Six takeaways from Chris Jones’s talk at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Just be there, at the right place, right time. When someone important says, “I dunno, why not that guy.”
When you’re reporting, call up your editor when something really good happens. Give them little nuggets, show them you’re excited.
If you’re trying to write something really good, if you’re swinging, you’re going to over swing sometimes. That’s natural. A good editor will reel it in.
Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run at 24, but don’t worry. You got time. But don’t talk about, do it. Go out and do it.
Reporting is the backbone; any great story has a backbone of reporting. Writing is difficult, the more I report the easier the writing is. Reporting isn’t a skill the way writing is viewed as a talent. Reporting is labour, reporting is just time, making phone calls. Work hard at it.
Shut up an listen, you’re serving the people you’re reporting on, and you’re serving your story when you do.
It’s interesting, to me, to not specialize.
I may not know a lot about derivatives, but that doesn’t mean I can’t profile a hedge fund manager.
I went to Korea to write a story about cloning.
I’m not a geneticist, but if you’re a good enough journalist and you know how to ask questions to people who do know what they’re talking about, it’s only your job to understand it well enough to interpret what they’re saying and figure out, one, if it’s bullshit, and two, a way that you can translate it to the people who are reading [the story].
1. Jordan Conn on the killing of a high school student, for Grantland. Conn spends time in North Richmond and reports on how the killing of a high school basketball player, for no known reason, impacted those who knew him.
“Wake up!” Espanosa yelled. Other boys — younger boys, ages 10 to 13 — ran to them and yelled at Rodney too. Rodney kept shaking. He seemed cold, but the night was warm. They hit him. They kicked him. They’d seen people shot but had never seen people die. Screaming and hitting was the only way they thought they could keep Rodney from fading away.
Finally, the younger boys decided they’d seen too much. They turned and ran away. But Espanosa stayed there, cradling his friend’s head, begging him to stop shaking, to focus his eyes and breathe, to live.
And this ending:
For now, on November 7, Rodney was just riding toward his house, turning down Market. A black car pulled up, the window rolled down, and a gun stuck out. He kept riding, then turned into his driveway. It was a few minutes before curfew. Rodney was home.
2. David Zucchino covers the funeral of the three young Muslim students slain in Chapel Hill.
Now, on a bitterly cold winter day, Muslim men bowed and prayed as an imam chanted janazah, or funeral prayers. The mourners' taqiyah, or skullcaps, brushed the worn grass of a soccer field at N.C. State in silent tribute. Non-Muslim mourners stood with bowed heads.
The only sounds were the sudden stab of a baby's cry and a northern wind that rustled through the tall pines cloaking the field.
3. Ta-Nehisi Coates on David Carr.
Carr was a master at activating the journalistic imagination. He was constantly imploring his writers—many of us under 25—to do something different, to tell stories differently, to break the form. He would have stories from Esquire or The New Yorker photocopied. He would distribute these photocopies to his writers, like the blueprints of imperial-army weaponry, and charge us, his rag-tag militia, with the task of reverse engineering. Then he would assemble us around a long table in the conference room, and quiz us on what, precisely, we’d gleaned from the future-tech of our enemies, and what of it we might use to turn the tide in the great war.
And:
David made us feel like the writers at the big publications—at GQ, at The Atlantic Monthly, at Esquire—were no better than us. He pushed to go harder, to try match their pace, and he did this by activating fear and shame.
4. Ben Montgomery with a little slice of life: 300 words on sunflowers that blossomed in a field and the people who stopped to take them in.
The sunflowers that strawberry farmer Eddie Jones spread on seven ordinary acres winked open a few days ago -- hundreds, then thousands, of them -- and began to pull from the stream of life a bunch of people who paused to take in something temporary and quite beautiful.
5. Colleague Christopher Curtis on Canadiens forward Dale Weise, his path to Montreal, and what it meant for him and his family.
A car service took him to the Crystal Hotel on Peel St. It was dark now, about 11 p.m., and he sat in his room, looking across the cold, vacant lot on René-Lévesque Blvd. and onto the Bell Centre lights.
“It was one of those ‘pinch me’ moments, I was so excited,” Weise said. “I sat down and thought, ‘Man is this really happening?’”
Finally, Weise spoke to his father, Miles — an affable warehouse manager who says he nearly cried tears of joy when he learned his son would play for the Canadiens.
“I remember he said, ‘You’ll be wearing the same jersey as Guy Lafleur,’ ” Weise said. “It was a ‘pinch me’ moment for him, too.”
An interesting tidbit sandwiched in the middle of David Granger's Note from the Editor in the latest Esquire. I like that it was included. Nice to see a little fire.
Popular Mechanics was nominated for General Excellence in the 1-to-2 million circulation category, and twice in the Personal Service category.
Before discussing his career as one of the three greatest coaches in the history of college basketball, we must deal with one aspect of Smith’s life that trumps all the championships, all the wins, all the losses, and all the great players who came his way. The fact is that, when this country was finally forced through blood and witness to confront the great moral crisis that grew out of its original sin, Smith was a winter soldier of the first rank.
And:
It was a game for poets then, not for the slick salesmen of the modern era. Some of them were beat poets, and some of them wrote epics. I always thought of Smith as one of those all-American craftsmen-poets — Longfellow, maybe, or Edgar Lee Masters. His lines were always perfectly metered. Lord, how his game always rhymed.
2. Brendan I. Koerner on Rodney Mullen's second act in the tech industry, from the latest Wired.
On the cusp of turning 50, he still thinks of himself as a skater and nothing else—finding new ways to manipulate his board, he says, is “the soil of who I am.” And so while he'll always cringe at the notion of anyone watching him fall while practicing his tricks, he won't freak out if you see him tumble off the thought-leader carousel. After all, compared with what he's used to, the landing is sure to be soft.
3. This obituary of crossword creator Bernice Gordon, form the always great Margalit Fox. An interesting lede, and you have to wonder how her editors first reacted to it. Glad to see the Times run with it.
Bernice Gordon, a self-described ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ who over the last six decades contributed some 150 crossword puzzles to The New York Times, died on Thursday at her home in Philadelphia. She was 101.
4. Russ Bengtson on Lebron James at 30.
Then there’s Kobe Bryant, all defiance and rage.
and:
But that transition, if it’s going to come, has to happen soon. Aging isn’t just a matter of minutes, although those are more important than the years. It’s what a player is asked to do in those minutes.
5. Bill Laitner in the Detroit free Press on James Robertson, who walks 21 miles to work every day.
Leaving home in Detroit at 8 a.m., James Robertson doesn't look like an endurance athlete.Pudgy of form, shod in heavy work boots, Robertson trudges almost haltingly as he starts another workday.But as he steps out into the cold, Robertson, 56, is steeled for an Olympic-sized commute. Getting to and from his factory job 23 miles away in Rochester Hills, he'll take a bus partway there and partway home. And he'll also walk an astounding 21 miles.
and:
At the end of his 2-10 p.m. shift as an injection molder at Schain Mold's squeaky-clean factory just south of M-59, and when his coworkers are climbing into their cars, Robertson sets off, on foot — in the dark — for the 23-mile trip to his home off Woodward near Holbrook. None of his coworkers lives anywhere near him, so catching a ride almost never happens.
Something to mull over. Chuck Palahniuk on “thought” verbs:
From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands,Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.
The list should also include: Loves and Hates.
And it should include: Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.
The basic idea is to avoid using shortcuts, to force yourself to fully unpack ideas in detail. Instead of saying “X” desires “Y”, explain why. It’s some classic show don’t tell, but Palahniuk takes it one step further:
Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.
I dig it, though not always obvious or easy to accomplish. One specific example given is how the beginning of a graf could be tweaked. He's commenting on fiction writing, but it could easily be applied to ledes as well.
Instead of writing Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline, Palahniuk says, write Brenda would never make the deadline.
Then explain why she wouldn't, in detail.
For non-fiction, applying this to a story would necessitate more reporting, which is never a bad thing. You'd have to spend enough time with Brenda to know exactly why she wouldn't make that deadline.
One more example from Palahniuk:
No more transitions such as: “Wanda remember how Nelson used to brush her hair.”
Instead: “Back in their sophomore year, Nelson used to brush her hair with smooth, long strokes of his hand.”
It’s more authoritative. Or as he says:
Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.
He uses the example of a lawyer in court, presenting his case and showing everything detail by detail. In the case of a jury, it would be more convincing.
A couple things of note from Wright Thompson writing about his career for the Still No Cheering in the Press Box project.
I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they’re all dispatches from a worldview.
You always want to write what’s really happening. Not sort of what it looks like from the outside.
I completely trust myself. I can make a decision and just do it. And I’m not scared to completely change gears in the middle of reporting, or to follow it down a rabbit hole. I feel I have a pretty good sense of what will and what won’t work.
I had an unbelievably great editor [at the Kansas City Star] in Mike Fannin. He really deserves the lion’s share of the credit. One of his great catchphrases was ‘Be literary, but hurry.’
Nobody gets hired to do (longform journalism) as their first job and no one is ready to do it. You’ve got to write a lot of 1,200 word stories before you can write a 3,000 word story. You need to write a lot of 3,000 word stories before you can write 5,000. The difference and degree of difficulty and complexity of a 6,000 word story versus an 8,000 word story is staggering. It’s like a whole other thing. It’s exponential.
I think you’ve got to read a lot and write a lot and make a lot of mistakes.
I’m outlining on the road during stories. I’m outlining constantly. Trying to figure what is the story, what is the story. That’s what I’m asking myself over, over and over again on the road. What’s the story? What’s the conflict? What’s the resolution? What’s the arc? What’s the narrative arc?
And you’ve got to know you’re ending when you see it. It should almost always be an action that speaks to the metaphoric heart of the story. You start to figure it out.
1. John H. Richardson on Michael Brown Sr. and the Agony of the Black Father in America. The access in here is impressive—at the family's thanksgiving dinner, later at a baptism—and the writing is just as good, including these two descriptions.
Brown is an internal person, the kind of man who takes things in and contains them until they can be tolerated.
And:
"And you could just see all of the blood. Every time you looked at the sheet, it was more and more blood."
Brown looks up. "That was the most hardest thing I ever been through in life," he says in a voice that still seems stunned, so soft and distant it could be coming from inside a safe at the bottom of a river.
Soon, the absence was forgotten, and the grass grew and then withered over the ground where Viola lay, a blank space between the graves for a 77-year-old woman and a child who died on the same day she was born.
And:
The stone includes Viola's full name, "Viola A. Vanclief," and dates that are painful to read: April 2, 2007, to March 4, 2010. Nierenberg and county workers agreed on an inscription: "Beloved Child."
3. Esmeralda Bermudez on the tragic end of an old friendship. Beautiful ending:
The morning after the accident, Jaramillo put on his black sneakers and set out in the darkness.
When he reached the intersection where their morning ritual had begun, he paused at the candle memorial honoring Noriega.
Then, he headed up Lorena Street, alone.
4. Jimmy Breslin At Churchill’s Deathbed: ’E Was There When ’E Was Needed:
His voice once directed the affairs of continents and his words will move men forever, and he is of history. But only his family and doctors came to him yesterday. At ninety, Sir Winston Churchill is being allowed to die in the understatement and privacy by which his people live.
And:
He lies dying in bed, with the brandy going to waste on a shelf and his mouth unable to hold a cigar and the blood spilling inside his head. And now, for the ages to come, everybody is going to be explaining his life.
5. Mark Leibovich on Tom Brady:
As Brady’s news conference wound down, he seemed to regain his footing through a familiar theme: adversity. The Patriots would rally around one another. Brady had previously said to me that he tends to view most things in his life through the prism of people who doubt him — his abilities, his age, even the legitimacy of his biggest achievements. And now, his integrity.
At some point it seemed to dawn on him that there was an overcrowded room full of doubt right in front of him. A whole country. And this seemed, in this moment, to settle him. Maybe by the time everything played out, that would make the story even sweeter.
Five things I underlined in the second part of Telling True Stories.
Mark Kramer: The best idea will become a lousy story without access to people living their lives. This access takes charm, guts and aplomb.
Anne Hull: Think like a photographer. Watch. Change location. At a family dinner, change your place around the dining table. Keep moving, keep shifting your point of view, and keep quiet. Try not to interrupt the flow of events.
And: One woman's hand trembled because she was so exhausted. It's one thing for someone to tell you that her hands were shaking. It's another to watch someone's hands shaking. The best thing is to feel your own hands shake while watching her hands do the same.
Adrian Nicole Leblanc: I have learned over the years that I must draft scenes immediately. I do it right after reporting—ideally, as I'm typing my notes. I never used to that, which may be the reason that Random Family took nearly a decade to report and write.
Alex Blumberg on interviewing and being a better listener, from the latest Longform Podcast.
"If somebody starts talking about something difficult, what will happen is, if somebody unexpectedly gets emotional, you're like 'woah what's going on here.'
And your normal human reaction is to comfort and steer away, comfort and be like 'I'm sorry let's move on.'
What you need to do, if you want good tape, is to say 'talk more about how you're feeling right now.'
And it feels like a horrible question to ask, it feels like I'm going against my every instinct as decent a human being, to go toward the pain that this person is experiencing right now for whatever reason."
And then, he said, if the emotional moment happens, you shut up and listen.
Los Angeles Times writing coach Steve Padilla on verbs, from his “Writing Diagnostics” workshop, shared on Typecast.
"The meaning of life is all in verbs.
Worry about verbs, ask yourself 'is this the best verb I can use?'
It forces you to do better reporting, because you can only use strong verbs when you know what happened, so that forces you to really report.
If you emphasize verbs, you emphasize action. If you emphasize action, you have to emphasize people. If you emphasize people, you will have drama. If you have drama, you'll have interest. And if you have interest, you'll have the reader.
And: Three favourites from Padilla's 21 tips for finding stories.
1. Assume every story has a follow, either the next day, week, or month. Stories beget stories.
2. Mark your calendar for anniversaries of big events a year ahead of time. If a flood hits your town, you probably want to see how the recovery is going one year later.
3. Switch the focus of your story. We tend to focus on the stars, but perhaps the real story is the supporting cast.
1.This Jessica Pishko piece about the criss-crossing of two lives, and an unlikely publishing partnership.
"The News’s editor-in-chief is serving sixty-five-to-life for burglary, robbery and skipping bail; the managing editor is doing fifty-five-to-life for bank robbery."
2. Michael Kruse covers an execution. Chilling.
"The first chemical sedated him, the second chemical paralyzed him and the third chemical stopped his heart. He yawned two minutes in. His breathing became loose-lipped and labored. His mouth opened and closed, once, twice, 15 times, and then it stayed open. A man in a white coat with white gloves shined a light into his eyes and felt for a pulse.
It took 11 minutes."
4. Colleague Brenda Branswell with some nice writing on an old-timers hockey league.
"Guy Henri was back on the ice for his second game after returning from upper-body injuries — an eye operation and a pacemaker."
And this ending:
"With a photojournalist’s camera trained on them as they walked off the ice, the men grinned, their warm faces tinged with colour — not unlike rosy-cheeked boys coming in from the cold."
5. This story from Lane DeGregory, which grew out of a bizarre police report and became so much more:
"St. Petersburg Police Report No. 025223 describes both suspects as white females. It includes their height and weight. Then, in all capital letters, in parentheses, it says (BOTH ATTRACTIVE)."
Some interesting things from the latest Wired cover story by Mat Honan, Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention.
1. Women share online more than men do.
2. Buzzfeed knows this, targets Pinterest.
3. It realized that readers who come to the site from Pinterest aren’t looking to share elsewhere, so it stopped showing Twitter share buttons to people who came to its stories from Pinterest.
4. Pinterest is now the site’s second-largest social referrer, after Facebook and ahead of Twitter.
Most interesting:
5. Seems obvious in retrospect, but I had never considered it. Buzzfeed uses "headline optimizers."
"It can take a few different headline and thumbnail image configurations and test them in real time as a story goes live, then spit back the one that is most effective. Once a story goes up, an algorithm looks at the early traffic and social activity and predicts whether it is going to be a hit. Editors can then decide whether they should throw more social media resources behind the story to help promote it or just let it die on the vine."
I met Frank Hicks for a story last year when his antique shop was closing down to make way for a new condo development next door.
He’s 67 years old, and has ran antique shops in different locations for the last 35 years.
We talked, mostly about the antique business and its challenges, for about an hour and a half.
He had a lot in his shop: swords from Napoleonic Wars, bills of sale from the slave trade, even some old fossilized whale bones.
He touches history, he told me.
Before leaving, I asked him what he’ll miss most about the business. Collecting items? Selling them? Meeting other collectors?
Then he dropped this nugget of wisdom on me:
“It’s about the maze of life, the complexities of life, I’ve seen them all and I’ve experienced them all throughout the years.
There’s no perfection in life, we all have our little faults, our little kinks. But basically, there’s a goodness in most people, and I just like to be exposed to that aspect of people: the different philosophies, the different lifestyles.
What’s important in life is what you leave with up here [points to his head], what you leave with in your bank account doesn’t really matter.
I believe that every time you’re exposed to a new type of personality, or every time you start a conversation, you grow intellectually.
And maybe I still got a long way to go intellectually, but I’m still growing.
Three things I underlined in the first part of Telling True Stories.
1. Gay Talese: I believed then—and I believe now even more—that the role of a nonfiction writer should be with private people whose lives represent a larger significance.
2. I find a way to write with respect, a way to write the truth that is not insulting. I don't make allowances for their dalliances or deviations, but I slide those facts in without being harsh. Precise writing allows that; sloppy writing does not.
3. David Halberstam: I can always tell when a journalist is cheating. I can tell when it's a two-phone-call story. If you were an executive producer of a football game on television, would you have a better product if you had twenty cameras on the field or just two?
1.The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel for GQ. A story that sat around on my to-read list for months before it started popping back up in year-end list, may people citing it as having the best lede of 2014. I read the lede, then had to finally had to read the whole thing. Here's why:
The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized. Not a boot print left behind. It was cold and nearly moonless, a fine night for a raid, so he hiked about an hour to the Pine Tree summer camp, a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine. With an expert twist of a screwdriver, he popped open a door of the dining hall and slipped inside, scanning the pantry shelves with his penlight.
This would seem to almost any reporter a terrible handicap. One hallmark of literary nonfiction is its emphasis on personal observation. But Hillenbrand found that telephone interviews do offer certain advantages. No one appreciates this perspective more than the radio host Terry Gross, who performs nearly every interview on her program, “Fresh Air,” by remote. Gross told me that she began this habit, as Hillenbrand did, by necessity: The cost of bringing a guest to her studio in Philadelphia was simply too high. Over time, she said, she has come to believe that there is intimacy in distance.
“I find it to be oddly distracting when the person is sitting across from me,” she said with a laugh. “It’s much easier to ask somebody a challenging question, or a difficult question, if you’re not looking the person in the eye.” Gross also said the remote interview makes it easier to steer the conversation. “I can look at my notes without fear that the interviewee will assume that I’m not paying attention to what they’re saying,” she said. Finally, the distance eliminates nonverbal cues, which can interfere with good quotes. “A hand gesture might be helpful to communicate something to me. It communicates nothing to my listeners.”
3. Not a story, but rather Michael Kruse's TED talk on storytelling.
4. Jimmy Breslin, on deadline, writing about John Lennon being shot. The confidence to write that story in that way in so little time about such an important event is staggering.
Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.
Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.
5. The Lost Bones, by Ben Montgomery. This passage from about three grafs in:
They started with shovels, then trowels. The first hole they'd dug was empty, nothing but Jackson County clay. But, now, on the third day of digging, a graduate student got Kimmerle's attention. Her eyes were wide.
"Want to come take a look?"
Kimmerle descended into the open grave.
The months to come would bring protests and press conferences, more threats and a massive search for a second cemetery. Kimmerle would come close to breaking. She'd find more bodies than anybody expected. She'd find an empty casket. She'd find a hundred more questions.
Now, though, in early September 2013, at the bottom of the grave, she brushed away the earth.
There in the dirt was a perfect set of baby teeth.
