Write Stuff

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.

His Wall Street Journal editors call Barry Newman the dean of A-heds, the elegantly crafted feature stories that for years occupied the middle column of Page One. Now ensconced in a box at the bottom of the page, the A-heds could become a thing of the past, Newman fears, if Rupert Murdoch and his new editors get their way. But not yet.

For Tim Harper’s Craft class this week, the thin, graying, avuncular Newman opened a window into how he puts together these 1,200-word gems, which sometimes take a month to prepare. He writes about 10 a year, which, in these times, may sound like an unaffordable luxury. But when combined with other Journal reporters’ A-heds, Newman and colleagues produce a daily surprise and delight for readers, and the sort of reporting and writing that burnishes the Journal brand for excellence.

Newman has written about everything from grape nuts (hint: no grapes, no nuts) to a business called “Going out of Business” (we’re not making this up) to Moammar Gadhafi’s tent problem in Englewood, N.J. (For the record, his Englewood story was a one-day turnaround, but displays Newman’s trademark humor and punchy writing). One more anecdote of Newman’s resourcefulness, taken from a foreword to a Journal anthology of A-heds, “Floating off the Page”: Thirty-one years ago, banging about the Australian Outback, Newman learned that Australian sheep farmers, to keep dingoes (wild dogs) away from their sheep, had put up a barbed-wire fence longer than the Great Wall of China. A distant New York editor didn’t think the story worth more than $200 in expenses. Undaunted, Newman rented exactly $200 of air time from a local farmer with a small plane and got the color he needed from above.

Here are a few of the many tips Barry shared with Tim’s class:

* Test market your story idea with your colleagues. If they don’t like it, neither will readers.

* Build your story around an observable event or action to provide a narrative thread.

* Establish a sense of place, so that readers understand how the story couldn’t happen anywhere else.

* Keep the mystery alive. Don’t try to tell the reader everything in the first few paragraphs.

* Interview more than one person at a time. There’s nothing like dialogue to speed up your story.

* Use short, punchy sentences.

*Organize your notes into themes or categories. Newman indexes his notebook. Whatever works.

* Omit needless words. Be obsessive-compulsive about it. Compress, compress, compress!

* Be willing to kill your children. OK, he didn’t say that but it’s what he meant. Sometimes you’ve got to throw away your best stuff when it gets in the way.

* If you’re passionate about your subject, you can excite readers. If you’re not, you can’t.

* Do the reporting. Without it, you can’t write with confidence and authority.

William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, cared deeply about words and the way we use them. It’s fitting, then, that his obituary today paid homage to his longtime column on language as well as his famously alliterative phrase about the press, “the nattering nabobs of negativism.” The Times’ Robert D. McFadden also showed us how the use of small but specific details add up to a masterful description:

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

The obit also included, for both our edification and amusement, Safire’s “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid cliches like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Safire lived by words.  And he left us words to live by.

Rejoice, it’s National Punctuation Day! The brainchild of a former newspaperman turned newsletter writer, Jeff Rubin, the day is dedicated to the correct use of punctuation. Naturally, newspaper columnists and editors hungry for any idea they can turn around quickly have pounced on punctuation as a worthy cause. Here’s an amusing but pointed reaction from the Washington Post’s John Kelly, who characterized Rubin’s quest as “one man looking for comma ground in a world where most people don’t know their apostrophe from a hole in the ground.”

Punctuation can make a mighty difference in your writing. Here at The Write Stuff, we’ve long maintained that one of the strongest weapons in a writer’s arsenal is the period. Caught in a long, meandering sentence, long separated from its subject and verb, a writer always should ask whether it wouldn’t be better to end the sentence or break it in half. All that’s needed is a period. OK, sometimes a semicolon will work, too, although many people don’t how to use the semicolon (the most prominent use is to separate independent thoughts, both of which could stand alone as independent sentences, e.g. This is a sentence; this could be another.). A couple of Craft professors highlighted some other punctuation issues: The lack of punctuation in quotes (treat them the same as your writing and apply proper punctuation) and the overuse of punctuation, especially the comma, which allows too many writers to keep alive those meandering sentences. Which brings us back to the period.

Finally, to punctuate the day, here’s a quiz for your enjoyment.

Quotes

We like the definition of quotes as “bursts of life.” Good quotes brighten up a story, speed it along and draw the reader in. Marcella Veneziale showed how to use a quote right after the nut graf – always a prime spot for a good “global quote” summing up the story – in her piece for Chelsea Now on the struggling art market:

“For this sector, I would not call this a recession,” said art economist David Kusin, founder of the art market research firm Kusin & Co. “It’s a full-blown, sustained depression.”

—

A Reminder: Doing Things the Write Way

Hemingway said good writers borrow, but great writers steal. Hemingway didn’t have the Internet, which makes borrowing – and stealing – both easier and more dangerous.

It’s tempting to cut and paste stuff from the Web into our digital notes – a quote from an e-mail, a stray statistic, some background from the “About Us” corner of an organization’s web site.

We as journalists must be very careful that these digital clips don’t find their way into our stories. At best, it’s laziness and sloppiness. At worst, it’s plagiarism. Either way, it’s trouble.

—

Diversions

Here’s a fascinating site that lets you scan the U.S. map with your computer mouse – and up pops the front page of that’s day’s paper in that city:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/

That’s it for another fun-filled edition from your cheerful writing coaches. Come see us, or send us your stuff. We’ll try to help you improve it and/or get it published.

How to contact Writing Coaches:

Tim Harper Room 413 (or hanging out in the newsroom)
Tuesday noon – 5 p.m.
Wednesday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Thursday noon – 5 p.m.
Or by appointment: tim.harper@journalism.cuny.edu

Heath Meriwether heath.meriwether@journalism.cuny.edu

The death of one of our great writers, John Updike, sent me on a search for memories. Although best known for his novels and short stories, Updike was an extraordinary observer of real life, whether it was the glories of a pencil or the last at-bat of baseball legend Ted Williams. Here’s a memorable piece from Oct. 22, 1960 that had me on my feet cheering from the first sentence to the last:

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on–always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us, and applauded. I had never before heard pure applause in a ballpark. No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the Kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-two summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass, the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs–hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.

Although his writing often seemed effortless, Updike worked hard at his craft. Here’s an excerpt from an interview in which Updike, even though he’s discussing his short fiction, teaches an important lesson to those of us trying to write good stories:

With any short story you try to write first sentences that will in some way pique the readers’ interest, and then a lot of middle, and then you try to write a last sentence that will in some way close the case, close the issue, resolve it all, and leave him or her with a satisfied feeling of having seen a complete picture.

Take another look at the passage about Williams’ last at-bat. See how Updike applies his formula — a stage-setting first sentence, a middle that builds on it, and an ending that leaves readers satisfied. Then try to use his advice in your own work. You’ll be glad you did.

For more of Updike’s advice to writers, check out this excellent summary.

The occasional newsletter from the Writing Coaches at the
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Tim Harper        Room 413 (or hanging out in the newsroom)
Tuesday         noon – 5 p.m.
Wednesday         10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Thursday         noon – 5 p.m.
Or by appointment:  tim.harper@journalism.cuny.edu

Contact Heath Meriwether anytime at heath.meriwether@journalism.cuny.edu

—

“The language we use matters.” — President Barack Obama, Jan. 26, in interview with Al Arabiya network.

While President Obama was referring to the words used to describe the situation in the Mideast, he provided a refreshing reminder about the power of language in what we do.

Joshua Cinelli, in his commencement speech for the Class of ’08, conveyed what life was like for his classmates. His words bear repeating:

“We wrote beat memos, went to community board meetings.
“We went on cop ride-alongs, we studied Near vs. Minnesota and freedom of information laws in legal and ethics, we learned the research methods of the 21st century from a document frame of mind.
“We learned boots-on-the-ground journalism.
“As one professor is fond of saying, journalism today is more than twittering in your underwear.”

Joshua’s words underscore what is said every day in classrooms and the newsroom around here. The new technologies for telling a story, like Twitter, are useful but it is the “boots-on-the-ground” reporting that will define us as journalists.  Joshua capped his speech with an homage to Studs Terkel, who spent a reporting lifetime listening to the stories of ordinary people:

“The lesson Studs Terkel can teach us is one of the most important we can ever learn and I hope you take it with you.
“To listen. Let me say that again in case you missed it. To listen.
“Asking the questions is only half of our job. The other important part is to listen carefully and with great skepticism. And not just to the politicians and the power brokers, but to everyone who has a story to tell.”

SHOUT OUTS

As Jere Hester already has noted, there’s been no shortage of good work between semesters.  We particularly liked how Rachel Geizhals provided not just a news lede but some historical context for the Bushwick neighborhood that gave her Brooklyn Eagle story far more meaning:

BUSHWICK — The FDNY’s plan to cancel night shifts at several firehouses — including one in Bushwick, which was ravaged by arson in the 1970s — is reawakening bleak memories and igniting new fears for some New Yorkers.
Bushwick’s Himrod Street firehouse will be one of four to lose a night shift come mid-January as the FDNY reduces expenses to meet budget cuts. Company 124, the search-and-rescue unit at Himrod Street, will still serve round the clock, but Engine Company 271, the fire-dousing unit, will only operate from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“Fire service is like insurance,” said Rodrick Wallace, an epidemiologist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute who has studied Bushwick’s fire history. “To save money, are you going to cancel your health insurance over the weekend?”

BTW, what a strong storytelling quote!

Hats off, too, to Collin Orcutt, who has started a web site, Box Score Beat (http://boxscorebeat.com/), that reports on the people reporting on sports.  Without getting on a soapbox, Collin makes a compelling case for why beat writers make such a difference.  Because they’re there every day, learning about the people they report on, they can uncover such delightful insights as Jack Quick of The Oregonian recently revealed to his readers:

Remember the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” where Andy Dufresne wrote a letter every week to the state to get books for the prison library? Well, the same concept is under way with the grandmother of Blazers center Joel Przybilla. The octogenarian plans to write NBA commissioner David Stern a series of letters complaining about the $7,500 fine Przybilla received for his part in an altercation with New Orleans center Tyson Chandler on Friday. Chandler was ejected and suspended a game for throwing a punch. Przybilla said he was stunned at the fine, but was handling it better than his grandmother.
“She said she is going to keep writing Stern until she hears back from him,” Przybilla said, smiling. “And believe me, she will.”

Speaking of sports, Tim Persinko scored a knockout with his Canarsie Courier feature on boxer Dmitry Salita, a practicing Orthodox Jew who cannot work or travel on Saturdays.  We particularly enjoyed the observation from Salita’s long-time trainer, Jimmy O’Pharrow:

At sundown on the Saturday of his Garden bout, Salita hurried from his home in Midwood, to make it to the Garden in time for his 9 p.m. match. Before entering the ring, Salita had a rabbi say a prayer in the dressing room. After that, O’Pharrow said his own prayer in the dressing room.
“It wasn’t the same thing but I guess it was the same thing,” said O’Pharrow. “Go out there and kick some butt, period. I didn’t say it like that when I said it to the man upstairs, but that’s what it basically meant.”

With that as our inspiration, let’s continue to kick some journalism butt during the rest of the semester.

Cheers,
Heath & Tim

Gene Roberts’ first editor was blind but it didn’t deter him from teaching the young reporter out of the University of North Carolina one of the most valuable lessons of his long, storied career.

“Make me see,” the editor of the Goldsboro (N.C.) News-Argus would demand after he’d heard Roberts’ daily farm column read to him. It’s a lesson Roberts never forgot as he went on to cover the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War for the New York Times and, as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, lead his newspaper to 17 Pulitzer Prizes in his 18 years there.

The journalism icon, now 76, who teaches writing and the history of the press in the civil rights movement at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism, spoke at CUNY last Thursday to students in Prof. Michael Arena’s investigative journalism class and, yes, a few awestruck professors.

Here are Roberts’ Rules of reporting and writing, some suggested reading and one plan for how to get a job:

•    Make Me See. Whether it’s a sweet potato that looks like Gen. Charles DeGaulle or the scene of a brutal civil rights confrontation, write visually so your readers feel like they’re there..
•    Make your writing conversational. His News-Argus managing editor had Roberts read both the print and radio versions of the AP Wire.  The radio wire was far easier to read, which taught Roberts another valuable lesson.
•    Make sure you understand what your story is about. Write a simple description of why your story matters.  We call it the nut graf.
•    Get the height of the smokestack. Roberts told a story about legendary editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who sent a reporter back to the streets when he couldn’t tell him the height of a factory smokestack.  The moral of the story:  Details matter. Specific details matter even more.
•    Read good writing and ask why it works, and apply those lessons. Roberts recommends the annual “America’s Best Newspaper Writing,” an annual compilation by Poynter of the reporting and writing winners of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) awards; he also suggested “Writing for Story,” by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin, who annotates his book with his writing strategies.
•    Learn your craft. Learn  how to report and write. Don’t get hung up on whether you’ve mastered the latest technology of delivering news; it’ll probably change by the time you graduate.
•    Do it all. Luckily, that’s part of the curriculum here.  In his early years, Roberts covered everything at small dailies — cops, courts, government, politics, breaking news.  He also bounced from being a reporter to an editor and back, which made him even better.  Here at CUNY, you work online, broadcast and print.
•    Work for a small daily or broadcast outlet where you have to learn to do it all (See above).
•    How to get a job, according to Roberts.  Go to a small newspaper, show up at 8 a.m. and stick around all day to talk to the editors who can hire you.  That’ll show the initiative and aggressiveness editors want to see (and it’ll save time-starved editors from having to respond to a letter or email).

If, threatened with waterboarding, I were forced to choose the biggest writing problem I see, it would be the nut graf. It’s talked about a lot in Craft classes but I still find myself questioning students about why their stories don’t explain to readers why they should care.

What makes a good nut graf? I use the words sweep, context and road map. I want to know how the story will help explain the importance of an event, incident, or personality (the “sweep”). I want to know how the story fits into the history and culture of our times (the “context”). Finally, in a rich nut graf, I want to discover the themes, the landscape of the story, the “road map” that tells me where the story is going and whether I want to take that journey.

Said even more simply, a good nut graf tells readers what’s in it for them, what they’ll learn, and why they ought to take the time to read your story.

Read almost any consequential story in the Times, WSJ, or Daily News, and you’ll see good nut grafs. The same goes for broadcast scripts. In profiles of people, such as the live-ins that Craft I students are now working on, Prof. Svoboda calls the nut graf the “Joe is not alone” graf. What is it about ‘Joe’ that reflects a larger theme, a recurring pattern, an emerging trend? That’s a useful way of thinking about it.

The nut graf – btw, it’s not always just one graf, but one cohesive idea — is so important that I often recommend that reporters write it first, or at least make notes for the themes and details to include. That can start as you take notes, and can continue as you come back to the newsroom to file your stories. It’s important to think about what you’re about to write. Put yourself in the minds of the reader and ask why they should care. Force yourself to take the helicopter view, to see the story in all its dimensions, and then provide that perspective to the reader.

The nut graf also benefits the writer. By organizing the thinking about what makes the story important, the nut graf will give the writer a structure and organization that will allow the story to flow naturally from one theme to another. It also will allow the writer to more easily choose the best story-telling quotes and details to advance the arc of the story.

Rima Abdelkader’s recent story on how foreign media handle American colloquialisms – a story that helped push page views at NY City News Service to record levels – did a nice job of explaining why a reader should care:

Joe Sixpack. Hockey Mom. Maverick.
Even for those passionately following the presidential election, the definition of these campaign buzzwords can change with the voter, pundit or reporter who interprets them.
Imagine, then, how foreign language journalists must struggle to put the terms into context for their audiences when such words often have no direct translation.
That problem faced Al Jazeera reporter Abderrahim Foukara when he wrestled with how to describe “maverick.” The world’s most watched Arab network finally decided to define the American colloquialism as “a bird that sings outside the flock.”
For Al Jazeera, and foreign-language media throughout the world, the issue of how to translate the language of American politics is more than just a matter of journalistic accuracy. Their decisions reflect their own diverse histories and cultures, as well as their ethical guidelines about bias in translation.

The last three paragraphs provide a cohesive summary of why the reader should care: the sense of the story, a specific and interesting example and the sweep and context of the issue. It caught the attention of readers as diverse as the editors of the Huffington Post to an individual American blogger in Guatemala.

Last point: Whenever you read stories in print, scripts, online or blogs, find the “nut graf” and ask yourself whether it succeeded, and why. Take away those lessons and apply them to your own stories.

Writing Tips
Use storytelling quotes, not quotes that simply convey information better paraphrased by the writer. Craft professors, appropriately, urge students to make sure to put quotes high in their stories. But student reporters often overcompensate with too many boring or rambling quotes rather than a few sterling, storytelling ones.
My advice is to establish a very high standard for any quote. It must help you tell the story, reveal a personality or express outrage or joy. With many quotes, you can capture the essence and write it far stronger yourself.

Karina Ioffee used strong storytelling quotes in her story about Colombian parents who attended the sentencing of the man who had killed their son seven years ago:

Residents of Bogota, Colombia, Leonor and Armando Garzon got on the first flight to New York after hearing about the attack. Both parents sat with their son — one of three children — as he lay in a coma for weeks.
“I caressed him and talked into his ear, in case he might hear me,” Leonor Garzon said. “But he never woke up.”
“Our lives the past seven years have consisted of knocking on doors seeking help to bring to light this merciless and cruel crime that you committed,” Leonor Garzon said at the sentencing, speaking directly to McGhee. “You’ve deprived us of living a full life in our old age and of family unity….we can never be together again.”

Shout Outs

Everyone contributed mightily to our lights-out election coverage, which makes it hard to single out any one person. But Jere Hester deserves a loud shout out for the planning and leadership he provided for the entire effort.

I’m always looking for a felicitous phrase that shows writing chops. Here’s how Carla Murphy summarized what happens at a storefront church headed by the Rev. Terry Lee:

All rely on Lee’s storefront church, in which the Holy Spirit is invited to enter, wipe its feet, disrobe, chat, eat, drink, dance, jump and relax, for up to six hours at a time.

That satisfied my craving for active verbs, and whetted my appetite for more.

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.