Narrative Digest

In a City Under Strain, Ladling Out Fortification

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:53:55 GMT

In our second Notable Narrative for June, cook Ines De Costa makes soup at a social club in the ailing city of Fall River, Massachusetts. New York Times columnist Dan Barry uses her preparation as a structure for narrating what’s amiss and what’s special in this former textile town. While “Vovó”—Portuguese for “grandmother”—chops and cooks, Barry draws several locals, including the town mayor and celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, into his story.

Barry keeps things cooking with clever imagery, such as Vovó’s body “transformed by spinal degeneration into the shape of a cupped hand.” But the elegance of the vignette resides in the sharpness of the sketch and the sound of his words. Barry writes that before coming to work, Vovó sleeps in a hospital bed and then rises to begin “her morning ritual of praying for you, me, everyone.” At St. John’s Athletic Club—where she makes the soup she sometimes gives away—Barry treats us to “knife-blade clicks in the kitchen and billiard-ball clacks in the bar.”

Barry’s tone flirts with nostalgia, but he works to make De Costa’s character more complex than a saintly senior who donates money to Calcutta orphans. (Asked if she occasionally drinks, she snaps, “Hell, no.”) And he steps aside to let the town mayor suggest that in this world, Vovó and others “you never hear from” bear more than their share of our burdens.

Writing for Their Lives

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:56:36 GMT

As we read this series, we thought of Chip Scanlan's discussion of using private records for insights into characters. This entire series is, in a sense, based on the private records of struggling kids. Through Snyder's reporting on a writing program in inner-city schools, we learn a great deal about the kids' emotional lives—and see them change some, as well.

Killer Blue: Baptized by Fire

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:14:31 GMT

June’s first Notable Narrative recounts the story of Blue Platoon, Killer Troop, whose soldiers returned to the U.S. in 2009 after finishing one of the last 15-month combat tours in Iraq. The story behind this multimedia project is simple and all too familiar: The Killer Blue soldiers serve. Some die. Others make it home. And some who come back find themselves damaged in ways they do not understand or accept.

But an inverted structure makes the story fresh. The video portion of the project opens by running several platoon members past the viewer, letting us hear their voices, and then dives into suspense by showing footage from a funeral. We hear the slow whine of the motor lowering a coffin into the grave and watch it descend, but we don’t know who died. Then suddenly we see scenes from the platoon’s homecoming. We scan the troop formation. Who didn’t make it? Who is missing?

The video of this Associated Press project is crisp, without the self-conscious grittiness of much war reporting. If this kind of footage makes the package almost slick, it somehow also makes it more dramatic. We see impeccable sequences of these young men playing golf, joking around, doing the terrible job that could end their lives at any moment. And we get to know the voices of men like Lt. Rusty Morris, who mentions “war stories that you want to tell, but you don’t want to tell.” We sense his grief, and we worry about what will happen to those who make it back.

Original music, links to a 2008 print piece, and interactive elements—including soldiers’ recollections about those who died—add depth to this complex portrait of a platoon.

Windows on Multimedia

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:31:04 GMT

The dictionary defines multimedia as a technique that combines sound, video, and text to express ideas. But it doesn’t offer a definition for multimedia narrative journalism. Two pieces recently crossed our desks that define the new form by example.

War-at-Home Narratives, Their Promise and Failures

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:23:35 GMT

Editors and reporters may suppose that uplifting stories of sacrifice on the battlefield "balance" the depressing and horrible facts of the war, or that their communities need tales of valor and happy endings as a counterweight to the endlessly lengthening roll calls of the dead and wounded. That's a tragic editorial miscalculation. The first thing J-school tells students, and it's true, is that a journalist's loyalty is not to sources, power, city, state or nation. It's to the facts. Truth.

A Land of War, a Journey of the Heart

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:32:44 GMT

Author Comments on "A Land of War, a Journey of the Heart" :

Q:	What can the first person contribute to works of journalism? In particular, what do you believe it contributed to your piece "A Land of War, a Journey of the Heart"?
A:	First-person stories are intimate. It's as if you're setting your chair close, leaning in, murmuring friend-to-friend rather than being a "Journalist Informing the Readers." A personal tale (as opposed to simply using "I" here and there) lets readers know you're involved and have biases, emotions, quirks. The story needs to stand up to the usual ethical and accuracy standards, of course, but you don't have to repress so much of your human side. Often, readers really appreciate that honesty. I used first-person in the Orchid Girls piece because I had no other choice. The story began while I was taking a one-year leave from The Seattle Times, volunteering in a refugee clinic on the Thai-Burma border. During my leave, I purposefully didn't do any journalism because I wanted to make friends and experience life free of the journalistic filter. After I returned to work, the jungle village we'd stayed in fell to the military dictatorship. I felt compelled to go back and write a story. But clearly, I was biased! I was looking for two girls I cared deeply about. I could not pretend to be impartial, so I just had to be me. I think seeing the situation through my eyes also allowed a lot of readers to care about a place and a conflict that's not in the news and very far away from their daily lives.
Q:	How can first person be inappropriately used?
A:	I'd like to make a distinction between a "first-person story" and sprinkling "I" into your stories. The former is a personal tale, told through your eyes. The latter is somebody or something else's story, and you're weighing in for a moment. Use both with great caution and rarely.
Q:	In what ways do you approach using first person so that it is effective?
A:	I rarely use it. I write personal tales only when the story really is about me, my experience, and writing with the first person is the most effective way to tell the story. I try not to sprinkle "I" into other writing because if it's not my story, bumping into "I" can be jarring. Also, I always ask myself, "Does anybody really care what I think about this?" Probably not! There are usually ways to recast the sentence so you can take out the "I" but still get the point across. You can have an intimate tone without using first person. When I do write a personal tale, I try to be really honest and include the emotional stuff. Otherwise what's the point? I also make liberal use of "you," second person. Often that lends the intimacy and informality of first-person without the heavy breath.
Q:	Any other thoughts you think would be useful to reporters, editors and students of narrative journalism?
A:	Keep a personal journal. It's good for your journalism and your soul to write stuff that you know won't be published.

Flight 1549 Survivor Got out of the Hudson, Back into the Air

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:32:50 GMT

Excerpts from an April 2009 interview with Lane DeGregory:

Q:	How much time did you spend with Casey Jones for the story?
A:	I talked to him on the phone for about an hour initially. We emailed back and forth after that. The photographer and I went to a talk he gave at a church on Sunday morning and shot pictures. We went to Mass with him and his family. Then were at his house from maybe noon till 7:00 that night. Then I rode on the plane with him the next morning. He had been upgraded to first class for life, and whoever travels with him also upgrades. But the difference between the fares was [hundreds of dollars]. It seemed like an ethical problem for me to take the upgrade, and the paper didn’t have the money to pay for it. So he swapped seats with some lucky guy, and he came back to sit with me.
Q:	What other reporting did you do for this piece?
A:	I also read all the stories I could find about the plane crash itself. And [Jones] had done a television program where they had had asked him to keep a video diary the first week after the crash. Some clips from it were on YouTube, but he sent me the whole thing.
Q:	Your narrative arc seems simple at first, but you sneak in a lot of chronological shifts and backstory. Can you talk about how you decided to structure Casey Jones' story?
A:	I wanted to frame the piece around the trip. I knew I wanted to see him boarding the plane in the first section. The next section was the closest thing I write to a nut graf; my editor Mike wanted to bring everybody in. That’s why the second person voice is in there. Melding the background and the present in the third section was a little tough. Then it got easy—I got to narrate the crash. Jones was a very introspective and religious man. He’d thought about these things a lot, which made it great to interview him. His narration of that flight took almost an hour during the interview process. We just really slowed it down. It had really only been about 23 minutes.
Q:	Did you consider trying to insert more context on post-traumatic stress disorder into the piece?
A:	No. My editor is usually the one to tell me, “Let’s broaden this,” or “let’s tighten the focus.” He said there would be so many pieces done about the survivors that we should just keep the lens focused on Casey. So I was able to focus on what the effects on him were specifically, rather than interviewing some expert and writing about what post traumatic stress disorder is and does. At first, when I heard that he’d already been back in the air, I thought, “Oh, shoot. He’s already flown a few times.” But then I realized it was a gift that he’d already flown, because even after he had done it, the crash was still affecting him.
Q:	In this piece and others you’ve written, you propel the reader quickly and effectively into intimacy with your subjects. What are your strategies for creating this intimacy?
A:	My goal is usually to take the readers with me wherever I go. One of the stupidest stories I ever did got the biggest response. It was an “up all night” piece about what happens between midnight and 6:00 am. I had all these old ladies calling me up and saying, “I’m never up that late, and I didn’t know about any of this.” It was so gratifying to take them someplace they would never go. I try really hard not to be in my stories. On some of the chat boards, some of the negative comments [on the Jones piece] were about the end of the story, where Casey holds the hand of a “woman.” That was me, but I didn’t want to put in that it was a reporter. We do talk about those kind of things. When I did the last big profile of Evel Knievel, I called myself a visitor. I ask my editor to make the call—I defer to him on things like that.
Q:	We’ve highlighted a lot of your narratives on our site, and one of them just won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Do you have any tips to offer?
A:	One lesson from this story is to go back. I covered news for 10 years before I ever did features. It seemed then like the stories would always be better if you could wait a couple weeks. And it’s true. For this story, I had Casey all to myself—I didn’t have to compete with anyone. And his story was still interesting six weeks later. The other lesson is to ask. Some people wouldn’t ask, “Can I ride with you on the plane?” But he said, “Sure.” When you’re willing to ask for access, most people will give it to you. I’m so lucky to get the access I do. If I hadn’t been able to fly with Casey, it would have been just another story with an interview and a microphone.

The Collar and the Gun

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:31:22 GMT

The life and death of an American Catholic in Africa provides the subject for this month’s Notable Narrative, “The Collar and the Gun.” The three-part serial draws out narrative details that make Kaiser’s missionary lifestyle come alive, from the brown soap the priest used to patch cracks in his truck’s engine to the Coke bottle he used to carry holy water.

Christopher Goffard takes on the challenge of sorting through conflicting factual evidence, as well as the quirks and contradictions of an individual life, and comes to a place without clear answers. Was Kaiser’s death murder or suicide? Were his fears well-founded given the environment of political corruption and violence, or were they the delusions of a mentally ill man?

Given the length of Goffard’s serial—nearly 11,000 words in The Los Angeles Times—we wished the author had more fully sketched his implicit villain, Daniel Arap Moi, whom Kaiser describes first as “a great Christian prince” then later as responsible for torture and murder. A piece this long might also have placed the Catholic Church in the historical landscape of Kenya.

But Goffard’s eloquence as a narrator shows in his complicated treatment of Kaiser’s shotgun, which, like the priest’s body, served him so effectively for so long, but may have been the means to his end.

Flight 1549 Survivor Got Out of the Hudson,
Back into the Air

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:28:09 GMT

This month’s first Notable Narrative invites the reader in just before takeoff and then follows Casey Jones—who survived the U.S. Airways crash landing in the Hudson River—as he returns to the airways over Manhattan.

The St. Petersburg Times’ Lane DeGregory tells a story so spare it feels almost incomplete on the first read. But details lurk below the surface, showing how trauma can touch everything in a survivor’s life: Jones, who “never used to care about clouds,” now watches them out airplane windows; he worries that he's supposed to be doing something big, “but he can't figure out what that is.” DeGregory uses more than a dozen questions in the story to echo the uncertainty that dogs Jones in the wake of the accident.

DeGregory maintains suspense, even in her account of a crash we know Jones survived. Her subject’s unusual predicament, as well as her own language, keeps us wondering what will come next. “You want to think you'll do the right thing in a disaster. Maybe even be a hero,” her subject muses.

Using the fly-along that makes the entire piece possible, DeGregory tersely captures the effects of post-traumatic stress, gliding through three flights, Jones’ backstory, and the crash itself before touching down at fewer than 2,000 words.

The Line Between Fact and Fiction

Fri, 15 May 2009 13:15:25 GMT

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, film makers and painters. Artists, after all, build things that imitate the world. So do nonfiction writers.

The Monster Inside My Son

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:59:29 GMT

Excerpts from a May 2009 email interview with Ann Bauer:

Q:	"The Monster Inside My Son" is so intimate. Can you write about the decision not to incorporate much in the way of outside material into this piece?
A:	My editor Sarah [Hepola] and I discussed this at length. I did quite a bit of research, first personally, then for the purpose of writing the essay. But what I found was confusing and inconsistent. There was no one definitive study from, say, the NIH that linked autism with violence. There were a couple papers on the Web, but when I contacted the authors of those they either did not respond or declined to be interviewed. In the end, what Sarah and I decided was that it would be irresponsible to throw out some random statistic then use my personal situation to illustrate it. Instead, I simply told my story, with all of its darkness and questions, and let readers take from it what they would. It's all I felt qualified to do.*
Q:	You write that you felt reluctant to "break the silence" about your son's spiral into violence. Can you speak a little to that reluctance? What do you hope to accomplish with this piece?
A:	The question of WHY to publish something so personal comes up nearly every time I do [it]. Here's my benchmark: An essay should never be therapy or catharsis or a platform on which to make some point. I write when I feel there is a reason for other people to hear and/or experience what I have to say. In this case, the Sky Walker incident convinced me there are other people out there, living in silence or even lying to themselves, feeling ashamed (as I did); and the only way to begin solving this thorny, multi-faceted problem of autism and violence—which I believe stems largely from the way people with autism are treated in our society—was to open a dialog. So I did.
Q:	Journalists often try to find human elements in the demons of their stories, yet the language you use—from "slithering" to "golem" and "the warty beast from a Grimm fairy tale"—clearly reinforces the monster reference in the title. Can you explain your strategy?
A:	Autism is a mysterious condition and it's always fascinated me that fairytales and myths have referred to it for hundreds of years. The changeling story almost certainly is about autism. Ancient rabbis were said to "conjure up" golems from dust—creatures without human feeling who became (nonetheless) saddened and violent when they realized how alien they were from the rest of the world. During the worst months with my son, I read these stories looking for answers but [was] also comforted by the fact that people had been puzzling over tragedies like ours seemingly since the beginning of time. I suppose some of that just leaked into the essay, because it was the way I thought.
Q:	The various narrative pieces you've written about your son for Salon.com have such different conclusions. Do you regret any part of the disparities between the pieces? Is there anything in them that you would change?
A:	I've fretted terribly over this: For years, my essays always ended on a hopeful note. One of the reasons I so resisted writing “The Monster Inside My Son” was that I could not find a "happy" ending. I felt in some sense that I was betraying readers who've looked to me for years to be a certain kind of advocate. It was, however, those very readers who seemed to appreciate the honesty. Life is not consistent. And if memoir is to be honest, it has to cop to those ragged ends and changing circumstances. Given that everything I've written was the truth in its time, no, there's nothing I would change.
Q:	Some publications struggle with the use of the first person by reporters. What do you see as the purpose of first-person narrative journalism?
A:	First-person narrative is tricky. Most of it, frankly, is awful. In my opinion there's way too much spilling of personal stories all over the Internet, to no real end. But the essays that DO genuinely enlighten and illuminate—these are extraordinary, and necessary. I read a piece last year by Kevin Baker, the historical novelist, about being tested for the gene that causes Huntington's Disease, and it just knocked me sideways! It was about family, about fear of the known and the unknown, about how one identifies a sense of self. It was magnificent. I aspire to that sort of relevance.

***
* In an email exchange with Bauer's editor at Salon.com, we inquired about the fact-checking process they used for various forms of journalism. Here is her reply:

The fact-checking process for essays and news stories is different. Ann Bauer is a long-time contributor to Salon and has earned our trust over the years. (This is her fifth story for us about Andrew. She's been writing about his autism for four years now). She and I discuss her pieces in depth and I edit for clarity, but we don't independently chase down the facts in her essays. With investigative pieces we do intensive fact-checking, verifying the facts and getting double sourcing whenever possible. Whenever we work with freelancers on news stories, especially freelancers without a strong track record, we are extra careful about fact-checking. Staff writers and editors are of course expected to know and follow journalistic ethics at all times.

The Perils and Promise of Memoir

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:55:44 GMT

We are rarely unanimous about submissions we receive, but “The Monster Inside My Son” by Ann Bauer elicited uniform praise for its artful embedding of one narrative within another, its tackling of the thorny subject of autism, and its understated voice. Then the argument began.

The Monster Inside My Son

Thu, 14 May 2009 23:51:45 GMT

Our second notable narrative for this month chronicles dual transformations. An autistic young man who had found his footing collapses into rage and violence. And a mother who once wrote of her son’s autism as a gift allows him to be locked up, shocked, and given “buckets full of dangerous, doping drugs” for fear that he might kill someone.

Ann Bauer uses relentless dissonance to tell her story, which appeared on Salon.com. Her son has completed pre-calculus, yet the only school available to him teaches him how to count change. The son unloads his anger on others, while his mother turns inward to thoughts of suicide, caching 80 sleeping pills.

The friction between the outside world and Bauer’s family life generates an innovative chronological structure. “Feb. 14” registers not as Valentine’s Day, but as the date Bauer reads a newspaper story about an autistic son who beat his mother to death. On the day her son should have graduated from high school, he sits in a psych ward of the Mayo Clinic. At an inauguration night party, Bauer finds herself stumped by a Barack Obama trivia game. “I surveyed the crowd of happy, shining faces,” she writes. “People were wearing buttons, T-shirts, even necklaces that spelled out ‘hope.’ This struck me as sinister and somewhat rude. Hope was bullshit.”

The power of all this dissonance leads the reader to the brink of despair—but Bauer herself arrives there first, wishing for “something as simple as cancer” to bring her son “early death” rather than the struggle he now faces. In the wake of earlier, more optimistic pieces on autism from this writer, “Monster” is searing testimony.

Miracle Landings

Fri, 01 May 2009 16:33:42 GMT

News stories that feature crippled planes, heroic crews, and crash landings are narratives without even trying to be. They give us a drama in several acts, life-and-death choices, strong protagonists, and spontaneous eloquence. Homer could hardly ask for more.

The Art of the Short Story

Fri, 01 May 2009 10:37:47 GMT

It's important that we learn to tell actual stories—that is, stories in the literary sense—in short, quick-and-dirty versions. The point, after all, is that we use improved storytelling skills to make more appealing reads. A Sunday story that runs 3,000 words helps. But short daily stories that brighten the weekday paper may be even more important. Short stories reach more people. And they reach them more often.

Remembering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:47:26 GMT

Our Notable Narratives for the end of April are two films, each recounting the death of a major American newspaper.

“Remembering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer” records the voices of journalists reflecting on what they will miss about their paper, which continues as an online-only publication. Footage of the trademark globe atop the paper’s office building leads to a series of interviews with staff members, who talk about the excitement of covering events “way above [their] pay grade,” the rush of the newsroom, and a sense of having served the disenfranchised of Seattle. Curt Milton’s video moves from staff interviews to slower, layered visuals of employees assembling for a final picture, then closes with that formal group photograph—graciously ceding the final word to the kind of images that ran in the pages of the paper for more than a century.

“Final Edition,” which appeared first and inspired Milton, establishes a more traditional narrative by using a husband and wife who work at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News as an entry point into the story. Their description of the announcement that the paper will be sold or shuttered launches the narrative arc. We know that the paper will fold in the end, and so we watch uncomfortably as the video records the staff still in limbo. By the time that Rich Boehne, president and CEO of Scripps, tells the newsroom that he will close the paper, we have met and identified with many of the reporters and editors, and we suffer with them. [To read our interview with John Temple, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, click here.]

The Rocky Mountain News’ effort is the more ambitious of the two projects, involving a team of videographers and producers who reach out not only to the paper’s staff but also the citizens of Denver and even the mayor. Ultimately, “Final Edition” propels the viewer into the heart of the devastation and betrayal reporters and editors feel, while “Remembering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer” retains the reserve of a tribute. But the two together capture the complicated mix of pride, anger, and grief that so many journalists feel as printed newspapers founder.

The Girl in the Window

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:46:03 GMT

“The Girl in the Window” is the story of Dani, a child so removed from normal human community she has been labeled “feral.” In this St. Petersburg Times piece, Lane DeGregory walks along a delicate tightrope, exploring an abused child’s situation without compounding her exploitation. We found ourselves drawn in, not only by inherent interest in the story but also by a vivid intimacy in the writing: “All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.”

A significant online component adds to DeGregory’s article. Photographer Melissa Lyttle portrays Danielle’s tantrums, using pictures and audio in place of more invasive video. The online package, though, was sometimes disorienting in its sheer volume.

The text, too, was extensive, and while we applaud the inclusion of Dani’s biological mother in the narrative, we wished a piece of this length offered more real insight into her. We did, however, appreciate the literary context DeGregory offers about “Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book”—and the subtle way she shows that many of the narratives that precede Dani’s do not have happy endings. (See the Editor’s Corner.)

In the complimentary portrayal of Dani’s life with her new parents, DeGregory risks descending to “all you need is love” for narrative closure. And yet what makes the piece successful are the nagging questions exhumed along the way, like those from a childcare worker who asks, “What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?”

Read a Poynter Online interview with Lane DeGregory and Melissa Lyttle.

Final Edition

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:31:37 GMT

Excerpts from an April 2009 interview with John Temple, former editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

Q:	What story were you hoping to tell in “Final Edition”?
A:	The idea was to tell the story of what the Rocky meant to the community and to the people who worked there, whether the final outcome was sale, closure, or bankruptcy—which we thought were the three possible outcomes. The documentary had three different titles and endings at one point. When it was announced that the paper was up for sale, we posted a lot of video on our Web site of the president of Scripps making the announcement. And then we did a number of videos that day. I think as early as the next day, our senior editor for multimedia and photography, Janet Reeves, and video journalist Sonya Doctorian came to me and said, “We think we should do it as a documentary.” It was a great story, and we thought we should cover it ourselves.
Q:	Please talk about the decision to use a married couple, Jeff Legwold and Laura Frank, as narrative guides through the video.
A:	We were lucky to have such an articulate and profound person as Laura. And early on, Jeff was very angry. He had written an eloquent response to the Scripps decision to sell the Rocky Mountain News. One lesson from this experience is that the uncertainty extends much farther than just the employees. We don’t realize how many people are affected—really it’s the children, spouses, partners, parents, as well as close relatives and friends. And so we felt that showing a family took the story out of the newsroom and into the home. I thought Jeff was so articulate with the angry point of view that it provides the necessary critique—that we weren’t all going along with what was happening.
Q:	What was it like to help put together this story—which is partly your own story—while staying in your role as professionals?
A:	It was okay. We were okay. The good news is that we did it so early that the stress and strain hadn’t set in as much as it would. You couldn’t help but be affected by the sadness of the story we were working on. But we’d done it before. Columbine was just months like that. And, of course, much, much worse.
Q:	Were there any debates about including the anger or distress employees felt in what amounted to the final story on the closure?
A:	No, we felt that it was very important that this meet our journalistic standards. But that also meant that it had to have balance. Jeff said the company had quit on us. But the video also shows me—I didn’t know what Jeff was going to say—explaining that Scripps had owned the Rocky for more than 82 years. Somebody who spent that much time and effort in a market, it’s hard to say they’re quitters.
Q:	Do you see the film as primarily for the paper’s staff, the Denver community, or a larger audience?
A:	It wasn’t for the staff. The film was for the community. I had no idea that there would be such national interest. But I did want to make a documentary because I felt it would be more comprehensible and more affecting for a larger audience who didn’t know the Rocky. There are things we did to create a sense of the newspaper as a character in the story. We had partnered with MediaStorm [a multimedia production studio] during the Democratic convention. Prior to the convention, MediaStorm did some training sessions. We learned a lot from that experience that we could then apply to “Final Edition.” This was the first unique story that we had a special ability to tell [via multimedia] in a way no one else could. We had a very thought-through Web plan for our final edition. Really, we had a three-pronged approach: print, video, and the Web site. They were all interconnected. We wanted all of them to be of the highest caliber to reflect on the quality and the commitment of the people in the room. It was a collaborative effort, building on what we had learned so far and pushing to the next level. The paper has always believed that our role was to focus on the local story. We thought it was a very significant local story, and that it deserved our best effort. We’re proud of what we did.

Reckonings and Requiems

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:24:08 GMT

Spring comes later to us in Cambridge than to many parts of the world. Even though crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths are showing their colors, temperatures still drop precipitously some nights. The signs of warmer days give us solace, though, as this has been a particularly bitter winter.

First Person Singular: It's not just about you

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:54:38 GMT

Getting stuck next to a compulsive talker is one of the worst things that can happen at a dinner party or on a long bus ride. Even worse: the self-centered compulsive talker. What makes this experience so awful? The person's desire to tell his or her story, without thinking about which aspects might be interesting to the listener. This experience translates directly to the page. The worst books and articles are those that seem to have been written only to satisfy the writers' egos.

Remembering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:01:01 GMT

From an April 2009 email interview:

Q:

What story were you hoping to tell in your video?

A:

This was meant to be a chance for the people who worked at and loved the P-I to tell their story. Much had been written about the P-I's potential sale and possible closing and about how the community felt about losing the paper, but there hadn't been much chance for the staff to speak about their feelings of loss and sadness. And this would be one of the last chances.

I have to give credit here to assistant managing editor Chris Beringer who made two key suggestions: to focus on the staff and to ask the question "What will you miss about the P-I?" Those two ideas gave me vital direction and helped guide the shooting and editing of the video.

Q:

How did you decide to use the group photo shoot in the video?

A:

I always tell people there are two really difficult parts of any video project—getting the piece started and then figuring out how to end it. In this case, the opening and closing are linked. I came up with the idea of having the audio of staff members identifying themselves play under a shot of the P-I's iconic neon globe with its giant letters spelling out the paper's slogan: "It's in the P-I." The sign refers to the news being in the P-I, but I wanted people to know that we were the people in the P-I who made it all happen. And that we were the people who loved the place.

It was decided that we should do a final [staff] portrait to run in the commemorative edition of the paper that would appear on our last day. I quickly realized that picture would be the perfect ending for the video. The people who were "in" the P-I would gather one last time. We'd show everyone gathering for the shot and then we'd end it with the still frame (which seemed like a very newspaper format) and the long fade out at the end.

Q:

What was it like to shoot the story and stay in your role as videographer?

A:

It was tough. Photographers talk about the camera being a shield in dangerous situations. The camera protects you. That's how it was for me making the video. I was able to focus on the details of getting the interviews and editing the piece and delay my emotional response.

It wasn't until I finished editing the end of the video and saw my name come up on the credit that I really felt the sadness hit me. There were some tears and a catch in my throat. It still happens when I watch the video. Others in the newsroom started to drop by and watch the video and they had the same reaction. In a sense, we'd been using the daily production of the paper as a shield and now the enormity of what was happening was settling in.

Q:

Do you see the video as being for the P-I staff, the Seattle community or a larger audience?

A:

All three, I think. Primarily the staff. I wanted them to have something that would reflect their point of view and their thoughts. So much had been written and speculated about us, more than a little of it inaccurate. I wanted this to be our turn to speak.

And I knew that many people in the community who loved the paper would share our grief and would miss many of the same things we would. Plus, it would tell a larger story of what's happening to the industry and what we'll lose as newspapers go dark.

Q:

How did you come up with the idea of doing a video in the first place?

A:
I was leaving town for the weekend on the day the Rocky Mountain News closed and posted their final video. I forwarded a link to the video to Chris Beringer (an assistant managing editor who was working on the commemorative edition for our final day) and Sarah Rupp (senior producer for seattlepi.com) and suggested we might want to do something similar. Both immediately said yes and I left town wondering what I'd just agreed to do.

I knew we couldn't compete with what the Rocky had done (and I purposely didn't watch their video until I was finished with ours). I had been shooting video around the newsroom since early January when Hearst put us up for sale: shots of people working, the news meeting, walking through the newsroom... stuff like that. I knew I had that material to work with. But what else to add to it?

I decided pretty quickly that the best thing would be to just interview staffers and use those interviews as the core of the video. I set up the camera in the newsroom and e-mailed the staff, inviting them to come by and tell us what they'd miss. Close to 50 people did. There's something powerful about a person just standing there and telling you directly what they think. It really says, “This is who we are.”

Q:	What story were you hoping to tell in your video?
A:	This was meant to be a chance for the people who worked at and loved the P-I to tell their story. Much had been written about the P-I's potential sale and possible closing and about how the community felt about losing the paper, but there hadn't been much chance for the staff to speak about their feelings of loss and sadness. And this would be one of the last chances. I have to give credit here to assistant managing editor Chris Beringer who made two key suggestions: to focus on the staff and to ask the question "What will you miss about the P-I?" Those two ideas gave me vital direction and helped guide the shooting and editing of the video.
Q:	How did you decide to use the group photo shoot in the video?
A:	I always tell people there are two really difficult parts of any video project—getting the piece started and then figuring out how to end it. In this case, the opening and closing are linked. I came up with the idea of having the audio of staff members identifying themselves play under a shot of the P-I's iconic neon globe with its giant letters spelling out the paper's slogan: "It's in the P-I." The sign refers to the news being in the P-I, but I wanted people to know that we were the people in the P-I who made it all happen. And that we were the people who loved the place. It was decided that we should do a final [staff] portrait to run in the commemorative edition of the paper that would appear on our last day. I quickly realized that picture would be the perfect ending for the video. The people who were "in" the P-I would gather one last time. We'd show everyone gathering for the shot and then we'd end it with the still frame (which seemed like a very newspaper format) and the long fade out at the end.
Q:	What was it like to shoot the story and stay in your role as videographer?
A:	It was tough. Photographers talk about the camera being a shield in dangerous situations. The camera protects you. That's how it was for me making the video. I was able to focus on the details of getting the interviews and editing the piece and delay my emotional response. It wasn't until I finished editing the end of the video and saw my name come up on the credit that I really felt the sadness hit me. There were some tears and a catch in my throat. It still happens when I watch the video. Others in the newsroom started to drop by and watch the video and they had the same reaction. In a sense, we'd been using the daily production of the paper as a shield and now the enormity of what was happening was settling in.
Q:	*Do you see the video as being for the P-I* staff, the Seattle community or a larger audience?**
A:	All three, I think. Primarily the staff. I wanted them to have something that would reflect their point of view and their thoughts. So much had been written and speculated about us, more than a little of it inaccurate. I wanted this to be our turn to speak. And I knew that many people in the community who loved the paper would share our grief and would miss many of the same things we would. Plus, it would tell a larger story of what's happening to the industry and what we'll lose as newspapers go dark.
Q:	How did you come up with the idea of doing a video in the first place?
A:	I was leaving town for the weekend on the day the Rocky Mountain News closed and posted their final video. I forwarded a link to the video to Chris Beringer (an assistant managing editor who was working on the commemorative edition for our final day) and Sarah Rupp (senior producer for seattlepi.com) and suggested we might want to do something similar. Both immediately said yes and I left town wondering what I'd just agreed to do. I knew we couldn't compete with what the Rocky had done (and I purposely didn't watch their video until I was finished with ours). I had been shooting video around the newsroom since early January when Hearst put us up for sale: shots of people working, the news meeting, walking through the newsroom... stuff like that. I knew I had that material to work with. But what else to add to it? I decided pretty quickly that the best thing would be to just interview staffers and use those interviews as the core of the video. I set up the camera in the newsroom and e-mailed the staff, inviting them to come by and tell us what they'd miss. Close to 50 people did. There's something powerful about a person just standing there and telling you directly what they think. It really says, “This is who we are.”

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