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?