Here’s a story I wrote for Poynter Online today about the challenge news organizations face as they look for new ways to engage the public in political discourse while trying to remain fair and balanced in their own coverage.
You know how much I love comment-generated discussion, so if you have some ideas about the issues addressed in the article, share them in the comments section of this blog or in the feedback section of the article. What are your thoughts about news organizations having political blogs with content submitted by non-journalists who can freely share their opinions? Does it taint the news organization’s image or strengthen it?
The book, “Journalism: The Democratic Craft,” by Roy Peter Clark and G. Stuart Adam, starts off with some great essays about writing. If you’re a writer, or if you care at all about the written word, you should check them out. They are:
A couple of my favorite quotes from these essays are:
* “I felt that to truly render what I saw, I had to define myself as a writer or narrator; I had to reinterpret things.” – Naipaul
* “During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind to deal with the abstract. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on the floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron … and how they looked. A physical fact.” — Didion
* “I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” — Orwell
Amen.
What are some of your favorite essays about writing?
During a “tech talk” yesterday at work, I heard words like “blidget, widget and wiki” being tossed around the room. Some understood what these words meant, but others asked for definitions. Our conversation reminded me of the many discourse communities [PDF] that exist, little language circles of people who speak words known to the limited few within that community. Town officials, for example, often spew off jargon that makes sense to them, but that doesn’t translate well to the written word. When you’re trying to write stories about what happened during a town committee meeting, you want to make it simple enough for readers to understand what you’re talking about; in other words, you want to put it “in plain English.”
But what is plain English nowadays, anyway? There are so many discourse communities that it’s difficult to enter into each of them and try to understand the language their members speak. The languages within these communities doesn’t have to be foreign as we know it, as in Spanish or French. Slang, for instance, is an example of a language that a select few know. The discourse community of people who speak slang is growing, according to a Boston Globe article titled “Talk Amongst Yourselves.” The article noted that modern slang is traveling faster with the help of the Internet and sites like urbandictionary.com. Here is a list of modern slang that accompanied the Globe article. Just for fun, I used all the words in a short story. See if you can understand it:
I’ve got a bad case of the gnar. It’s bunking! It happened when Veronica, an agnorant girl who lives down the street, said, “Listen, I don’t want to break your crayons, but you’re a buster and a butterfaith.” I ignored her and started checking my vitals. Ugh. If she wants to call me those names, she can. She’s just a dandruff anyway. The other day I was earjacking and I heard her say I was an errorist and noob who always flosses and multislacks while pretending to remail. Well, I’ll show her. How dare she pay me out? I’m going federal. Geesh, she doesn’t ever have to worry about me asking her to marinate this weekend. If I confronted her all about it, she’d just spit me back a nonpology. I hate when she swiffs about me. I may not be work hot, but I’ve got presidential tint in my car. Yeah, that’s right. I have presidential tint and I DON’T subwoof like that 100m hottie Veronica.
Chances are, unless you study slang, you don’t know what this story is about. Words can be secret codes. It’s up to authors to determine how much of the code they want to share with readers. Novelists might want to safeguard this code in hopes that readers find their own hidden meaning in the obscurity of the language. Journalists, on the other hand, would hopefully be more inclined to strive for transparency and a lucidity of meaning.
What might make perfect sense to the writer may not make sense to the reader. When you write, are you aware of how other people might interpret the words you use? Do you strive to make everything clear, or do you like leaving some things up for interpretation? What slang words or neologisms do you like to use?
“Don’t be afraid to leave the pauses in,” my editor told me. “And it’s OK to have an ‘um’ or two in there.” I had spent a week editing audio for a soundslide highlighting a talk that National Public Radio’s vice president of news, Ellen Weiss, gave last week. To trim the audio, which included the voices of many, I edited out the “ohs,” the “ums,” the “wells,” to shorten the length of the audio. But it came out sounding rushed and choppy. So I edited. And edited. And edited.
I ultimately started over and let the natural cadence and flow of the conversation stand as it was. In listening to the final product, I could appreciate the breaks in conversation, the moments of contemplation, the little imperfections that make us human.
The fact that I tried cutting the ums and silences made me think about how often we do this in our day-to-day life — not the uming, but the cutting. We charge through life, pushing past the pauses, not giving ourselves time to stop and think. Rush, rush, rush through the rigmarole of life. Sometimes, it’s OK to slow down.
So, here’s the final product of the edited audio, pauses and all. My colleague Billy Kulpa took the accompanying photos and put the soundslide together.
In the midst of chaos, journalists in California dealt with having to cover the fires’ destruction while also juggling risk and personal upheaval. Many evacuated their homes, then went straight to work, filing stories and responding to readers’ questions online around the clock.
I wrote an article about the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s coverage and interviewed some Society of Environmental Journalists board members for suggestions on new angles journalists can take in their coverage of the fires and their aftermath. You can add your comments to the article here. Several news organizations did a good job of covering the fires, but I chose to focus on just one of the paper’s, as another article that ran prior to the article I wrote did a round-up coverage of different news organizations’ coverage. Which news organization(s) do you think did a particularly good job of covering the fires? Was there something you would have liked to see more of? What ideas do you have for new angles to the fire stories?
Every night I say I’m going to get more sleep, but it doesn’t usually happen. At midnight, I get a sudden burst of inspiration to write a blog post, or I decide that it seems like a good time to clean my room or look for things that I’ve lost in the clutter of my dresser draws.
At 8 p.m. I’m pooped. At 1 a.m. I’m wired. It’s weird how our bodies work, especially when they’ve been trained to follow a certain sleep schedule. Maybe I should just turn my clocks ahead so that when it’s 11 p.m. in all my neighbors’ apartments it’ll be 1 a.m. in mine. Or maybe I should fly back to Spain where siestas are a staple of daily life, putting commas amidst the run-on sentences of America’s biography.
We need more commas in life. A recent article from New York Magazine, “Snooze or Lose,” looked at how children’s cognitive abilities are affected by a lack of sleep. In it, Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University explains that “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development.” He goes on to say that, ” “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.” Wow. Also disturbing is the fact that children in elementary through high school get about an hour less sleep a night than children 30 years ago, according to studies referenced in the article.
I think part of this has to do with the fact that we’re so plugged into the world. At the end of the work day, it’s tough to know when to pull the plug. E-mail, iPhones, the Internet — all these technological advances have given us great capabilities to communicate with the world around us, but they’ve also severed a lot of our face-to-face communication, and our free time. There is always an e-mail to write. There’s always a phone call to make. There’s always a news update to read. This is especially tough for journalists as more and more newsrooms develop 24/7 continuous news desks. News doesn’t sleep, so sometimes journalists can’t either.
Geez, I’m glad I’m posting this at 9:05 p.m. instead of four hours from now.
Why do you think we’re a sleep-deprived, crazy busy nation? What do you think could help slow us down?
I’ve asked my 88-year-old grandmother, or gramz as I call her, to write about her life. I don’t expect her to recap everything that’s happened in the past nine decades, but I want to have the milestones, the memories, captured in writing.
My memory has failed me in the past, so I don’t trust it to remember all that gramz has told me about her life. When I go home on Christmas break, I’m going to sit down with her and ask her some questions. I’ll record our conversation. I’ll store it away for later use, for years from now when I’ll wish I had my grandma’s voice on tape.
Not enough old people live to tell their life stories, and not enough young people bother to listen to them. Give nursing homes some credit. They’re goldmines for journalists and anyone who appreciates the art of storytelling. Walk into one of these smelly places and, if you can hold your breath long enough, you’d be amazed by the stories you’ll hear. Stories about war. Stories about lost loves. Stories about what it means to survive in an often cruel and unfair world. The details in these stories remind us that the elderly are like walking diaries, their wrinkles the lines on the pages, their expressions pen-marks to places of the past.
Many older people want to revisit these places of the past before they die, if not in person, then at least in memory. And it’s funny how easily we can travel there with them. I’ve never been to Washington, D.C., but my grandma has taken me there so many times through her repeated recollections of her first job at the Pentagon that I feel as though I was right there with her back in 1943. If I weren’t in journalism, I’d want to teach children or work in geriatrics. I’m fascinated by children’s innocence and the tales they tell, which may explain why I often talk about my own childhood memories, secretly wishing I could revert back to childhood. And maybe that’s what the elderly want, too — to return to a time when the world seemed fresh, alive and conquerable, to come full circle and return to innocence (insert Ami chant here).
Next time you see elderly people playing bingo, bending over shopping carts in the grocery store, or cruising around town on a pimped-out motorized scooter, strike up a conversation. Listen to what they have to say. Help them preserve their story. Storytelling is an act of survival, helping us to tighten our grasp on the memories we hold dear and let go of those that drag us down. It’s these memories, both the good and the bad, that I want to write about someday, maybe in a memoir about myself, my mom and my gramz. It’s these memories that come from asking the simple question: “What’s your story?”
What do you think about “old people’s” stories? Do you have any funny ones to share?
When I come home from work every day, I head straight for my mailbox. I jiggle the key, open the box, and hope for a letter from a friend, a magazine or a mini package that’s small enough to fit inside my tiny letter holder.
When I had a day off from school or work back home in Massachusetts, I used to jump at the sound of the mail truck when it would turn the corner onto my street at 3:30 p.m. each day. The mailman, Ray G., and I were friends. He knew me because I’d already be at the mailbox just as he was about to stuff it like a stocking full of goodies.
Now, I look for blogalicious goodies. Whenever I write a blog post, I think about what readers might want to learn, and what might entice them to post feedback. Of course, comments aren’t always positive, but as long as they are not offensive, even “negative” comments can help generate a lively discussion.If I get a comment a week, I consider myself lucky. And so this begs the question: Why don’t people comment more often?
Steve Outing, a self-proclaimed online media pioneer, has put together a document, “Talk, Why Don’t You,” highlighting answers and possible remedies for this problem. Outing says there is a “90-9-1” rule, meaning that of the total number of blog readers, 90 percent will read or view the blog, 9 percent will occasionally comment on the blog, and 1 percent will comment regularly. This sounds about right. Outing makes some other interesting points, which you can read here. (Scroll down to the Oct. 8 entry.) There is also a Facebook discussion about this topic.
Here’s to hoping for more comments and stuffed mailboxes.
What compels you to reply to a post on this blog (or any blog)? Do you have suggestions for getting more people to comment?
Here’s an essay I wrote last night for Poynter.org called “Paper: It May Burn, but It Won’t Crash.” I got the idea for this piece from one of my good friends, who indirectly reminded me about the importance of not just thinking, but talking about your stories — your own life story and the stories you write, hear and read.
Sure, you can mull over a story idea in your head, or scribble notes on napkins when inspiration decides to visit you in the bread aisle of the grocery store, but when you talk about your ideas, you can better articulate the meaning of your story, the “why should I care?” of your story.
I’ve been doing a lot of talking lately, and it’s helped me to think about purpose and meaning and how these play into writing. When I tell people I’m writing a story, they’ll often say, “Ooo, you should check out this Web site,” or “Have you read this study?” I then have that many resources to peek at and ponder over. That’s how I came to write my most recent essay. I prepared, prodded, peeked, poked and pondered. It’s a strategy that works for me.
What strategies do you have for developing your story ideas?
Garrison Keillor said it in a column earlier this year: Newspapers are about style. Interestingly, the title of this column is “Seven rules for reading the paper.
Keillor writes:
“It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing from their lives: the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena. It is so lumpen, so sad that nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy — a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.”
Like “duty,” as in one’s duty to read the newspaper, “rules” is a buzzword that makes many readers’ ears perk up. I’ve been taught that there aren’t any rules in journalism, so I was surprised when I read the headline of Keillor’s piece.
What do you think about Keillor’s piece and the notion of “rules” in journalism?
Word on the Street 