Fall 2005 (Convention Special)

 

 

CONVENTION ROUNDUP

From the notebook of Carolyn Lumsden...
Thursday Night
We met Oct. 27-29 at the lovely Poynter Institute, which co-hosted the event with The Palm Beach Post. To both, our thanks. There were 22 of
us; the hurricane earlier in the week kept away several people. Thursday night's reception was at the Institute.

Friday Morning
Chip Scanlan, a Poynter faculty member, gave a pretty good imitation of a reporter sitting down to write.
Here's the little diagram I drew of his workflow description:
Begin with idea (also known as "stupid assignment")
Collect - report - read - experience
Focus (this is continual)
Order
Draft
Revise
Reporting involves two mutually exclusive skills - creating and criticizing. The criticizing can browbeat the creating ("I suck, my
editor sucks"), so the trick is to first create and then criticize. The creating part is done through free writing, automatic writing, just
banging away, writing as quickly as you can, then stepping back to ask "Do I have a theme? Is this too long? Does it make sense?"

Critical questions (from interesting piece by David Von Drehle of The
Washington Post, "How I Wrote the Story"):
Why does it matter?
What's the point? (the one I find myself always asking oped writers)
Why is this story being told?
What does it say about life, the world, the times we live in?
What is this story really about, in one word?
An effective piece of writing has a single dominant meaning, or theme, that can be summed up in a word. Don Fry would ask, "Tell me the story
in six words." Chip suggests one word, then using the five W's to elaborate. Roy Peter Clark, also of Poynter, sang for us "Teen Angel" and read us
"Teen Angle," his story of how he came to love copy editors. His soon-to-be-published-by-Little-Brown book "Writer's Toolbox" will
contain the secrets to great jokes, sentences, paragraphs, hence stories. (One tip: put the funny word at the end of a sentence: "When
they heard the screams, no one suspected the roosters.")

Other interesting tidbits: The average written sentence has been cut in half since the 1700s, from 44 words to about 22 now. (And when the AP
decreed that all leads should be no longer than 18 words, the great writer Sol Pett sent in a lead from a GOP convention that was 287.)
Kathleen Parker regaled us at lunch with tales of her career and how she writes her column.

Bob Steele, the father of ethical journalism, warned us to beware that healthy skepticism doesn't turn to cynicism. He then led a discussion on
fairness vs. fair play, on the op-ed page's role in elections, on "evoke" vs. "provoke" (prompting an emotional response vs. prompting an
action). Finally, when we spoke of the nutcases who often plague us, he warned us to be careful of discounting certain ideas and people. "Would
we appreciate doctors speaking of us as patients that way?"
.
Julie Moos, Howard Finberg and Rick Edmonds, all of Poynter, startled us with figures on technology use: the fastest-growing product is the DVD,
70 percent of the U.S. population uses the Internet, 50 percent use high-speed access, 29 percent of Internet users download podcasts, 90
percent of U.S. children have gone online.

Craig Newmark of craigslist.com is eating our lunch with free advertising. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia anybody can edit. RSS ("really simple syndication") is a
personalized feed, "The Daily Me." The group said the next period will show declines in circulation of 2 to 3 percent (they were right). "We may be in a death spiral," Rick said. As circulation falls, so will ad lineage and thus the number of pages we have.
On the other hand, 300 layoffs (as of that time) out of some 54,000 print newsroom jobs is not a lot, Rick also pointed out.
John Timpane of Philadelphia got to debate David Smalley of Fredericksburg, Va., on whether newspapers were facing the firing squad
or salvation from the Internet. They pretty much agreed that we would all be working at blogs in a decade or so.
(To quote David: "It is a juggernaut. We are doomed." John: "We should not die. We should be reborn. ... We've got a brain trust.")

Friday Night
A good time was had by all. Too good a time was had by some.

NewsArt artists Barrie Maguire, John Overmyer and honorary NewsArtist for the day Elizabeth
"Libby" Rock told us they have 15 artists with 33,000 drawings on a Web site that's very easy
to use (I can testify) and described how they work. In my next life, I will be a NewsArt artist.
Kelly McBride of Poynter then gave an astonishing talk -- she modestly said she was only a "facilitator" -- on sexual mores and song lyrics.
She passed around a few lyrics. Wow. I don't have kids, so I had no idea.
And I'm not to blame. She says she is "worried, but lecturing
won't help." Here are her suggestions for op-ed editors:
Make yourself uncomfortable.
Avoid predictable positions.
Embrace complexity.
Explore the gray.
And then we explored the gray of "My Humps" and "Milkshake."
.
Well, according to the invaluable Nuts and Bolts, led by Richard Burr of Detroit, none of our print readers cares much for our online product.
--On podcasting editorial board meetings and blogging with readers: "Nobody downloaded," "Nobody watched," "The same six to eight people blog,"
"Readers are uninterested in what we do."

Popular features: Philadelphia's "Voice Box," "Influences" (newsmakers are asked "What's your favorite music," etc.) "Brain Food" (what's going
on at think tanks, universities, etc.). Writers and editors take turns doing a daily log. And five readers are allowed to roam around the paper
and do daily logs about what they see. Pittsburgh does "Out and About," a 400-word local funny feature.
I loved Atlanta's cartoon feature: Readers can vote whether they like or hate that day's cartoon. Also, Atlanta made all editorial board members
take mass transit for a week and write blogs. Tampa runs a letter of the day.
Matthew Cooper of Time, the man of the hour in the wake of the Scooter
Libby indictment the day before, gave us a few minutes of his time and
talked about being at the center of one of the year's biggest stories.
He also did his dead-on Bill Clinton impression for us.