What a bunch of wusses!

There is apparently something in New York called The Writers Room that rents space to writers and would-be writers to give them a place to work. A pretty cool concept, I think. But it's obviously populated with a bunch of wusses. Yep. Wusses. This article in the New York Daily News reports that a member of this little colony has been voted out because he uses, get this, a typewriter. Apparently the delicate nerves of the rest of the writers in this little colony are just too sensitive to deal with the muscular sound of words being slammed into shape by metal keys striking paper. Poor babies.

What's really funny is that the logo for The Writers Room is--get this--in a typewriter font!

It seems member Skye Ferrante took an eight-month hiatus from lugging his mother's 1929 Royal typewriter to his spot there and found, upon his return to the space he pays $1,400 a year for, that those in charge at The Writers Room had decided that all of the typewriter users had finally died off and such things would no longer be welcome in the quiet as can be confines of this high-minded colony of writers. They did relent and allow Ferrante to keep coming until his deal runs out at the end of June. Well, that was sure swell of them.

I know we all approach that scary void that is writing in different ways. Believe it or not, I still do rough drafts with a fountain pen and I even have some manual typewriters here I use to write rough drafts, letters and other things. I also compose on the computer many times but it's usually not my best work and it's usually not meant to be. My computer keyboard is where the workaday writing gets done. For things I care about, the best place to start is always with words directly on paper. I've got many reasons for that and chief among them is the ease of the delete key. I find many times I would like to have back words I deleted when I got distracted by the temptation to edit before my work was finished. I've already written about this process here in this blog, so I'll not go much deeper there--just scroll down.

I am prejudiced by my background here. I entered the newsroom after the days of typewriters on reporters' desks but not by much. And I learned to write under all kinds of pressure in a room without even the silencing effect of cubicles. It was just a bunch of desks shoved tight against each other and every desk was occupied by a reporter who was constantly talking on the phone, typing madly on the noisy keyboards of the early days of desktops and, oftentimes, the cacophony of reporters listening to tapes of interviews to try to double-check quotes on deadline. There was a copy desk still attached to the engraving department with pneumatic tubes. It was a noisy place and I cranked out 300 bylined stories a year in that din. And I never noticed. My words were always there in my head not hanging in that mid-air confusion of sound and furious activity.

Poor babies. They have to sit there in pristine silence with their own precious thoughts so ethereal that they could just drift away in the noise of someone banging those typewriter keys. Poor babies. I'm so sorry that writing is such a painful process like a migraine headache that requires a retreat to a dark, silent room to wrestle with the agony of getting words on the LCD. I'm sure their muses are such soft whispers that the sound of toilets flushing on the next floor up could drown out the most precious of nuggets of literary gold. Poor babies. It must be such a pity to have that thought stream broken by the sound of the doorknob being turned every time someone new enters the colony for a day's work. And, oh my God! That rustling sound of them taking off their coats! Really! I can't see how anybody can work in an environment so beset with noises that fracture the delicate dew-coated spiderwebs of words hanging right there in the mind. Poor babies.

Wusses.

We'll Make it Up on Volume

Newsweek is up for sale. Another in a long series of media tales of collapse and change. The clip below from The Daily Show features the editor of Newsweek talking about the announcement of the sale and what it means, in his eyes, from the perspective of what is being lost in America as more of the traditional journalism outlets consolidate, shrink, close and simply drift away. Jon Stewart, as always, is razor sharp in pointing out the many realities of the world around him. And, in this case, it strikes me as being critical in that he notes that the "Emperor has no clothes" observation to be made about content aggregators is that they will have nothing to aggregate if nobody is around to do works of journalism. And we are fast approaching that time.

Meacham also notes that it's impossible to do quality journalism if people are unwilling to pay for it. And if that becomes the case, the audience will get exactly what it pays for--FOX News. All opinion and no reporting. Comment and analysis without journalism is empty. A meaningless, uninformed shell for deliberately uninformed people. And I think it's sad to face a potential reality of an American public that goes in a generation from being daily consumers--willing to pay for it--of news and information into an uninformed, easily inflamed, unthinking mob. I can remember the daily newspaper that showed up at my parent's house everyday. And we were clearly a working-class family complete with my mother being a stay-home mom and my dad carrying a lunch box out the door every day along with the tools of his carpentry and brick mason trades. No elites here. And at 6 p.m. every night, it was the local TV news from stations in the closest cities followed by the network news. We were an NBC household so it wasn't Uncle Walter.

I'm not advocating the clinging to print journalism. I think print on paper has lots of life left in it but it is much less life than we used to think and I believe that print will continue to shrink as the ad revenues that support continue to wither. But I also think that we have to get back to seeing that there is value in hard work and reporting. You can't aggregate what isn't there and, as Meacham points out, we don't see any of these various aggregators getting rich and building Rupert Murdoch style empires on content aggregation. It's as empty as the dot-com bubble with all of those companies that were losing money on every transaction who justified it with the statement that is at the head of this entry.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jon Meacham
www.thedailyshow.com
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Long days

As we slide toward summer (thermometer says we're already there in Georgia!), I'm struck by how discombobulating the day length is after that time change a few weeks ago. As I work to finish my workdays, I'm thrown off by how light it is outside and I have to keep an eye on the time or my mind-clock waits until twilight begins to creep and I find myself still at my desk at 8 p.m.

I wonder when  most writers find themselves at their most productive? Is it the long daylight days of summer or does it take the dark, long, cold nights of winter to put writers in their chairs banging away at their work? I've always been either fortunate or unfortunate in that my writing was dictated by a paying job that required regular output. Daily newspapers were kind of funny that way--they came out everyday regardless of the number of hours of sunlight available. But I also know that those papers we put out in July and August were challenged for news in many cases as it seems folks just slowed down and stretched out across all of those hours of daylight like some chaise lounge on a shady porch. Being in the Southeastern U.S. likely influences that a great deal--who wants to be out there in the 90-degree, 90-percent humidity doing something newsworthy? No wonder we had lots of pictures of kids in pools and eating ice cream in our local sections along with short stories about the heat and the lack of rain.

I've often wondered when I'm at my most creative with words. I think my production and ability to create is stunted in the long days. Heat. Humidity. Too much to do outdoors. It's hard to say. Maybe my mind gets muddled by the heat and the distractions of sunny days. Or maybe it takes the short daylight days to put me at my desk like Bob Crachit scribbling away.

So, as I look out at the green-yellow cloud that covers Atlanta in the spring, I'm wondering where all the words went.

Some words are ugly ...

In watching the zoo that is our nation's capital this week, I've been reminded that not all words are good words. And I'm not talking about the "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" of George Carlin fame. No, I'm talking about how we have seen reasoned debate sucked from the public square like a mobile home in a tornado. Instead we have people standing outside Congress shouting racial epithets and making slurs about any number of groups that they have decided stand against them. We have a Congressman yelling "babykiller" and later apologizing saying that he wasn't talking about the person who was speaking at the time. Well, are we really that stupid or does the Congressman just hope we are?

I'm a Southerner. I've grown up hearing the ugliest of words used in everyday conversation during my childhood years. I've been happy to hear those words slowly disappear from the public discourse over my lifetime. And I'm saddened beyond measure to hear them back again. And while I understand the decision-making process in the national media when it comes to covering these protest groups, I also hold them accountable for not revealing more to us just exactly what these protesters are. Racists. People of hate. Screaming toddlers standing in the public square yelling "Mine!" and "No!" at the top of their lungs. Spoiled children. And they are not the heirs to the legacy of the Founding Fathers nor are they the heirs to the generation that bled, died, and sacrificed for the freedom of the entire world only 60 years ago. No, they are not. Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Madison, Hamilton--all were men who believed with their very souls that the ultimate good they could do was to serve their country. Not to stand on the sideline and hurl ugly words at the ones who have chosen to sacrifice and serve their country. To travel on good roads, fly into safe airports and stand behind the protection of police officers on the public payroll and act like spoiled toddlers is the ultimate in hypocritical selfishness.

I believe that there is legitimate debate in our public square. I believe we have serious policy issue discussions to be had. But I don't think standing outside the nation's seat of representative government and using racial epithets is any of that. I think it's spoiled children who are too immature to carry on a reasoned debate. Grow up America. Your ancestors are ashamed at how some of you are behaving today.

Yes, some words are just ugly.

Survival is a strong urge

Meet Uno. In recent weeks, this pine warbler has become quite the center of attention for our household.

He first came to my notice a few weeks ago when (I hope) the last spasms of cold weather from an already cold winter were gripping the Southeast U.S. I had scattered some birdseed across the top railing on the deck while filling up the feeders and I noticed this bright yellow pine warbler sitting there in the pile of seed. Not standing, sitting. He was comfortably plopped in the seed with his belly on the rail and his feet tucked underneath. I thought that was odd as most of our birds hop around on the railing and forage for the seed I leave behind as I'm filling the various feeders on the deck. I went back to washing my hands and fixing coffee and didn't pay much attention to the outside scene for a few minutes.

After getting my coffee made, I looked again and it occurred to me that something was different about this particular pine warbler. He had only one leg. The right leg was drawn up tight against his belly and he was hopping around on one leg. Observations over the next few days confirmed we had a one-legged pine warbler who was coming regularly to our back deck. He wasn't able to get to the feeders like the other birds as he couldn't manipulate the claw on his right leg. He could, however, hang on to the suet feeders with one leg long enough to get a few bites and he was pretty good about foraging on the deck for spillage.

A few days later, I pointed out this bird to my wife, Amy. She began to watch for him and we began to put a soft suet--called Bark Butter--on the top of the deck railing for him and the other birds as it was still cold outside. The Bark Butter can be spread with the back of a fork against the vertical railings on the deck, across the rail on top and even into the bark of a tree--thus the name. As it turned out, the pine warbler loves Bark Butter. So much so that he came up to Amy one day--he's quite brave--and snatched some off the fork as she held it out toward him.

Well, that was the start. As you can see from the photo above, he is a very brave pine warbler. This photo is of Amy's mother visiting recently to feed the bird I've come to call Uno. Within a day of the incident with the fork, Amy had him regularly coming to her finger to snatch off bits of Bark Butter. He would hop away a bit, eat that and then return. Sometimes he doesn't even wait for us to get to the rail--instead flying right at us and hovering just long enough to grab the treat and fly off into the trees to enjoy it.

So, there's Uno. About three times a day--sometimes more--he will land on the deck railing and look at us expectantly awaiting his favorite treat. When I go out into the yard with the dog he will come to the deck and sit and look at me. He'll wait patiently while I go inside and get the Bark Butter and come out with some on my finger. He'll dance nervously on the rail and then confidently come up and grab some off the end of my finger. He still likes Amy best but, as the photo attests, he has become quite fond of all of us as long as we produce the Bark Butter.

The Overwhelming Potential of the Weekend

I have a son who thinks the most perfect Saturday imaginable is one spent entirely in his pajamas. I can remember how much I used to love Sunday afternoons after church when I could spend hours with a Sunday paper scattered across the floor into two somewhat organized piles of the sections I had read and those I had not yet read with another pile for the slick-paper inserts from which I had rescued the comics and Parade. I'm not sure I could spend hours with any Sunday paper I've seen lately without pharmaceuticals being involved.

I kind of like my kid's approach. I look around and weekends are becoming more and more like the other five days. A headlong rush of things that have to be done--not to mention that many of us spend at least part of a weekend working in these stressed, job poor times. Boy, wouldn't it be great to just decide to spend those Saturdays--especially these daylight-starved winter ones--in your pajamas? Maybe get a stack of magazines and pile them up around you in the floor and just read and sip on coffee.

I also look at this and think about how hard it is to write in such a world as ours. Now I'm not stranger to "get it out" writing as I spent lots of times in the newsrooms of daily newspapers. Life on the city desk of any daily newspaper is not a place of reflection and time spent lost in thought. But, even then, we had cycles as we didn't have the ever-present Internet that can be filled at any time with new copy. No, we had deadlines, editions and we days that closed out when final edition came off the press. Then it was time to breathe, think about what you had accomplished, read the product of your hard work and move on. But that is gone with today's world and I wonder if writing hasn't suffered much for it. Good writing requires a little bit of "soak time" to get the words out as you want them to be. While I'm not a slavish writer who goes through draft after draft--that's obvious enough from reading my work--I'm also noticing more and more that my writing is suffering at the hands of e-mail and instant communication. I fail all too often to actually go back and read what I wrote. And rare is the time when I set aside a piece of work and return to it with fresh eyes and a mind chilled from the fevered moments of creation. There's no time.

So, look at that weekend not as something to be filled in but, rather, as something to be lived in. Like a pair of comfortable pajamas. And, when you write, it's not a race to fill in that screen--or page if you're old-fashioned like me.

Who Do You Know?

"In an e-mail exchange with a friend of mine this morning, he was marveling at how I seem to be able to come up with experts when he needs one. Exact words: "It never ceases to amaze me who Richard knows." And I had to smile when I read this--not that smile of smug satisfaction, by the way.

No, I smiled because my friend had just defined what journalism is all about. Do journalists need to know lots of things and become subject matter experts in a wide range of areas? Of course not. I will take a journalist with a fat list of contacts over a know-it-all any day. It truly is a case of who you know versus what you know. I think good journalists are always looking for one more source, one more contact and one more person to add to their database.

Which brings me to the next thing in a good journalist's arsenal. The next best thing to knowing somebody who knows something is to know somebody who knows somebody who does. I've often said some of my best sources are ones I never quote in my articles. Instead, these are the people I can call any time and know that they will be able to tell me exactly the person I should call to get an answer to my question. Then they proceed to give me that person's contact information and offer me the option of saying that they said to call. Priceless.

The Brown Shoe Problem

Well, I always have to explain this one. It kind of follows the theme lately--under the category of phoning it in. The Brown Shoe Problem refers to something that is barely adequate and doing the least that is necessary to get by. In this instance I'm referring to the art of writing headlines.

Brown shoes are just that. Not all that interesting but they are shoes. Simple, plain, sturdy and kind of uninteresting. A Brown Shoe Headline Problem is also all of that. Favorite examples are things like: "City Council Meets" and "Legislature Considers Budget." There are many other headlines like that. Well, you know, they are accurate. The city council meets most all the time and the function of most legislatures is to consider a budget. But those headlines aren't all that interesting are they. They pretty much scream out "Don't Read Me!" or perhaps "Really Boring Article Under Here!"

Deadlines are wicked things. They force us to often do work that is good enough and to just get it out. On the Internet this is more true than ever, I suppose. But if you're writing something that is as interesting and compelling as a brown shoe, why bother? If the City Council met and spent three hours doing nothing but talk why not a headline that says so. I bet one headline that says: "City Council Talks Much, Does Little Tuesday Night" will see some more action on future agendas. Or, how about, "Legislature Talks Much; Plans to Spend More and Can't Say Why." Now that's a headline. Ultimate headline? "Read This or Die Now."

I think when it comes to writing and just facing those production pressures it's always easy to fall into the Brown Shoe Problem. And I fully understand those pressures. Believe me, I've written many headlines that just didn't sing. But it wouldn't hurt if, just every once in awhile, we all sat down and spent just a few minutes on those headlines. And, I'll bet, a few minutes on headlines would result in some rewriting of ledes and top grafs in our copy. And that is a nice Italian loafer.

Cops and Reporters

I noticed that former Greenville, S.C., Police Chief Mike Bridges has died. The photo here is from the Greenville News and was shot in his office--an office I remember well from my days as a young reporter at the The Greenville Piedmont, a now defunct afternoon newspaper.

My mornings during my shifts as a cops reporter would start by working my way through Greenville County's Law Enforcement Center, which housed the city's police department as well as much of the county's sheriff's office and the detention center. It was a one-stop cop shop for a reporter. And one of the routines of my morning rounds would involving having Chief Bridges wave to me from his office and ask me to come in and chat. Weather, news, sports, local government, what's going on--all were the topics on Chief Bridges' mind. But there was also an open door there that he wanted to make sure I understood. You have a question? Ask it. You want to know what I think about something? Ask me. Chief Bridges was always ready to talk and add his expertise or simply his opinion.

At the same time, I had pretty much unfettered access to his detectives, officers and department leaders. There was no asking permission to talk to me. Bridges trusted his officers, trusted his leadership and trusted me to talk to him if something didn't seem right. And he was always perfectly willing to say "I can't talk about that now but I will when I can." I respected that and understood the game. He also understood that I'd likely try to find my answers elsewhere and he would frequently hint as to where I might find them.

And, like any good cop, Chief Bridges had a wicked sense of humor and was quick to use it. It was sneaky and it was often unexpected as he was, after all, a serious man with a serious job. Cop humor is not subtle. Was there tension? Absolutely. There should be when journalism meets public officials. But Bridges was a quick study. He restricted the use of high-speed chases in his department. He used community policing tactics that included officers on horseback and bicycles. He encouraged his officers to find ways to solve problems that didn't involve the use of force and he had his department accredited by national policing organizations with strict rules about police procedures. He understood that public trust was much more to be desired than fear. His leaders were opinionated, plain spoken and quick to point out problems both in the department and in the community.

Rest in peace Chief Bridges. And thanks for your patience a long time ago when I'm sure I had no idea what I was doing.

Phoning it in

So, after watching another half-inch of rainfall in Georgia I was feeling kind of jealous of my neighbors to the north who got snow. Lots of it, apparently. I went off in search of some snow coverage at the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper's website. I found lots of pictures there and the usual coverage you'd expect to find of a major snowstorm moving through the Southern Appalachian ridgetops. Road closings, events cancelled--good stuff.

I also found some great photos from Friday night (29 January 2010) that were taken by, I'm guessing, staff photographers at the Citizen-Times. Nice photos of downtown in the snow with folks walking around, cars on the move and various public landmarks covered in snow. At least that is what I gathered from the first of the 41 photos. The second part of the batch has no cutlines (captions to non-newspaper folk) other than:

"Snow continued to fall steadily on downtown Asheville Friday evening."

Yes, 23 photographs that all had the same information attached to the them. The other photos in the package are nicely differentiated by information provided by the photographer as to location, what's going on in the photo, etc. The usual kind of stuff. Photographer No. 2, however, doesn't seem to like having to go out in the snow nor does he think much of having to actually help out his readers by giving them some information about what he took pictures of. Phoning it in. Why do all the work? Why bother? Why have a job? I will say some of the photos are nice and, for all I know, the second photographer could be an intern. I don't know. But what I do know is that he did the work, took the pictures and left the reader hanging. Twenty-three photos all with the same cutline.

Maybe I've got a theme going here. Maybe I'm becoming a cranky old guy like I always knew I would. But to work on writing and words requires some effort. And the same holds true for transmitting a story through photographs. A Friday afternoon snowstorm is a nice photo essay topic. Towns in the mountains like Asheville see snow but not like those in, say, West Virginia or New Hampshire. A heavy snowfall in Asheville is news and it presents some great photo opportunities and the ability to convey that is enhanced by the web and it's lack of space restrictions.

The problem with phoning it in is simple. If you, the one doing the work, are thinking "Why bother?" it is a certain bet your reader will too. And, if that's the case, why bother?

Beatitudes Wordle from Wordle.net

More outsmarting ourselves?

I was talking to an editor friend of mine recently about some writers who work for her. She was complaining about output from her staff--or, to be more accurate, the complete nonexistence of output from her staff. I was walking through the process her writers were using and I was frankly dumbfounded to find that none of them ever took notes. Nope. They recorded all of their interviews and then transcribed the interviews before beginning work on the finished piece.

I think my answer to that would be to pick up the recording device and drop it in a bucket of water and ask the writer where the story is now. But I've been accused of management tactics akin to Bobby Knight so I'd advise not following my example there.

And the more I thought about that problem, the more it occurred to me what the real issue was. The massive wasting of time in transcribing and and then writing is only one part of it. And it's actually the minor piece of the puzzle. The real problem is that little electronic backup in the form of the digital recording means the writer isn't listening during the interview. I've watched such writers work from typed up lists of questions hammering through the interview like a contestant on Iron Chef. They aren't listening to what is being said in those answers and they don't dare deviate from the script to respond to what the interview subject has said. In fact, you can see them ignoring anything that doesn't match what is on the list of questions.

One of my favorite stories about young reporters involves Edna Buchanan, the long-time crime reporter in Miami. She is a wonderful writer and reporter and is known for asking all the right questions and her writing reflects a sharp wit and keen eye. And early in her career she had to write up a story about a local official being found dead in his car from an apparent suicide. It was a straight ahead piece--who, how, where, why, and covered the meaning of the death in terms of what the person did. But her competitor had asked one more question and it turns out the male official was wearing a woman's clothes when the body was found. One question. An open ear and an open mind that let the story tell itself and not have it told before the interview begins. So, while that electronic back up is grinding away, the reporter is grinding through the process of the interview. Process is what makes sausage--not good writing and reporting.

Taking notes is old-fashioned. It's hard work. It requires that you truly capture what the person is saying and listen carefully. It requires that you think on the fly and know what to write down and what to leave out. It means keeping a space in the margin to note the spot on the counter so you can go back and find the spot on the recording you need to double check a direct quote. As a reporter, I was careful but I also rarely went back and listened to the tapes of my interviews. I had my notes. And we did use tapes then and I often found the tape a garble of background noise such as squeaking chairs, coughs in the background, sounds in the newsroom and God knows what else. But my notes were clear. Precise. And I could rip through them in minutes to find what I needed and get my work done. As a reporter I was doing more than 300 bylined stories a year. I didn't have time to transcribe interviews.

But I also think it made me a careful listener. And it made me ask follow up questions if for no reason other than to slow a subject down so I could capture the information. It also allowed me to ask questions in more than one way so I could get the best answer from my interview subject and allow them to restate their ideas to make them clearer or to further flesh them out. And when I pick up publications today all I can see is those unasked questions in the articles I read. And, now, I wonder if it's not dependence on those recordings that have rendered so much of today's journalism brain numb and question poor.

Tools of the Trade?

I've been having a conversation by letter recently with a friend of mine who is still held captive in the newspaper business. So, of course, the topic of conversation is often about words and writing. He's amazed that I use fountain pens and manual typewriters as much as I do for letter writing and other writing tasks.
In fact, if I'm writing something that I find important for whatever reason, I use these tools as first-draft implements. I often write things out longhand on legal pads and then do my first editing work as I type it all into the computer. On the surface it seems like more work to do it that way but I'm finding I get better results and a smoother finished piece when I start that way. I've also done the same with one of the many manual typewriters here.

Now, of course, I collect both of those implements and have more than my share. So at some level it's a juicy rationalization to say it improves my writing to use these tools. But I'm not alone, writertypes on ebay sells lots of beautifully restored typewriters and all of the ones he lists includes a long explanation of why using a typewriter is superior for writing as opposed to simply word-processing. He notes the computer is indispensable once the first draft is done and the first edits are done by hand on that draft. And I agree.
The most wonderful thing about computer word-processors is that "delete" key. It's also the most awful thing about them. The temptation to edit on the fly is too great and you can get locked up spending excessive time on one sentence and never move forward. You can also lose good work to that delete key and never be able to write it again as well as you did the first time.

We are all familiar with the cut and paste function on our word-processors. But we have lost the reasoning behind such a function. It used to be writers would write things and then discover they fit better somewhere else in their work, so they would literally cut them out with scissors and paste them into the right spot with rubber cement. I've seen pictures of copy desks from long ago with giant rubber cement pots set in the middle of all of those blue-pencil folk working over copy and making those cryptic editing and proofreading marks all over them. And I also think about how much better edited newspapers were in those days without the sloppiness that comes with spell check and other automation--not to mention the added workload dumped on those folks because of those innovations. Anyway, back to cut and paste. If you've deleted all of that work, you've got nothing to cut and paste. While zipping along you thought: "That just doesn't go there" as you hit that delete key. Five paragraphs later, you find you know exactly where that thought does go but now it's gone. Lost to the delete key. And, try with all that is in you, you'll never get it back exactly as you wrote it before.

So, tools of the trade. Have we outsmarted ourselves as writers?