Monday, October 19, 2009

Shorts4

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Shorts #4

Here are (mixed up) reporter notes from actual news stories (well, plausible news stories…). Identify the WWWWWH and then use the key info to write leads for the story. Conform to AP style.

Slug: Speech
There was a speech at USU . It was sponsored by the political science department. It was about how history repeats itself, titled, “Déjà Vu All Over Again: Rise of the New Russia.” It was at the Eccles Conference Center on campus at 7 p.m. About 200 people attended. The speaker was from the University of Virginia—Professor Igor Dullard, an expert in Russian and Soviet history and author of a new bestseller, “The Bear Is Back: Russian Adventurism in the 21st Century.”

Slug: Crash
From Logan Police Department reports: Traffic stop, 11:43 p.m. . 1400 block of North Main Street. Blue Datsun sedan, 1998 (UTlic: HGI 901), failed to stop at stoplight at 1400N, northbound, hit left front bumper/fender of white Chevy van, 2004 (IDlic. IDSPUD). Datsun attempted to leave the scene but damage to right front wheel made vehicle undriveable. Officers apprehended driver and passenger near Deseret bank. Driver, Jerald Doolittle, d.o.b. 6/13/88, 438 East 500 North, Apt. 2B, Logan, UT, declined BreathAlyzer field test and was arrested on suspicion of DUI. Driver of Chevy, Howard Russet, d.o.b. 3/21/57, 14500 East 2500 North, Pocatello, ID, uninjured.

Slug: Thai protest
Thousands of protesters are camped in front of the prime minister’s compound in Bangkok, Thailand, protesting alleged government corruption. The prime minister is Samak Sundaravej. He has denied charges of corruption. He’s been in office for seven months. He refuses to step down. Protest leaders are calling for 1 million people to join in a nationwide protest, disrupting government functions and rail and air service.

Slug: La-Z-Boy
John Frontman said today that the 57-year-old La-Z-Boy Co. in Tremonton, Utah, will close its doors next month. The company, which makes recliners and other furniture, employs more than 500 people at its Box Elder County plant. The jobs will move to Mexico, where labor costs are lower, Frontman said. He said current La-Z-Boy workers will be welcome to relocate. Union officials called the announcement “a disaster.”
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Shorts5

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Shorts5

The lead, as you know, is the roadsign for the story: It summarizes the most important elements and tells the reader where the story (and reader) are going. The following provides you with the 5Ws and H, plus additional info. Your task is to take this information and organize it into the first, second and, if necessary, third paragraphs of a news story.

Slug: plane crash

WHO? 218 people (212 passengers, six crew)
WHAT? Delta Air Lines flight 1021 between Denver and San Francisco crashed on emergency approach
WHERE? two miles north of the Salt Lake City International Airport
WHEN?
WHY? pilot radioed the tower, said there was smoke in the cockpit and cabin and he was losing power, asked emergency landing
HOW? plane lost power; pilot tried to guide in but nosed into marshes near Great Salt Lake at nearly 200 mph; plane cartwheeled, breaking into pieces and exploding.
Other info: only three survivors, undentified, all in extremely critical condition at SLC hospitals. Last transmission from pilot, still unidentified pending notification of family: “I can’t make it. We’re going down. Tell Candy and the girls I love them.” Info from National Transportation Safety Board spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Slug: Tuition increase

WHO? USU President Stan Albrecht
WHAT? Raising tuition by $12 per credit hour
WHERE? affects all students at USU main and satellite/regional campuses
WHEN? Beginning with Summer 2009 semester
WHY? global economic downturn and state budget cuts to higher education have resulted in a loss of $6.5 million in state funding and potentially larger losses in revenues from USU’s investment portfolios.
HOW? not applicable
Other info: Info provided by USU spokesman John DeVilbiss. Provided this quote from Albrecht: “We tried everything conceivable to avoid having to raise tuition, but have very reluctantly concluded that USU will not be able to weather this economic storm without a combination of deep cuts to programs and projects, along with this unfortunate but essential additional cost to our students. I wish there were another way, but there isn’t.” Statement from ASUSU President Bob Flathery: “This is totally bogus. There is no freakin’ way students should have to pay for the university’s poor planning, or for the Bush administration’s idiotic mismanagement. Hundreds of students will have to drop out.”
USU enrolls approximately 27,000 fulltime (FTE) students at its main and branch campuses. The increase of $12 per credit hour means that a fulltime student enrolled in 15 credits will pay $180 more per semester, and at current enrollment levels, USU will bring in an additional $3,960,000 per semester.

Slug: radioactive waste

WHO? Cache County Sheriff’s Office
WHAT? Released statement to the press about train traveling through Cache Valley and Logan carrying 20,000 gallons of low-level radioactive waste from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory near Pocatello to a containment unit near Yucca Mountain, Nevada
WHERE? over RR tracks from Cache Junction in NW corner of the county, through Newton, Petersboro, Mendon, Wellsville, exiting the southern part of the valley west of Providence and Avon
WHEN? Train is expected to reach Cache Junction at 10 p.m. ; will travel slow to minimize risk and transit the valley, north to south, in about 2 hours.
WHY? first use of transportation links between Idaho and Yucca Mountain with actual high-risk cargo; first tested last summer.
HOW? the waste is shipped in specially constructed barrels made of an experimental alloy or lead, titanium and arsenic, designed to resist leakage for 120,000 years. Robots load the cargo on and off the train.
Other info: Sheriff’s spokesman Hugo Nutjob: “We will be monitoring the train closely as it passes through the valley, and will provide security as needed.” Local authorities work with federal DOE officials, who are overseeing the transfer. DOE statement: “The protective casks are virtually unbreakable, and pose no danger whatsoever to public health and safety, short of a catastrophic event that caused the barrels to be breached.”

1130 Shorts6

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Shorts6

Use the information below to write a news story. Use all the most important information, discarding the rest, in an inverted pyramid/ summary lead format.
Write for tomorrow’s paper.

Slug: master plan

The Logan City Council has finally received a final version of a master plan to govern growth and development in Logan. The plan has been on the drawing board for nearly three years. It is intended to impose “a comprehensive, consistent and rational approach to help the city plan for growth.” That’s what City Zoning and Planning Board Chairman Herbert Jones said when he met with reporters before Monday’s meeting of the city council. Council member Louise Brown applauded the master plan document. “Growth in Logan has been like a runaway freight train,” she said. “At last we will be able to respond intelligently to development in the valley.” The plan includes a dedicated downtown business district to attract new business with tax incentives, green-belt areas that restrict development, and planned residential areas along transportation corridors. The council will now begin several weeks of review and deliberation on the details of the master plan. Several public hearings are planned to solicit citizen input and reaction.

Slug: Accident

According to reports, there was an accident yesterday afternoon on Highway 89/91 in Wellsville. Apparently, black ice on the road was the cause, the report said. At about 4:20 p.m., a dark blue Dodge van was slowing to turn left from the northbound lanes of route 89/91. The driver, Chereese Grummund, d.o.b 1/14/75, of 1209 N. 400 W., Hyrum, was turning into the Trailside convenience store to buy gas. The driver of a recreational vehicle behind Grummund apparently didn’t see her van until tragedy could not be averted. The RV driver was Nelson Haverford, d.o.b. 11/23/31, of 12 Saddleback Cir., Preston, Id. The camper ran into the rear of the van, which flipped over. It slid into the southbound lanes of Hwy 89/91, but an oncoming Chevy Geo driven by Robert Murphy, d.o.b. 7/25/85, of 1720 E. 1800 S., Orem, Ut, managed to avoid hitting it. Murphy jumped out of his car and helped other people from the convenience store get Grummund out of the van. She had contusions on her face and head and complained of neck pains. She was transported to Logan Regional Hospital by ambulance. Haverford and his wife, Gertrude, d.o.b. 6/19/43, and their granddaughter, Bertrice Haverford, d.o.b. 10/20/83, of Preston, were uninjured. Their camper was totaled, though. Grummund was cited for operating a vehicle without working brakelights or taillights. Haverford was cited for following too close. Haverford told officers that his camper skidded on ice. (Source: Cache County sheriff’s reports)

WAIT! When you’ve written that story, rewrite it with this new information (below), which you just got from a last-minute call to the Sheriff’s office. File BOTH complete versions.

Slug: Fatal Accident
Grummund’s daughter, Candace, d.o.b. 1/4/06, apparently was riding in the rear of the van but not in a car seat or seatbelt. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

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Speeches

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Covering Speeches; Getting the ‘Nut’

Covering speeches is something that all journalists do all the time. In some ways, it is the easiest possible assignment—all you have to do is sit and listen and take notes; the speaker does the work and hands you quotes and quips and facts and opinions.

The difficult part is transforming a speech, which has a particular structure and form, into the kind of inverted pyramid news story that we’ve been working on. The inverted pyramid is useful for the reader, as you know, because it provides a selective, quasi-telegraphic account of news in decreasing order of importance—first things, first.

For the reporter, translating events and even a speech into that kind of user-friendly structure requires judgment and discipline. First, the reporter must decide what the most important fact(s) or theme is—in the short story about the car accident from a couple of weeks ago, which of the facts was the most important? Sure, the accident itself, but was it Floyd Finger’s arrest for DUI, or was it Marcie Mommish’s injury, which sent her to the hospital? Or both?

This judgment of what’s most important, and then the skill to write it in a way that focuses the reader and story on that element—that’s the trick we’re trying to learn.

A speech, however, is not structured so conveniently. Most speakers start with a couple of jokes, ease into their topic, build to a couple of crescendos (the main points), and then taper off at the end. So instead of an upside-down triangle (pyramid), a speech might look like a diamond shape, or a figure eight.

So the challenge in covering a speech is to figure out a major theme on which to focus your news story. Can you describe it in one word, or a few works? (Remember the Fred story—the city council meeting boiled down to this: “Those jerks are going to raise taxes again.” Or even one word: “Taxes!”)

This boiling down process is important. It requires thought and imagination. As Michael Gartner said, the reporter has to be fair as well, so the story must reflect accurately and fairly what the speaker was trying to say. You have to find what we refer to as a “hook” on which you can hang the whole story. If you don’t find a good focal point, the rest of your story either won’t hold together logically, or you’ll run out of stuff and report only a small portion of the whole story.

Here is a structure for inverted pyramid news stories that I think is very useful, and can work for you (nearly) every time.

• 1st¶ Summarize the most important/central news in one sentence. Sometimes, you can identify this in your head in one word—“Taxes!”—and then add the other required lead stuff (who, when, where?) to make a summary sentence.
• 2nd¶ Support the lead paragraph with other critical info. For example, a person’s name often would NOT go in the first ¶, because most people aren’t household names. Sure, you can lead with, “President Obama said today...,” but you can’t say, “Floyd Finger was arrested....,” because no one knows who the heck he is. So the first reference to the person might refer to her/him as a label—a Logan city councilman, a USU professor, a Salt Lake City man, etc., and then name the person in the second graf.
• 3rd¶ If you can, find a good quote that supports your lead.
• 4th¶ The “nut graf.” I’ll give you some readings on nut grafs, but basically, this is a paragraph that answers the “So what?” or the “What is this about?” question.

These top paragraphs represent the story’s roadsign, telling the reader what the story is about and where it’s going. If you can boil your notes down to this, the rest of the story can proceed logically, filling out the major points of the story and taking the reader along an easy trail that was marked by the lead “roadsign.”

(For more on nut grafs and how to focus a story, see new posts on NewsHounds on Nut Grafs and on “Michelangelo’s David.”)

Here is my version of the Michael Gartner speech story. Let me acknowledge that this is kind of a hard story to write, because it’s more a lecture than a speech with good news “hooks” on which to hang the story. But it is still possible to come up with a central theme that can help hold the whole thing together, without simply listing Gartner’s 12 points—which then reads like a transcript, not a news story.

Compare my version below to your own, and a feel free to kibbitz. I include a few notes highlighted in the text, FYI.

TP

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Gartner Speech
Pease (Note: This is how you should slug ALL stories!)

One of America’s preeminent journalists told USU students Tuesday that although modern journalism has never been more challenging, reporting is also “enormous fun.” (This is what I came up with as a summary “hook” that includes his main theme and permits me the flexibility to cover as much of his tralk as I want. Note that I don’t name Gartner in the lead—does everyone know who he is? but I refer to him as an important journalist.)

“Who else in the world is paid just to ask questions, to think and to write?” said Michael Gartner, a former TV and newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize-winner. “There simply is nothing more satisfying, nothing more fun.” (This second graf does two things—specific ID of Gartner, and a quote that gives the reader the “sound” of the speaker.)

Gartner, who was president of NBC News, editor at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Des Moines Register, and co-owner and editor of the Ames (Iowa) Tribune, offered a crowd of nearly 200 students and faculty at the Memorial Union his “12-Step Program to Good Writing.”

Gartner was on campus as part of the university’s William Henry Fox First Amendment Lecture Series, sponsored by the Journalism and Communication Department. (These 2 grafs serve as the “nut,” which tells the reader what this story is about and whys/he should care.)

“Gartner is a national treasure,” said journalism Dean Eaton X. Benedict.

But writing isn’t always fun, said the retired editor, whose editorials for the Ames Tribune won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. “Sometimes, it’s painful. Sometimes, it’s frustrating. Sometimes, it’s embarrassing,” Gartner said. (This graf takes the reader back to the lead angle, or “hook,” and continues the conversation into his 12 points. Not the “But,” which is a quick and easy and effective was to make a transition into new material or a different direction.)

And it is a craft that never stops developing, he said, offering a 12-point list of what it takes to be a good writer.

Among Gartner’s 12 suggestions was advice for young writers at every stage of their careers, including life lessons such as the need to have passion, curiosity and care for other human beings. (This is a synthesis of the entire speech—my own interpretation. Rather than just list his 12 points in chronological order, which is Boooorrrrring, I try to find ways to lump stuff together logically.)

Because of changing expectations of journalism and society, the challenge is some ways greater for journalists today than when he was starting, Gartner said. “Today, for you to get into the brains of my children—and of me and my father,” he said, “you must report more thoroughly than ever and write more gracefully than ever.” (Note: A speech story is all about a person talking, so try to select as many good, tight, pithy quotes as possible so the reader can “hear” the speaker’s voice.)

His advice? “You must report. Read. Listen. Simplify. Collaborate. Trust. Experiment. Talk. Pounce. Care. And balance.” (This quote lists his points, but it’s confusing to the reader. So I go quickly into an explanation in the next graf.)

All writing depends on reporting, Gartner said. “Words alone aren’t enough. Good writing needs fact. You cannot be a good writer if you are not a good reporter.” So the first challenge of good writing is collecting good facts.

Equally important, he said, is the ability to listen—both to sources and coworkers, and to the written word. “You cannot be a good writer if you don’t read,” he said. And, “You cannot be a good writer if you don’t listen.” (Note that in many of these paragraphs, I try to make a smooth, logical transition from one topic to the next, and paraphrase material to set up a quote.)

Listening goes both ways, Gartner said. Good writers also have to listen to their writing, and simplify complex ideas, concepts and sentences. “The easiest thing for the reader to do is quit reading,” one of Gartner’s first editors told him.

“What wonderful advice to a newspaperman,” he said. “You have to keep the reader interested.” (This quote follows on the previous graf—completing the thought.)

One way that Gartner suggests for keeping the reader connected is to use editors and co-workers as trusted collaborators. Talking to co-workers and bouncing ideas and stories off each other is an essential way both to improve stories and writing, he said, and can also serve as a reality check.

“Trust means honesty and respect, openness and courtesy” with editors and other reporters to fine-tune stories and find the “music” that makes the difference between facts and good writing.

In addition, Gartner said, the journalist must listen both to his or her own writing “voice,” as well as to sources for great quotes. “The good writer knows how to use quotes,” he said—as punctuation, transition or reinforcement. “It takes a good ear to get a good quote” and to use it effectively.

Finally, Gartner said the best writers and reporters must care deeply about their craft, and about other people.

“You cannot be a good writer if you do not love writing and love reporting. It’s simply impossible,” he said. “And you cannot be a good writer if you do not care what you are writing about.”

Part of that is to care enough to be fair, he said. (That is a transition from the previous graf to this one.) “Fairness is vital for every story and every newspaper, because an unfair story hurts the credibility of the reporter and the editor and the newspaper.”

Gartner’s audience, mostly journalism students, responded often with laughter and applause to the veteran editor’s advice. “This is the kind of stuff you never read in textbooks,” said junior journalism major Forrest Ranger.

As part of the event, Gartner was awarded the journalism school’s annual William Henry Fox Prize for distinguished journalism. The next speaker in the series, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, will be on campus next month.

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