopher and Tina. They stuck a "Box House" on a steep hillside - when they didn't know how deep they might have to dig to find bedrock or how high the cost might climb.

Ellen and Jay faced less-daunting challenges. A new wrinkle they discovered was that when journalists spend this much time on a story, they have to restrain themselves from getting involved.

"I had to shut myself up a lot," Ellen told me. "Sometimes they didn't ask, and I'd still give my opinion."

The strangest moment might have come when Christopher shopped for a bed at IKEA in Phoenix without Tina and asked Ellen to try a mattress. That was a little more personal than we're used to getting on stories.

You might find yourself in new territory, too. I hope you look forward to picking up Home Front every Saturday because you want to discover what happens next to Christopher and Tina. I hope you find the newspaper story so compelling that you want to watch the video version, too.

I've learned from watching rough cuts of the first three episodes that the story isn't the same on TV. Viewers who see Christopher and Tina only on TV will have a different understanding of their story than readers who meet them only in the newspaper.

That's not bad. That's reality, in print and on HGTV.

And I'm delighted that we can share it with you.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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