About the Story: Ford's story made a point of looking not only at the problem and potential consequences, but also at solutions. She did the math, determining how much it would cost to install beepers on the buses that lack them, and then took that number to a city official for comment. But she says this was not a complicated story to produce. She located statistics through the Board of Education and the Department of Motor Vehicles. She interviewed the school official, plus parents and children outside their schools. A producer gathered interviews from bus companies. "I had very easy access to what I needed," says Ford, proving that hard-hitting stories aren't always difficult to develop. The story includes the voices of school children, parents, a deputy chancellor of city schools, a school bus company executive and a representative of the school where a student was killed when a bus without a beeper backed over her.

Behind the Story: Celeste Ford says she liked this story because it represents "nuts and bolts" enterprise. It is a story she encountered while covering another story. Ford was at a City Hall meeting, waiting for an interview. To pass the time, she scanned a meeting agenda. Ford says she has a habit of reading everything she gets her hands on, looking for story ideas. She saw an item on the agenda about a proposed city resolution asking the state to tighten up beeper requirements on buses. Ford smelled a story. "It touched on two key issues," she said. "One, does it make sense? What I read about the buses not having beepers did not make sense. Two, the indignation factor. I think it is okay for a reporter to get indignant, in the watchdog fashion." Ford saw a very fixable problem that citizens would care about, so she pitched the story to her shop. She suggested it as a sweeps story. It was not a hard sell.

Beyond the Story:

• The station commits resources to priority stories. Former WABC News Director Bart Feder made education coverage a priority in his shop. The decision was based on Feder's news values and buttressed by viewer surveys. "Research says viewers want education reporting. Education has often been overlooked. The challenge is to make it visually interesting," he says. Feder backed up his philosophy by allocating resources to education coverage. Ford has a part-time producer assigned to help her. Ford is rarely pulled from her education specialty to cover general news, but pitches in when big stories or staff shortages demand it. Newscast producers understand that education coverage is a signature of WABC's newscasts, and give the stories appropriate play.
  
  
• Reporters build expertise over time. Celeste Ford has worked for WABC since 1988. "Education has always been an interest of mine. I wanted to do stories I was interested in," she says. Ford believed coverage of New York City schools was "grossly neglected." So while working as a general assignment reporter, she built school contacts and generated education stories from a school system so big and complex she calls it "Byzantine." Getting into the schools can be tricky. "Sometimes the public affairs people don't return your calls," she says. But Ford the generalist continued to mine the schools for stories. Her persistence paid off. Three years ago, the station developed education as a full-blown specialty. There was only one choice for its reporter: Celeste Ford. "She's earned the right to do it here," said news director Feder.
  
  
• Issues are made interesting. Ford looks for issues that are important, then finds ways to make them interesting. She covers problems in the schools, a reporting process she describes as "a difficult dance." She says, "School officials know my stories may criticize them, but they'd rather have the critical story come from me, because they know I do my homework." Starting in 1996, Ford spent a school year doing homework on the problem of overcrowding in city schools. She and photographer /editor Robert Caccamise focused on one class of 44 second-graders in Brooklyn. They told the story through the lives of three students, whose school days were made more difficult by their packed classroom and their teacher's divided, diluted attention. Their 1997 documentary, "Room 104: The Overcrowding Crisis" won a du-Pont Columbia Award for documentary excellence.