One summer evening my family and I were walking out of Appleby's restaurant in the Westfield Shops shopping center when my son spotted a huge black cloud of smoke coming from the downtown area. We drove as close to the fire as we could and then walked to the police lines. The fire was burning in an abandoned factory close to the intersection of Elm and Franklin streets. A big crowd had gathered, the people curious, as we were, to get a close-up look at the fire.
We all knew there would be a big story and lots of photographs in the next day's newspaper. Why? We had witnessed something that was newsworthy. The fire, which the newspaper would term "spectacular," had gotten our attention and the attention of anyone within miles of that enormous black cloud.
In the next day's Westfield Evening News, the fire was the lead story, the subject of a banner headline one that stretches across all six columns and the stories and photos devoted to the fire covered all but perhaps the bottom six inches of page one. The story wasn't the lead in The [Springfield] Republican, but it received almost as much space on the front page. The coverage included a dramatic photograph of the smoke and flames with a couple of firefighters in the foreground.
Most journalism texts offer a list of the criteria that make something newsworthy. Those criteria might include timeliness, proximity (is the event or situation close or near to the readers?), prominence or eminence (are the people involved public figures or celebrities or otherwise known to the readers?), impact or consequence (will the readers be affected?), conflict or controversy (is there that added spice that makes readers sit up and take interest?), and the catchall category of human interest.
I think of reporters as being the eyes and ears (occasionally the noses, fingers, and taste buds) of the thousands of people in the community who are unable to see, hear, etc. what reporters are paid to see, hear, etc. While those people are going about their business teaching school, repairing cars, nursing the ill, and the like many newsworthy things are happening in their community. The City Council may be meeting, an accused murderer may be on trial for his or her life, a bicyclist may be on his or her way to the hospital after being hit by a car, a fire may be burning downtown. It's the reporter's job to cover those things and the many other things that go on in the community.
One of my former city editors and I'm sure many other city editors talked about covering the city like a blanket. The goal, never reachable, is to cover everything that might be of interest to or have an impact on the newspaper's readers. Not all of the stories in the newspaper, by the way, are what we call hard, or breaking, news. Many stories respond to things that happen. But many other stories are proactive, rather than reactive. We call them feature stories (more below on features and feature leads).
A copy of USA Today I have on my desk as I write this, for example, has on its front page a feature story on the hurdles women athletes face as they return to their professional sports after having babies. Other features in that same newspaper include stories on the increasing murkiness of the waters of Lake Tahoe, the trend in some cities to pave their streets with bricks, and an unproven quarterback who would try to lead Oklahoma to a national championship.
I might note in ending this short chapter on the journalist's mission that the press has been viewed, since nearly the birth of this nation, as a watchdog. One of its roles is to represent the public by monitoring the doings of local, state, and federal governments. That is not its only role, as the previous discussion should have suggested, but it is an extremely important one. It is at the root of journalists' zealous regard for First Amendment protections and of efforts, such as the drive for a federal law shielding journalists' confidential sources, to keep information about government flowing freely to the public.
On the front are news stories, headlines (brief summaries of the stories in the present tense), photos with captions (a line or more of type under or next to the photo describing its contents), and graphics. On other pages are stories, headlines, photos, graphics, and ads. Stories that must be continued from the front to an inside page jump to what is called runover space.
Most newspapers have several sections. The front of each section, not surprisingly, is called a section front. Section fronts are devoted to such subjects as local news, sports, business, entertainment, food, and living.
Many newspapers also have multiple editions, press runs of the newspaper whose content varies with the geographical location to which they will be distributed and the time at which they are printed. News outside the city or town in which the newspaper is published is often covered by reporters working out of bureaus, offices in the specific communities to which they are assigned.
Some of this country's newspapers have bureaus in key U.S. cities, and some of them have bureaus in other countries. The Christian Science Monitor, although not a newspaper with big circulation, has nine U.S. bureaus and seven international bureaus. Writing of newspaper size reminds me that the 20 biggest U.S. newspapers have circulations that range from about two million for USA Today to several hundred thousand for newspapers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or Detroit Free Press that might, at one time or another, be in 20th place. But about 85 percent of U.S. daily newspapers (there are about 1,500 of them) have circulations under 50,000. Those figures suggest that newspaper practice is predominantly a local or regional enterprise.
Some stories have a byline (a line above the story naming the writer), and many stories have a dateline (the name of the place in upper-case letters from which the story originates and occasionally the date on which the story was filed). Reporters and editors have deadlines, times by which a story must be completed or set in type.
The front of many newspapers contains a mix of hard news stories (stories that have a time element and must be run at the earliest possible opportunity) and feature stories, stories that are occasionally related to a hard news story but are more often timeless in nature. Many feature stories can be run today, tomorrow, next week, perhaps even next month or next year.
The front almost always contains a lead story, recognizable generally by its placement in the upper-righthand quadrant of the page and the large size of its headline type. Type is measured in points. There are 72 points to an inch, so a 72-point headline, a size usually reserved for lead stories, is one-inch-high. The text of this journalism book is set in 12-point type.
The photos and other graphics that run in the newspaper are collectively known as art. Other graphics might include maps, charts, and illustrations.
In an editorial meeting the key editors consider what play (or display) they should give to various stories, meaning where the stories will be displayed and how prominently. Will they go, for example to the front or inside, the name given to all newspaper space that is not on a front? The meeting is also known at some newspapers as a budget meeting and, according to at least one journalism text, a news huddle. It is called the page 1 meeting at the Christian Science Monitor.
(Students from the Westfield State Communication Club toured the Boston headquarters of the Christian Science Monitor in the fall of 2004. They returned with a handout titled "How the Monitor Works." You can find more information on the workings of the Monitor at csmonitor.com.)
On a slow news day, a day when there is relatively little local hard news, or on a day when there is a great deal of advertising in the newspaper, the newspaper will contain even more stories than usual from the wire services, organizations that distribute news stories, photos, and features to newspapers and radio and television stations, and there is likely to be a substantial number of feature stories. You'll understand that every newspaper except the largest carry many wire stories. Even The New York Times, which tries to cover the world, has to rely on wire stories for some of its coverage. The dominant wire service in this country is the Associated Press, or AP. Some of the bigger newspapers such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have their own wire services. They make their stories and features available to other news outlets.
When there is a great deal of advertising, the newspaper is likely to have a big news hole, the space available for news after the advertisements have been laid out.
Most newspapers (the exceptions are big ones like The New York Times and The Washington Post that have their own stylebooks) adhere to AP style. That style is discovered in The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. (See "A Word on Style" on Page X.
Copy preparation describes the way we prepare hard newspaper copy, although such copy is by and large obsolete, having been replaced by copy written and edited on computers. The basics include the name and slug, a brief description of the story's contents in the upper left of the first take (another word for page), double-spacing, a "more" in parentheses centered at the bottom of any take that is not the last take, and an end mark centered at the end of the copy on the last take.
Copy-editing symbols are those symbols we use to edit hard copy. Again, the use of those symbols is more or less obsolete now that most newspaper copy is written and edited on computers.
As a prefatory note, it is worth pointing out that the newsroom is only one part of the newspaper's operations. The newsroom is responsible for gathering, writing, and editing the news. Other departments are responsible for the physical production of the newspaper and its distribution. And other departments are involved in the newspaper's functioning like the business that it is. Among the key departments, besides the newsroom, are the production department, the press room, display and classified advertising departments, and the circulation department.
In the newsroom itself, the basic functional distinction is that between reporters and editors. What reporters do can be stated simply: they write stories after gathering the news. What editors do can not be so easily summarized. Some editors, of course, edit copy, and some of those editors have the specific title of copy editor. Other editors write headlines or lay out pages. In some small newspapers, editors might perform all three of those jobs edit copy, write headlines, and lay out pages. Some editors (examples are city editors, metro editors and state editors) assign stories and some of them work closely with the reporters to whom they assign the stories. Other editors (titles might be editor, executive editor, or managing editor) set policy, administer budgets, hire and fire staff.
Besides that basic division between reporters and editors, newsrooms are also organized by subject or geographic area. Among the common subjects that merit separate departments in all but small newspapers are features (especially Sunday features), editorial comment, sports, style (or lifesyles or living of some other name to describe the department that half-a-century ago was called the women's page), and entertainment. The larger the newspaper the more departments it is likely to have. A paper like The New York Times, for example, has departments responsible for a weekly book review, a Sunday magazine, and a Sunday travel section.
The scope of a newspaper's geographical divisions is also related to size. A very small newspaper might have a city staff period. Most of the newspapers around the country cover the communities in their circulation areas with a bureau system. The Springfield Union-News, for example, has bureaus in half-a-dozen western Massachusetts communities. The bureaus are staffed by reporters (in some cases a single reporter) who are responsible for gathering the news in the community or communities the bureau serves.
In addition to the assigning of reporters to bureaus, newspapers divide their city, or metro, staffs into beats. Among the specialty areas are city government, education, police, courts, business, the arts, the environment, science, and medicine. (See more on beats and specialties on Page 35.)
The reporter who fails to attribute is also likely to be guilty of editorializing, inserting his or her own opinion into a news story.
The expression of opinion should be reserved for the editorial page and the op-ed page. The op-ed page, not surprisingly, gets its name from its position opposite the editorial page. These opinion pages contain editorials, which represent the opinion of the newspaper; columns, which represent the opinions of columnists; letters-to-the editor, which represent the letter writers' opinions; cartoons, which represent the cartoonists' opinions, and other pieces representing the opinions of contributors outside the newspaper.
To be sure you have attributed properly, apply this test to any story you are ready to hand in: Is there any sentence, other than a sentence that relates a verifiable fact (Christmas falls on Dec. 25) or reports an observation (Smith was wearing a Westfield State College sweatshirt), that is not attributed to a source?
I find that some students who are otherwise careful with attribution can't resist the temptation to write essay-like conclusions to feature stories, especially profiles, and therefore end on a note, not only of failed attribution, but also of editorializing.
It's great to have a good quote or anecdote with which to conclude a profile or other kind of feature story. But you can choose also to simply stop without attempting a conclusion.
Consider this example, the final sentence of a profile of Professor F.M. Station: A. Station's interest in radio has given her many pleasant hours during the last three decades. B. "My interest in radio," said Station, "has given me many pleasant hours during the last three decades."
A. is the essay-like conclusion mentioned above. B. is an attributed quote that also has the virtue of leaving the reader with a closing summary of the story's theme.
The reporter attributes with a blend of direct quotations, which report the exact words of a speaker and are so indicated by quotation marks, and indirect quotations, which report the words of a speaker but not necessarily the exact words and which lack quotation marks.
News people's overwhelming favorite verb of attribution, a verb which credits a speaker with his or her spoken words, is "said." In The News Business, John Chancellor and Walter Mears caution against seeking synonyms for "said." They describe "said" as "a spare, unobtrusive, utilitarian word," adding that the temptation to use synonyms "can produce such words as 'conceded,' or "acknowledged,' or "claimed,' or 'asserted.' Or even 'averred,' which is stuffy enough for lawyers, but of no utility to newswriters.
"All but the last are useful," Chancellor and Mears say. "Each carries a special meaning. If that is what you mean, use it. But it is easy to slant a story without meaning to, just by switching words in an effort to avoid repetition." They add that "said" is "the handiest word in the language. It usually beats declared, claimed, contended, asserted, alleged, promised, and all the others. It is a colorless word. Use it unless you mean to color the statement that follows and can show in writing that the slant is accurate.
"Substitute 'claimed' for 'said," and the verb casts doubt on the statement being quoted. Substitute 'declared,' and you may have elevated the statement, perhaps more than you intended. 'Declared' is overused, and should be saved for formal statements and occasions."
I cite three reasons for preferring "said" to other verbs of attribution except in contexts that clearly allow for variations. "Said" is short, it is conversational, and it is neutral. The intransitive alternative to "said" is "told," which is just as short, just as conversational, and just as neutral. It can't, however, be used as frequently because it is a transitive verb; it requires an object such as "the audience" or "the members of the team."
First, prepare for the interview if you are not under deadline pressure. Arrange the meeting with your source well in advance and then find out everything you can about the person and subject you will be talking about. Careful preparation can lead to a better and even time-saving interview.
Written material obtained in advance of the interview can be helpful. If you are doing a profile, for example, it is immensely advantageous to have a resume of the person you are profiling. Having the resume in advance saves a good deal of interview time because it is then unnecessary to question the source on basic details of education and career. In some instances, the resume, also known as a curriculum vitae (c.v.) in academic circles, will list presentations and publications. The subjects of those presentations and publications may lead to productive questions during the profile interview.
Second, take detailed notes and use a tape recorder when it is possible to do so. Most journalism texts don't place enough emphasis on the value of using a tape recorder. Those texts often present several objections to tape recorders: they may make a source uncomfortable, they may malfunction, they may lull the reporter into sketchy or careless notetaking, and they give reporters extra work because the tapes have to be transcribed. I have answers for all of those objections. We live in an electronic age when all but the reclusive are accustomed to seeing electronic journalists in action. There certainly are instances when a tape recorder might be out of place. It might be counterproductive, for example, to put a tape recorder in front of a man or woman celebrating his or her 100th birthday. Reporters should always ask before using a tape recorder, and he or she, it should go without saying, should approach sources tactfully and courteously.
It is true that tape recorders may malfunction (I once supplied a tape to a radio reporter whose tape had turned out to be faulty). The remedies are to test the tape and the batteries beforehand AND to take notes with just as much diligence as if the tape recorder weren't there. My practice is to forget about the tape recorder and pretend my notebook is the only tool I have.
Now to the main objection: that tape recorders are too time-consuming. First, there are many assignments that are carried out without deadline pressure. By their nature, feature stories are timeless. Time spent listening a second time to a tape of a key interview is time well spent. When there is a deadline, reporters can still use tape recorders by being selective. A trick I and many reporters use, when we know we won't have time to re-listen to the tape, is to annotate our notes with tape counter numbers. If, for example, the senator makes a particularly vivid characterization of his election opponent in a speech, the reporter might simply look at the tape counter and write down the number. When the reporter writes the story, he or she flips through the notebook to find the marked quotes and then winds through the tape to find the quotes.
Using a tape recorder, to turn to the positive side, has two major advantages. The tape offers a fuller and perhaps more accurate recording of an interview than do hand-written notes. I often do a little demonstration in my journalism classes to prove that. I play for the students snippets of an interview I've recorded and then I show them the notes I've taken on the same interview. The notes are always sketchier than the tape even though I've had a lot of experience interviewing and can get a lot of material into my notebook.
The other big advantage is the ability to choose from a complete range of direct quotations without fear of misquoting. It is true that any quote recorded in your notebook can be handled as an indirect as well as a direct quote. But sometimes, we want to let the speaker address our readers in his or her own words.
The conventional format for the hard news story has long been described as an inverted pyramid. The regular pyramid might, in some cases, represent the format of an essay in which the information presented gradually becomes more and more important. The inverted pyramid represents the idea that the newspaper reporter begins with the most important information first. He or she then presents the remainder of the facts involved in the story in a descending order of importance. Theoretically, each piece of information presented to the reader should be less and less important until the least important of the facts is reported at the very end of the story. This structure does not mean, of course, that the story necessarily exhausts the information that the reporter has collected. Space is an important consideration in a newspaper, and a reporter is constrained to write for the space that is available. On one night, an education reporter returning from a school board meeting might have 20 inches for his or her story; on another night he or she might have 12 inches.
In the days of hot-type newspaper production (that era ended in the 1960s and 1970s) stories would often be cut in the composing room. Editors and printers would simply cut a story from the bottom, lopping off paragraph after paragraph until the story was short enough to fit in the place available for it. The inverted pyramid structure made it possible for those cuts to be made with the knowledge that the least important of the available information was being excised.
At the heart of the inverted pyramid idea is the summary lead. Theoretically, a lead of a hard news story should summarize the essentials, providing the reader with the guts of the story even if he or she should read no further. Let's discuss the lead in detail.
A lead, when we apply the term to hard news stories, is the first sentence or two of the story. Often the first sentence is also the first paragraph. (Newspaper paragraphing is dramatically shorter than the paragraphs most students have written in freshman essays and other forms of writing. Look at the front of any newspaper, as my first managing editor asked me to do, and you will see that the paragraphs generally consist of one, two, or three sentences.)
Chancellor and Mears describe the lead as the tee shot of the story. If you play golf, you know that the tee shot often determines whether the golfer will have a good hole.
The hard-news lead, that is, a lead written on a breaking news story that must be told as soon as possible, answers the so-called four Ws (who, what, where, and when). Many journalism texts add two more letters, saying such leads answer the five Ws and H (who, what, where, when, why, and how). Sometimes, the "who" is a "what." It's not always a person that's making the news. It could be, to take a couple of examples, a snowstorm (as in, A late-winter snowstorm dumped . . .), a hurricane (as in, Hurricane X swept through the Florida panhandle . . .), or an airplane (as in, A single-engine plane crashed . . .)
The lead contains a past-tense verb such as dumped, swept, crashed, announced, and voted, and almost always contains a time element, a word or words such as "yesterday," "Tuesday," and "early this morning," that describes when the action took place.
The lead of a hard-news story generally contains no more than 35 words, according to most journalism texts. I like to think of that number as a useful guideline. If a lead you write runs 40 or more words, you should read it aloud to see whether you've included more than the reader can digest whether you have written a cluttered lead, one that contains too much information.
The placement of the time element and the placement of modifiers can occasionally be troublesome. Most journalism texts say that the time element should come where it fits comfortably. Often, but not always, it fits comfortably after the verb as in President Bush announced yesterday (or Tuesday). . . "As a rule," says The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing, "put the time element after the verb unless the day of the week can be read as the object of the verb or is awkward in other ways, producing oddities.
"A Washington story," The Word continues, "reports that Congress postponed Wednesday. In New York, a top federal mediator sought Thursday, presumably without finding it. A story begins, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Henry Chielinsky Thursday . . ." One of my students, covering a debate on the war in Iraq, wrote in his lead that two professors "argued over the justifiability of preemptive strikes Thursday." Now I don't think anyone who read that story would think that preemptive strikes were launched on Thursday. Nonetheless, our job is to strive for precision in our writing. What the student meant was that the professors argued Thursday.
I've seen many leads in which the verb could not have been placed after the verb because the verb has to be followed immediately by its object. Note these examples from The Springfield Union-News of July 5, 2001: "Hundreds of civilians fled Chechnya for refugee camps yesterday amid reports of summary executions by Russian forces as troops combed villages searching for rebels in the war-shattered republic." "A typhoon lashed southern Taiwan early today, hours after it battered the northern Phillippines with winds nearing 90 mph and heavy rains that reportedly left 15 people dead."
Here is a lead from an Associated Press story that appeared on the front of The [Springfield] Republican on March 15, 2004:
ASHDOD, Israel Two Palestinian suicide bombers attacked this closely guarded Israeli port yesterday, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 18 in the first deadly assault on a strategic installation in more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
This lead answers the four Ws. The who, of course, are the bombers, the what is the attack and its elaboration, the where is the port of Ashdod, and the when is yesterday.
This lead contains 34 words, roughly approximating the guideline mentioned above. The reporter who crafted this lead apparently considered three pieces of information to be essential the fact of the attack, the number of persons killed and wounded, and the attack's representing the "first deadly assault . . ."
Here is a sampling of hard-news leads:
SPRINGFIELD Peter L. Picknelly, a giant figure in Springfield's civic and economic life, died yesterday while vacationing in Portugal. -- The [Springfield] Republican, 10/5/04
BOSTON Justices on the state's highest court yesterday expressed concerns that public school students in Springfield and other poor communities are falling behind in education, but said they saw no easy solution to the problem. -- The [Springfield] Republican, 10/5/04
WESTFIELD The City Council's Finance Committee, meeting last night with representatives from Lowe's Companies Inc., unanimously approved a 10-year tax increment financing agreement with the home improvement retailer. -- The [Springfield] Republican, 10/5/04
WALTHAM, Mass. Gary Payton, the veteran guard the Boston Celtics acquired in an off-season trade with the Los Angeles Lakers, reported to training camp yesterday. -- The [Springfield] Republican, 10/5/04
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 4 Three powerful car bombs exploded across Iraq on Monday morning, killing at least 26 people and wounding more than 100 others in a day of carnage that demonstrated the relative ease with which insurgents are striking in the hearts of major cities. -- The New York Times, 10/5/04
MOJAVE, Calif., Oct. 4 A private rocket ship shot into space this morning and won a coveted $10 million aviation prize for its creators. -- The New York Times, 10/5/04
LONDON, Oct. 4 The British soccer club Manchester United said on Monday that it had received a preliminary takeover offer, which one person close to the talks said was from the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Malcolm Glazer. -- The New York Times, 10/5/04
Two American scientists who solved the enigma of how people can smell 10,000 different odors and recall them later were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine yesterday. -- The New York Times, 10/5/04
I think a bit of wrestling in an effort to condense and give the reader less to digest might have produced something like this: A city man who shot himself Tuesday in front of police and neighbors was reported still in critical condition yesterday.
B. The Buried Lead: The reporter fails to include in the lead the essential news that the story is reporting. This error can result from undeveloped news judgment; more often it results from novice or student reporters' tendency to substitute a general summary for a specific point. My own college's student newspaper and many other college newspapers I've seen run many buried leads.
Consider this example of a buried lead: Massachusetts Acting Gov. Jane Swift spoke about the state's economy in a speech last week at Westfield State College. The lead of this story, which is not a real one, should have said something like this: Massachusetts Acting Gov. Jane Swift told a Westfield State College audience last week that the worsening state economy may result in tuition increases at the state colleges.
Alternately, I call the buried lead a say-nothing lead (there is no news in it); a teaser lead (the reporter teases the readers by delaying the essential information), and a label lead (the reader knows where the package comes from but not what it contains.
For feature writers, the world is their oyster. That might be an exaggerated way of putting it when the feature writers are working for local or regional newspapers. It would not be exaggerated when the writers in question work for the Associated Press, or The New York Times, or The Christian Science Monitor. But the point is that the subject matter for feature writers is nearly limitless. They are free to explore anything that interests them, assuming that the subject would also be interesting to readers.
And that brings us to the lead, which is particularly important in a feature story because its capacity for arousing or not arousing interest may determine whether the reader stays with your story. Let's consider two kinds of feature leads: the general lead and the particular lead.
The General Lead There is nothing wrong with writing a general lead that simply states the subject or describes the theme of the story. You will find plenty of them in good newspapers. Suppose, for example, you were writing a story about college students who suffer from serious depression. You might write a lead that went like this: A substantial number of College X students struggle with serious, even debilitating, depression, according to campus counselors.
The Particular Lead Some reporters and editors look at that general lead and ask, Can we do better? Is there another way of getting readers interested in a story about student suffering from depression? One way is to animate the lead. What do I mean? One can inject flesh-and-blood into the lead, using a person to represent a group of people who are the subject of the story. To put it another way, perhaps we can tell a little story about a person. We think it's easier for readers to get interested in stories about people than stories about abstractions or general ideas.
Here's how a personalized lead might go:
Mary Doe, a junior at College X, says she knew something was wrong when she couldn't get interested in celebrating Christmas.
"I had always been a person who loved everything about Christmas," said Doe, 20, who lives in Goshen, Mass.
"Last December I was totally wasted. I couldn't study for exams. I wouldn't answer the phone when my friends or my family called. I couldn't start the papers I had to finish for my courses. All I did was sleep and watch television."
Doe said her roommate eventually persuaded her to see someone at the counseling center on campus.
"They diagnosed me as suffering from depression," Doe said, "and they referred me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants. It was tough making it through exams, but by Christmas I was functioning again." Doe is one of many students, according to College X's mental health counselors, who suffers from depression.
The idea behind this kind of lead is to take an individual to stand for a group, a class of people, a situation involving many people, places or things. The individual is not always a person. Suppose you were writing a piece on a new kind of coffee shop that has sprung up in northeastern cities. Your lead might focus on ONE of those shops.
Some people who teach journalism call that kind of lead a Wall Street Journal lead because for many years the Journal has used it, especially in the trend stories that run in the lefthand and righthand column on its front.
Here is a real-world example of a Wall Street Journal lead that appeared in The New York Times on Nov. 25, 2001:
Corinne Spurrier was as enthusiastic as any soccer mom in Manhattan. On a crisp Saturday morning in Riverside Park, her 9-year-old son's team, the Golden Eagles, played their final game of the season on the banks of the Hudson River. She cheered as her son, Ian, raced across the grass in his yellow jersey. She clapped whenever one of his teammates scored and yelled when a player missed an opportunity.
Only one thing nagged her: heading. When she saw Ian hit the ball with his head, a red light flashed on in her mind. "I should ask his pediatrician if this is a good thing for him to be doing," she said. "I think of Muhammad Ali. What are the side effects?"
The same question disturbs many parents of soccer players. Sure, heading looks easy when done by professionals, and it makes for great television. But many parents are all too aware that children are less physically developed than their world-class counterparts.
In the last year, from league meetings to scientific conferences, there has been renewed debate about whether young players should head soccer balls.
That last paragraph might serve as one of those general leads we talked about above. But this is the particular lead, one that chooses one particular parent to represent all those parents who worry about the effect of heading on young soccer players.
Profiles One of the most common perhaps the most common kind of feature story is the profile. The full-blown profile draws on many sources. The reporter talks, not only to the person who is the subject, but also to many people who know the person. But even a less ambitious story, one that involves only an interview with the subject, can make for interesting reading. What the reporter is doing in such a story is letting the subject talk, and the result is that the readers get to hear the subject talk about himself or herself. The talk can be fascinating or at least interesting. Here is a take from a journalism student's profile of Marsha Marotta, a professor of political science at Westfield State. Before turning to an academic career, Marotta was an editor for the Springfield newspapers.
Marotta said that she has found that a lot of the skills she learned in journalism are also assets in teaching. "In a class you ask a question and the class just sits there," Marotta said. "The inclination is to then answer the question. But as a journalist you can't answer your own questions.
"Not being afraid of that silence and making students take responsibility for their part forces them to engage," said Marotta.
"Why, why, why? As a journalist you have to understand why," she said. "I'll pose a question to a class, get an answer back and have to ask why." Marotta said that it's not enough to know the answer; you have to know why. "Asking why gets to the heart of the issue.
"The most important thing though is the writing," said Marotta. "I emphasize good, clear, strong writing. Write me an argument. Write it in a way that works as a cohesive and coherent piece."
Marotta said that students who get A's in most other classes often wonder why she gives them a lower grade. "I'll tell them they've got a lot of good ideas, but they need to present them in a clear and cohesive way," she said.
Marotta said that the most difficult aspect of her job is the four-course teaching load. "A lot of places have a 2-2 or a 2-3 load," she said. "I think because I like to be so prepared, a full teaching load is touch. I read all this," said Marotta, pointing to a thick volume of Thomas Jefferson's writings, "so I can pull out a few things that can be useful to the class. I put so much into it, but everyone probably feels the same way."
The student who wrote the story on Professor Marotta simply let the subject talk. And the result is an interesting story. Students in my "Writing for the Media" class do a simple profile, one based on an interview with the subject of the story. I suggest in writing the lead that they simply get the subject talking. Something like this:
X, a professor of English at Westfield State College, said she got interested in medieval literature after taking a course in the Anglo-Saxon language.
"I was fascinated by the development of the language," X said. "I went from Anglo-Saxon language to Middle English language and literature. I was hooked."
Another approach to a profile is to let other sources talk about your subject. Students in my "Journalism I" course talk to several sources besides the person who is the subject. They might write something like this:
X, a junior at Westfield State College, said Y, a professor of mathematics, brings her subject alive.
"It's like watching a TV show," said X. "The students are on the edges of their seats."
I think of profiles as vehicles for experimentation. Students might let their subject or people who know their subject tell an anecdote. They might report significant details, physical or otherwise, that reveal their subject. They might note, for example, that one professor drives to campus every day with a racing canoe strapped on her car or that the college president works out every day at 6 a.m. in the college Wellness Center, or that one administrator has 10 photos of his grandchildren on his office walls.
Students might get ambitious in doing a profile, immersing themselves temporarily in their subjects' lives in an effort to put the readers in the presence of their subjects. They might emulate in a small way the so-called literary journalists, who like to "hang around" with their subjects for days, or weeks, or months, or even, in some instances, for years. They might discover, as many writers have discovered to their exhilaration, that they can write the same kind of scenes fiction writers write. Those of you who get interested in this kind of thing can explore the work of literary journalists in a number of anthologies.
As a final note, if you'll forgive the pun, the writer of a profile or any other kind of feature story should take pains to write a good conclusion. My colleague, English professor George Layng, writes in his journalism handbook: "All good story-telling involves developing a strong ending, and the conclusion is where you can display your particular talents as a story-teller. Consider ending with an anecdote, a vignette, a quotation, a question, or an arresting image or fact."
A veteran beat reporter covering a speaker well-known to him or her or covering a meeting of one of the bodies he or she has been covering for months should not need extensive preparation. In other instances, the reporter, if there is time, should prepare in the same way the reporter prepares for a key interview.
Getting to a speech or meeting in plenty of time and finding a good vantage point for listening and note-taking is important. First, obviously, the reporter has to be able to hear what's being said. But more importantly, at both speeches and meetings, the audiences often become participants in the stories. A group of activists, for example, may walk out in the middle of a speech in an effort to call attention to the speaker's racism, or sexism, or militarism, or . . . Parents may make angry comments at a school board meeting called to explain the details of a redistricting plan or a group of residents may throw verbal brickbats at a public hearing on a plan to build a steel galvanizing plant not far from their homes.
The stories on speeches or meetings should have specific leads and, like all hard- news stories, report the information in the form of an inverted pyramid, opening with the most important facts and closing with the least important facts of those the reporter has decided to include in the story.
Many student reporters write buried leads (see above) on speech and meeting stories. Leads like these: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy spoke about the U.S. health care system in a speech at Westfield State College yesterday and The Westfield State College Student Government Association met for three hours Tuesday night. Neither of those leads is specific; in each of them, the news has been buried. Perhaps Senator Kennedy called for universal government-sponsored health insurance. Perhaps the Student Government Association voted to censure the college president. The news is what the speaker said and what the entity holding the meeting did.
Let me illustrate the use of beats and specialties by reference to the newspaper for which I worked for 15 years in the 1970s and 1980s, The [Durham, N.C.] Morning Herald. For many years, I had the education beat. I was responsible for covering the local public and private elementary and secondary schools in Durham and a number of post-secondary educational institutions, including Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The education beat is one beat that is common at newspapers of all sizes.
We also had reporters assigned to cover police news (nearly universally called the "cop beat"), the courts, city government, county government (unlike Massachusetts's counties, North Carolina counties have substantial governing responsibilities), state government, arts and entertainment, business, and science and medicine. We had a Sunday features editor, a lifestyle editor with a small staff, and a sports editor with a staff of four or five reporters. The sports department had a beat system of its own.
In my "Writing for the Media" course I show a video on beat reporting that is part of a series on news writing produced by The Annenberg School of Communication and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It focuses on two young reporters, one a female crime reporter and one a male sports reporter. Let me devote a bit more space to those two beats as examples. For the crime beat, I'm going to reproduce a section from the "Journalism I" handbook written by my colleague in the English Department, George Layng, who is a former reporter.
Crime is a staple of most news, and for good reason: it often is dramatic, violent, and interesting. Law and order, though, is not just entertainment: residents want to know if their community is safe, businesses want to protect their property, and politicians use crime as an election issue. When psychological and cultural issues are considered, it becomes clear that crime touches every aspect of society in some way. All of this makes covering crime one of the most interesting and exciting beats but also one with a number of risks.
Reporting on Crime Stories
1. Contact Police: the police are usually your main source for the basic information. Different departments have different procedures for releasing information: Here are some of the common sources:
a. Log: a listing of calls to police and arrests. Included are the time, location, type of incident, names of those arrested, and the charges. Ignore minor incidents, such as trespassing and minor motor vehicle arrests; focus on the more serious calls and arrests. Write down all the information including any case report numbers (these might be helpful later on).
b. Case or Arrest Report: a report filled out by the officers involved. It is on a standard form that provides the details of the case and the facts about he people involved. Some departments will make this public to you. Most in Massachusetts will not. However, some departments will give you the key information from the report especially if you can given them the report number. Typically the chief or the desk sergeant will summarize the report for you.
c. Press Release: most departments will routinely write up a brief summary of the most important cases and arrests. These are printed and are available to the media. Oftentimes there is one officer who is in charge of dealing with the press. Sometimes copies of these reports are left in a box by the front desk at the police station for you to take. While these provide more information than a log entry, they usually are less detailed than the case or arrest report. Always try to report beyond the press release.
d. Officers: Most departments limit those who can speak to the public. Typically the chief, a detective, or a sergeant will talk, although occasionally an officer on the scene will give you information. The officers involved can provide a very valuable form of information especially if you've already gathered the basic facts elsewhere. These sources will give you more particular details that can make for interesting stories. Officers sometimes will give you background or off-the-record information that can be valuable. If talking to an officer on the scene, make sure you don't interfere with her or his work.
2. Talk to Witnesses: Eyewitnesses can provide specific and vivid details and quotations that make a story more engaging. The police usually will not give you the names of witnesses so that they are shielded from any retribution. However, if you are on the scene of a crime or ask people who work or live near the scene, you usually can track down witnesses. Remember to double-check the basic information you have from the police a witness may have a different story.
3. Draw on Court Records and Proceedings: The courts can provide additional basic information and some dramatic stories during the trial.
a. Trial List: similar to a police log, this lists the cases scheduled to be presented in courts on a given day, the charges, and the defendant and sometimes the defendant's lawyer. It usually is posted outside the courtroom or in the clerk's office. Look for the case number.
b. Case File: contains a variety of information, such as the original arrest report and additional briefs filed by the prosecuting and defense lawyers. This can provide specific information that was not released by the police or that was discovered after the arrest. This is also an important way to get the defendant's argument against the charges if there is a brief filed by the defense lawyer. However, a case file is not always public information and even if it is, the file may be in the hands of the prosecutor. Get the case file number from the trial list.
Writing Crime Stories
Crime stories pose perhaps the greatest legal risk to reporters: the chance for provoking a libel suit is high if you do not diligently work to accurately report the story. This said, though, crime stories are often the most exciting and widely read stories in a newspaper. Keep the following points in mind:
1. Include Attribution: always make clear the sources of your information. 2. Preserve a Defendant's Innocence: Remember that in the United States a person is INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. Simply because the police arrest and charge somebody and can present some evidence does not mean that the person is guilty or that the evidence is enough to convict the person.
Therefore, always make clear the police CHARGE or ACCUSE a person with a crime or that a person ALLEGEDLY did this or that. Until a guilty verdict is issued, the person is simply SUSPECTED of having committed the crime.
My thanks to Professor Layng for permitting me to reproduce that section on covering crime.
Let me add a few words on covering sports. I know some of you who are reading this don't follow sports at all, but a number of you are intensely interested in sports and its coverage in the media. Sports reporters, like all reporters, write hard news stories (which we might also call game stories) and feature stories.
The hard news, or game, stories are written in the inverted pyramid format. The leads on those stories may answer the 4 Ws. An obvious formula might be: Team X beat Team Y yesterday in a game at Z field, arena, rink, etc. More often the lead includes a highlight of the contest as well as the results. Here is an example from The [Springfield] Sunday Republican (Sept. 26, 2004):
Brady Quinn tied a school record with four touchdown passes to lead Notre Dame to a 38-3 victory over Washington yesterday.
That approach is common in the round-up stories that include the results of many games or other contests. One such round-up appeared on the same page that carried the story on the Notre Dame game. Each individual report began with the result in bold type.
One, for example, was UConn 40, Army 3. It continued: Dan Orlovsky threw for 288 yards and four touchdowns to lead Connecticut.
The young sports reporter featured in that video I show in "Writing for the Media" acknowledges that writing game stories is a necessary part of his job. But he observes that he prefers to write feature stories because he can go into more depth on the people involved in the games he covers. The approach to writing sports feature stories is the same as the approach to all feature stories. It involves a keen curiosity about the world of sports in all its ramifications. Writing feature stories is a great opportunity for the reporter who loves sports: he or she can explore any subject that interests him or her and that will interest the readers.
"I think Barrett was one of the first to realize that news for the air has to be written differently. We were all ex-newspapermen, and he quickly taught us how to adapt our style to the new medium. He edited every story we wrote, eliminating the old newspaper clichιs and making our copy listenable."
Let me list some of the key characteristics of broadcast writing, characteristics that make it different from newspaper writing. First of all, as I've noted above, broadcast writing is generally much shorter than newspaper writing. The writer for radio or television must boil down a story to its essentials. (If you've followed the discussion of writing hard-news leads, by the way, you'll realize that a broadcast writer is doing what the newspaper reporter is doing in crafting a hard-news leads: summarizing the story.) I suggest to students who are rewriting a newspaper story for broadcast that they take advantage of the summarizing that has already been done in the lead of the newspaper story.
Like the entire story, the sentences in a broadcast story are short. The newspaper writer turning to broadcast writing should, therefore, be well-prepared. The newspaper reporter, after all, is already accustomed to writing short sentences. Nonetheless, a comparison of the same story written for newspaper and broadcast will generally show that the sentences in the broadcast version are even shorter than those in the newspaper version. Why are the sentences even shorter? Because they are being written for the ear, not the eye. The listener can not go back to read a sentence again.
The structure of broadcast sentences is also dictated by the fact that the sentences are meant for listeners, not readers. I'll make the argument in a few pages that newspaper reporters and editors ought to know their grammar. Do you remember sentence structure from your early training in grammar? There are simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. Broadcast writers prefer the simple sentence (a subject and a verb in a group of words that can stand by themselves) and the compound sentence (more than one subject and verb in two or more groups of words that can stand by themselves).
You can see that I am trying to simplify terms here. A simple sentence, to use the grammatical terms, is one independent clause; a compound sentence is two or more independent clauses. In effect, a garden-variety compound sentence is two simple sentences separated by "and," "but" or one of the other five coordinating conjunctions: "or," "so," "for," "nor," and "yet." So a broadcast writer who uses a compound sentence with "and" as the conjunction is simply offering a variation on the parade of simple sentences.
There is no doubt that a broadcast writer is at liberty to use occasionally a compound sentence, one that has at least one subordinate, or dependent, clause. Take as an example: Transit police responded swiftly after the bomb exploded. This is an independent clause followed by a dependent clause. The listener should have no trouble following it. What should be almost always avoided is the compound sentence that begins with a subordinate, or dependent, clause. When a writer uses that construction, the listener, who may be about to go out the door or turn off the radio, might not hear the main point of the sentence.
Attribution is another matter that is dealt with differently in broadcast writing. In newspaper writing, the reporter is free to put the name of the person quoted at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the sentence. The broadcast writer should also use the name first. (When I say name, by the way, I should note that the source might be described by his or her function rather than by name in a broadcast story. It might, for example, be a spokesperson for X Corporation rather than Harriet Doe, the public affairs director of X Corporation.) Why does the source go first? Again, it comes back to listenability. The broadcast writer should not make the listener wait to hear the source for a string of words. The listener then has no context for what he or she is hearing, and, as we noted above, he or she might be about to go out the door or turn off the radio.
Not all good writers are good at spelling. The key thing, as far as spelling is concerned, is to know your abilities. If you're not good at spelling, you can find a variety of lists of frequently misspelled words and work at memorizing them. More importantly, you should use the spell checker religiously, keep a dictionary at hand, and have a second person read your copy for spelling errors. Remember that the spell checker can not help you use a word correctly if there are several versions of that word. The spell checker won't tell you that "your" should be "you're" because "your," of course, is a perfectly good word and correctly spelled in this example.
Knowing when to use "your" is a matter of correct usage. Many books, including almost all of the handbooks assigned in freshman composition courses, have lists of frequently misused words, such as lie and lay. It's worth spending some time with one of those lists.
I find that many college students have forgotten basic grammatical terms and principles. They don't know, for example, the difference between the various tenses or the difference between an independent clause and a subordinate clause. Knowing those things, you might be thinking, is important to an English teacher but not to a journalist. Wrong, I say. How does one recognize and correct a fragment or a run-on sentence, for example, without understanding independent and subordinate clauses? Or how does one keep the tenses in a story consistent if one doesn't know the tenses?
A serious journalist, in my opinion, should have at his or her fingertips a good grammar book. One I recommend is listed on Page X. Lacking a grammar book, the writer might make do with a freshman handbook or with one of the other general writing books, also listed on Page 50.
For each of the assignments I give in basic journalism course I compile what I call a "sampling," a page listing some of the mistakes I've found in reading the stories submitted for that particular assignment. In addition to errors in attribution and the punctuation of quotes, I find these to be the most common errors in language use:
-- Failure to use an apostrophe with possessive nouns. Some students write about todays weather rather than about today's weather. As I write this, incidentally, my computer has underlined the incorrect version above. Take advantage of the help built into your word-processing program. If you have a problem with possessives, look at every word in your story that ends in "s" and ask yourself whether the word is a possessive or a simple plural.
-- The missing apostrophe is a fairly common error, but it is not nearly so common as what English teachers call the comma splice. Students mistakenly use a comma to join two independent clauses. Here's an example from my samplings: "'It's painful to give bad grades to students, I don't like students to feel demoralized,' X said." That first comma is wrong. Best in newspaper writing to replace it with a period. The other ways to join correctly two independent clauses are with a semicolon or with a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction like "and" or "but."
-- Also common in students' stories are misused words. Here are a few examples, again taken from my samplings: "it's" for "its"; "effect" for "affect"; "there" for "their" or "they're"; "use" for "used"; "sight" for "site"; "laying" for "lying"; "to" for "too"; "loose" for "lose." Students who have done a lot of reading are not as likely as non-readers to make those kinds of mistakes. But avid reader or not, you can improve your word usage by spending time with those lists of commonly confused words I've referred to above.
In his column, McDermott cited a reader who complained that the newspaper's use of the term, "antiabortion," was "a sleight-of-hand trick to sway the mind of the reader against the pro-life movement." McDermott noted that his newspaper was following the stylebook, which says to use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.
McDermott included in his column a little style test. Is it, for example, WallMart, Walmart, WalMart, Wal-Mart, or Wal-mart? Is it doughnut or donut? Is it Daylight savings time, daylight-savings time, or daylight-saving time? A look at the stylebook would show that it's Wal-Mart, doughnut, and daylight-saving time.
It is not important, in my opinion, for a reporter to know the rules of style. It is important, however, that he or she know where and how to find them. The where is easy. The rules are found, as I've already said, in The Associated Press Stylebook. With just a little bit of practice, the how is easy too. The stylebook is organized as an alphabetical reference book with the addition of several special sections: one on business usage, one on sports usage, and one on the basic law of libel.
Let's take an example from the main section. Suppose you wanted to know your newspaper's style for the title of a Catholic priest. Let's say you were writing something about Father John Dean, the longtime chaplain at my own college, Westfield State. Knowing that the book is organized as a reference work, you might go to "Titles" or to "Priests" or perhaps to "Clergy." With just a bit of tenacity, you would eventually find that on first reference, a Catholic priest should have the title of "the Rev." In our example, then, Father Dean would be the Rev. John Dean. Another entry would show that on second reference, a newspaper following AP style would refer to Father Dean simply as Dean.
My text for "Writing for the Media," a required basic course for all communication majors at Westfield State, is Mass Media Writing: An Introduction by Gail Baker-Woods and a number of other authors, published by Gorsuch Scarisbrick. That book, in addition to dealing with newspaper and broadcast writing, touches on writing public relations and advertising copy. Here are some other books that should be useful for the journalism student:
-- The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.
-- On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
-- The Rinehart Guide to Grammar and Style by Bonnie Carter and Craig Skates.
-- The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing by Rene J. Cappon.
Also of value to journalists and journalism students are a number of web pages. One of them, to take an example, is www.notrain-nogain.org. This site, designed specifically for newsroom trainers, provides a number of handouts on writing, editing, and reporting. The page says most of the trainers involved in the web site are active participants in the Training Editors Conference and the listserv NewsCoach, both hosted by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Students may find other links to web pages on my home page, which is a link on your WebCT home page.
-- Begin with your name (or initials) and a slug, separated by a double space, in the upper lefthand corner of the first take, or page. A slug is a two- or three-word description of the story's subject. Examples of slugs could be downtown burglary, campus rape, and school board meeting.
-- Drop about a third of the way down the page and begin the story. (This practice resulted from the fact that editors needed space for directions to the printers in the composing room who would turn the copy into type. The printers would have to know, for example, the size of the type the story should be set in, the page on which the story would appear, and the headline slug so the story and its headline could be matched up.)
-- Double space.
-- At the bottom of any page except the last, center the word "more" in parentheses to indicate that more copy is to come.
-- At the end of the story, center one of these end marks: #, -end-, and -30-.
-- To correct mistakes in hard copy, use copy-editing symbols. Students in my classes get a handout describing the copy-editing symbols if their texts do not have such a description.