Journalism and the power of story

Journalism and the power of story, part 1
Where it begins ... how to get going ... and why we write

@ Beatrice Motamedi, Newsroom by the Bay 2011

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

It all begins with this guy ...

Homer Simpson. Photo courtesy of besos y flores on Flicker,
licensed under Creative Commons.


... duh, oh. I meant, this guy.

Bust of Homer from the British Museum. Photo courtesy of
1way2rock on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons.


Homer BC vs Homer AD ... and modern journalism

• Not one guy. Possibly several guys (and gals). And hundreds of
stories, not just one. And stories over time, not just once.

• Not a writer. Primarily, a speaker. The ﬁrst podcaster?

• Probably blind. Thus, totally dependent on others for facts, quotes,
description. No single person = the whole story.

• Wrote for an audience that had already heard these stories, so his
versions had to be short, punchy, new, memorable.

• The world’s ﬁrst war correspondent?


opening lines of the Iliad
(Homer’s lede)

Rage — goddess, sing, sing the rage of Peleus' son
Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless
losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many souls,
great ﬁghters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse…


Compare to Edward R. Murrow,
CBS, April 15, 1945

• “Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard, had you been
with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch, or if
you have no appetite to hear what the Germans have done, now is a good
time to switch off the radio. For I propose to tell you about Buchenwald ...”

• “The prisoners had crowded up behind the wire. We entered. And now let me
tell this in the ﬁrst person, for I was the least important person there ... Men
and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of
uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling
with their eyes. I looked past them to the green ﬁelds beyond, where well-fed
Germans were plowing. (One person) ... came up and said, ‘May I show you
around the camp?’”

• Listen to Murrow’s report


What makes Homer and Murrow so good?

• and how the heck do these old-school guys connect to journalistic writing,
online journalism, multimedia storytelling, and all the rest?

Left: Edward R. Murrow. Photo courtesy of KUOW 94.9
Public Radio on Flicker, licensed under Creative
Commons. Above right: Edward R. Murrow’s star on the
Hollywood walk of fame in Los Angeles, Calif. Photo
courtesy of bsoist on Flicker, licensed under Creative
Commons.


News values that create good stories*

• Impact: so what? who cares? Troy? Buchenwald?

• Immediacy: when did it happen? Yesterday? Today? Last Thursday?

• Proximity: can I get a grip on this? Is it local to me? Lunch?

• Prominence: who’s my Achilles?

• Novelty: is it new or recycled? what’s really fresh? am I hitting the story at the
right point in time, i.e., the latest iteration in the story cycle?

• Conﬂict: who’s pro and con? who stands to lose? what’s the problem?

• Emotions: what’s the story behind the story? Beyond facts, what is it about?
*from Tim Harrower’s “Inside Reporting” (McGraw-Hill: 2007)


Testing for emotion and subtext

• The Godfather (President Obama’s favorite ﬁlm. Why?)

• The Matrix: the red pill and the blue pill. What are they, really?

• Harry Potter: the best-selling children’s series, ever. Why?

• Avatar: the highest-grossing movie of all time. Why?

• Others?


Meta-topics for Newsroom by the Bay 2011

• “High School Conﬁdential”– News, views and stories about what matters to teens,
from homework to hobbies

• “Science @ Stanford”— News, views and stories about all things science

• “Heart of the Art”– News, views, etc. about artists, art happenings, museums,
performances, exhibits on campus

• "News 2.0" — News, etc., about multimedia journalism, digital journalism, citizen
journalism, backpack journalism, etc.

• "One World" — News, etc., about multicultural topics, including diversity, students of
color, world music, comparative lit, poli sci or other departments, etc.

• Other?


What’s your meta-topic?

• 5-minute reﬂective write: what topic has your news team chosen? Why were
you drawn to it? What is it really about? What’s the essential question at the
root of your topic? How can you be creative in addressing this topic? (You do
have to do this but you don’t have to turn it in. It can be your opening
blogpost for your website, however).

• 2-minute dyads: pick a partner. Tell your partner what you’ve written (one
minute). Partners don’t speak but listen silently. After you speak, your partner
repeats to you what he/she has heard (one minute). Did he/she get it right?
Does your topic, your question, your story have legs? Do the same (listen,
repeat) for your partner. (Do this, and report back to your team/team leader ...
think of this as a tiny focus group/crowdsourcing your ideas).


Testing for story: An Imam in America*

• News happens, but stories matter — they tend to embody more of the news
values, and they go on to have a deeper and more lasting signiﬁcance. Is this
news for today only, or is it a story?

• Does this story have impact? Immediacy?

• How do the headlines/decks add to your understanding/peg the emotion?

• What jumps out at you? What are you most likely to remember?

• Click on the package

*This story was part of a series in the New York Times, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for feature writing.


Testing for story: Being a black man*

• News has great immediacy, but story tends to have a longer line: a story will
begin with news, but is also capable of going forward and backward,
providing context and perspective.

• Does this package have proximity? Prominence?

• How do the various elements in this package work together to create a
multimedia whole?



*This story was part of a series in the New York Times, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for feature writing.


Testing for story: the troubles at King/Drew*

• While news strives to be objective, stories are aware of the subjective stakes
— who stands to gain, who stands to lose, who will be hurt or helped by a
story’s publication. Does this story have stakes? Who do you think got pissed
off when this story appeared in print?

• Does this story have conﬂict? Emotion?

• How do the headlines/decks help tease out the emotion?



*This story was part of a series in the Los Angeles Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service,
the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in 2005.


Tracy Weber’s Top 5 Storytelling Tips

• Do use documents and data, but open with one small story that says it all,
e.g., the imam wakes up, the little girl who died

• Ask questions again and again until you get to the heart of the story, the
quote you need. Be patient. Listen.

• Take notes; write down everything you hear and as much as you can. But
when you quote, be judicious. You will not use all of your quotes.

• Be honest; if you don’t understand, say so: “I really want to ﬁnd a way to put
this into basic English, so could you help me with that?”

• Prepare to rewrite. The lede for Tracy’s story was rewritten 70 times. Talk it
out; talk over what you’re writing with a friend who knows nothing about the
subject.


Final ﬂicks
• Literature is news that stays
news, says Ezra Pound. News
without story doesn’t last. Story
without news isn’t journalism.

• Stretch the text: how can your
headlines, captions, pull quotes
tease out the news values in
your story?

• Think beyond text: how would
you tell your story without
words? What parts of the story
could you tell with photo,
podcast, slideshow, surveys? Is
your story only text, or
something else? Ezra Pound, poet. Photo courtesy of Steve D. Hammond
on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons.


Journalism and the power of story, part 2
Story types, feature packages and elements of feature style


Types of journalistic stories (roughly in order as they occur)*

• Advancers • Investigative/enterprise

• Breaking news • Columns

• Spot news feature • Reviews

• Roundups • News analysis, editorial,
commentary, opinion
• React

• Proﬁles

Examples are all from the San Francisco Chronicle @ sfgate.com on 6/21/11


note day,
time story
was posted
Advancer: it hasn’t happened, but it will


Note repeated references to time of
day; this story will be updated hour by
hour with new details (victim’s ID,

Breaking news: just facts quotes from neighbors, etc.)


The roundup: all the news, all over


Deeper in the story, comment
from tobacco makers,
American Cancer Society, more

The react: what’s your take? gov’t. ofﬁcials — tomorrow, AP
will lead with this


The proﬁle: up close and personal


Notice how AP makes sure you know they got
this through their own initiative/enterprise

Investigative/enterprise reporting


Columns: many voices and choices


Reviews: plot + point of view


Editorial: the publication’s voice


Opinion: adding community voices


Assemble your own feature package

• Work with others from your news team to identify the types of stories that you
are doing so far for your meta-topic, e.g., proﬁle, advancer.

• Examine your list and answer: is this a list, or is it a package? How do the
stories relate to each other? How do they (or don’t they) cohere? Does each
story (or video, or podcast, or gallery, etc.) tell a different part of the whole?
How can you create stronger connections between stories?

• How many of your stories depend on words? Which stories could you tell
without words?

• What do you need to write, photograph, shoot (video) or podcast that you’re
not doing already?


Elements of style: remember these guys?

Bust of Homer from the British Museum. Photo courtesy of Edward R. Murrow. Photo courtesy of KUOW 94.9 Public
1way2rock on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons. Radio on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons.


Diction — choice of words

•alliteration (“doomed ... down ... dogs” ... “rags and the
remnants of uniforms”)

•consonance (“countless losses” ... “smiling with their
eyes”)

•strong verbs — (“cost” “hurled down” ... “prisoners
crowded .. we entered ... I looked”)


Syntax — the order of words

•see ﬁrst four lines of “Buchenwald” — each sentence is
different in terms of syntax. Varying like this keeps your
audience engaged

•see Homer’s lede — one long sentence, but punctuated
by clause/where you naturally need to pause

•employ repetition for effect (“so many souls ... ﬁghters’
souls”)


Imagery and point of view

•imagery (“House of Death,” “death had already marked
them”)

•personiﬁcation (the will of Zeus is “moving towards its
end”)

•direct address (“Rage – goddess, sing ...” ... “If you are
at lunch ... now is a good time to switch off the radio”)


Using quotes effectively

• Paraphrasing can be quicker
and more effective than a quote

Nurse Owen Jay Murphy Jr. twisted the jaw of one patient until he
• Internal quotes, when used screamed.
properly, are extremely effective
He picked up another one – an elderly, frail man – by the shoulders,
at capturing speech slammed him against a mattress and barked, "I said, 'Stay in bed.' "

He ignored the alarms on vital-sign monitors in the emergency room,
shouted at co-workers and once hurled a thirsty patient's water jug
• Quote only what you need — against the wall, yelling, "How do you like your water now?" according
this spokesman said much to state records.

more, but what is quoted here Murphy's fellow nurses at Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center
finally pleaded with their bosses for help. "They were afraid of him," a
is exactly what’s needed, no hospital spokesman said.
more

from “When caregivers harm: problem nurses stay on the job as patients suffer,” by Tracy
Weber and Charles Ornstein, LA Times/ProPublica.org, 7/11/09


Avoiding wordiness
and jargon
From a memo issued early in
World War II to instruct federal
workers on what to do in case of
an air raid:

“Such preparations shall be
made as will completely obscure
all Federal buildings and non-
Federal buildings ocupied by the
Federal government during an air
raid for any period of time from
visibility by reason of internal or
external illumination.”

Poster for George Orwell’s “1984.” Photo courtesy of
thefoxling on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons.


FDR kept it simple:
“Tell them that in buildings where
they will have to keep the work
going, to put something over the
windows.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Photo courtesy of donkeyhotey
on Flicker, licensed under Creative Commons.


Using description,
detail, observation

• Try Five Senses writing: look,
listen, smell, taste, feel. What
kind of detail can each of these
actions give you?

• Shut up: try writing and
describing for a paragraph or
more without using a quote

• OK to use interior quotes (what
someone was thinking), but you
have to ask them/check to
make sure you’re correct


• Interior quote, set
Torrance’s experience is typical of a traumatized teen. Speaking at his friend’s funeral,
off in ital; checked the words went past in a blur. Then it was over, and Torrance was walking back to his
with Torrance pew when it hit him: I am exactly like Marquis. I am Marquis. I am 17, the child of a
single mother, a young black man. It could have been me.

Torrance ran out of the funeral home at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and MacArthur
• Five Senses Boulevard. He started crying and waving his arms, black parka ﬂying. He stumbled
writing; no quotes over the curb and into the street. People began shouting from the sidewalk.

But Torrance didn’t respond: he raved and waved his arms and walked in circles and
then he fell down and he stayed there, in the middle of the street on a bright fall
• And now the morning, rocking and moaning to himself as the cars sped by, horns blaring.

quote Finally a teacher got Torrance back onto the sidewalk and hugged him hard until he
stopped moving. "What do they want from us?" Torrance cried, rage subsiding into
anger and anger melting into tears. "This is the sixth person I know who died. The sixth
person; I shook his hand. What do they want from us? What do they want from a black
man? I’m scared. I’m scared."

From “The long arm of childhood,” Beatrice Motamedi, the Oakland Tribune, 5/31/11


Recommended reading: books on story & craft

• “Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time
Pulitzer Prize Winner,” by Jon Franklin (Plume)

• “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s Guide from the Nieman Foundation
at Harvard University,” Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, eds. (Plume)

• “America’s Best Newspaper Writing: A Collection of ASNE (American Society
of News Editors) Prizewinners,” Roy Peter Clark and Christopher Scanlan,
eds. (Bedford St. Martin’s)

• “Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction,”
Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, eds. (Ballantine)


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