Dear Picayune Pissants:
First, I don’t believe it has ever happened in the 30 years since Wally Alley first fell off his pickup truck in Belchertown, Mass., that EVERYONE writing his tragic accident story managed to get fired for making errors of fact. That’s extraordinary. I will consider whether I want to rehire you for Pease’s Picayune Pissant....
Next, for those of you who missed today’s class (and those who were there but are easily confused), some recaps and reminders:
1. Read Chapter 6 in Harrower (“Beyond Breaking News”). Note esp. pp. 114-115 as you start developing your own story ideas, most of which will not be breaking news, summary leads, but “softer” feature stories.
2. If you did not do so today, please bring me your Gartner speech stories tomorrow (and anything else that you did, but for which the grade on your gradesheet is missing).
3. Generating Story Ideas. We now move into the latter half of the semester, in which you are increasingly responsible for finding and covering your own stories. As discussed, you should start NOW building a file of possible story leads—topics that interest you, flyers, newspaper clips, ideas that come to you in the shower, etc.
This is important, because you will be writing (almost) one out-of-class story per week, starting next week. And you will have to come up with most of your own story ideas, pitch them to your gruff-but-lovable editor (me), and organize your time to bring them off.
Here is (one way) to develop a story.1. Come up with a general topic (in Peez’s fable, Michelangelo wanted to portray the general epitome of male beauty)
2. Focus on some aspect of the topic. What about it? (Michelangelo focused on David)
3. Figure out the angle you want on your “David”—So what? You should be able to answer that question in a short sentence.
4. Who are your sources? Minimum three sources per story. Who can you talk to who will provide good insight, expertise on your “David”?
(If you missed class today, you have no idea what “David” means. Tough.)
4. From now on (more or less), you will have pitched me a story by every Friday (or Monday, latest), which will be due the following Friday by 5 p.m. (this is flexible, depending on the story). I will give you a set of dates in class tomorrow. This means that you will be planning next week's story as you interview and write this week's story. OK?
5. Your first three out-of-class stories:
1. Friday, 2/27: Your own story idea (see No. 6 below)
2. Thursday, 3/5: Story growing out of the Annual Career Fair in the TSC, all day Wednesday, 3/4. Stories due to me by 6 p.m. Thursday via email.
3. Friday, 3/20: Conceive and pitch a story (by 3/4), due the Friday after Spring Break.
6. Tomorrow (Wednesday) in class, bring a written (typed) pitch for your first story (due 2/27).
For example:
Topic: Winter roads
Focus: County snowplow drivers
What about it?
a. County is running out of road salt and will cut back on plowing. OR
b. Plow drivers are POOPED from long hours, and their overtime is breaking the budget. OR
c. The long, dark, lonely road of the snowplow driver—I wanna ride around with Butch.
Sources:
• For a: Daryl, the Cache County Road Manager, County Executive Lynn Lemon, plow driver? Sheriff?
• For b: Daryl, other county people, snowplow drivers.
• For c: Find a plow driver and ride with him (or her). Talk to drivers about how plows are a) dangerous or b) saviours? Talk to homeowners who get pissed when plows knock over their mailboxes, plow their driveways in....
7. Once you have pitched your story tomorrow, post it here on NewsHounds. Then read each others’ story pitches and make suggestions on angle, focus, ideas for sources, etc. You will do this every week.
8. Story Frames. Today’s video offered some suggestions/perspectives on how to approach news stories. Too often, the narrators said, journalists focus on the extremes—he said/she said, conflict, etc.
While these elements do help the journalist write an easy story, they may be too easy and too simplistic (and this may contribute to why a lot of people don't like journalists....?). A more accurate way to reflect the community and your readers is to focus not on the extremes, but on the middle.
Tension in a story/topic may be a better way to think about how to frame the issues—disagreements on issues, not screaming. Most issues are not simply black and white. (BTW, this also relates to the journalistic myth of objectivity. Read my essay On Objectivity.)
So now, in addition to asking yourself the Fred question—What happened?—also start thinking in terms of the deeper issues: people’s motivations, emotions, the So what? and Why? questions.
As Harrower points out (pp. 114-115), you may start with an event—the WTO demonstrations in the video, for example—but then evolve to thinking about the “sidebar” stories beyond the central-event story. Harrower uses the example of graduation (an event) to construct what he calls an “Idea Map”—tangent ideas of stories growing out of the main event. These may be called “sidebars,” but really can be more interesting than the main event. This relates to the video’s message of looking for stories behind events, stories that answer more than just What happened?
This strategy is useful on a number of levels, because it means that you are not tied to the event, which is old news if you don’t get it done right away.
Thus, we talk about two general kinds of stories: “time-bound” stories, which are constrained by their time elements; and “process-oriented” stories, which means the deeper, featurey kinds of stuff that gets at motivations, emotions, character, process, history, etc. (See Bill Blundell's story blocks.)
Reporters have to make this kind of extrapolation all the time when they have some kind of annual, time-bound event to write about, but they get bored writing the same stories year after year about: Graduation, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Halloween, solstice, etc. Ditto with issue stories that are TOO HUGE to tackle—air pollution, cancer, sports, mental health, gender—so the reporter must find a smaller focus to serve as a vehicle for the larger topic. For ex: Focus on someone with bad asthma who is housebound while the inversion fills the valley with smog as a way to write about air pollution. Etc.
9. Coming Attractions:
1. Interviewing. Next week, we’ll talk about interviewing. After the actual writing, information-gathering (and interviewing, specifically) is the most central basic skill of the journalist. So we’ll talk about doing that. (Re)read pp. 74-83 from Harrower’s Ch. 4 on interviewing, quotes, attribution, etc.. And read the related interviewing handouts listed on AskDrTed: Interviewing and More Interviewing Skills.
2. Midterm Exam. Wednesday, 2/25. This will include some “knowledge” questions on news values drawn from your readings; a section of AP Style stuff; and a fact sheet from which you will write an inverted pyramid news story. You may use your Stylebook.
OK? We’ll discuss all this in class tomorrow (2/18)
No comments:
Post a Comment