Word choice bagger preview

Some stuff to get you thinking about word choice (plus they're just plain good reads). Eugene found the story links; I stumbled across the poem. We'll pull from these at today's bagger:

Quiet man gave no hint of violence (Rick Romell, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel):
Excerpt: He was the type of person you'd scarcely notice in a crowd - quiet, a bit on the tall side, brownish hair, glasses.
"Not in shape but not overweight - Joe Average," said his neighbor, Shane Colwell.
But Terry Ratzmann, the man believed to have opened fire on members of his congregation as they worshipped, slaying seven and wounding four before killing himself, turned out to be anything but average.

A boy who was like a flower (Anthony Shadid, Washington Post):
Excerpt: Bathed in the soft colors of turquoise tiles, the room was hushed, as the caretakers finished the washing. They wrapped his head, his gaze fixed, with red and yellow plastic. They rolled the corpse in plastic sheeting, fastening it with four pieces of white gauze -- one at each end, one around his knees and one around his chest.

During school siege, Russia took captives in Chechnya (Kim Murphy, L.A. Times):
Excerpt: It was 6 a.m. when Russian soldiers hoisted themselves over the wall, crashed through the window and broke down the front door. Their quarries were still asleep.
Shouting, shoving and kicking, the soldiers pushed 67-year-old Khavazh Semiyev and his wife into a truck waiting outside, then went back for the others -- his two sons and two nephews, his son's wife, his 52-year-old sister.
Then -- and Semiyev couldn't believe his eyes -- they went back for his grandchildren: Mansur, 11 years old. Malkhazni, 9. And Mamed, 7.

Kidnapping Grandma Braun Part I (Helen O'Neill, Associated Press):
Excerpt: It was cold the night Grandma Braun was taken, that bitter dead-of-winter cold when the countryside is sheathed in ice and the stillness is broken only by great gusts of snow that swirl across the fields and back roads, erasing footprints and car tracks and all traces of life.

Old Timer’s Day

By Donald Hall

When the tall puffy

figure wearing number

nine starts

late for the fly ball,

laboring forward

like a lame truckhorse

startled by a gartersnake,

—this old fellow

whose body we remember

as sleek and nervous

as a filly's—

and barely catches it

in his glove's

tip, we rise

and applaud weeping:

On a green field

we observe the ruin

of even the bravest

body, as Odysseus

wept to glimpse

among shades the shadow

of Achilles.

Deeper thinking

I came across this blog post by New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin, in which he talks about why journalists sometimes react to a hot story and go down that path, instead of thinking through the story and treating it more thoroughly, or even pursuing the story that's the opposite of the hot story; and how that can damage our credibility.

It's something that drives me crazy, when you see newspapers or TV scream about, say, an explosion of shark attacks in Florida, when in reality it's three people attacked in a 100-mile stretch of coastline, or some such.

For us, that kind of reaction can manifest itself if we chase a "trend" story or another hot national story and try to localize it, thinking that, of course, the same thing must be happening here. Sometimes it is, but not always, of course. Doing some thinking at the story-idea/assignment phase might help us tell better stories when these hot stories come up, because they'll always come up. Perhaps we can find a more nuanced angle, or perhaps we should be writing the counter-trend story.

The specific example in Revkin's blog entry was that two studies came out, one saying global warming contributed to more hurricanes, the other saying it wasn't much of a factor. A political scientist counted 79 media stories on the global-warming-affects-hurricanes study (the hot story) and 3 on the minimal-factor study (not the hot story). Here's Revkin:

"(There is) an institutional eagerness to sift for and amplify what editors here at The Times sometimes call 'the front-page thought.' This is only natural, but in coverage of science it can skew what you read toward the more calamitous side of things. It’s usually not agenda-driven, as some conservative commentators charge. It’s just a deeply ingrained habit. ...

"As I’ve said many times, in a couple of book chapters and talks, one danger in this kind of coverage — not accounting for the full range of uncertainty or understanding in dealing with very important environmental questions — is that it ends up providing ammunition to critics charging the media with an alarmist bias. And once the coverage corrects, it results in what I call “whiplash journalism” (coffee causes cancer; coffee helps your sex life…) that could disengage readers entirely from the value of journalism."

Gang violence in Oakland; Refugees playing soccer

Sports Illustrated had a couple of great pieces for the non-sports people like myself.

One, "How Dreams Die" by George Dohrmann talked about how street violence has gotten so bad in and around Oakland and Berkley, Calif. that kids who would've normally turned to sports as a means of escape, have given up their dreams of becoming professional athletes and given into gang life.

One youth football organizer described it as such: "It used to be that if you played sports, everyone protected you. Now it is open season on everybody. The neighborhoods are that devastated."

He starts and ends the article with Fred, a kid who's been on the wrong side of the law, but who wants to turn his life around through football. I especially loved how Dohrmann incorporated Fred's "Pledge of Success" at the beginning with a sense of hopefulness, and in the end with bitterness.

If you've been feeling like there isn't too much good in the world and there's nothing you can do to change it (what journalist doesn't feel that way?) please, please check out "Alive and Kicking" by Gary Smith. It's as uplifting as "How Dreams Die" is depressing. Smith follows a Jordanian-American who left behind her wealthy family, and created a soccer team of refugees from all over the world (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Pakistan...) -- kids who had seen their families massacred, and who were struggling to fit in and find success in the states.

It's really incredible how one person (one person!) took it upon herself to adopt these kids and these kids' families to help turn their lives around. It's really inspiring (and well-written).

Both stories are reminders to me of why I need to read the sports pages more often. Consistently, some of the most compelling articles in our paper (or in journalism) revolve around them.

Jazz up your numbers

Yeah, you know if it's about numbers, it's Joan.

Check out sensibleunits.com next time you're writing a story with measurements or sizes in it.

5,000 tons of recycling collected in a certain local township? Guess what? That's 28 blue whales' worth of recycling.

Someone has driven 8,000 miles on a countrywide trek? That's 29 Grand Canyons long.

One tip - leave out the comma when you type in your number and unit of measurement. Have fun with this... comment and let me know how you put this to use!

More 1st person in a story

This from Lon Wagner of the Virginian-Pilot, a really fun read about a big-time guitar collector and his stories. Lon uses first person just in a couple spots. Do you like it, or think the story would have worked just as well done another way?

Use of first person in a story

A friend of mine sent me the link to this ESPN story about Len Bias' death. It's a good read with lots of different story lines intertwined.

The writer uses both "I" and "we" to tell the story, and I couldn't decide if I really liked or really hated his use of the first person.

I'd be curious to see what anyone else thinks about it.

Video storytelling from NewsTrain

So a bunch of us went to this NewsTrain seminar at PNA Wednesday and Thursday where we were learning the basics of telling stories with video and about other online tools at our disposal. Part of our assignment/duties on Wednesday was to shoot and edit a B-roll to share with the rest of the workshop.

Here's a link to the videos we shot (including an existential visual essay on PennDOT by ex-YDR staffer and sweater-vest supporter Ted Sickler): pnafoundation.ning.com

We'll admit, our efforts are probably a bit... elementary, compared with some of the stuff our photogs and reporters are doing, but in our defense we only had a lunch break to shoot the video.

A mania for meaning

I've been meaning to share these two passages from a book I just finished reading that I'd recommend to all of you, "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty:

"The need for narrative, the need to place events in stories, shapes much of our writing and speech. Linking facts into cause-and-effect chains makes them easier for our brains to absorb, making them more memorable for readers and even for the writer. Creating narrative links gives a sense that there are casual chains that will allow us to predict and control events in the future, a sense that is not always true."

"In the end, using writing to give cognitive meaning to events may parallel an equally deep human need, the need to give emotional meaning to an existence that is opaque. The universal desire to feel that life has some purpose is perhaps stronger in writers, whose occupation instills in them a mania for meaning."

(I especially relate to that last line. Weird, huh?)

Quotes

I was putting together some thoughts for YDRU and came across the following quotes. I just like 'em, plus, each of which touch on stuff we've focused on in the last 18 months of writing talk:

"Don't say the old lady screamed -- bring her on and let her scream." -- Mark Twain.

"Don't write about Man, write about a man." -- E.B. White.

"The more personal you are, the more universal you become." -- Donald Murray

"The effort of writing never sucks." -- Ken Fuson

Losing the war

So I'm reading "The New Kings of Nonfiction", an anthology of nonfiction pieces compiled by Ira Glass (yeah, yeah, I know I'm always talking about "This American Life") and I really enjoyed this piece by Lee Sandlin called "Losing the War".

I recently interviewed a World War II veteran about his experiences in the war, and found it hard to extract any sort of really gripping or poignant memories from him. Now, that could be just because I'm an out-of-practice reporter, but Plotkin was with me and he tried getting this man to elaborate a little bit more about his feelings and ... nothing.

I wish I had read Sandlin's piece before going into the interview, because I feel like I would've had a better understanding about where this veteran were coming from. In "Losing the War" Sandlin talks about how later generations will never be able to fully understand the terrible experience of World War II, and that the veterans who understand the experience, still, years later, are really just trying to forget. If you're at all interested in writing about the military or war (which I imagine many of us are because of Iraq and Afghanistan) I think this piece is worth checking out. If nothing else, it will give you a bit more insight into the minds' of our vets.

If you're not interested in writing about the military or about wartime, well read it anyway. These are trying times, as journalists we should all be seeking a better understanding for what moves men and nations. And how can you not be engaged with such solid writing? War ends at the moment peace permenantly wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of the sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened.