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.

The lead’s the thing. Editing sessions with new students last week suggested many of you struggle to come up with leads that hook readers.  A common flaw:  Too much information crammed into the first paragraph.  When you stuff most of your notebook into that first graf, you drown your readers, and yourselves. Consider some leads Jere Hester highlighted for us from this summer’s internships. You’ll see how a writer can use imagery (Lindsay Lazarski on, arrgh, the smells and sights of rat infestation),  contrasts (Damiano Beltrami, on a Spanish speaker at an Arabic-speaking university) and contradictions (Carla Murphy, on how African-American jazz greats were treated at home and abroad) to entice readers to stay with your story.  Some, like Joe Walker, even violate the usual strictures against quote leads.  The true test is what works.

How do you know when something works?  Bounce your leads off professors, editors, colleagues.  Talk about what works, and what doesn’t.  Analyze good leads in newspapers and magazines.  Think about some ideas we shared last year.  From that list, my favorite advice is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Don’t worry, you’ll get lots of practice trying to write the best possible lead.

Most of you are about halfway finished at the J-School – the midpoint of the middle semester – and you’re realizing what it takes to be a professional, to get the OK to do the stories you want to do, to get someone to publish them and even sometimes pay you for them. You’re realizing how important a good pitch can be.

As coaches, we get a fair number of requests for help with pitching, and we’d like to get more. The goal is to get more work published, and to get paid for it whenever possible. Don’t think that pitching is for freelancers only; even if you work in a large news organization you’re constantly pitching to be able to get the assignments you want.

Preparing a good pitch not only helps us get assignments and clips, but also makes us more productive. When you know you can get a good story, you work more efficiently. Yes, it takes more time to do a good pitch, but it’s worth it.

We’re going to start assembling a file of good pitches and queries for you to peruse, and we have books that offer prescriptions for good queries. Get in touch if you have a story you want to talk about pitching. Something you’re working on? Something from first semester? Something that can be expanded? Something you’d like to do in the future? We’ll help.

For now, here’s Tim’s pitch checklist. If you can answer the questions below before you pitch a story verbally or send out a written query, you’re going to increase your chances of getting the assignment, the clip and the paycheck.

Tim Harper’s Pitch Checklist

Main questions:
- Is this a story?
- Or is it just an idea/topic?
- How can I make it into a story?
- Is my premise true?
- Am I sure I can get the story?
- Do I have the critical source or facts or statistics? Or am I going to be embarrassed if I can’t do the story because some key sources don’t call me back?

More questions:
– Can I sum up the story in one sentence?
- The focus of this story is… The heart of the story is…
- Do I have a prospective nut graf or cosmic section? Maybe it will get better, but it would be helpful to be able to write out a possible nut graf/cosmic section.
- Would the prospective lede and/or nut graf of the story make a good pitch? (Most editors say yes.)
- Can I back up or support or expand on the elements of the story identified in the nut graf?
- How much work have I done on the story already? What research/interviews have I done? What statistics/facts do I have?
- Who or what are my sources? Who will be the people in this story? Are they only talking heads? Or will they be real people doing real things, people with a stake in what happens or doesn’t happen?
- Will those people talk to me? In the time and the depth I need for the story?
- How will I report this story? Sit-down interviews? Phoners? Statistics/reports? Historic background? Live-in? Fly on the wall? Attend an event or go along on a task?
- How am I going to structure this story? Anecdotes? Are there opportunities for narrative?

And maybe the most important questions:
– Where is this story going to run? Where will I pitch it?
- Why is it suitable for this market? What stories has this market run that make me think the editors will like my story? Has this market run stories so similar to my mine that the editors won’t be interested?
- Where else has this story been published? How are the previous stories different and/or not as good as mine? Is mine fresher, with new information, a different angle, more personalized, a narrative?

Shout Outs

We’re all awash in story after story about seized-up credit markets, subprime mortgages, securitizations and enough acronyms (TARP, TARF) to drown in. The result is a lot of repetitive, headache-inducing information without much understanding or context. That’s where CUNY reporters, with boots squarely on the ground in New York City, help tell the human stories unfolding in this recession.

Karina Ioffee and Damiano Beltrami provided excellent examples of street-level stories that provided sure indicators of what’s happening in our economy. Karina reported in the Daily News on strong citywide sales of private safes for the past six months. Damiano, in The Hunts Point Express, followed the plight of John Hyun who may have to close his small market in the Bronx after 10 years of operation. We liked Damiano’s nut graf that summarized the challenge facing people like Hyun:

The economic crisis that has affected New York and the nation in recent months has hit small business like Hyun’s hard. With rising rent, electric and heating bills, owners have faced an up-hill battle. The Big Brother Market is a portrait in miniature of these large-scale troubles, one of many Bronx businesses battered by forces beyond its control.

Damiano was well ahead of the competition, which is the way we like it at CUNY.