Want to elevate your story? No better way than asking why

I think the most difficult question reporters seek to answer is also the most important one. Every kid learns to answer the five Ws in middle school, four of which are general stock of every local news story.

Sometimes it’s an interesting exercise to figure out which Ws are the most important. Sometimes it’s easy — a car crash is a story about what, where and when. Sites like TMZ rely solely on who. Stories about New Year’s Eve babies are all about the when.

More often than not, the question of why falls through the cracks.

Sometimes it should. Why was that baby born on New Years’? Because her parents got frisky sometime in March. Not an important piece of the story.

Why did Iggy Azalea/Justin Bieber/John Travolta/Billy Joel get into that argument/fight/lawsuit/car crash/whatever? Probably because he/she was drunk.

But more often than not, the why gets short shrift.

If a reporter wants to elevate their work, the first step should be to ask why whatever happened happened, and seek to explain that within the reportage. Why is the politician being indicted? That’s an easy one, and the answer goes into the lede.

“Why did the cars crash” may be more difficult to answer, and may require comment from the police or witnesses.

It gets harder on enterprise pieces — there may be no news peg — but that is often why enterprise articles feel untethered. Why are we writing this story? “Because we had the information and want to do something with it,” is not a good enough answer.

Take, for example, a story about the most accident prone roads in the area. You have a neat visualization, a map and a hunk of data to inform it all. Where is taken care of. What and When are obvious, but Why is more elusive.

Why are there so many accidents in those particular spots? If the answer is, “Because there are too many cars on the road,” all of a sudden your story may be about the growth in the use of cars, not which intersections may be the most dangerous.

At worst, your “why” has just muddied the story with context. But without a passing glance at “why” these roads are in such bad shape the story remains dry and technical — sharing numbers and stats like they mean something on their own.

So, the why of things can be challenging, but if the goal is to elevate a story there is no better way than to ask yourself “why.”

Defeating Skynet with creativity and flexibility

If journalists lose their jobs to the robots, they only have themselves to blame.

Recently on NPR's Fresh Air, Dave Davies interviewed author Martin Ford about his new book, "Rise Of The Robots: Technology And The Threat Of A Jobless Future." Journalists have been hearing about robot-written stories for a long time, and many news agencies, like Forbes, have been using automated content production for years.
As Ford told Davies:

They're generating thousands and thousands of stories. In fact, the number I heard was about one story every 30 seconds is being generated automatically. And they appear on a number of websites and in the news media. Forbes is one that we know about. Many of the others that use this particular service aren't eager to disclose of that.

Ford even went so far as to read a computer-produced sports piece, written by software and published online:

Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday. Guerrero drove in two Angel runners. He went 2-4 at the plate. Quote, "when it comes down to honoring Nick Adenhart, what happened in April in Anaheim, yes, it was probably the biggest hit of my career," Guerrero said, "because I'm dedicating that to a former teammate, a guy that passed away"

Ford does not discuss who actually input the data itself — how the computer obtained the quote — but a future in which "journalism" consists merely of obtaining data and feeding it, punch-card-style, into Multivac is totally possible, and not too far off.

What's the solution? How do we forestall the robot apocalypse? How do we stop Skynet before the Terminator is sent back in time to kill Johannes Gutenberg?

First of all, I say, we have only ourselves and our inflexibility to blame. That software-written sports story above, or a million sports and news pieces like it, might have been written by any sports or news reporter across the country, and it has.

Journalism, perhaps owing to the sense of importance felt so strongly by journalists, has long become formulaic, more a matter of automobile assembly than the painting of a masterpiece, or the interpretation of that masterpiece.

I think the solution — at least the short-term solution (long-term, the robots will win) — is to shed tell that gamer in a completely new and inviting way. Tell that town budget story in a way a robot couldn't conceive of. The robots can write what happened, but it is up to us to explain why it mattered, and to tell the story in a way that convinces readers of that fact.

That, a robot cannot do, yet.

Creating dimension in stories using technology

One of the tools offered by Knightlab at NU is a method of embedding sounds. I am hoping to use it on a coyote-mapping project. SoundCite will enable us to hear the sounds of the coyotes we're writing about.

The project involves generating a crowdsourced map of coyote sightings. Embedding the sounds will enable us to bring readers into the experience

This is one way I am hoping to tell better stories, with more dimensions.

Recently, working with reporter Akiko Matsuda, we generated a storymap (below), using another of Knightlab's tools. We thought it might be an interesting way of telling a local story, without using traditional reportage.

Translating jargon into something interesting for all (or more, anyway)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about languages and translation, and no, I’m not talking about a problem Google Translate might solve.

I mean the problem of jargon. It’s endemic to local daily news organizations, who tend to write for everyone “in the know.”

It’s not just sports departments. Science, education, health, even restaurant and food — all of these topic areas tend to be written using the assumption that the only people who read those articles are already interested and already knowledgeable. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this bacteria seems to thrive in the closed environment of sports.

The following is the second paragraph taken from some volleyball coverage at The Daily Pilot, in beautiful Fountain Valley, California:

“The No. 3-seeded and No. 3-ranked Ramblers, the defending NCAA champions, rallied in the first set, then rumbled to a 25-22, 25-19, 25-17 triumph to end No. 1-ranked and No. 2-seeded UCI's bid for a fifth national crown in nine seasons.”

That sentence is completely inaccessible by anyone other than the relatively very few people who live in the coverage area and follow volleyball closely enough to care. Everybody else might as well be reading instructions on how to code a website.

(I picked the Pilot at random. Any daily news org with regular game coverage would have revealed a similarly difficult paragraph, high up in the story. And, in all fairness to the Pilot, some of their sports coverage, particularly their player profiles, are very well written.)

I believe this is a problem sports departments need to overcome.

Now, let me be clear — I am not suggesting that all sports writing should be Shakespeare. Just accessible. Nor am I suggesting that all sports writing should be Dr. Seuss, just not the athletic equivalent of a DVD player installation manual.

I cannot hope to solve this problem, though I know there are solutions — some of which involve the very construction of news organizations and are way above my pay grade.
Nonetheless, I have put together examples of some of the best sportswriting ever, with a little explanation of what younger sports writers (and science, health, education, food, courts and general topic reporters) can learn from these examples.

4. “Lawdy, Lawdy, He's Great”

By: Mark Kram

What can be learned: Acknowledging flaws and depth to benefit the narrative. Too often, a sense of idolatry comes through in sports pieces. We revere these Gods-among-men, even as we call them bums and blame them for the downfall of polite society. Kram, covering Mohammad Ali, writes how fragile Ali seemed after the fight, which makes the triumph feel all the more, well, triumphant.

Excerpt: “The maddest of existentialists, one of the great surrealists of our time, the king of all he sees, Ali had never before appeared so vulnerable and fragile, so pitiably unmajestic, so far from the universe he claims as his alone. He could barely hold his fork, and he lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, which had been scraped pink.”

3. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”

By: Hunter S. Thompson

What can be learned: Putting yourself in the story. This is not a traditional news piece, and Thompson is really making fun of the Derby rather than celebrating it. But he is the story, as much as the Derby itself. By unabashedly making himself the main character, he turned the story on its head, and made unique and unforgettable.

Excerpt: “In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his name was something or other--"but just call me Jimbo"--and he was here to get it on. "I'm ready for anything, by God! Anything at all. Yeah, what are you drinkin?" I ordered a Margarita with ice, but he wouldn't hear of it: "Naw, naw...what the hell kind of drink is that for Kentucky Derby time? What's wrong with you, boy?" He grinned and winked at the bartender. "Goddam, we gotta educate this boy. Get him some good whiskey..."

I shrugged. "Okay, a double Old Fitz on ice." Jimbo nodded his approval.”

2. “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”

By: John Updike

What can be learned: Setting the scene. Before the reader knows anything about the characters in the story, Updike gives a detailed and complex description of where the story takes place. It sets more than the scene, but the tone and pace of the entire piece. And even if you’ve been to Fenway 100 times, Updike’s eyes are good at picking up the sense of the place.

Excerpt: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters.”

1. “Raised by Women To Conquer Men”

By: Frank Deford

What can be learned: Allowing your characters to drive the story. It’s a story about tennis great Jimmy Connors, that begins with the presumption that there was a time before Connors was a tennis great. He is a human being, not a one-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a sports star, and Deford goes to great lengths to bring all three dimensions into focus.

Excerpt: “A kind of incompleteness plagues Connors. In the big tournaments, the ones he shoots for, he virtually never loses until the finals. What is it there? What seizes him at the last step? There is a flaw somewhere, something that denies him consummation in his life.”

The anatomy of a good story, as told by a professional storyteller

A recent episode of The Gist, a podcast of some wit from Slate's Mike Pesca, featured professional storyteller Matt Dicks.

A veteran of The Moth and himself a professional storyteller and teacher of storytelling, Dicks listened to entries submitted by fans and picks them apart — politely, in a constructive-feedback kind of way — explaining what worked and what didn't.

He's talking about narrative storytelling, not necessarily news, but there's a lot to be learned here. I encourage a listen.

Checklist: 10 Things to Think About When Writing a News Story

I have compiled a list from a wide variety of sources (among them Poynter's Roy Peter Clark and my own executive editor, Traci Bauer) of what I consider to be the top 10 things to keep in mind when you're writing a news story.

There are others, primarily specific to the type of news story that you are writing, and some of the items on this list should be de-emphasized based on circumstance — depth, for example, is not as important on a breaking news story, though I would argue that is true more often than we might think.

This is, in all honesty, my list. Your list might be completely different.

What’s Important

10 Things To Look Out For

Authoritative voice

If NPR was covering the issue on air, would they call you up? Be the definitive source on the subject.

Concise and precise writing

Are you writing what needs to be written or are you padding for inches? Can that extra info be dropped or transformed into a story told in an alternative manner?

Context and perspective

Compare apples to apples, but also look at orchards. And then compare orchards to orchards.

Relevancy

Why does this matter to our readers? Is it relevant to our area? Is it old news?

Depth

Be concise, but plumb what depths need to be plumbed. Ask questions even if you think you already know the answer. A song with one note isn’t a very good song.

Sense of place

These communities are unique -- treat them as such. Give every story a scene.

Time management

Is the story taking too long? Set a deadline and meet it -- maybe you need more than a deadline, maybe you need a timeline looking forward -- a coverage plan.

Varied formatting

How can this story be told in another way? Be creative -- there are tools to be used both online and in the manner in which the story is told.

News peg

A hard news lede might not always be the best course of action, but pegging a feature to something actually happening in the world is preferable.

Solutions

News very often identifies problems. Try identifying a solution, perhaps through a source. Use journalism as a way to fix the world.

Lessons on reporting, from a group of education reporters

One of the best online resources out there for reporters — that I’ve come across, anyway — is the Education Writers’ Association.

It’s a shame they limit their scope in that way, because the resource is worthwhile for every reporter, regardless of what beat they cover. (That being said, education reporters will find the most value here. Such is the way of the world).

There’s a lot to go through on the site in terms of resources, but I particularly like the EWA’s brief on standards and practices. 

I’ll bullet out a few of the best lessons, though I’ll alter them a bit, to make sure the relevance to the wider newsroom isn’t lost.

• First, do no harm. Journalists should be careful not to add to a victim’s trauma or pain when reporting highly sensitive or controversial stories. Sometimes sources and victims lack sophistication concerning the media; other times they may be too traumatized themselves to protect their child adequately. In such cases, reporters must use their own judgment, remembering that safety and well-being should take precedence over competitive media pressures.
• Understand political dynamics. Reporters need to be skillful in detecting when school politics are in play at the local, state, and federal levels. Elected and appointed officials, school board members, teachers’ unions, and administrators all engage in political tugs for control or power. Governors, lawmakers, and mayors sometimes promote specific policies or changes with broader political goals in sight.
• Use technology & social media. Journalists need to be comfortable telling their stories using multiple platforms. They should also be able to generate story ideas and engage readers via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Across all beats, journalists are expected to do more multimedia reporting (online, in print, through video and audio), social media promotion, and online reader engagement.
• Use spreadsheets & database programs. Journalists must possess at least basic proficiency with spreadsheet and database programs. Reporters will also find that knowledge of these programs enhances their ability to sort, summarize, and analyze education-related data of all types
• Report & interview on a broad range of subjects. Journalists must be both specialists and generalists. Most reporters will find they have to cover a broad range of stories, including politics, business, breaking news, and human interest. Beats can (and should) overlap with others. Education can, for example, overlap with politics, social welfare, crime, and economic development. Learn the major sources and issues on those beats as well as your own.

I am, as you might have expected, paraphrasing quite a bit. I have also not delved at all in the “ethics” portion of the “standards and ethics” brief, which is very interesting by itself.