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It's been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The impact on wildlife was devastating. Cleanup crews poured into the nearby port town, also called Valdez, where an animal rescue center was set up.

"The chaos is incredibly difficult to describe or even imagine," says LJ Evans, a local resident who volunteered to help. "Somebody came back with the first bird — the reporters were so frantic, somebody got in a fight trying to take a picture of this poor little oiled bird."

"We were working 14-, 16-, 18-hour days there for the first month and a half," Suzanne Bishop, another rescue worker, tells LJ on a visit to StoryCorps in Fairbanks, Alaska. "We ran countless times a day from one room to the other with dog kennels stacked up high all the way down the hallway of otters."

"I had nightmares for years, because they screamed," LJ says. "I'd never heard a sound like that."

"I remember going home every night and sobbing, because it was not only terribly sad, it was very hard work," Suzanne adds.

"Then one joyous day, in this whole long stressful experience, we took all these birds that had been washed, and lined up all these kennels on the beach — 30 of them, 40 of them — each one with half a dozen birds," LJ recalls. "We opened all those crates, and they swarmed out into the water and made such an incredible noise. They either paddled or they flew, but they got the hell out of there.

"There was so much stress, so much tension for so many months," she adds. "At least for that moment, that little while, you could feel good about something that we had done."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

In the little more than a week since the Cesar Chavez movie came out, there have been as many complaints as kudos about the handling of the complex story about the Mexican-American union organizer and civil rights leader. Some pointed out that Filipinos were left out of the story, others mentioned Chavez's views about undocumented immigrants went unsaid and still others noted the role of women in the movement was downplayed.

Another concern that was aired had to do with the background of the film's director, Diego Luna. He is of Mexican, not Mexican-American, origin. Chavez's youngest son Paul Chavez told NPR that the family was initially concerned about "a Mexicano telling a story that is really about a Mexican-American Chicano in the United States," but that they were eventually won over by Luna's passionate commitment to the story and willingness to learn.

Luna was able to push through a project that had circulated around Hollywood without success for decades because he is considered "bankable." And "bankability" is the most elusive and valuable currency in the notoriously risk-averse industry (Fast & Furious 7, anyone?).

A quick scan of other "Latino" members of the Tinsel Town A-list quickly reveals that most immigrated from Latin America or Spain: Luna and his compadre Gael Garca Bernal, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, the so-called "Three Amigos" directors Alejandro Gonzalez-Iarritu, Guillermo del Toro and Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarn, Penelope Lopez and Javier Bardem, Sofia Vergara, Jennifer Lopez, Robert Rodriguez, George Lopez. Only the last three individuals on that list were born in the U.S. The rest migrated to the U.S. after making a name for themselves in their home countries.

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As winter loosens its grip, employers are taking on more help.

Hotels, bars and restaurants added 33,000 workers, while retailers tacked on 21,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists say those increases suggest employers are growing more confident that Americans will be spending more this year.

"Consumers still have the wherewithal to make discretionary purchases and were just waiting for the snow to be plowed and the temperatures to rise to resume spending," IHS Global Insight chief U.S. economist Doug Handler wrote in his analysis.

The Labor Department report showed that all together, employers added 192,000 jobs in March.

That hiring boost encouraged people to resume their job hunts, pushing up the labor force participation rate to 63.2 percent, from 63 percent the previous month. With more people filling out job applications, there was no improvement in the unemployment rate. It held steady at 6.7 percent.

Still, that was a big improvement over last year's 7.6 percent.

This year's pace of hiring is "consistent with a moderately growing economy at present and a faster-growing economy later this year," Handler said.

The sense that the economy is thawing out after "a long, harsh winter" was echoed by Matthew Shay, who heads the National Retail Federation, a trade group for store owners. "Merchants are eager to move forward with their spring hiring and operational plans," he said in a statement.

The positive momentum also showed up in the construction sector, where employers added 19,000 jobs. Over the past year, construction employment has risen by 151,000.

That hiring helped March mark a milestone: private-sector employment returned to the pre-recession level of 2007.

There's news today about the 2016 presidential campaign that has nothing to do with the growing list of would-be candidates with White House aspirations.

It's about the big nominating conventions the Democrats and Republicans hold every four years. Legislation the president signed Thursday afternoon means those huge political extravaganzas will no longer receive millions of dollars in taxpayer support. It's not the only change that's likely for conventions.

Let's start with a little time travel:

"I'm Walter Cronkite, and this is our anchor desk for our CBS News Westinghouse coverage of this 1956 Democratic Convention. This is the dramatic high point of the convention ..."

Back then and for years afterward, there was around-the-clock coverage of conventions by television networks. Big news could hit at any time, and did.

At the 1964 GOP convention, bitter party divisions were front and center. Then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the man beaten by nominee Barry Goldwater, issued a stern warning: "I warn that the Republican Party should reject extremism from either the left or the right."

At the 1980 convention, former President Gerald Ford shocked everyone when he revealed a possible co-presidency if he joined the ticket with nominee Ronald Reagan.

It was a bombshell story until CBS went to Lesley Stahl on the convention floor.

"Walter, a top lieutenant just came and said it's not Ford ... they're coming all around me to tell me it's not Ford ... they're all yelling 'Bush' all around me. Someone told me it's Bush. They're all yelling "Bush" all around me ... everyone is yelling 'Bush,' " Stahl reported to CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite was surprised and amused: "Who's writing the script for this one? That's what I want to know," he said.

That moment may have been the last instance of truly unexpected and substantive drama at a nominating convention. And that's exactly the problem.

"Conventions became theatrical productions," says Don Fowler, a member of the Democratic National Committee for four decades and the man who managed the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

These days, news organizations — especially the big commercial broadcast networks — continue to question the worth of devoting prime time space to events with no suspense. Live daytime coverage is long gone except on cable.

Fowler says he got complaints from the networks in 1988.

"We fussed with them for weeks about how much of the convention they were going to cover. They reduced substantially in '88, and they've been trying to do that since then. I think in 2012 both conventions received as little coverage as any conventions previous," he says.

Meanwhile, Republicans are planning another big change in 2016. They will hold their gathering months earlier than usual — perhaps in June, in hopes of quickly wrapping up what could be a no-holds-barred fight for the nomination, and to give the GOP nominee a head start on the general election.

There's even talk about scaling back events to as few as two days.

But Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina, says these changes in scheduling and coverage don't mean conventions are unimportant.

"I still think conventions become a very significant way that voters can tune in to and see sort of the best arguments from each party for why they should elect a particular candidate," he says.

Still, it's no wonder — in a time of budget battles and questions about the relevance of big party nominating conventions — that spending some $18 million in federal money per convention has now come to an end with the president's signature. The money will instead be used to finance research on childhood diseases.