Write Stuff

It started with an e-mail just past midnight Nov. 3 and ended with a Nov. 12 story on the Metro front of the New York Times. But what happened in between for Damiano Beltrami was a classic case of a good story in the hands of a good reporter and editor (and good teachers, it turns out).

But let’s start at the beginning. At 12:02 a.m., Nov. 3, Andy Newman of the Times’ Local staff asked four reporters by e-mail whether they’d be interested in a story in which the DA’s office confirmed an armed robbery suspect’s alibi that he was posting on Facebook in Harlem at the time when the crime occurred in Brooklyn. Even though busy with his capstone and other CUNY work, Damiano said he was fascinated. A bit later, Newman said the story was his.

First lesson: Raise your hand.

Damiano picked up a camera at school and headed to Harlem where he interviewed the now-free Rodney Bradford (he’d spent 12 days at Rikers Island jail), his father and step-mom. They all said Rodney had been in Harlem at the time of the crime and used his dad’s computer to post to Facebook. He took down their stories, shot pictures of Bradford at his dad’s computer and a screen-shot of his Facebook page.

Now what, Damiano asked himself. He felt he needed an expert to put what happened in a larger context. After tirelessly calling law professors at Columbia and NYU, he couldn’t find anyone who had anything to say about this intersection of social media and the law.

Mary Ann Giordano, the editor of The Local, pushed Damiano to keep trying. He spent most of a Saturday night searching Lexis-Nexis and Factiva (”social networking and law”) until he came up with John Browning, a Dallas lawyer who’d written articles on the topic. Damiano e-mailed Browning. Bingo! The next day, Browning responded, and gave Damiano examples of how social networks had been used in both criminal and civil matters. But this was the first time, the lawyer said, he’d heard about Facebook being used as an alibi.

Giordano pushed Damiano to get another expert who might not agree with the DA’s handling of the case. Damiano called almost everyone on the faculty in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He made himself such a presence that a frustrated receptionist finally put him on hold and found a professor eating in the cafeteria.

Joseph Pellini provided Damiano with some great quotes suggesting it wasn’t hard to create a Facebook post that could be traced to another computer. (That may be a whole other story; after Damiano’s story was posted on The Local, techies filled three pages of comments about all the possibilities.)

Finally, Damiano was ready to put together his story, along with quotes from Bradford’s lawyer. But Giordano wasn’t through with him. She sat down with his copy, and used a yellow highlighter to note all the fact-checking she wanted, including verification of everything from the Dallas lawyer. Damiano couldn’t immediately contact Browning so it was back to searching Lexis and Factiva, and employing every stratagem he learned from research professors Barbara Gray and Anne Mintz. He verified everything and learned he’d misspelled the first name of one of the victims in the armed robbery case.

Lesson learned: Even if you only have five more minutes, you should check one more time. You have to make those calls if you want to report at a higher level. Keep on harassing people until you get the other side, more information and better anecdotes.

During the whole process, Damiano said he appreciated the lessons he learned from Craft professors Dody Tsiantar and Rebecca Leung (I) and Indrani Sen and Jan Simpson (II). They’d drilled into him the importance of making sure all the names in his stories were correct, and to always include a source contact list with phone numbers. “It shows that you are really serious about what you’re doing,” Damiano said.

Damiano filed his story on The Local, and then a shorter, edited version appeared on the Metro front. But in today’s media world, a story never really ends. The story was picked up by AP and The Huffington Post, and several tech sites. It created a flashfire of comments and conversation across the Internet.

“News is the kindling for conversation,” said Jim Schachter, head of the Times digital operation, at CUNY’s New Business Models for (Local) News conference last week.

We’d add that reporting like Damiano’s is the kindling for the kind of superior journalism that will always get talked about, whatever its format.

Space. Time. Shape.  Interactive professor Jeremy Caplan used those three words to explain the differences in how we write for online or for print.  In a follow-up to Trudy Lieberman’s discussion last week, we found Caplan’s descriptions quite useful in understanding the two forms.

First, the differences:

Space — A blog can be any length, from a very short post to a four-part series (or longer).  You’re not restricted to a defined number of words, lines or space.

Time — In print, a story is a snapshot in time.  It can be a powerful, evocative, provocative piece but it is bounded by what you know at a certain time.  The online piece allows a story to evolve over time, and provides a natural place to update a situation and add new information.  The format also allows  multiple posts on the same subject over time.

Shape — Online is three-dimensional.  You can see it, hear it, read it.  Print is flat, one-dimensional (you can only read it although we might argue the best writing allows the reader to imagine, or see, the scene).  Online gives the reporter more ways to tell the story.

What’s the same?

Storytelling, Caplan says.  Whether online or print, your story needs a beginning, middle and end, with a protagonist (person, place, organization) and conflict or tension (some action that needs to be overcome, dealt with).  In either form, if the content isn’t there, if the reporting isn’t there, it doesn’t work for the reader.

We also asked Interactive Professor Sandeep Junnarkar what he tells his students about blog writing.  It’s useful advice:

* Be fair, accurate and balanced.  Don’t have an axe to grind.

* Be level-headed.  Don’t fire off wild opinions.  It’s not only rash, it will hurt you when potential employers, or interview subjects, check your work.

* Be authoritative based on your reporting, not your opinion.

That’s something on which we can all agree, whatever form we’re writing in.

When Trudy Lieberman started a blog on health care coverage two years ago for the Columbia Journalism Review, she felt like she’d been let out of prison.  Suddenly, after four decades confined to the strictures of print journalism — 5W’s, nut graf, inverted pyramid, a limited space — she found her voice, one based on her authoritative reporting of health care policy and how it’s covered.

“I could be edgy, irreverent, engaging and analytical,” said Lieberman, CUNY’s director of the health & medicine reporting program and a long-time contributing editor to CJR.  “Because I know the subject so well, I could cut through the BS and be totally honest.”

We asked Trudy to share her thoughts:

WRITE STUFF (WS):  How’d the blog start?

TRUDY: Two years ago, I asked CJR Editor Mike Hoyt if I could do something online about health care coverage and he suggested the blog with at least three posts a week.   I gulped.  Three stories a week after I was used to spending three months or longer on stories for Consumer Reports and for the print version of CJR?    Suddenly, after all these years, I would be doing daily journalism again. By the second week, though, I realized I really could do this, and I loved it.  An old newspaper person (I worked at the Detroit Free Press for eight years) never totally leaves the beat.  I could write fast because I had great knowledge of the subject, and it was so easy to connect the dots that too often go unconnected.   It was very easy for me to switch to this form of journalism.  My work  only got better.

WS:  How?

TRUDY:  I got looser in my writing. I realized the constraints of the (print) format, the prescriptive style, had confined my writing all these years.  I always was focused on ledes and nut grafs that sometimes are still hard for me to write.  When I began the blog post, the nut graf turned into a nut sentence or two high up that answered the question:  What is this post about?  It’s the question I always ask myself when I start to write.  Instead of spending hours creating an outline on paper, it was simpler to write the main points of the nut graf and then come back and add the documentation or my take on an issue.  It was still an outline but more concise. The blog format helped me find my voice as a writer.   At Consumer Reports where I worked for 29 years,  I wrote in the voice of the magazine rather than in the first person, which made it hard to be breezy.

WS:  And now?

TRUDY:  When I started blogging, it was like I’d been let out of a pen.  My voice just took off.  I didn’t have to worry about the 5W’s or the other constraints we’ve talked about.

WS:  You’ve talked about how well you know the subject.  Obviously, most of us, particularly our students, haven’t had that kind of experience.  What’s your advice for them?

TRUDY:  It’s not about pretty writing.  It’s all about the reporting.  And I don’t mean storytelling, the term of art that’s in vogue today.  To me, those words mean something different and often convey to student journalists that all they have to do is find an anecdote, add a couple of grafs based on a quick web search, and the story is done.  The term does not imply a thorough investigation or understanding of an issue, large or small.  Reporting is about understanding what you want to say.  If you don’t thoroughly report the subject, it’s hard to have a blog post that says something meaningful.  Unless you can tell a reader what something means, the post can be useless.

WS: Talk more about the reporting, which is so central to what we talk about here.

TRUDY:  You can free yourself from the constraints of the print format, but you can’t free yourself from reporting if you want to be a good journalist, and that means  interviewing the eleventh person who may say something that blows up your story.  Young reporters have to learn to make that last phone call.  It can be a hard lesson to learn.

WS: Health care is a complex subject.  Does the blog help you explore and explain the complexities?

TRUDY:  Yes.  The truth is a lot more complicated than ‘He said, she said’ journalism, a dictum that goes hand-in-hand with the tenets of the old journalism we all learned.  That means blog posts should be more than two-source journalism.  You’ve got to go out there and do the reporting, no matter what medium your work will appear in.   You can’t sit on the Internet and do it.  You’ve also got to read deeply about the topic you’re writing about.  The challenge of using the new tools is to figure out how to report complicated stories in short form, perhaps as a long-running series or with context added by engaging the public.  I feel like we can really invent something here, and the new digital journalism gives us a clean slate to do it.

WS:  Your best advice?

TRUDY: Reporting is the foundation of everything we do.  Reporting for one story helps build a base for the next one.  That’s what good reporters have learned. I urge students to first do a thorough clip search before starting a story, learn what the topic is all about, and then go and report the hell out of it.