Write Stuff

Joe Nocera, the Times’ business columnist, Tuesday presented a primer on reporting to Tim Harper’s Craft Class. The veteran business writer and columnist has covered everyone from Boone Pickens (from his Texas oil-patch days) to Steve Jobs (who called Nocera a “slimebucket”). He’s also explored issues from Google’s daycare problems to the extraordinary financial meltdown and bailout of the past few weeks.

Here are Nocera’s nuggets on reporting:

• Make the first phone call. The hardest thing to do in reporting is to make the first phone call, when you don’t know much. It’s like an insurance salesman making a “cold call” on a customer.
• Keep them talking. Once you’ve got them on the phone, ask simple questions, “I don’t mean to sound dumb but how does a ‘credit swap’ work?” The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
• Luck matters. Creating your own luck matters more. After some persistent reporting, and a lot of questions to Apple PR folks, Nocera got “lucky” when Jobs called him names and, yep, gave him some great stuff for the column he was writing.
• Don’t be afraid of what you think. If you’re outraged by something, your reporting can show readers why they should be outraged, too. Do the reporting, then trust yourself to tell the reader what you found.
• Don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Just because Treasury tells you the banks are spending all that government money to ease credit doesn’t mean it’s so.
• Get specific storytelling details. Make yourself so familiar to your sources you become a fly on the wall. Nocera years ago immersed himself in Pickens’ deal-making sessions and captured the image of Pickens in a bathrobe eating a Granny apple. In a story with a lot of financial numbers, that image is the one Nocera and readers most remember. (OK, Nocera also copped to sharing a few drinks with Pickens along the way).
• Make your writing a conversation, not a dissertation. Don’t write to your sources in the jargon they use. Write to readers as if you were telling them a fascinating story.
• Follow the “5 Moms” rule. When a source hooked up Nocera with a Google mom, she unloaded to him the problems she was having with the company’s vaunted daycare program. She enlisted four other Moms for Nocera. When that many people tell you something’s wrong, you’ve got a helluva story. You’ve also got the reporting evidence to rebut the official company line.
• Learn the rules well so you can break them later. The need for strong reporting, accuracy and fairness never changes. But there are guidelines – rarely use questions and quotes leads – that can be broken by wise heads, as Nocera’s columns show.

We’re not against long sentences here but too often writers lose their way and don’t understand the story they’re trying to tell the reader, if you get what I mean, hopefully, as scribes pile on the clauses, modifiers, punctuation and parenthetical phrases (Parody alert!). To help stop this trend, take a look at the lead in a Times story from Istanbul by Sabrina Tavernise:

High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right. “There was no sincerity,” she said. “It was shallow.”

So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.

In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism. Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.

Check out the length of her sentences. The longest one is 19 words, the one with the colon. Her meaning is clear. The sentences work to pull you into a lengthy story about one young woman’s struggle with her identity, and her country. The nut graf also sets the scene for what is to come.

Caution: The short sentence can be overdone. The best writing often varies sentence length, using short sentences to make a powerful point, the longer sentences to convey information or continuity. But the short, declarative sentence often is the best antidote to tangled, tortured writing.

Shout Outs

Here are some good examples of short, clear sentences to power a story. Lee Hernandez used them for his Daily News story on the designer Isabel Toledo:

When Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, wore an elegant black tunic and palazzo pants to a Calvin Klein fund-raiser in Manhattan last June, Isabel Toledo swooned.

“Michelle really wanted to be sophisticated, and she did it,” says the Cuban-American designer.

“Graphically, she was a visual message that read, ‘I’m in control.’”

Toledo should know — she designed the set.

Simple, easy to read, a powerful verb in the lead — “swooned” — and short sentences that make a point. One quibble: Given the lead, keep everything in the past tense. Use “said” instead of “says.”

Matt Townsend kept it simple, but powerful, in his Daily News lead on the rescue of a pregnant woman in Brooklyn:

Two good Samaritans carried a seven-months pregnant woman out of her smoke-filled Brooklyn apartment building Saturday after a discount store in the building caught fire.

When Yole Basile’s three daughters screamed, “Mom’s up there,” laundromat manager Karl Ahrendts and neighbor Francisco Jaenchaies knew they couldn’t wait for rescuers to help the woman.

“I looked at the other guy and said, ‘Let’s go,’” said Jaenchaies, 33. “If she would have died, it would have been like two people dying because she’s seven months pregnant.”

The pair raced up to the third-floor flat on New Lots Ave. in Brownsville where the 34-year-old woman was lying helpless on her bed.

Quick Takes

Maureen Ker and Jessica Firger did a good explainer on “pop-up stores” that create marketing buzz for retailers. Kate Zhao did some excellent reporting on how China may not welcome the U.S. with open arms when Treasury folks come calling for help with the credit crunch.

The Wrong Stuff

Hey, we can learn a lot from bad writing, too.  Check out the Write Stuff blog for our Wrong Stuff bad writing contest, and please post your best examples of the worst writing in the journalism you’ve read recently (Caution: No fair sending in anything from your colleagues. Let’s pick on others even as we recognize that we’re capable of similar atrocities with the language.)

We like to celebrate good writing and reporting in this space.  But there’s much to learn, too, from bad writing.  Many of you probably are aware of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest, which parodies  the 19th century English novelist who penned the immortal words, “It was a dark and stormy night.” For your reading enjoyment, here’s the winning 2008 entry from Garrison Spik:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

Man, that’s baaad, as in good. Spik weaved mixed metaphors, overheated modifiers and extraneous detail into one masterful run-on sentence. Here’s a list of previous winners.  In another bad writing contest sponsored by the scholarly journal, Philosophy and Literature, I found a winner who actually meant to write what she did.   It came from Judith Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Huh??? It  should be noted that an admirer called Butler “one of the 10 smartest people on the planet.” That may well be but her impenetrable writing can’t be one of the reasons.  Your first responsibility as a writer is to be understood.  That requires simple (not simplistic), powerful language that is clear to the reader.  You’ve got to know where you’re headed or your reader never will. You can’t hide behind jargon and fancy words.

It’s probably too easy for a journalist to beat up on academic writing.  That’s where I’d love to get your help.  Based on your reading of journalism in all its forms, please post  your favorite examples of bad writing for a  Wrong Stuff contest that could help us understand how to avoid them in our  efforts .  Let’s exclude our CUNY colleagues from this contest even while we know we’re capable of similar atrocities.  There’ll be a suitable  prize for the best of the worst examples (It will not be a copy of the collected essays of Judith Butler.)

When the news broke a month ago about David Foster Wallace’s suicide, I realized I didn’t know his work except for a riveting essay on tennis great Roger Federer.  Since then, I’ve read countless appreciations of Wallace, who  taught creative writing at Pomona College and was best known for his epic  modernist novel, Infinite Jest. “Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking, and absurd with equal  ease; he can even do them all at once,” blurbed the Times’ Michiko Kakutani.   One admirer compared him to Joyce in Ulysses.

Why do I bring this up?  I’m a big  believer  in reading great writing wherever you find it or even when, embarrassingly for me in DFW’s case, I hadn’t found it. Even when a writing approach differs from your own. “He (Wallace) was the great enemy of word limits, proportion and journalistic restraint,” said Sam  Anderson in New York magazine this week.  That’s another principle espoused here, to get outside your comfort zone, to read sports if you usually read science, to dive into fiction when your habit is nonfiction.

Ask yourself why a writer works for you. Anderson made this compelling case for Wallace: “At his best he managed to dissolve his personality so purely into text that it felt like he was in the room with you, or more accurately right there inside of your head — as Emerson once wrote about Montaigne: ‘Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.’ ”

Wow,  wouldn’t we all like to write words that bleed, that live.  Here, before I make amends by reading more DFW, are the passionate picture-painting words he used to bring to life the art of Roger Federer:

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

The simple period is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer’s arsenal.  Too often, we see run-on sentences that never end.  Writers tend  to just keep adding commas and dashes and semi-colons, almost anything to keep  the sentence going.  Stop it.   Use the period.  It will  disentangle your sentences and, often, force you to use active verbs rather than gerunds.

Don’t take our word for it, though.  The legendary New York columnist, Jimmy  Breslin, delivered a mini-sermon on writing as he extolled the craft of tabloid  journalist Steve Dunleavy in a Monday profile in the New York Times:  “In a time of listless reporting, he climbed stairs.   And he  wrote simple declarative sentences that people could  read, as opposed to  these 52-word gems that moan, ‘I went to college! I went to graduate school college!  Where do  I put the period?”

At CUNY, let’s show Breslin and the world that we understand the power of the period.

We constantly stress the need to capture as much telling detail as possible in your reporting.  The more specific the details, the better your writing will be, transporting your reader inside the scene or action.  Mathew Warren did that splendidly in his recent piece in the New York Times:

A slender young woman hung 30 feet in the air, coiling her body around two pieces of black silk that were attached to the rafters. A crowd watching below screamed as she unraveled herself and started falling toward them and then gasped with relief as she came to a stop just above their heads.
The woman, Anya Sapozhnikova, was performing her aerial circus act, but this was not Cirque du Soleil, and there was no big top. Instead, it was a warehouse party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
While the notion of circus performers is largely associated with major productions like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Coney Island sideshows, a new generation of performers is taking the circus arts to unexpected places. Fire eaters, stilt walkers, aerialists and sword swallowers are among those showing off their skills at parties, concerts, clubs and in the streets and in parks.

Mathew explains his strategy:  “I wanted to start with the performers and the moment of tension, with the crowd looking up as the woman unraveled herself toward them.  I knew that would draw in the readers.”  He succeeded.  His third paragraph also is an excellent example of a nut graf that captures the essence of the story. And check out the active verbs – hung, screamed, unraveled, gasped – that empower the lead.

Shout Outs

There’s very little that matches the thrill of breaking news before anyone else. With the media herd stampeding on the financial meltdown saga, Dan Macht dug up a story no one else had uncovered: The effect of the crisis on non-profits and philanthropy in New York City.  Dan’s story in Crain’s New York Business was days ahead of the competition:

When Pamela Maraldo heard that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had filed for bankruptcy on Monday, she immediately thought about the $10,000 grant she had been counting on receiving from the investment bank.
Ms. Maraldo is the executive director of Girls Inc., a nonprofit in New York City. Lehman gave it $10,000 last year to fund a tutoring and martial arts program for 6- to 18-year-old girls, and Ms. Maraldo was counting on the same amount this year.
“The bottom line is that we will have to work twice as hard this year,” said Ms. Maraldo.

Eliot Caroom broke news, too, when he looked beneath the debris of the government seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to see if there were still opportunities for investors.  Turns out there were.  Investors would’ve almost doubled their money by today if they’d invested at the time Eliot’s story was published in forbes.com  (Don’t worry, the story contained appropriate warnings about such gambles on ‘penny’ stocks.)

Megan McGibney and Vinita Singla checked out a professor’s tip and produced a much-picked-up story for the News Service on a little-enforced election law:

Don’t wear your favorite Barack Obama T-shirt or your shiny John McCain campaign button Nov. 4: You might get hassled at the polls.
An obscure, seldom-enforced state law bars anyone from wearing political buttons and other campaign paraphernalia within “a 100-foot radial measured from the entrances of the voting booth.”
With the election just over a month away, the law is suddenly gaining notice: an email begging potential Obama voters to “PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE” leave T-shirts and buttons home on Election Day is circulating on the Internet – spurring worried calls and emails to state election officials. The New York Civil Liberties Union plans – for the first time – to include a similar warning in its voter information materials.

Collin Orcutt got an early jump on a different local angle on the last days of Yankee Stadium with his story in the Highbridge Horizon.

If the Yankees don’t extend their streak of 13 straight postseason appearances this year, it won’t just be the players missing out on the playoff glory.
Many area residents are upset that the team appears to be going out with a whimper in its final season in historic Yankee Stadium. For local businesses, the Bombers’ swoon has a lot more than an emotional wallop.
“When the Yankees win, everybody is happy and makes more money,” said Alvin Williams, 55, an employee at Ball Park Lanes Bar and Restaurant, across the street from Yankee Stadium. “When they lose, it affects the entire Bronx.”

These stories reflect the journalistic equivalent of the sage baseball advice of legendary hitter Wee Willie Keeler:  “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”  Reporters who follow their instincts to the stories no one else is telling will always end up with a good batting average.