I figure this warrants a different thread than “Stories To Read” because they seem to be the stories we’re focusing on for analysis. Here I figure we can just drop stories that we think may be good reads and that may or may not lead to deeper analysis ...
I’ll start by reposting the Gangrey Web site link: http://www.gangrey.com. Again, this is a site run by a few St. Pete Times writers dedicated to ferreting out narratives from across the country.
Also, earlier this month Tom French of the St. Pete Times dropped his latest opus. This one’s about the zoo. I just came across this today and haven’t had a chance to read it, but figured I’d pass along:
I can’t post in Stories To Read because I think only you’re allowed to post there. So here’s one story, albeit not a great one, from last year like you were asking.
One of the greatest things about the rebirth of The Wire on HBO, (really the greatest TV show ever. watch it, really), has been the spate of articles about series creator David Simon and his take on the journalism world—the subject of this season’s on-going subplot.
At issue has been a dispute between Simon and his former bosses at the Baltimore Sun, John Carroll (fmr. La Times editor who resigned rather than gut the paper) and Bill Marimow (now Philly Inquirer editor).
This article from the Columbia Journalism Review highlights the issues very well: http://tinyurl.com/2yatyo
Money sections for our study:
“You might argue—especially if you’re David Simon—that there are broader economic and social forces at work in all these stories, that black hospitals in many cities will continue to have problems, that poor children will continue to die needlessly, that immigrant families will continue to be fractured. And this is where the difference emerges between Simon’s broad sociological approach and the rifle-shot approach taken by Carroll and Marimow, and rewarded all over the country by the Pulitzer board: the latter approach demonstrably affects—possibly even saves—individual lives.
“‘I don’t think a paper can necessarily take on all the complex issues that go into blighted neighborhoods and blighted lives,’ Carroll says. ‘To try to do every factor, you’ll dissipate your energy and not really give attention to any one factor.’ Carroll offered the school system as an example. There could be fifty topics worth writing about, he says, such as unions protecting bad teachers, wasteful bureaucracy at the board of education, and unsafe schools. ‘If you do all fifty,’ he says, ‘you won’t do anything well enough to have an impact.’”
...
“A spotlight beamed higher and wider, however, may not effect any appreciable change. Is it a greater virtue to confront deeper truths about where our country is going and how successful we are at living up to the American ideal of equal opportunity than it is to improve individual lives? Should we keep doin’ the same, no matter how many times we get burnt?
“Lynda Robinson, Simon’s colleague at the Sun, now an editor at The Washington Post Magazine, says that he was on the right track before he left nonfiction. The combination of systemic analysis and narrative, she says, is the highest form of journalism, and she cites reporters like Katherine Boo as examples of the ‘investigative-narrative’ style. ‘You come out of it not just understanding why the system isn’t working, but caring and understanding the lives of people affected by it,’ Robinson said. Jan Winburn, who is now delighted to have the title of narrative editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also mentions Boo’s work as a model. ‘Ironically,’ she says, ‘a criticism of narrative is that you paint a picture of what’s happening, but don’t get at the root cause or explore the policy that causes that problem. The great reporters are bringing those two things together.’”
I’d like to hear other’s reaction to this before I post my thoughts ...
Jupiter the Rat, a nice SF Chron “schools” story (pdf attached):
Oops—here is Jupiter pdf.
Finally had a chance to read these three stories. I was actually already familiar with the St. Pete Times piece.
I’d like to contrast the ledes and endings of “Bucket” and “Jupiter”. I am wondering whether “Bucket” would have been better if you just eliminated the first two lines. Instead it would start: “The white bucket is made of plastic and held five gallons of dish detergent before it started holding 300 pounds of Donald Schramm, 50, of Detroit.”
I dislike stories that include the line: “This is the story ... “ or “This story is about ... “ Perhaps from time to time it’s necessary, but I find it usually distracting and unnecessary.
Also, the ending to “Bucket” felt to me like the writer was putting words in the subject’s mouth. Sometimes that type of trick needs to happen, but I think with such a magnetic, interesting personality like Schramm you didn’t need it.
My “Bucket” bashing will end here. The middle is great.
Both Jupiter’s beginning and ending, I thought worked very well. The ending and in particular, the double meaning of the last word “sage” could have encapsulated the entire story. I remembered the Kleinfield NY Times piece Mary Ann linked to a while ago. That story very much confronted the idea of death and I think this story in its own way did as well. Seeing as it probably served as the introduction to death for many of these children, I think the ending fit well.
Perhaps I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m curious how many “great” stories have confronting death and mortality as either an explicit or implicit theme. Off the top of my head, my two favorite profiles--Gay Talese’s piece on Joe DiMaggio and Richard Ben Cramer’s piece on Ted Williams--have dealing with death and mortality running through them.
Perhaps I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m curious how many “great” stories have confronting death and mortality as either an explicit or implicit theme. Off the top of my head, my two favorite profiles--Gay Talese’s piece on Joe DiMaggio and Richard Ben Cramer’s piece on Ted Williams--have dealing with death and mortality running through them.
wow. interesting idea...just a thot: what if “great stories” have at their core some kind of fundamental confrontation (conflict/ opportunity for change), and on the spectrum of confrontation-ness, death is the ultimate that humans face? Don’t know… The stories we have posted:
Lethal Gene is about confronting a horrible disease (ultimately ending in slow death)
Camille is about trying to comfort kids who are on a path toward certain death…
Reading Throne is about creating a living monument (for a dead kid)
Felon is about being separated from your child (a kind of death) after having been involved in a murder (certain death)…
Cheerleader is about confronting the Forces that Be to clear your kid’s name (not death, but conflict nonetheless...), and in the end, the kid is the victim of another kind of conflict (the prison of his mother’s overbearingness)....
Black and White? Inherent conflict of race ...
Outsiders: kids confronting societal expectations—don’t be a thug!)
Ring of Regret ... the death of a romance…
interesting stuff....
Great story to examine the use of dialog for narrative affect. The structure seems to be straight chronological, but the device she uses to move the story forward is simply a conversation once attribution is established. Every once in a while to anchor the story’s meaning to her readers she pops in a line like this:
“She kept trying to converse, to connect, to understand this place where her son was now, without her.”
Thoughts on this one? Thoughts on dialog? A question I have is if she used a tape recorder to take the conversation while she observed and wrote down body language, etc…
Aside from this being a good example, I think, of a writer simply getting out of the way and telling a story simply despite volumnious amounts of research, I had a couple questions I wanted to throw out:
1. What do we think of his reliance on Myspace for a large portion of the story. I use facebook to keep tabs on some of the the college students I cover and it gives me a nice window. However, so much of Myspace in my experience seems to be factually questionable that I have some concerns. One could make the argument, however, especially in this piece that how Leon Davis PRESENTS himself is much more important than what the actual truth of Leon Davis is. If you accept that assertion then the Myspace usage is entirely legitimate.
2. What do we think of re-telling narratives of police reports without attribution by starting out the section saying something like: “Here’s how police said it worked.” I think it is a good tool to take care of attribution issues without interrupting flow. I feel also that it could become a crutch if used too much.
What do we think of re-telling narratives of police reports without attribution by starting out the section saying something like: “Here’s how police said it worked.” I think it is a good tool to take care of attribution issues without interrupting flow. I feel also that it could become a crutch if used too much.
Liam—interesting thoughts, as usual ...would love to hear from other people out there in Narrative Land…
I, for one, think attribution is always kind of a stickler in narrative pieces. I like the idea, in all sorts of stories, including hard news, of dispensing with attribution re cops with the summary “according to police,” or “this is what police say,” or “according to investigative files,” followed by a Big Fat Colon.
But attribution in general is kind of thorny, don’t you think? Sometimes people don’t use it at all (i.e., it is assumed that the reporter found the stuff, vetted the stuff, and can write the stuff with authority.) Last year, I coached a wonderful series on AIDS orphans. In a couple of places, particularly, it seems, the last one, about a young girl with AIDS in Fort Lauderdale (http://tinyurl.com/2ynwqj), the paper had us include a little explainer box saying something like, “The scenes in this story are based on interviews with blah, blah and blah. At least two sources corroborated the information in the scenes,” kinda thing.
My own view is that’s going a little overboard, but then, people are still stung from the Blair-Kelly stuff. How do we know it’s true? Where’s the journalistic proof?
Re the MySpace stuff, I think the whole MySpace/ reader-generated content thing is fascinating. The question of how that affects/ should affect our reporting and storytelling hasn’t even begun to shake down yet…
Great topic, and something I think we struggle with all the time and maybe never get quite right. I love the idea of a box at the end with background ("this story is based on phone interviews and in-person interviews with these people, etc) but I think maybe only use this if we’re doing a really long piece. For shorter stories or regular dailies, I think as long as we have a couple of “police said"s in the body, that’s enough for a reader to reasonably assume that yes, we talked to police. We should feel comfortable to speak with authority in our stories.
I actually like the “And here’s what police say happened:,” type of thing. The folks over at St. Pete’s do that all the time and I love the conversational tone of this, but I know not everyone likes it. I recently read a great story in the Washington Post (also posted on Gangrey so I’m sure you guys saw it!) about the Detroit mayor trysting with his chief of staff. Despite it being a newsy topic, the reporter wrote with a pretty informal, conversational tone and I loved it! I think if we did this more with hard-news stories, we would keep readers interested and would differentiate ourselves from the APs and online news services of the world. Of course this is an argument that lovers of narrative writing have made forever. Anyway!! I digress. The reason I bring this up is this: Some people who commented on that story hated the tone, thought it was making fun or making light of a very serious situation. It’s all a matter of preference. I think however you feel about conversational tone versus a more formal tone will dictate how you feel about “police said” and “according to police.” I am a firm believer in playing fast and loose with style rules if it makes the thing sound better… but alas, I will probably lose that battle.
Wow. Thanks, Tanya, I hadn’t seen this piece. Just between you and me and the lamppost and everyone out there in Narrative Land, I think this suffers a bit from the snarkiness of the Voice ... But maybe I’m just old. It’s such a great tale that I am just wondering if the SnarkFest is 100 percent necessary?
But it kinda goes back to the issue of Voice we are exploring elsewhere in the threads....(Reading Throne, http://tinyurl.com/2f7dfj ... I read a really great definition of Voice the other day ... Mighta been from a Kelly Benham handout, can’t remember (I hate not attributing ...so, sorry If I’m wrong)...but it was something like, “Voice is the thing that lets people know, ‘You’re in good hands.’”
Cool, no?
My gut feeling (and again this might be just me) is the voice in this Detroit piece is saying, “you’re in snarky hands....”
Lane DeGregory in the St. Pete Times today.
http://tinyurl.com/2kkm4n
Thoughts on dialog? A question I have is if she used a tape recorder to take the conversation while she observed and wrote down body language, etc…
Hey—yep, cool Lane piece. I was curious about the tape recorder thing after you posted, so I wrote to Lane and asked her. This is what she said—not only about recorder, but about how story came to be:
“No, I didn’t have a tape recorder with me. I wish I had. ... Everything was scribbled quickly on a legal pad as I sat at the table next to them, eavesdropping with their permission. There was a lot of dialog I left out and/or edited out because I didn’t have it all down. I sort of picked and chose my full sentences to write, and could tell the ones I needed when I heard them. But I hadn’t gone into that story with the idea of doing it as a dialog. That was my editor’s idea after I read him some passages from my notes.
“Originally, the story was 75 inches long! He had the foresight to make me chop the top to 1/3 of its narrative (lots of background about them was lost) and focus on the moments between them. The story ran at under 40 inches ...
“I if I’d known I was going to write it in dialog I definitely would have brought a tape recorder! Luckily, there were a ton of pregnant pauses between mother and son which allowed my left hand to catch up with writing ... “
Mary Ann -
A lot of people didn’t like the tone - you’re definitely not alone! I guess I wasn’t thinking of it from the perspective of someone who lives in Detroit (here’s the Post parachuting in and making fun of the situation and by extension, the city and those who live there), but more from an outsider’s point of view. I definitely can see why some folks didn’t like it. But MAN I loved that lede. And I was just so pulled in by the story itself (like you said, those facts are just so amazing).
Though some people in the comments, Detroiters, were saying they’re just so embarrassed by what’s happening and have almost disowned their own city. Those people didn’t seem to mind the tone, maybe because they agree and are just wiping their hands of the whole thing and saying ‘yeah, go ahead, make fun, it’s all true.’ It depends so much on perspective, I think.
If it were printed in an alternative weekly or a publication that caters to a younger audience, I’m guessing it would have gone over better (tone and all)? But in the Post, I think you might be right in that the snark factor was a little much!
Anyway, didn’t mean to get so off topic! I’ll check out the voice threads!
