What’s Peyton’s place? (continued)

But don’t let yourself feel too warm and fuzzy — the journalism biz is a competitive game, and, according to MacPhail, amicable relations between he and his daughter and local journos went south sharply after the publication of the Peyton’s Fort dealing with the serial arsonist.

Ann Fisher, editor of the Sanford News, Tammy Wells, reporter for the Biddeford Journal Tribune, and Drew McMullin, editor of the Biddeford Journal Tribune, were unwilling to comment on Peyton MacPhail or Peyton’s Fort. Ralph Barr, the reporter for the Portland Press Herald covering Sanford, did not return a phone call to his office.

But Wells, who in 2000 wrote a gushing profile of the multi-talented Peyton, fired off an angry email on April 13 to MacPhail after he posted a copy of the Peyton’s Fort article on www.maineindymedia.org with an introduction that said "both the Sanford News and Journal Tribune refused to cover the fires in an investigative manner."

"Saw your piece on Maine Indy Media," Wells writes. "Just one point. The next time you decide to question my journalistic integrity and mention my name, please take the trouble to spell it correctly. It’s Tammy, two ems and a y."

Lynn Bowles owns the Sports Stop sporting goods store on Main Street in Sanford and has known Peyton for seven years. Bowles says she’s not really surprised Peyton’s Fort scooped local press in its first edition because Peyton and her father have a knack for digging into all kinds of things.

"Peyton and her dad work on an awful lot of things because she’s home schooled," says Bowles. "She has a lot of insight. They must have been working on [the arsonist story] and she just reasoned this out all on her own."

Marge Trowbridge serves on the Finance Committee in Sanford and has lived in town for 24 years. She was a source for the arsonist article.

"She’s a very unique young girl. I’ve noticed that she’s a listener and an observer and she likes to learn," she says. "She asked me what I thought about all the fires and I just started listening to her talk about where the fires were being set and how it did go around in a circle. She was right on."

Is she surprised Peyton scooped the adults?

"Nah, there are a lot of smart 12 year olds out there," Trowbridge says.

But, along with the hunch Peyton got right are several conclusions that appear to be just plain wrong, including suggesting a recent fire at Para’s Pizza on School Street was started by the serial arsonist. According to Littlefield of the Sanford Police, that fire wasn’t suspicious.

Roy Peter Clark, Vice President of the nonprofit journalism school the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg Florida, believes it’s practically impossible for a preteen to wrap his or her head around the level of analysis necessary to craft a reliable investigative piece of journalism. In 1983, Clark founded the institute’s summer Writers Camp which has trained thousands of children ages nine to 13 in journalism. Clark has never seen Peyton’s newspaper, but says it can be dangerous when children, who tend to have very little understanding of the universe beyond their own bedrooms, take on complicated stories in the real world.

"This sounds like the Blogosphere come to home schooling," says Clark. "The kind of story we’re talking about is an investigative story. If I have a 12-year-old student [at the Writers’ Camp], I might send the student to find out why the food in the cafeteria is so unpopular. If the school has been damaged in a hurricane, I might send a team of students to talk to someone about how to rebuild the school, but that’s not an investigative story."

Clark says it’s hard to imagine a child Peyton’s age pulling off such a piece without significant guidance from an adult.

"Children are precocious. I’ve seen children do all kinds of different things — musical ability, computer technology, math and science — but this act requires a set of judgments," he says. "Maybe those judgments are being made by the parent-slash-teacher with the child and, in a way, that kind of makes it a collaborative exercise. The parent is assuming responsibility for the stories by acting in that role."

MacPhail says he helps Peyton conduct her research, edit her writing, and organize her ideas, but the crux of the stories comes from his little girl. And he doesn’t plan to encourage her to shy away from tough topics.

"I’d rather open her eyes up," he says. "When I was a [political] campaign manager she was putting the flyers out with me. She was with me when I was out running the [night]clubs. I want her to be politically active and involved and to take on big stories, not just ‘Why is Aaron Carter so popular?’ We’re prepared for any [response to the paper]; that’s what life is. You have haters in life, but you just got to do what you do and hope people appreciate it."

In early May, Peyton’s Fort Volume 1, Issue 2, was printed and distributed around Sanford. The headline for this latest edition, "Why is there a Toxic Waste Dump in Sanford?," is bracketed by two menacing black skulls. The article describes an abandoned recycling plant on New Dam Road in Sanford which the newspaper alleges is "a living, breathing nightmare."

Back at the little blue house on the edge of town, Peyton and her father are working to make Peyton’s Fort more formidable. The first Web edition of the newspaper was posted this month at www.sanfordnews.net. Though she swears she’s a print fan at heart, Peyton has cleared a space in one of her attic rooms to film monthly national news segments which will soon be broadcast on her Web site. She also has plans to sell ads for Peyton’s Fort at the cut-rate price of $10-to-$20 per quarter page.

But she’s interested in so many other things — like butterflies and digging a really deep hole in her backyard to see what’s under there — that she can’t really say journalism is her favorite thing, she just likes it a lot. She doesn’t stress about what the outcome of her newspaper gig might be and she doesn’t really get why the whole thing is an issue anyway.

"[Peyton’s Fort] wasn’t meant to be competition," she says. "We’re only a front-and-back-side paper, they [the Sanford News and the Biddeford Journal Tribune] have got like four pages [sic], front and back. With sports and everything."

In the next issue of Peyton’s Fort, Peyton plans to try to solve an unsolved local murder. She’s a little bit afraid of that one, she says, but she’ll have to see how the story develops to figure out if she should really be freaked out.

She shrugs.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com