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.

There’s a tradition among journalists of “collecting string,” facts and impressions gathered in daily reporting that can become the stuff of a far larger story with wider sweep and a richer texture. Here’s how Jere Hester describes the practice: “Fill your notebooks – and your minds – with impressions, details. Take the time to ask those just-curious questions that seemingly don’t have anything to do with the deadline piece you’re working on. The stuff you don’t think is important now will make sense later as the story grows.” “Collecting string” is one of the most useful habits any reporter can develop.

Laura Silver’s extraordinary essay in the City Section of the April 20 New York Times, “The Fire, and the Mystery”, reminded me of this. Laura had been collecting string – both factually and emotionally – for more than a decade about a chance conversation she had with her aunt and grandmother 12 years ago:

It was the spring of 1996. The three of us had spent a pleasant afternoon on the Brighton Beach Boardwalk at the famed Russian restaurant Tatiana: my grandmother, she was alive then; my Aunt Deena, we were on tentative speaking terms that year before her death; and I, the only granddaughter.

We drank hot coffee with vanilla ice cream in clear glass mugs. I was 25, Deena 51 and Gramma somewhere past 90. But then Deena blurted out something that stopped me midswallow. “You had another aunt, you know, who lived right around here,” she said. I took notes on a napkin: 1950s. Fire. Mermaid Avenue. Dead.

The image of the napkin says so much about the power of reporting. So, too, does the writing. The period can be the most effective weapon in a writer’s arsenal. It forces the reader to stop and think. In Laura’s essay, I found myself unable to get those five words out of my mind — 1950s. Fire. Mermaid Avenue. Dead. They created the framework for an essay about a mystery and a quest for a deeper understanding of a family and a life.

Before I turn this over to Laura, there’s one other writerly aspect of the essay I’d like you to consider. It’s Voice — the affect, or tone, of the writer. I’m often uncomfortable with writers who insist they’re trying to find their voice, which sometimes can result in overly self-conscious, even self-involved, writing. And I think it’s a big danger for people starting out in the business. My advice is to let the reporting do the work. Again, through the image of scribbling on a napkin, Laura established the personality of a reporter who would visit graves in a cemetery, sift through decades-old records, all to find out more about this mystery. That allowed her distance even as she explored the intricate emotional landscape of her family history without making a reader feel uncomfortable or intrusive. That voice had a lot to do with the authenticity and power of the essay.

Here’s what Laura had to say about the reporting and writing process, which began a few years after the initial conversation, and went through about 30 drafts before she sent it to the Times:

I’m not sure if I have that original napkin, but the idea stuck with me so strongly that I didn’t give up on it for 10 years…I wrote this piece in fits and starts, gathering steam, then losing it, then taking a break for additional research. It started as a more reported piece, with a visit to the site and interviews with local residents and shopkeepers. But that wasn’t the most compelling part of the story, for me or for readers. The more I worked on it, the less I thought about the site of the Mittlemans’ house and the more I pushed myself to explore the hard, personal parts of the story.

Whew. It was worth all those hundreds of hours. Seeing the photo of my long lost relatives in the paper was a moving experience and a real gift, as if, finally, they were receiving an honor that had not been bestowed upon them in their lifetimes.

Shout Out

In another example of Voice, Damian Ghigliotty and Matt Townsend spent a night with the smokers at “smoke-free” Shea Stadium. The story had a lot of attitude, but more the smokers’ than the writers (although one of the writers did get thrown out even when he wasn’t smoking). The story adopted a conversational voice with the reader, as you’ll see in this kicker that ended with a zinger:

How far we’ve come from the days when pitcher Johnny Podres used to light one up between innings on the way to winning the World Series for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955.

So what will the rest of the season be like for smokers at Shea? Head for the top of the upper deck? Employ a lookout for security guards? Or come up with another strategy?

“This is my first game of the season,” Mr. Rhoades said. “But I guess I’ll have to now.”

Of course there is one other option, but it was not discussed that day.

Writing Tips

It’s difficult to explain how to write with voice. It’s easy to sense the writer’s voice when you read William Faulkner, Mark Twain or Tom Wolfe. But it’s not as easy with a journalist, when some of the conventions of the craft can seem to smother a writer’s personality. Often, the problem comes when you use journalese rather than simple, direct language. Another error is when you use the insider jargon of courts or cops or whomever you’re covering. Keep reminding yourself how you’d tell the story to your best friend. But perhaps the most common mistake young reporters make is trying too hard and coming off as forced or, even worse, false or pompous. I like the writing coach Jack Hart’s advice:

The best strategy for developing an authoritative voice is simply to be yourself…You create an individual style once you start to feel like yourself when you write. The words must become as comfortable as your skin. If you’re relaxed at the keyboard, your audience will feel a personal connection as they read.

E.B. White kept his advice simple. “The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity,’’ he said. Keep yourself in the background, at a remove, so that the personality comes through in the reporting, not in your calling attention to yourself or the writing.

When the news flashed across my screen Monday, I did a fist pump when I saw the name Gene Weingarten as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Gene is the resident humorist and writer extraordinaire at The Washington Post and a former colleague of mine at The Miami Herald, editor of the magazine when the paper had one.

I rushed to the blogosphere to see what people were saying about Gene’s piece, a tour de force in which he observed what happened when he got famed violinist Joshua Bell to play, anonymously, at rush hour at a crowded Washington, D.C., Metro station.

What I found was The Post’s Joel Achenbach, a Weingarten disciple and a former Herald colleague, talking about how Gene and his Post colleagues won six Pultizers last Monday. It’s worth repeating:

The Post has just won six Pulitzer Prizes, which looks like a typo. It was a newsroom-wide triumph — Metro, National, Investigative, Foreign, Financial, Magazine. Within that Variety Pack of journalism, there’s a common ingredient — something we too seldom discuss when we cogitate about how to reinvent the business model: Reporting.

Original reporting still matters. It’s probably our best gimmick. It’s what we do (imperfectly to be sure) better than anyone else in the news business. It also can’t be easily replaced on the cheap by some other information-delivery system.

Achenbach then explained what made Gene’s story such an exquisite piece of writing:

The story is immaculate. There’s not a loose word in the whole thing. You could pick that story up, turn it upside down, and shake it and nothing would drop out. Maybe there’s something in there I missed – but it sure looks like everything’s bolted down.

Moreover, nothing gets into the Post magazine without going through a fine filter of editing, revision, copy-editing, fact-checking, and proof-reading. . . A lot of that labor is unglorious [inglorious? Paging the copy editor!]. So I’d put, as a newspaper virtue right up there with Original Reporting, what you might simply call Sweating the Small Stuff. Which also isn’t cheap, or easily automated.

We’ve talked a lot about these themes in The Write Stuff. I know you’ve heard the same exhortations from your Craft professors, and others. It’s not that we’re ignoring the challenges to the media business these days. Far from it. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on learning how to be comfortable in all the platforms — print, online, blogs and broadcast. Yet, if you learn nothing else at CUNY but how to report and write accurately and effectively, and sweat the small stuff, you’ll be armed with the skills and the mindset that can’t be duplicated by any distribution system or marketing scheme. There’ll always be a place for a good reporter.

Shout Outs

In that spirit, we salute examples of good reporting that led to strong writing. Kate Lurie literally got the name of the dog in her delightful piece in Chelsea Now on how pet-pampering seems recession-proof:

As she tried to usher a large, freshly coiffed dog named Humphrey into a kennel, Elle Wong, a bubbly co-owner of Towne House Grooming, asked brightly, “So, is it official? Are we in a recession?”

Similarly, we liked the details Linnea Covington got in her story about up-and-coming songstress Shara Worden. In a quick paragraph, a reader learned a lot about what shaped Worden’s musical life:

Worden’s love of the music scene isn’t surprising as she grew up surrounded by musicians, listening to Top 40 on her radio, and indulging in the Michael Jackson and Joan Jett records her father, a national accordion champion, would bring home from the library. Musically inspired since the age of 3, when she composed her first song using the sounds from a toy cash register, Worden was performing in community musical productions by the age of 8 as well as studying the piano.

Heather Appel captured the scene at a Passaic coffee shop with the kinds of observation that put you inside the scene:

It’s 8:30 on a Thursday morning, and Joe Nazimek and John Mancuso are sitting at Marina Stationers, coffee cups in hand, chuckling over a handwritten sign that reads “Trespassers will be Shot. Survivors will be shot again.”

Writing Tips

Last week we shared with you four key questions that award-winning writer David Von Drehle uses to help himself craft a nut graf. To refresh you, they are:

1. Why does it matter?
2. What’s the point?
3. Why is this story being told?
4. What does it say about life, about the world, about our times?


Fittingly, we asked Gene Weingarten this week what advice he gives budding feature writers:

Every feature story, no matter how small or limited the subject matter may seem to be, should really be about The Meaning of Life. That is my signature line, and I believe it.

While that may sound daunting, it’s Gene’s way of saying that you’ve got to ask yourself what you want readers to take away from your story. When you can answer that question, you’re on your way to a good nut graf and a more compelling read.

Details matter in writing. One of the first, best suggestions is to over-report what you see, hear, smell and touch. When you go to a scene, walk into a room, visit a store, meet an interview subject, write down all the detail you can – not because you’re going to use it all, but because such reporting will produce the telling detail that will pull the reader inside the picture you’re drawing.

Perhaps because your Write Stuff correspondent has driven southern highways and byways for 56 days and 8500 miles, I was struck by the detail in Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the tale of a family road trip that does not end well. The family’s grandmother is a bug for detail:

…they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890…she pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone to sleep.

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Shout Outs

Some of the South’s best writers remind me of the best beat reporters. In travels to their literary haunts, I’ve been deeply struck by how William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris and Flannery O’Connor brought to life the character, and characters, of their native South. These authors so saturated themselves in their surroundings, it pours out in their writing. It’s a good lesson to remember. The more reporters immerse themselves in their neighborhood, the more they can evoke a sense of place in their writing.

O’Connor spent much of her adult life – she died at 39 – in and around her farm home near Milledgeville, Ga. Consider the detail and imagery she packs into this description in her story, “You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead”:

The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left beyond the fence line and had run it almost up to the house on the one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.

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Shout Outs

The greatest gift for a writer, author Tom Wolfe says, is reporting. The reporter gets to use all of the senses to give the reader the sights, sounds and smells of a scene. When writing leaves you feeling as if you were there, that’s good writing.

Listen as Danny Massey, who covered a memorial for the former slaves and freed blacks who were buried and forgotten in the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, captures the call and response of a church audience:

“Forgive us, please,’’ shouted the senior minister emeritus of The Riverside Church in Manhattan. “Forgive us for disregarding your precious gifts to this world, for the desecration of your hallowed ground where you laid your loved ones to rest. And forgive us for almost forgetting you. Say again, ‘Forgive us, please.’ ’’ The hundreds who gathered in Lower Manhattan called back, “Forgive us, please.’’

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Shout Outs

It all starts with the reporting. After a summer of internships, we’ve got some real-world proof of that maxim.

Tim Catts’s reporting for BusinessWeek.com literally helped an Ohio waitress win $1 million. Presented on his second day on the job with nothing more than a tip that a CNBC stock-picking contest might be rigged, Tim spent half his summer investigating every angle on the story. He showed how the contest could be manipulated, showed how the top four finishers probably gamed the system, how another had a long record of stock manipulation complaints. His reporting prompted CNBC to investigate its own contest and disqualify the top four finishers. That led Tim to Ohio and the “fifth-place’’ finisher, a waitress who had never owned a stock in her life (This story appeared three weeks before the winner was announced, showing just how fully Tim owned this story):

It’s Friday afternoon in the tiny Appalachia town of St. Clairsville, Ohio, and Mary Sue Williams is about to begin her shift as a waitress at Undo’s, a spacious Italian restaurant that overlooks Interstate 70. She enjoys taking care of her regulars, she says, and after nine years in her job, she has accumulated plenty of them. Even with dozens of the restaurant’s tables empty, she cuts quickly across the floor to the bar to refill an empty water glass. “I’m going to do this until I can’t walk,” Williams says, insisting that she wouldn’t quit for a million dollars.
That conviction may soon be put to the test.

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