Paper Does Brisk 'Monkey Business,' Including a Book

By: Mark Fitzgerald Multimedia packages for reporting projects are nothing new ? but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel added a unique twist in July when it reported the story of a baby orangutan named Mahal, whose sad history seems to be having a happy ending at the Milwaukee County Zoo.

To add to reporter Jan Uebelherr's print-edition, three-part series on the little orangutan rejected by his birth mother, the Journal Sentinel created not just the expected Web mini-site with video, but also a 24-hour "Good Morning Mahal Cam," a "Friends of Mahal" page on Facebook, and a children's book called "Little Mahal and the Big Search for a Real Mom."

The children's book idea hit Mark Katches, the paper's assistant managing editor/projects and investigations, one night while he was editing Uebelherr's story at home, just after reading a bedtime story to his 14-month-old son Luke. He called Uebelherr, and said he had an idea, and that he didn't think it was crazy. Says Uebelherr, "it made sense to me, because the way the story was unfolding it was sort of like a kid's book."

Indeed, Mahal's short life so far has been a simian soap opera. He was born in Colorado Springs in April 2007 to an unusually young orangutan in a breeding arranged by a group racing to head off the besieged species' extinction. His mother immediately rejected him. Mahal was placed happily with an affectionate mother of nine ? only to have her die 20 days later. The next family he was placed with scared little Mahal to death. "He was basically at the window saying, 'Get me out of here,'" Katches says. A return to his birth mother seemed to work for a couple of weeks, but then she turned abusive. Finally a likely foster mom was found at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and Mahal has been its star attraction.

Uebelherr had never written for children before, and says, "We had three weeks to get this done." Gary Markstein, a designer in the newspaper's features section, created the cover illustration, while Creative Director Lonnie Turner designed and illustrated it with photos by staffer Jack Orton. "Little Mahal and the Big Search for a Real Mom" was soon set for release in late July. The paper has received "hundreds" of orders for the $3.95 book that will also be sold at the zoo and local bookstores.

The newspaper's main series is no Walt Disney production. "Jan wove in very important issues," Katches says, "The destruction of the rain forest, the losses among a species that could be extinct in 10 years, the ethics of tapping a mother that wasn't ready."

But Katches says editing the series and writing a bedtime storybook about a red-haired orangutan was a bright spot in days that were also occupied overseeing investigative projects on bad nursing homes and federal failures to regulate dangerous chemicals: "Problems with the Great Lakes or troubles within the pension system don't lend themselves to children's books."