Other feature story types

Week 7

Examining Other Feature Types

Trend Stories, Rule of 3, How to Identify

What's due for next class, Feb. 27

We talked about your narrative story/profiles ideas. Those of you who came to class -- yes, I'm calling out those students not in class and reminding them they are still responsible for the work they missed -- have some direction on which stories you're going to pursue. Because, very likely, a narrative/profile story of some kind will be due before class on March 6. This next week NEEDS to be spent interviewing and spending time reporting and researching your piece. You should have zeroed in on your story, talked to that person, and hopefully spent some appreciable time with them, writing all of that down in your notebook. We will discuss the reporting next class. And then you will begin writing. Game on. If you have not made decent progress on your profile by Monday, I suggest you email me. You should begin panicking, because panic is good for the writer's soul -- it makes you act. Nothing like a deadline to get you out of the chair and into the reporting frame-of-mind.

Also:

- Read Chapter 6.

- In "Next Wave," read "Introduction: The New Masters" (it's short) and "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die" and "The Unspeakable Choice." The first story is a rapid-fire action piece, entirely reconstructed. Think about how he got those details, since he wasn't there when it went down. (Clue: It was filmed for a TV show.) The second story unfolds mostly before the reporter's eyes -- and it takes an abstract idea and makes it concrete.

Non-required reading: The Dark Power of Fraternities

We talked briefly about this Atlantic story in class yesterday. The lede is great. But the story quickly devolves into a think piece full of abstractions and policy and non-concrete discussions. Which is fine, if limited. But the excitement and interest generated by the lede's full-of-voice writing and great details is largely missing deeper in the story.

Your story ideas!

Ladder, explained in detail

Ladder of Abstraction

By Roy Peter Clark

Poynter Institute

Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like "freedom" and "literacy." Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and public policy lurk. In that place, teachers are referred to as "instructional units."

The ladder of abstraction remains one of the most useful models of thinking and writing ever invented. Popularized by S.I. Hayakawa in his 1939 book "Language in Action," the ladder has been adopted and adapted in hundreds of ways to help people think clearly and express meaning.

The easiest way to make sense of this tool is to begin with its name: The ladder of abstraction. That name contains two nouns. The first is "ladder," a specific tool you can see, hold in your hands, and climb. It involves the senses. You can do things with it. Put it against a tree to rescue your cat Voodoo. The bottom of the ladder rests on concrete language. Concrete is hard, which is why when you fall off the ladder from a high place you might break your leg.

The second word is "abstraction." You can't eat it or smell it or measure it. It is not easy to use as an example. It appeals not to the senses, but to the intellect. It is an idea that cries out for exemplification.

An old essay by John Updike begins, "We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements." That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion? The answer is in his second sentence: "Consider the beer can." To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. "Pop-top" and "beer" are at the bottom of the ladder, "aesthetic experience" at the top.

We learned this language lesson in kindergarten when we played Show and Tell. When we showed the class our 1957 Mickey Mantle baseball card, we were at the bottom of the ladder. When we told the class about what a great season Mickey had in 1956, we started climbing to the top of the ladder, toward the meaning of "greatness."

Let's imagine an education reporter covering the local school board. Perhaps the topic of discussion is a new reading curriculum. The reporter is unlikely to hear conversation about little Bessie Jones, a third-grader in Mrs. Griffith's class at Gulfport Elementary, who will have to repeat the third grade because she failed the state reading test. Bessie cried when her mother showed her the test results.

Nor are you likely to hear school board members ascending to the top of the ladder to discuss "the importance of critical literacy in education, vocation, and citizenship."

The language of the school board may be stuck in the middle of the ladder: "How many instructional units will be necessary to carry out the scope and sequence of this curriculum?" an educational expert may ask. Carolyn Matalene, a great writing teacher from South Carolina, taught me that when reporters write prose the reader can neither see nor understand, they are often trapped halfway up the ladder.

Let's look at how some good writers move up and down the ladder. Consider this lead by Jonathan Bor on a heart transplant operation: "A healthy 17-year-old heart pumped the gift of life through 34-year-old Bruce Murray Friday, following a four-hour transplant operation that doctors said went without a hitch." That heart is at the bottom of the ladder — there is no other heart like it in the world — but the blood that it pumps signifies a higher meaning, "the gift of life." Such movements up the ladder create a lift-off of understanding, an effect some writers call "altitude."

One of America's great baseball writers, Thomas Boswell, wrote this essay on the aging of athletes:

The cleanup crews come at midnight, creeping into the ghostly quarter-light of empty ballparks with their slow-sweeping brooms and languorous, sluicing hoses. All season, they remove the inanimate refuse of a game. Now, in the dwindling days of September and October, they come to collect baseball souls.

Age is the sweeper, injury his broom.

Mixed among the burst beer cups and the mustard-smeared wrappers headed for the trash heap, we find old friends who are being consigned to the dust bin of baseball's history.

The abstract "inanimate refuse" soon becomes visible as "burst beer cups" and "mustard-smeared wrappers." And those cleanup crews with their very real brooms and hoses transmogrify into grim reapers in search of baseball souls.

Metaphor and simile help us to understand abstractions through comparison with concrete things.

"Civilization is a stream with banks," wrote Will Durant, working both ends of the ladder. "The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."

Story structure

Week 6

Story Structure

Ladder of Abstraction

Why thinking is more important than writing

Non-required reading: Famous writer on getting really old

Roger Angell, a well-known author and New Yorker writer, penned a piece about getting old. It's a personal essay. And it's quite good -- lots of writers are suggesting it -- I've only gotten through half of it so far. (And hat-tip to Joelle for suggesting I post this on the blog!)

Notice the sharp use of imagery, such as here where he describes how his mind is slowing down:

My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.

That's vivid. That's showing. Would love to know what you all saw in the piece that struck you.

How not to conduct an interview

I happened to see this last night during the Olympics coverage. I immediately cringed. 

Profile examples

***********
Reckless Again - Clint Eastwood After 70
Parade Magazine, December 2008
by Gail Sheehy

Required reading

Jimmy Breslin wrote about the guy who dug John F. Kennedy's grave.

It's amazing.

This is the lead -- (notice the attention to the tiniest details. What he wore. What he ate for breakfast. His wife's name. His boss' name....) 

Washington -- Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Read the rest here OR here.

Week 5 tips

Week 5/ The Art of the Interview & Profiles

How to listen and how to really hear

What makes a good profile?

A story with a beginning, middle and end

Running in tomorrow's Tampa Bay Times ...

Please at least skim these essays before class Thursday

And as you read these, or skim them, be thinking about:
- What is the beginning, middle and end?
- What is the story?
- What is the action?
- What is being shown to me, the reader? And what is being told?

Think about structure and details and showing vs. telling.

Long-form stories are hits with readers

Interesting story about how the Indianapolis Star had a long article do massive traffic:

"The exorcisms of Latoya Ammons," a 5,300-word feature by investigative reporter Marisa Kwiatkowski, has become one of the most widely read pieces in the paper's history since it was published last month, according to Jeff Taylor, the Star's editor and VP-news. But even as the story continues to rack up social shares to make BuzzFeed jealous, including 62,000 on Facebook, the paper may find more luck cashing in via Hollywood than on Madison Avenue.

Also of note:

Either way, long-form works of journalism such as "The exorcism of Latoya Ammons" is becoming more attractive to publishers, including digital-only players such as BuzzFeed and Business Insider, as they seek to build engagement with readers and show social media sites like Facebook that their content is high quality. 

Your story ideas

Finding your voice

Finding your voice

Do you all want stuff on paper?

We can discuss in class.

A profile in audio

This is not a narrative. Not at first glance.

But listen to this Storycorps story about a mentally disabled mom and her daughter.
It is three minutes long.
It's mom and daughter talking, telling the story.
And it is told with a beginning, middle and end.

It begins with mom giving birth, her hopes and fears.
And then the trial and tribulations they faced together.
Finally, how they came to accept and love each other.

Note: They use scenes to show what they mean. Like the daughter describing how she tried to prepare a teacher to meet her mom.

Also: Have a tissue nearby. The NPR announcer needed one.  

Can we talk about....

There is a good way to ask a question. 

And not a good way.

"Can you talk about ...." has become a common opening for journalists to ask questions, especially in sports, especially at sports news conferences.

I have long hated the form. Some of you who've had me before have heard me rail about it. Well, here's a good piece about what "can you talk about ..." needs to stop.

Non-required reading

So that meth story we talked about in class ran Sunday. You can read it here.

Don't forget -- 5 story ideas to me by end of day Tuesday.