Breaking down an NYT cop-shooting story

I liked the following story by Al Baker, a New York Times cop reporter, who put together a Nov. 14 police-shooting story with additional reporting feeds from five colleagues. It’s a model for the crucible reporters frequently must endure on deadline, when they anticipate the reader’s most penetrating question: What REALLY happened?

In the following police-shooting story, the best answer on deadline was: “a tragedy.” Whose fault was it? The reader wonders. “We’re not sure,” the newspaper answers, “but at this point here are the facts.”

Read the 1,800-word story for its straight-forward tone and its attempt to capture both sides of the story, at times with minute-to-minute narrative construction. (My observations are in caps:)

COMMISSIONER DEFENDS ‘TRAGIC’ SHOOTING
AS WITHIN POLICE GUIDELINES
By AL BAKER

Striking a balance when the facts are cloudy

THE LEAD IS A EFFECTIVE LITANY OF THE KNOWN FACTS

A troubled 18-year-old man. A furious family argument inside a first-floor Brooklyn apartment. A 911 call. Then, in the darkness, 20 bullets fired by five police officers. The 18-year-old is fatally wounded. The police say he was holding a hairbrush.

The episode unfolded in about 14 minutes in the apartment, an alley next to it and the sidewalk in front of it on Monday evening. The victim, Khiel Coppin, was struck by 10 of the bullets fired by the police and was later pronounced dead at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, the authorities said.

TIGHT DISTILLATION OF THE COPS’ CASE

Yesterday, the police gave their version of events, going to considerable lengths to defend the five officers who fired the shots — displaying elaborate charts, playing portions of a 911 call from Mr. Coppin’s mother in which he could be heard screaming, ”I got a gun,” and showing blowup photographs of Mr. Coppin’s handwritten notes, pulled from his pockets after he died.

”As we know the facts now, this shooting appears to be within department guidelines, as officers fired at someone they reasonably believed to be about to use deadly force against them,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, describing the shooting as a ”terrible tragedy.”

BACK QUICKLY TO THE OTHER SIDE

Paul Wooten, a lawyer for Mr. Coppin’s family, responded brusquely to Mr. Kelly’s statements. He said the commissioner played only a small portion of the 911 tape ”that helps the Police Department,” and he demanded a thorough investigation. The police later released a transcript of a second call in which an operator phoned Mr. Coppin’s mother, Denise Owens, to get a better physical description of her son, whom Ms. Owens said was not armed.

Standing with Mr. Coppin’s mother, father and siblings outside the morgue where they had just identified his body, Mr. Wooten also disputed the contention by some officials that Mr. Coppin provoked the shooting as a means toward his own death, a phenomenon known in law enforcement circles as ”suicide by cop.”

”There’s no credible evidence at this time to suggest that this was a suicide attempt,” he said.

COMMUNITY RESPONSE

Some witnesses disputed the police account, and others asked why the police were unable to subdue the man without killing him. A group of residents from Bedford-Stuyvesant marched to the 79th Precinct station house to express their displeasure.

PROCEDURAL DETAILS

The shooting will be investigated by the office of Brooklyn district attorney and by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, officials said.

PERSPECTIVE GRAF REINFORCING THE TRAGIC NATURE OF THE CASE, SETTING THE READER UP FOR A MORE EXPANSIVE LOOK AT THE DETAILS

It was clear yesterday that in those moments in the darkness, sudden and seemingly random movements by Mr. Coppin collided tragically with moves by the police. Dissecting what happened during those 14 minutes, action by action, shows that whatever the level of training and preparedness of the officers, in a volatile and fluid situation a potential tragedy may be just around the corner.

”It is hard to justify shooting someone with a comb,” said one police official. ”And you find yourself in a position of defending the actions. Unfortunately, policing takes on the demeanor that you have to be right 100 percent of the time — and that is an impossible standard for anyone to meet.

”There will be a lot of controversy over this,” the official added. ”It was a tragic accident, a tragic mistake. And, unfortunately, you cannot take back the bullets.” Mr. Kelly said the events on Monday simply outpaced the department’s ability to respond.

THE STORY MOVES TO THE TROUBLED LIFE OF THE VICTIM

Mr. Coppin’s mother, Denise Owens, had experienced trouble with her son long before Monday.

Three times in January 2005, Mr. Coppin robbed people in the street, twice striking his victims and pointing a gun at them, according to a law enforcement official. He confessed to the robberies after his mother turned him in, and spent time in a juvenile facility.

Ms. Owens, the police said, struggled with her son’s psychiatric problems. He took antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, and had been admitted to Kings County Hospital Center’s psychiatric ward, officials said.

On Monday, after reaching out to a crisis team, Ms. Owens told detectives, she asked her son to leave the apartment, but he refused. She said she twice pretended to call 911, to scare him into leaving. ”She also said that Khiel had picked up a tape dispenser, put it under his sweatshirt and said that he was, quote, ‘Prepared to die,”’ Mr. Kelly said.

HAVING ESTABLISHED A MINUTE-BY-MINUTE CHRONOLOGY, THE REPORTER SHARES IT WITH US. IT HELPS US FEEL THE HELPLESSNESS OF THE PARTICIPANTS. THIS ALLOWS THE TONE OF THE STORY TO CHANGE. THE SENTENCES GET SHORTER. (THE STORY AVERAGES 19.3 WORDS PER SENTENCE, WHICH FOR THE CLAUSE-HAPPY NYT IS TIGHT WRITING.) THE STORY MOVES WITH MORE FORCE.

Ms. Owens called 911 at 7:05 p.m. to report more trouble with her son. The call went over as a ”10-52,” which means a ”family dispute with a firearm.”

As Ms. Owens spoke to the operator, giving her address, a man she identified as her son was heard in the background saying, ”I got a gun and I’m gonna shoot you,” according to a transcript of the call. He repeated the threat four times during the call, which lasted 1 minute and 17 seconds.

At 7:07 p.m., two uniformed officers from the 79th Precinct arrived at Ms. Owens’s apartment at 590 Gates Avenue. They found the door to Apartment 1D ajar and saw Mr. Coppin holding two knives, one in each hand, in the hallway between the front door and a back bedroom.

The officers ushered out Ms. Owens and her 11-year-old daughter. Ms. Owens told them that her son ”was armed with knives, but not a gun,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Coppin, however, told the officers he had a gun. As they approached him, he lunged toward the officers with the knives and yelled, ”Shoot me, kill me,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Coppin then retreated to a back bedroom as the officers went the other way, to an outside hallway, where they met two detectives.

Mr. Coppin peeked periodically from behind the bedroom door, showing a knife or holding something under his sweatshirt while saying he was armed. ”At one point, he yelled at the officers, ‘Come get me, I have a gun, let’s do this,”’ Mr. Kelly said.

At 7:08, the officers called the emergency service unit, whose officers are trained in the use of nonlethal restraining equipment and tactics.

At 7:17, Capt. Charles McEvoy, the second in command at the 79th Precinct, joined the four officers in the hallway.

Captain McEvoy called for the hostage negotiation team. A lieutenant on the scene also called for technical assistance and response unit. In the next moments, the officers in the hallway heard Mr. Coppin moving a gate that covered the bedroom window. Officers in the street began yelling that Mr. Coppin was going out the window.

At 7:18, a sergeant on the scene reported Mr. Coppin’s location outside the window over the radio. Mr. Coppin dropped four feet to the sidewalk. He walked through an exterior gate and marched toward officers in front of the building — officers who had not been facing him inside. Captain McEvoy ordered five officers in front of the building — two officers and a sergeant from the housing bureau, and a sergeant and detective from the 79th Precinct — to back up and take cover, which they did, behind police cars.

Mr. Coppin ignored the orders to stop, show his hands and get down on the ground.

”He just kept walking toward the officers,” said Beverly Holloman, 50, who watched the police as Mr. Coppin climbed out a window three floors below hers. ”He wasn’t saying anything.”

Witnesses said Mr. Coppin had his right hand under his black sweatshirt and was holding an object, with his left hand on top of his right hand. He reached under his sweatshirt, pulled out the object and pointed it in the officers’ direction as if he were aiming a gun, Mr. Kelly said.

The police officers opened fire. No gun was recovered.

NICE TOUCH TO MAKE THE NEXT SENTENCE A SEPARATE ONE, RATHER THAN COMBINING INTO PREVIOUS GRAF

But the hairbrush was.

The officers range in age from 35 to 45, and each one has at least 10 years in the department. One of the officers fired six times, one fired five shots, two of them fired four times. The detective, the only one in plain clothes, fired once, using a revolver.

A spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner’s office said Mr. Coppin was shot in the chest, his right hip, the back of his left forearm, the front of his right and left knees, and the back of his left leg. He also suffered three wounds to the left thigh and one to the front and another to the side of his right ankle.

INFO ABOUT VICTIM’S NOTES COULD HAVE BEEN MOVED UP BUT MY IMPRESSION IS THAT THE WRITER, STILL UNSURE WHETHER THIS WAS A SUICIDE-BY-COP INCIDENT, DIDN’T WANT TO PREJUDICE THE READER. THE SENTIMENTS VOICED IN THE NOTES ARE NOT CONCLUSIVE

The notes in Mr. Coppin’s pockets said: ”those closest 2 death iz closer 2 happyness” and ”that’s why more bums truly smile than millionaires.”

GOOD, TIGHT GRAFS ABOUT PROTESTS

There were angry outbursts in the neighborhood yesterday.

At one point, Mr. Coppin’s friends, acquaintances and others marched to the 79th Precinct station house to protest the shooting of an unarmed black man nearly a year after another black man, Sean Bell, was killed in a hail 50 police bullets in Queens.

The demonstration at the station house was led by a man waving a brown hairbrush.

”How many?” the man, Calvin B. Hunt Jr. said, referring to the number of police bullets. ”Twenty shots,” the crowd of about 100 people answered.

At the building where Mr. Coppin lived, several people described officers swarming in the street, their guns drawn, focusing on Mr. Coppin.

ENDING IS CONSTRUCTED TO REINFORCE THE POINT OF THE STORY: A TRAGEDY

A woman who witnessed the shooting but declined to give her name held her hands high to imitate how Mr. Coppin was holding his hands up as he stood in the window as police yelled for him to get down, though she could not see if he was holding anything. ”I spent the majority of the night on the bathroom floor, terrified,” said one woman.

”I’m a mother,” she said. ”Do you have any idea how it feels to know that I stood there and watched another mother’s child get shot?”

Playing off the news: a graf-by-graf breakdown of local-angle journalism

One of the most common assignments you get, especially at small- to medium-sized papers, is the local angle. At my first paper, we joked about doing a story about one notorious national figure because we assumed she had passed through our California town on the state highway. The stories we actually did weren’t much further-fetched.

When former President Johnson died, we did a feature on the guy who had run Johnson’s first U.S. Senate campaign in Texas and happened to live in town. When the first TV movie about Charles Manson ran, we profiled a local sheriff’s deputy who’d been among the lawmen who arrested Manson.

Most of the time, the idea to do a local-angle story comes from your editor, not from your heart. Which is the first strike against you. You’ll often have to listen to a preconceived story theme that may not match the truth. Which means you’ll have to work harder at (a) finding a true angle, (b) selling your boss on an idea different than his own, or (c) finding out that no approach works and breaking that news to him.

How to be a playah

The question to keep asking yourself as you report and write these stories is: Is there a real connection between the larger event and the perceptions I’m collecting? Are people aware of the phenomenon? Am I having to work too hard to introduce them to it, and perhaps working too hard to shape their opinions? Is the local angle real or imagined?

Here’s a breakdown of an everyday, off-the-news story I edited a few summers back, with my comments interspersed between the grafs in bold-face. It started on a Thursday. Shaquille O’Neal had joined the Los Angeles Lakers and signed a monster contract–one of several huge ones that took place in the National Basketball Assn. that week. I was talking to one of my reporters, John Mitchell, and we wondered (I’ve forgotten whose idea this one was): How was this playing out on the playgrounds of L.A.?

John is one of my newspaper’s best street reporters, so I was convinced that he’d bring meaning to the story. He found more meaning than I expected, so instead of publishing the story on Friday, we waited one more day so he could work into the night Thursday.

As you’ll see, several structural principles make this story work–summation, foreshadowing, quotes, transitions–but none of it would matter without the validity that John’s reporting brought to the concept. See what you think:

1st graf: Engage the reader by presenting the essential conflict simply.

Every time an NBA star signed another impossibly huge contract this week, Dave Koch’s job got tougher.

2nd graf: Expand on who Koch is and explain his mission to better describe one half of the conflict.

Koch directs 400 teenage athletes at USC’s National Youth Sports Program, trying to instill not only athletic skill but also an appreciation of discipline, long-term planning and the need for education. You can’t rely on the slim chance of a big pro contract, he tells them.

3rd graf: Remind the reader of the news:

Then came the wave of unprecedented pro basketball contracts, so fast that it was hard for the boys to keep the names straight, hard for them to conceptualize the dollars: seven years, $56 million; five years, $50 million; seven years, $98 million. By the time Shaquille O’Neal signed with the Lakers for $120 million for seven years Thursday, almost a billion dollars in free-agent money had been thrown around the NBA.

4th graf: Show how the news affected the kids:

And Dave Koch’s athletes, youngsters whose bodies have yet to catch up with the size of their feet, fantasized yet more about getting their share, getting it fast, getting it all in one shot.

5th graf: Expand on the 4th graf with an example:

”I’m a baller,” insisted David Santana, 13, stretching to show his full 5-foot, 11″-inch frame and size 13 shoes. ”I want to be a professional ballplayer too. I can do it.”

6th graf: Most stories like this would continue to bring in quotes from other boys. But that sabotages the mission of the story, which is expanding on the theme–the contradiction–developed in the 4th graf. At this stage, one voice is enough. There’ll be room for others later if the reader isn’t bored. The key right now is: move the story along. Keep up the pace. So the story uses statistics to make a couple of points.

O’Neal will make about 500 times as much as a Los Angeles public school teacher. What coaches like Koch tell kids like David is that the odds of emulating the lowest-paid pro, let alone Shaq, are overwhelmingly long. First, David will have to make his high school team. That will cut the chances of making the NBA down to about 10,000 to 1.

7th graf: Now it’s Koch’s turn to talk about his dilemma. We could have used him earlier but it would have been less credible; we needed to hear a kid’s voice first, because the kids are the focus of the top. Koch, by contrast, is more intersting in the context of what the kids say.

”Kids read about these one-in-a-million athletes getting mega-million-dollar salaries, and it’s hard to convince them that it’s all right to be one of the other 999,999 individuals working hard to make a decent living,” Koch said.

8th-through-10th grafs: Now we can hear some more of the kids, having laid out our story hypothesis. So far, each paragraph had a specific mission. Now, our context developed, we can slow the pace and go a little deeper on each step. The reality of what John found was that many of the kids had a measured reaction to the mega-bucks signings.

Word of O’Neal’s deal zipped through the USC camp as the teenagers moved through their organized schedule, from basketball and swimming to discussions about first aid and AIDS. They tried to imagine the sheer size of the contract.

”Los Angeles is going to have the best basketball team,” said Shangameir Sutton, 15. Yes, he admitted, he too has a secret desire to be a pro. ”They wouldn’t have to pay that much for me.”

Alan Hatcher, 13, has the same dream, but recognizes that education comes first. ”You need the experience of college,” said Alan, who plans to be a pediatrician. Fourteen-year-old Ronald Pennington, who is a head taller than Alan and constantly told he is an NBA natural, also demurs. ”I’m not good at it,” he said shyly. He thinks he’ll be a veterinarian.

11th graf: We embark on a second venue. I’d wanted reaction from young kids, but John suggested adding older, more hardened young men from a midnight-basketball league designed to keep them off the streets. In the first sentence of the 11th graf, the story establishes the change of scene. The second sentence establishes the contrast in attitude.

Hours later, a few miles away at a midnight basketball league game at Harvard Recreation Center in South-Central Los Angeles, the unfathomable millions were again the topic among basketball junkies. Only here the players were older, 17 to 34, chastened by life, aware their glory days were over, playing for fun.

12th and 13th grafs: The story expands on the contrast of scenes: Kids don’t worry about who pays for the tickets. The older players do.

Here there was a realization that the boys at USC had yet to grasp: Somebody was going to have to pay the bill for Shaq’s payday, and that somebody was the loyalists. The Lakers had already announced that the cheapest ticket at the Forum would rise to $21 from $9.50.

”That makes it impossible for many families to go see a game,” said Marlan Morton, 35, a former member of the Harlem Globetrotters who was playing in the night game. Still, he acknowledged, ”This is business.”

14th graf: We need to establish what midnight basketball is. We could have done it in the 11th graf but we didn’t need to yet. What’s coming in the 15th graf requires context in the 14th:

Midnight basketball has been popularized around the country as a way to draw young men in tough neighborhoods off the streets at the most dangerous hours. The league at the Harvard center, which includes the Los Angeles Clippers as a main sponsor, began seven years ago as a way to persuade gang members to stay off the street. At first, gang members were among the players, as the organizers had hoped. Today, the gangs no longer come, only the connoisseurs of hoops.

15th-through-18th grafs: The 15th graf is long, but it’s effective because (a) you now appreciate midnight basketballers and (b) this graf contains a powerful litany of feelings and viewpoints, and shows how the big contracts play out down at this level of fandom. It distills a lot and doesn’t waste space on quotes.

The players of the midnight league complained that the professional game is no longer a people’s sport, that they were being squeezed out of seats by corporations and celebrities. They expressed disap pointment in athletes who grew up on these same rough streets but disappeared as soon as the ink dried on their fat contracts. They shared their shame over athletes from O.J. Simpson to Michael Irvin, who seemed to get caught up in a lifestyle that brought disgrace on their families. They suggested that Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’ 17-year-old basketball phenom, sent the wrong message when he skipped college and went directly to the NBA from high school.

”Education goes out the window,” said one player.

For the pros, the young men complained, basketball is about nothing but money. Here there were no paychecks, only an intense love of the game among athletes whose bodies are finely tuned, if past their prime. It was almost 9 p.m. The first game of the evening was about to start. The sneakers squeaked on the hardwood floor.

19th-through-23rd grafs: In a pinch, these five short graphs could have been cut. They do not directly contribute to the primary local-angle theme. I left them in because they expanded–by showing, rather than just telling–on the tangential theme in the 18th graf: that basketball at the street level is about love for the game, a purity that seems to be disappearing at the pro level with these huge contracts.

”I’m one of the old guys,” laughed Craig Washington, a 24-year-old UCLA lab assistant. ”I have a 9-to-5.”

Washington plays each week in a league with Byron Mayhan, a high-flying point guard, and Brian Bennett, a deadly outside shooter, both students at Los Angeles Trade Tech.

There is a payoff from playing in this league, but it is not financial. If you play here, you are less likely to be hassled by gangs from rival neighborhoods.

”People know us as basketball players and don’t bother us,” said Bennett, 23.

That’s the difference between this league and the NBA, Mayhan said: ”One is a way to survive. The other is show business.”

24th and 25th grafs: This is our closer. What you hope for is that the back of a feature story will resonate–remind the reader of the top, say something that makes the reader feel he has been on a journey, and that the journey is now complete. Something reflective can be helpful. John was taken with the slave metaphor that an administrator of the midnight league saw in the big salaries.

Ed Turley, the league’s assistant director, saw mixed implications in O’Neal’s contract. Fine, let him get as much money as he can. But there was something disturbing about the language he kept reading and hearing as teams bid for these free agents. It reminded Turley of the auctioning of slaves.

”Free agents aren’t really free,” he said. ”And this bidding sounds too much like some auctioneer asking: ‘What will you give me for this big 7-foot-1 strong center?””

AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL YOU BEAT WRITERS: I like to think of myself as a normal guy when I read a newspaper. That is, I don’t read every story every day, and every once in a while I realize there’s an important running story that I’ve paid insufficient attention to, and it’s time to get engaged. Here’s where you betray me: Too often, by the time you’ve written your third or fourth consecutive daily story about a running development, you forget that people like me exist–you forget to tell me, somewhere in the first four or five grafs, what the hell the story’s about.

I have an example, and then I have an even more poignant reaction from another normal person.

The example ran in my paper the early part of last week. It was one of the scores of stories written so far about the Enron scandal. Pretend to be normal, and read the first eight grafs, and keep asking this question: What exactly is the furor over Enron’s collapse about?

Enron Corp.’s collapse could take years and involve a review of millions of paper and electronic records, so the agency has begun looking for a shortcut: an insider who would tell all in exchange for leniency from potential criminal or civil prosecution, authorities confirmed Sunday.

It is a path well trod by federal authorities in other complex white-collar investigations of corporations: Gain the full cooperation of someone high up enough in the hierarchy to have extensive knowledge of its operations–and potential culpability in questionable acts–but not so high that there aren’t others in even loftier positions to merit offering a deal.

Current and former Justice Department and FBI officials confirmed that such a process is underway but did not discuss details, saying it is perhaps the most sensitive part of the investigation as it gets up to speed.

“It’s obvious: You look for the weak points, someone you have leverage on, who is in a position where they know a lot and has a great deal to lose,” said one FBI official, who spoke Sunday on the condition of anonymity. “That will be one of the first points of the investigation. You gain enough information against that person to say, ‘This is the only course of action for you that makes sense.’ ”

And, said two high-ranking senators investigating the burgeoning scandal, it appears as if some executives both at Enron and at its auditor, the accounting firm Andersen, may have engaged in potentially criminal behavior.

See what’s happening here? I’m interested but the writer cruises past the words “burgeoning scandal,” oblivious to the fact that he has yet to defined it.

“Clearly, on the face of it, some of the activities carried out by the [Enron] corporate executives were not legal, and in violation of rules and regulations–if not laws,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), on the same show, also had harsh words for Enron executives.

“We know that they were trading fast and loose with offshore corporate entities that were hiding their debt from the public,” said Lieberman, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, which is conducting one of several congressional investigations into the company’s failure. “We know that they were saying things to the public, to shareholders, the retirees . . . about how the stock was going to go up and–at the same time they were selling their stock right then.”

Okay, that was where I stopped reading. I felt like an outsider at a party. There I was, watching Sen. Lieberman make allusions to “trading fast and loose…” as if I were supposed to know what he meant. Am I being too critical? In case I am, the prosecution now calls to the stand a screenwriter named Patricia Marx, who a couple days later wrote the following op-ed piece in the New York Times in which she wrestled with the same dilemma:

Here’s the thing about following current events. When an item first appears in the news, you must make a quick decision: Will it turn into a daily front-page story or will it end up being filler, buried next to an article about Connecticut opening its motor vehicle tax records to the public? All too often, I make the wrong call.

The first time I heard the name Enron (about a month or so ago), I thought: Football play? High-performance drink? New fabric that’s part enamel, part rayon? When I learned that it was an energy trading company accused of, um, something Very Bad, I thought: Well, whatever it is they’ve done, it will all blow over. Enron, I concluded, was the Y2K of 2002. Rather than waste my time on a story of no consequence, I resolved to concentrate on something that would be discussed on news shows and at dinner parties for months to come: the unveiling of the Segway scooter.

Boy, was I mistaken. Now, after having discounted the Enron crisis early on, I am a hopeless nitwit on the topic–unlike those Enron insiders who only pretend to know nothing.

Major news stories are complicated, and the window of opportunity for learning the rudiments is, unfortunately, limited. Sure, you can read all you want at any time, but if you miss the first crucial days, you will never catch up. It’s like missing the first few weeks of kindergarten; you’re going to have a tough time in graduate school, not to mention first grade.

I learned this lesson years ago when the friction in Yugoslavia began. How could a country with such pretty beaches, I figured, become an international problem? I never did get everything straight over there. But it may not be too late to get in on the Enron crisis. At least the story involves no maps.

So how do you determine if a news germ is going to blossom? (1) If the key players deny there is anything to it, it will be a big deal (the corollary: if the key players say it will be monumental, it will turn into the next Segway story). (2) If it involves a name you’ve never heard of or can’t pronounce, you’d better at least read the headlines every day. (3) If it seems boring, it will be the sensation of the century.

The other night, in an effort to catch up, I watched the news on PBS. Jim Lehrer asked Senator Fred Thompson if he ever thought, “Oh, my goodness, we’ll never figure this one out?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “there are too many people that play here.” I knew exactly how he felt. I turned off the television and returned to deepening my expertise on the long-term implications of the retirement of Yves St. Laurent.

The moral of this story, beat writers, is that normal people are out there, and they’re interested. It’s just that they get left behind sometimes, and you have to remember what that feels like, and take pity on them.

Thanks in advance.

Breaking down five versions of the news media’s uncounted-ballot study

Your mission is to write a story of between 2,000 and 3,000 words about a complex report detailing the screwiest election in American history. You’ll need to address the findings, a variety of hypothetical scenarios, the backdrop, the reaction and the perspective–and you’ll be tempted to cram it all in the first half-dozen grafs.

What you’ll find out, as you try, is that you keep overloading the story, and are forced to strip some crucial information out of the top and scatter it through the rest of the story. As much as you fancy yourself an uncompromising reporter, you’ll make one compromise after another in structuring this beast. So will your competitors. And all of you-even if you walked away from the keyboard the night before, satisfied you’d done your best-will be slapping your heads when you read your rivals’ work the next morning. For they’ll have made at least one better choice.

This was the challenge some of our best political writers faced last week when newspapers around the country printed the result of a long-awaited media study of the uncounted Florida presidential ballots. Here are the first several hundred words of five different versions, published by five media organizations that were among those who studied the uncounted ballots: the Tribune Co. (represented here by the Los Angeles Times), the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

These are presented in no particular order, but they’re fun to study because they show you how different writers and editors–with access to the same data–made different decisions about points of emphasis. As you study them, keep focused on how each version was based on a particular “greater good,” and how that sense of mission governed each story’s compromises-the decision that put certain details further and further down, even though many of those details seemed awfully important.

Who won the ‘Who Won?’ story?

Let’s start with the L.A. Times’ version, which used the first two grafs to compare scenarios that had Bush and Gore winning:

WASHINGTON — If the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed Florida’s courts to finish their abortive recount of last year’s deadlocked presidential election, President Bush probably still would have won by several hundred votes, a comprehensive study of the uncounted ballots has found.

But if the recount had been held under new vote-counting rules that Florida and other states now are adopting–rules aimed at recording the intentions of as many voters as possible–Democratic candidate Al Gore probably would have won, although by an even thinner margin, the study found.

The second graf gave us the most enticing, albeit moot, points of the study: In one distant scenario, Gore might have won. The third graf expands on that by explaining that more folks attempted to vote for Gore:

The study provides evidence that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore than for Bush–but so many Gore voters marked their ballots improperly that Bush received more valid votes. As a result, under rules devised by the Florida Supreme Court and accepted by the Gore campaign at the time, Bush probably would have won a recount, the study found. Since the study was launched, the nation’s debate over the Florida recount has cooled and Bush, whose legitimacy as president already was accepted by a large majority in January, has won massive public approval for his leadership of the war against terrorism.

The study, a painstaking inspection of 175,010 Florida ballots that were not included in the state’s certified tally, found as many as 23,799 additional, potentially valid votes for Gore or Bush.

The fifth graf grapples with the toughest part of the story-the study examined many scenarios, and the margin was always tiny:

The significance of these ballots depends on what standards are used to weigh their validity. Under some recount rules, Bush wins. Under others, Gore wins.

But in almost every case, the outcome still is a virtual dead heat, with the two candidates separated by no more than a few hundred votes out of nearly 6 million cast in the state.

Now the story invests five grafs in the history of the 2000 election:

A little more than a year ago, after one of the most tumultuous election nights in the nation’s history, Americans awoke to discover that the presidential race was–improbably–deadlocked.

Florida, with 25 electoral votes, was too close to call. And without Florida, neither Bush nor Gore had a majority of electoral votes.

The official results, which the state certified over Democratic protests, were: Bush 2,912,790, Gore 2,912,253. The margin of 537 votes, less than 0.01% of the total votes cast, triggered an automatic recount.

For 36 days, politicians and lawyers argued over whether and how to recount the state’s votes. The Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount to begin; the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the recount to stop. On Dec. 13, Gore conceded. On Jan. 20, Bush took office as president.

But thousands of potentially valid votes remained uncounted. And, as a result, the Florida election’s outcome remained a matter of debate.

Then the story transitions back to the findings, using bullets:

In January, eight major news organizations commissioned a definitive examination of the uncounted ballots in an effort to answer some of the outstanding questions and see if lessons could be learned for future elections.

The review found that:

* Precincts with large numbers of black voters were measurably more likely to produce spoiled ballots than precincts with few black voters. The data cannot explain why. However, the study debunked the belief that older voters are error-prone. Across the state, precincts with younger voters had higher error rates.

* Bush probably would have won any recount of “undervotes,” ballots that were rejected because they registered no clear vote for any presidential candidate. By contrast, Gore would have won most recount scenarios that included “overvotes,” ballots that showed votes for more than one candidate. However, Gore’s lawyers never pressed for overvotes to be recounted.

* Ballot design was a key factor. Although the Florida fiasco initially focused on the “butterfly ballot” for punch cards in Palm Beach County, the voters’ error rate was even higher in some counties that used more modern optical scanning systems but had equally confusing ballots. Most of the errors occurred in 18 counties where ballots spread the presidential candidates across two pages or two columns.

* Hand recounts can be reliable, but only if the rules are clear. The researchers who examined the ballots agreed on the marks they saw more than 97% of the time. The disagreements came mostly when they were asked to judge whether a voter who failed to punch a clear hole in a ballot had left a “dimple,” an indentation on the card.

* Some Florida counties handled their ballots so carelessly after election night that county officials could not say with any certainty which ballots had been counted and which had not.

And now the obligatory reaction grafs begin:

White House spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish, speaking on behalf of Bush, said: “The American people moved on…”

The Associated Press’ lead was more complex than the L.A. Times, summing up the entire study in a long one-sentence graf:

A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome–by the barest of margins–had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount.

It gives us a dollop of historical background almost immediately:

Bush won Florida, and the White House, by 537 votes out of more than 6 million cast. But questions about the uncounted votes lingered.

Almost a year later, a media-sponsored review of the more than 175,000 disputed ballots underscored that the presidency came down to an almost unimaginably small number of votes.

Good perspective in the fourth graf:

The new data, compiled by the Associated Press and seven other news organizations, also suggested that Gore followed a legal strategy after Election Day that would have led to his defeat even if it had not been rejected by the US Supreme Court. Gore sought a recount of a relatively small portion of the state’s disputed ballots; the review indicates his only chance lay in a course he advocated publicly but did not pursue in court–a full statewide recount of all of Florida’s untallied votes.

The reaction is far higher than the L.A. Times:

”We are a nation of laws, and the presidential election of 2000 is over,” Gore said yesterday in a prepared statement. ”Right now, our country faces a great challenge as we seek to successfully combat terrorism. I fully support President Bush’s efforts to achieve that goal.”

Said Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer: ”The election was settled a year ago. President Bush won and the voters have long since moved on.”

The news organizations set out to examine as many as possible of the ballots set aside as either undervotes or overvotes. Undervotes involved about 62,000 ballots where voting machines were unable to detect a choice for any presidential candidate, and about 113,000 overvotes were read by machines as possibly containing more than one choice.

Then four grafs that, using clear, short sentences, explain the results from varying scenarios:

Since the legal wrangling focused on how votes were defined, the media-sponsored review did, too, calculating results under different standards.

Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide, Gore erased Bush’s advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes.

Completing two partial recounts that Gore unsuccessfully pursued in court showed Bush maintaining a lead ranging between 225 and 493 votes.

Strikingly, all these outcomes were closer than even the 537 votes of Bush’s official victory margin. With numbers that tiny, specialists said it would be impossible to interpret the survey results as definitive.

The Wall Street Journal took a less traditional and less conditional approach: Its first graf started with a feature structure and ended by flatly saying Bush would have won–period:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to suspend the counting of disputed presidential ballots in Florida last year remains one of the most controversial actions in the court’s two centuries of history. But a year later, there’s this important update: An exhaustive review of the state’s ballots suggests that George W. Bush would have won anyway.

Background in the second graf:

The review of 175,010 Florida ballots by The Wall Street Journal and seven other media organizations was conducted with the help of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It attempted to examine all the ballots that didn’t register as votes when they were counted by machine.

The project, which took more than nine months and cost nearly $1 million, is likely to be as close as anyone will ever get to a comprehensive understanding of what really happened in Florida last fall.

Distillation of the key scenarios in the third graf:

The results suggest that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the vote counting ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to continue, as many Democrats had advocated, Mr. Bush still would have won the election by 493 votes. That’s only a handful less than the official victory margin of 537 votes. The study also suggests that if then-Vice President Al Gore had won his original request for hand counts in just four heavily Democratic Florida counties, Mr. Bush still would have won, by 225 votes.

And then an aggressively interpretive fourth graf:

In other words, despite the ferocity with which critics have assailed the logic of its decision, the findings indicate that the Supreme Court didn’t steal the presidential election from Mr. Gore, as some Democrats believe. Instead, if anything can be said to have cost Mr. Gore the election, it was poor ballot design and a lack of voter education.

The Journal story, realizing how distant Gore’s chances were, decided to place the more-folks-wanted-to-vote-for-Gore graf lower:

None of the review’s findings are likely to settle the partisan dispute over the 2000 election. The study offers plenty of grist for those on both sides of the debate. It provides strong evidence, for instance, that a clear plurality of voters went to the polls on Nov. 7,2000, intending to vote for Mr. Gore. Thousands more Gore voters than Bush voters appear to have been foiled by a combination of their own mistakes and confusing ballots.

In another twist, the media consortium’s study shows that Mr. Gore might have edged out Mr. Bush if ballots were recounted the way the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 12 was necessary for constitutional fairness but impossible to complete given legal time constraints. That ruling called for “uniform rules to determine [voters'] intent” on all ballots statewide. Under several scenarios that applied such statewide standards, Mr. Gore’s victory margin was less than 200 votes.

Then a nice graf underscoring the thinness of all scenario margins:

In two scenarios analyzed by the consortium, his margin was nearly identical regardless of whether the statewide standard was as loose as Democrats had proposed — counting the infamous “dimpled chads” on punch-card ballots — or as strict as Republicans had wanted — counting only chads with at least two corners detached. All of the margins in the consortium’s analysis are smaller than Mr. Bush’s state-certified victory margin of 537 votes, or 0.009% — so small that imperfections in the study, or the vagaries of how county officials would have counted the votes, could have altered the results.

Then another two grafs that add to the nearly dismissive tone of the Journal’s article:

One indisputable conclusion is that Florida’s election system didn’t work well and needs to be reformed, a process the state has already begun. But the political impetus for nationwide ballot and election reform, which seemed so crucial to the country’s future last year, when the Florida results created a crisis for democracy, has been swept away by the tide of history.

For many Americans, the question of Mr. Bush’s legitimacy as president was settled when he took the oath of office Jan. 20. For nearly everyone else, the debate was decided Sept. 11. Polls taken since the terrorist attacks that day, including the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll over the weekend, continue to show that nearly nine out of 10 Americans approve of the job Mr. Bush is doing…

Several grafs lower, there’s a nice phrase that explains the purpose of the scenario (underlined):

To see what would have happened if Mr. Gore had gotten his way, the consortium accepted the four counties’ recounts but added results from Miami-Dade’s unfinished precincts by counting every ballot with at least one corner of a chad detached for a presidential candidate. The result: Mr. Bush, by 225 votes.

The Washington Post made, by my reading, the most effective compromises to give you the best distillation of the results in the top of the story (the first four grafs).

Here’s where the notion of the “greater good” came in: To achieve that result, the Post story used a trick that often clutters sentences beyond recognition–it crammed material into dashes in three of the first four grafs. Normally I hate that, but I accepted the insertion of perspective as doing more good than harm. (Notice that the second graf, which is too complicated for any more words, uses two sentences instead of dashed material.) You walk away from these first four grafs with an excellent understanding.

See what you think:

In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts — one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court — had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.

But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.

The study showed that if the two limited recounts had not been short-circuited — the first by Florida county and state election officials and the second by the U.S. Supreme Court — Bush would have held his lead over Gore, with margins ranging from 225 to 493 votes, depending on the standard. But the study also found that whether dimples are counted or amore restrictive standard is used, a statewide tally favored Gore by 60 to 171 votes.

Gore’s narrow margin in the statewide count was the result of a windfall in overvotes. Those ballots — on which a voter may have marked a candidate’s name and also written it in — were rejected by machines as a double vote on Election Day and most also would not have been included in either of the limited recounts.

Now the background:

The study by The Post and other media groups, an unprecedented effort that involved examining 175,010 ballots in 67 counties, underscores what began to be apparent as soon as the polls closed in the nation’s third most populous state Nov. 7, 2000: that no one can say with certainty who actually won Florida. Under every scenario used in the study, the winning margin remains less than 500 votes out of almost 6 million cast.

For 36 days after the election, the results in Florida remained in doubt, and so did the winner of the presidency. Bush emerged victorious when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 ruling, agreed with his lawyers’ contention that the counting should end. Since then, many Gore partisans have accused the court of unfairly aborting a process that would have put their candidate ahead.

Now five grafs on the deeper meaning:

But an examination of the disputed ballots suggests that in hindsight the battalions of lawyers and election experts who descended on Florida pursued strategies that ended up working against the interests of their candidates.

The study indicates, for example, that Bush had less to fear from the recounts underway than he thought. Under any standard used to judge the ballots in the four counties where Gore lawyers had sought a recount — Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia — Bush still ended up with more votes than Gore, according to the study. Bush also would have had more votes if the limited statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and then stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court had been carried through.

Had Bush not been party to short-circuiting those recounts, he might have escaped criticism that his victory hinged on legal maneuvering rather than on counting the votes.

In Gore’s case, the decision to ask for recounts in four counties rather than seek a statewide recount ultimately had far greater impact. But in the chaos of the early days of the recount battle, when Gore needed additional votes as quickly as possible and recounts in the four heavily Democratic counties offered him that possibility, that was not so obvious.

Nor was there any guarantee that Gore could have succeeded in getting a statewide recount. Florida law provided no mechanism to ask for a statewide recount, only county-by-county recounts. And although he did at one point call on Bush to join him in asking for a statewide recount, it was with the condition that Bush renounce all further legal action. Bush dismissed the offer, calling it a public relations gesture by his opponent, and Gore never took any further steps toward that goal.

Transitioning to reaction:

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to the study, said, “The voters settled this election last fall, and the nation moved on…

The rest of the story had sections on discerning voter intent, the genesis of this study, the history of the Florida election and deeper findings of the study that could be better appreciated within that technical context.

The New York Times pushed the Gore-might-have-won scenario down to the fourth graf, allowing it to use the first three grafs to expand on the Bush-would-have-won-anyway theme:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff – filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties – Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.

But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium’s independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to “count all the votes.”

The fifth and sixth grafs were devoted to the complaints of elderly voters and the consequences of ballot errors:

In addition, the review found statistical support for the complaints of many voters, particularly elderly Democrats in Palm Beach County, who said in interviews after the election that confusing ballot designs may have led them to spoil their ballots by voting for more than one candidate.

More than 113,000 voters cast ballots for two or more presidential candidates. Of those, 75,000 chose Mr. Gore and a minor candidate; 29,000 chose Mr. Bush and a minor candidate. Because there was no clear indication of what the voters intended, those numbers were not included in the consortium’s final tabulations.

Now three perspective grafs, ending with the key scenario that gave it to Bush by 493 votes:

Thus the most thorough examination of Florida’s uncounted ballots provides ammunition for both sides in what remains the most disputed and mystifying presidential election in modern times. It illuminates in detail the weaknesses of Florida’s system that prevented many from voting as they intended to. But it also provides support for the result that county election officials and the courts ultimately arrived at–a Bush victory by the tiniest of margins.

The study, conducted over the last 10 months by a consortium of eight news organizations assisted by professional statisticians, examined numerous hypothetical ways of recounting the Florida ballots. Under some methods, Mr. Gore would have emerged the winner; in others, Mr. Bush. But in each one, the margin of victory was smaller than the 537-vote lead that state election officials ultimately awarded Mr. Bush.

For example, if Florida’s 67 counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida court on Dec. 8, applying the standards that election officials said they would have used, Mr. Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes. Florida officials had begun such a recount the next day, but the effort was halted that afternoon when the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 vote that a statewide recount using varying standards threatened “irreparable harm” to Mr. Bush.

But the consortium’s study shows that Mr. Bush would have won even if the justices had not stepped in (and had further legal challenges not again changed the trajectory of the battle), answering one of the abiding mysteries of the Florida vote.

Even so, the media ballot review, carried out under rigorous rules far removed from the chaos and partisan heat of the post-election dispute, is unlikely to end the argument over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. The race was so close that…

What’s the lesson? Examine your choices not merely by the effect they have on a particular graf or section of the story, but on the story’s holistic mission. Find enough time to give your piece an extra read that compares the domino-like effects of your good choices with the “greater good” of your story theme.

In which we demand: Does each cluster of paragraphs perform a unique and vital function?

Once you’ve gained enough command of your short-form stories to assign each paragraph a unique and necessary purpose (see the Oct. 15 posting), you can apply the same logic to longer-form writing.

Rather than immediately striving for graf-to-graf synchronicity in your 75-inch story, find a more modest test to make sure you’re going in the right direction: Demand that each segment of your story play a specific role. Treat a segment as any logical chunk. Figure each story will have (I’m being very arbitrary) six to twelve segments.

One of the best lessons you can enjoy is to take a piece of somebody else’s writing you admire and see where these natural divides occurred.

A breakdown of a long story that ‘tracks’

I’ve tried to do this to one of the best newspaper features I read last year. It was written by the Los Angeles Times’ J.R.. Moehringer while he was our Atlanta bureau chief. J.R. came upon the tale of a Southerner named James Allen, who had become obsessed with collecting pictures of lynching.

The story defied any structural generalities. It was not a narrative. It divided the biographical details into two sections in different parts of the story. It divided the African-American reaction to Allen’s quest into two sections in different parts of the story. What it had that it made it work, that made it feel like a singular flowing statement, were (1) scenes, (2) beautiful transitional logic and (3) an insightful narrator who knew how to put history into perspective for you by letting you see his characters discover and experience history’s ripples. It was one of the best stories I have read in a long time about race in this country because it understood (without ever being so artless as to say so directly) that we are all–and will always be–prisoners of this history.

J.R. will tell you he got lucky because he stumbled into the opening scene the first time he met Allen, and later on was able to observe a gripping speech Allen gave which was obviously a great ending. Even with those advantages, the story makes a series of good choices. Let’s take a ride:

“AN OBSESSIVE QUEST TO MAKE PEOPLE SEE”

I. The opening scene: This scene introduces the issue (the heated interest over lynching photos) and the protagonist. J.R. is known as a stylist but watch how deliberately he moves–short sentences, parallel structure, each new fact taking you just a bit further into the story. There’s only a snatch of description of Allen. The point is to get you on board for the long haul, to make you willing to explore a notion that would make many of us turn away and quit reading:

NEW YORK — There isn’t room for everyone who wants to see.

The gallery can’t hold more than a dozen people at a time, so the crowds who come each day to see the exhibit must wait. Today, one of the coldest days of the year, the wait is three hours, and still the line stretches down the block.

The exhibit features 68 vivid photos of American lynchings. There is a photo of Frank Embree, a black man whipped across his legs and back and chest, then hanged. There is a photo of Lee Hall, a black man shot, then hanged, his ears cut off. There is a photo of Bennie Simmons, a black man hanged, then burned alive, then shot to pieces. There are photos of men and women, hanging from trees and bridges and telephone poles, most of them black–a small number of the 5,000 blacks killed by white mobs, mostly between 1880 and 1940, mostly in the South.

Most of the people waiting to see the photos are black too, though circulating among them is a man as white as the snowflakes wafting through the February air. He is James Allen, the 46-year-old owner of the photos, the well-known antique collector from Atlanta who set out to use his collecting skills to make people see, to find lynching photos that would “shock the country.” Judging from the line outside this gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he did just that. Judging from the look in Allen’s eyes–which are blue and big behind Harry Potter glasses–he shocked himself as well.

II. The confrontation: In those first four grafs the writer encircled the issue and the protagonist. Now, due to some luck–the unexpected appearance of a black celebrity–J.R. is able to introduce us to a powerful sub-theme: how blacks, in particular, are torn by this exhibit. Stevie Wonder is inside the gallery to ask Allen some questions. The scene takes 21 grafs but it ends with a powerful, engaging question–the question people will keep asking Allen throughout the story.

As the gallery closes for the day, Allen is exhausted. He walks across the street for a cup of coffee, but the moment he takes a sip, his cellular phone rings.

“Who?” he says into the phone. “Really? Are you sure? OK, I’ll be right over.”

He hangs up and stares.

“Stevie Wonder is across the street,” he says. “He wants to see the photos.”

Allen hurries back to the gallery, and there, just inside the door, wearing a full-length black overcoat and dark sunglasses, is the famous musical artist, who has been blind since birth. He is flanked by two friends.

“Mr. Allen?” one of the friends asks. “This is Steve Wonder.”

They shake hands.

“Steve was hoping you could describe your photographs to him,” the friend says.

“Sure,” Allen says.

He leads Wonder inside, to the first set of photos on the wall.

“I’m going to be graphic,” Allen warns.

“That’s OK,” Wonder says.

Allen talks slowly, deliberately, about a photo of a black man, Will James. He tells how thousands turned out to see James hanged in the center of Cairo, Ill., in 1909. He tells how, when the rope broke, the mob riddled James with bullets, then burned him, then cut off his head. He describes a photo of the head, jabbed onto a stake and set at the edge of town.

Wonder says nothing, while his friends look at each other in horror.

Allen leads Wonder to the next photo, and the next. Wonder seems bewildered, as if he can’t comprehend all that Allen is saying. When Allen steps away to speak with someone else, Wonder’s friends try.

“It’s like his neck is broken,” a friend whispers to Wonder, “and his upper body is standing straight.”

The friend twists Wonder’s head, to simulate a broken neck. He makes Wonder’s arms go slack, arranges Wonder’s body to look like the hanged man in the photo before him. Now Wonder seems to understand. Now he seems to feel the image, to see it.

Allen returns, and Wonder leans into him.

“Can I ask you a question?” Wonder says.

“Yes,” Allen says.

“What inspired you to do this?”

III. Foreshadowing: Four grafs to encircle the big issues we’ll encounter in this story.

It’s the first time a black person has asked this question, asked it pointedly, with an audience gathered to hear. But it won’t be the last. As thousands of Americans, blacks in particular, confront Allen’s horrifying collection of photos, they will often react by confronting Allen himself. Some will be angry. Others will be more like Wonder: They will shake Allen’s hand warmly and thank him for what he’s done–then ask in the next breath why he did it.

Was he motivated by compassion–or money? Is he a crusader–or a voyeur?

Faced with black anger and suspicion, Allen will tend to look wounded. He will pause and close his eyes and struggle to make his motives clear. After devoting years to the search for photos of lynchings, there will be days when it all feels secondary to this other search, for the best way to explain himself, for the right words to allay the fears of people he set out to help.

In the end, however, the two searches will seem the same–each an obsessive quest to make people see.

IV. Allen’s collecting biography: Seven mostly longish grafs, told chronologically, to show how his passion expanded, and also to give us a history lesson about this horrible phenomenon.

The first photo was a white man, Leo Frank. A Jewish factory manager falsely accused of killing a young girl, he was lynched in 1915, in the woods north of Atlanta. Nearly 65 years later, a photo of the lynching fell into Allen’s hands.

Not just a photo. A postcard.

From historians and collectors Allen learned that postcards of lynchings were once as common as postcards of Niagara Falls. Even after the U.S. Postal Service banned “violent” mail in 1908, a photographer could make a living off lynchings alone, selling the photos door to door, and especially at the lynchings themselves. Postcards and souvenir photos of lynchings allowed white mobs to spread their terror far and wide.

Allen bought the Frank postcard for $15, then found another, of Laura Nelson, a black woman in eastern Oklahoma. Nelson’s 14-year-old son was accused of shooting the local sheriff. When Nelson tried to hold off a posse of white men who came for the boy, she too was arrested. Weeks later a mob broke into the jail and took Nelson and her son to the Canadian River. They raped Nelson and hanged her from a bridge, and hanged her son alongside, his pants around his ankles.

Someone snapped a photo that day–May 25, 1911. The photo probably got passed around and went into a drawer and collected dust for decades before Allen saw it at a flea market and bought it for $75. When he found another photo, and another, he began to suspect that untold numbers of lynching photos must be out there, their existence unknown to Americans. He’d already established a national reputation as a “picker,” someone who finds and resells rare objects. But picking was only paying the bills. Finding lynching photos, he thought, could change the world.

Gradually the search for the photos consumed Allen. He canvassed the South. He haunted flea markets and pawnshops and antique stores. He peered into crawl spaces and attics and cellars, even under one old grandmother’s bed. He pored through albums and scrapbooks and family Bibles. He made hundreds of phone calls and mailed thousands of fliers. He advertised in newspapers and antique journals and on the Internet. He set up a toll-free number, launched his own Web site, and became a fixture at gun shows and gatherings of Civil War buffs. He spent thousands of dollars he didn’t have, including $30,000 for one rare photo of Frank Embree, gazing into the camera, a mixture of terror and rage on his face, just minutes before the mob lynched him.

Last year Allen decided to show the nation what he’d found. He chose to publish most of his 145 lynching photos in a book, “Without Sanctuary.” Then, last winter, he organized some of the photos into a small New York exhibit, and when the exhibit drew more visitors than the gallery could accommodate, when it sparked editorials and essays and furious debate in the black community, he helped move it to the larger New York Historical Society, where it remained on display until earlier this month. (More than 80 cities have offered to host the exhibit next.) This fall, Allen will take his photos to the Sorbonne in Paris. Next year he hopes to mount an enormous and potentially explosive exhibit in Atlanta.

V. An assessment of the collection by historians: four grafs to put Allen into perspective, to give us some guidance about how to feel about him.

Because of Allen, historians say, Americans in great numbers are talking about lynching for the first time since the 1930s, when the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People lobbied hard, but without success, for federal anti-lynching laws.

“These images have not really been part of our photographic and cultural history,” says Leon F. Litwack, the A.F. and May T. Morrison professor of American history at UC Berkeley, who contributed an essay to Allen’s book. “Now they’re unavoidable.”

Countless books have been written about lynching. But there is something different about 145 photos. By collecting so much visual evidence, many say, Allen has dispelled the notion that lynchings were rare, or that they happened long ago.

“In 30 years working in the field of African American studies,” says Randall Burkett, an archivist at Emory University in Atlanta, “there’s nothing I’ve encountered that enables white folk to understand the reality of racism in America in the way these images do.”

VI. A deeper look at Allen’s collecting biography: 11 grafs keyed to what he learned, so that we learn.

While collecting photos, Allen also gathered facts. He learned everything he could about lynching, beginning with the definition: A lynching is when three people or more, outside the legal system, kill someone accused of some crime or offense. Hanging is often, but not always, the method of the lynch mob. Victims are often burned alive, mutilated, dismembered, their teeth and fingers and ashes and clothes and internal organs sold as keepsakes. Allen found people still saving lips and locks of hair from lynching victims.

Allen learned that tickets were sold to lynchings, that the mood of white mobs was exuberant–men cheering, women preening, children frolicking around the corpse as if it were a maypole. He learned that special excursion trains carried people to lynchings from farms and outlying areas, that some lynchings were staged like theater, the victims dressed in costumes to deepen their degradation.

He learned that, in much of the U.S., lynching wasn’t exempt from the law, it was the law. Between 1880 and 1930, a black Southerner died at the hands of a white mob more than twice a week.

Six years ago, Allen devoted himself full time to the search for lynching photos, in part because he could see himself in each new photo he found.

“I’m a gay man,” he says. “And the discrimination I’ve known in my life has been from white males. I’m just angry, and this is a way to express my anger.”

He learned about the white males leering out of the photos, their eyes glazed with blood lust, by digging through old newspapers–which not only covered lynchings but often advertised them. Whenever he “exposed” another villain, Allen says, “it was a feeling of ‘gotcha!’ ”

In one photo, a grotesque little white man in the foreground points to the hanging bodies of two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. “Bo pointn to his niga,” someone scrawled in the margin of the photo, which Allen bought for $750 at an Orlando, Fla., card show. Besides acquiring the photo, Allen thinks he knows who Bo was, which may prove equally useful. Even if members of lynch mobs can’t be brought to justice, he says, their names should be recorded. “I’m building a case,” he says. “I’m building the truth.”

Allen believes lynchings didn’t disappear but took new forms. Echoes of lynching can be found everywhere, he says, from the death penalty to the current epidemic of police brutality. Whenever reporters ask the date of the last lynching, Allen answers grimly: “The last lynching hasn’t happened yet.”

Part of Allen’s education involved learning to do business with dangerous people. One day he phoned to make an appointment with a man who owned a rare lynching photo.

“When you get here,” the man said, “remind me to show you a picture of the nigger I blew away myself.”

Last year Allen got a call from a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The man was willing to sell his prized lynching photos, so Allen and his partner, John Littlefield, raced across northern Georgia, into the Alabama forest, reaching the man’s house in the middle of the night. When the man produced a noose and waved it at them with a sneer, Allen realized he’d been had, and wondered if he and Littlefield would live to see the sun rise.

VII. The black reaction: 15 grafs on the most intriguing part of the story. Watch how J.R. plants a seed in the person of Kymberly Newberry, who will return later on. Watch, too, how she uses her question to create a transition to the next section–the life forces that shaped James Allen:

Lately, Allen has been learning to cope with blacks’ reactions to his photos. Most blacks thank him for his efforts, but many are troubled that he is earning money from his $60 book, which has sold 20,000 copies and briefly became a top seller on Amazon.com.

“To commercialize the suffering of black people is to do the ultimate disservice to black people,” says Michael Dyson, a black scholar at DePaul University who holds the Ida B. Wells-Barnett professorship, named after the great anti-lynching crusader. “To make coffee-table books out of that kind of pain is highly problematic.”

Some of Allen’s critics are less offended by how much he profits than by how he presents himself. It’s fine to be a scavenger, they say, so long as you don’t call yourself an avenger.

“He’s not a saint,” says Julia Hotton, a black independent museum curator in New York and a consultant to the New York Historical Society. “I know why he did it. He did it because he’s a dealer. And that’s all he has to say.”

Hotton says older blacks especially can’t help feeling suspicious when they see Allen, and when they hear him.

“If they hear a white man with a Southern accent is collecting these photos,” she says, “they get a little skittish.”

On Internet bulletin boards, some blacks talk angrily about the fact that a white man is telling their story. One man says that white people exhibiting lynching photos is like Germans running a Holocaust museum. Others question the value of anyone, black or white, perpetuating such painful images. In the comment section of the online general-interest magazine Journal E, someone writes: “If Mr. Allen really wants to help African Americans, he could do much, much better than to pound fresh salt into old wounds.”

Not all the anger is aimed at Allen. Many of the 7,000 messages in the electronic guest book at the New York Historical Society, and the hundreds in the guest book from the photo gallery where the exhibit started, describe an unfocused rage. “To tell you the truth,” an 11-year-old girl writes, “I feel so mad and upset now I feel like killing whites. I know it was a lot, not all of them. I understand. But they still could of helped us.”

Whatever the reaction, Allen meets it head on. He repeatedly accepts invitations to speak to black groups, even when he knows the reception is likely to be hostile, and he’s spent many hours at the New York Historical Society, introducing himself to visitors.

Just recently, Allen approached a young black man looking at one of the photos.

“What do you think of the exhibit?” Allen asked.

“What do you think I think?” the man snapped.

Kymberly Newberry was angry the minute she saw Allen’s book. A black TV and film actor in Los Angeles, her experience was typical: She walked into a bookstore, looking for something fun to read, and Allen’s book stopped her cold. There, on the cover, was 16-year-old Lige Daniels, hanging from an oak tree outside the courthouse in Center, Texas, and just below his bare feet was a towheaded little boy, wearing a dress shirt and necktie and smiling as if for a school photo.

Newberry spoke to the manager of the store. She beseeched the sales clerk. She asked, what’s the point of this? What good can come from this?

Then she opened the book. She couldn’t stop herself, and when she saw what was inside, on page after page, she wanted to know just one more thing: Who the hell is James Allen, and why did he do this?

VIII. Allen’s personal bio: The question opens the door, and we walk through for nine grafs.

He was raised in Winter Park, Fla., a middle child in an Irish Catholic maelstrom of 11 brothers and sisters. He was the one who didn’t quite fit in, who had an unusual fascination with rare objects. Instead of bikes and toys, he would ask his parents for Chinese vases.

His salvation was the family housekeeper, Mary English. Without understanding why, he bonded with her, identified with her. A poor black woman who sometimes walked to work barefoot, she talked to him about hate, and about the high price of being born different.

He was 18 when his father threw him out of the house for being gay. He drifted around the South for a time, then landed in Atlanta in 1977. Flat broke, 23 years old, he got an idea. Maybe he could make a living off his love of objects. He borrowed a friend’s van and drove into the country, where he found an antique shop that would give him a set of oak chairs on credit. He drove back to Atlanta, set the chairs in a dirt lot and put up signs. The chairs sold instantly, at a tidy profit, and a picker was born.

From the start, while finding rare objects, Allen found an obsessive streak in himself, a tenacity without limits. There was the time, for instance, he sat all day with an old woman, begging her to sell him her antique blanket chest: To stall, he kept eating her spongy angel food cake, until he thought he might explode. (He got the blanket chest.) There was the time, driving through Alabama, he got a call on his cell phone about a slave-made jug in South Carolina: He did a U-turn in the middle of the road and drove all night to be the first one at the antique shop in the morning. (He got the jug.)

He lost his driver’s license twice and collected 35 speeding tickets in headlong pursuit of the next handmade quilt, the next antique highboy, the next odd piece of Americana.

It was never enough for Allen to be a great picker, one of the few who not only sells to private collectors but supplies the finest museums. (He has placed things with the Smithsonian Institution, and he has almost single-handedly stocked the High Museum in Atlanta with the work of renowned folk artist Howard Finster.) Allen wanted to be king of the pickers, a goal he now thinks he’s reached, partly because he did what no one thought possible. He found 145 photos of lynchings in America.

“Oh there’s no doubt,” he says. “I’m unquestionably the best.”

And yet, he lives modestly. His house is the house of a picker, a man who feels at home on the back roads of the Deep South. No other house in the heart of Atlanta has a homely creek burbling through its frontyard, or homemade gourds strung from the branches of its holly tree, or a crude purple sign painted by a black man from south Georgia:

“Be-Ware Dogs.”

IX. A detailed look Allen’s house: This 12-graf section flows easily from the previous graf. It’s largely a trick to create an anchor that will justify a revealing scene at the house. A black cameraman asks Allen a probing question that draws a better answer from narrator J.R. (“…In fact, there are endless theories…”) than from Allen.

Allen lives here with his partner, Littlefield, two pit bulls, a menagerie of screeching parrots, and hundreds of sad, haunting objects. His next collection will focus on “the seeds of racism,” he says, and his house is part research laboratory, part evidence locker.

Above the front door is an old sign from the Atlanta Biltmore: “Coloreds Only.” Against a far wall is a porcelain drinking fountain from Texas. Painted on it in delicate blue script: “Whites Only.” On a side table is an infant’s Ku Klux Klan robe from Indiana. Other than the blood-red Klan symbol it looks just like a christening dress.

The most striking object is out back: A wooden shack, 7 feet tall, 7 feet wide, 11 feet long. Allen found it abandoned along a dirt road in Florida, and found the black man who built it, living in a nursing home nearby. After paying the man $10,000 for the shack, Allen interviewed him for hours, recording his stories.

The man, a shellshocked World War II veteran, not only lived in the shack for 50 years but decorated every inch of it with his carving knife. He carved to compensate for his poverty, Allen says, and to comment about it. He didn’t have a phone, so he carved a phone. He didn’t have electricity, so he carved an electric meter–and wired it. He didn’t have a lock, so he carved himself a set of useless keys.

After a day of carving, the man would shut his door each night and sit in the dark.

“Why didn’t you go outside?” Allen asked the man.

“Because of the Klan,” the man said.

The man’s story enhances the beauty of the shack, Allen believes, and its value. The man’s story makes the shack more than a work of folk art; it’s a sort of monument. When Allen sells the shack, along with some furniture and art done by the old man, the asking price will be just under $100,000.

Allen’s house is always a hive of activity. Today, however, it’s unusually busy. A camera is set up, and Allen is being interviewed about a new kind of racial harassment in the workplace: Black workers across the nation have reported finding nooses on their chairs and doors and lockers. Because of his photos, Allen seems the most likely person to address this phenomenon, and to explain the symbolism of the noose, which he calls “the American swastika.”

When the interview ends, the cameraman, who is black, has one last question. Allen braces. Here it comes. But the cameraman, sifting through Allen’s stacks of lynching photos, only wants to know if Allen has any explanations for why lynchings happened.

In fact, there are endless theories. Economic competition. Institutional racism. Sexual confusion. Some even blame a sharp rise in black crime. Allen can recite them all, and often does. At the moment, however, only one comes to mind. “There are just some sorry-ass white people in this world,” he says.

The cameraman laughs bitterly.

X. Deeper examination of the black reaction: Again, the transition in the next sentences preserves the story’s momentum. We know enough about Allen and enough about his volatile obsession to appreciate the nuances that are central to many African Americans. J.R. works this for 15 grafs, showing us Kymberly Newberry’s change of heart, and then her isolation. As I read this section I truly understand the pain and ambivalence that I might, as a white person, have written off. The last paragraph of this segment points an unflinching, provocative finger at the protagonist and prepares us for the conclusion.

Somewhere under the clutter in Allen’s house lies a copy of his recent speech to a group of black psychologists in New York. The speech went well, he says. He nearly managed to explain himself, almost made them see, and many in the group approached him afterward to say kind things and to offer thanks.

The question-and-answer session, however, was bruising. Some stood and demanded to know just who Allen thought he was, a white man collecting relics from the “black holocaust.”

He tried to tell them that a white man can understand pain too. He tried to tell them that a white man can be heartbroken by black history, and want to help. He didn’t try to tell them about being gay, about watching AIDS stalk his community and claim his friends, an ordeal that gave him a heightened appreciation for all human suffering. Allen has learned that comparing the plight of gay men with the struggle for civil rights unsettles many blacks.

Then they asked about the money. Exactly how much was Allen making off their suffering?

“That’s the most hurtful thing,” Allen says. “To dilute everything I’ve done down to a commercial enterprise. I tell them it’s not their business. It’s not the point. It’ll be so long till I see any profits–if I ever do–that I will have earned them.”

Allen already has turned down an offer of $1 million for his photos. The buyer wanted to place them at Harvard, and Allen believes the photos must remain forever in the South, which is why he houses them at Emory, where they are available to students and scholars.

Still, he divides the proceeds from his book with the publisher, Twin Palms. And if he does sell his photos–to Emory, for instance–he won’t keep the sale a secret. “I hope it does make news,” he says. “I hope that everyone in the country who has a lynching photo realizes there’s a potential for that photo to be worth thousands of dollars–so they won’t destroy it.”

Kymberly Newberry, the black actor in Los Angeles, doesn’t care if Allen gets rich, and no longer cares who he is. Despite her initial anger, she eventually bought Allen’s book, and she studied it carefully. She read the essays while walking the treadmill at her gym. She wept over the photos in the waiting room at her doctor’s office. After living with the book for weeks, Newberry felt her anger turn to a grudging sort of gratitude.

“I don’t care who wrote the book,” she says. “I don’t give a damn. What’s important for me is that we get together and talk about it. If this man had nerve enough to do this, it’s a gift. We have to open it.”

But Newberry can’t find anyone willing to talk about it. Her friends react to the book the way she did at first, only more so. “Everyone’s response is, ‘No, I can’t look at that, I can’t deal with that,’ ” Newberry says. “Particularly black men. It’s the last thing they want to see.”

This may be one of Allen’s most startling discoveries, and it may help explain some of the reactions to him–along with the lack of reaction from any relatives of the victims in the photos: Lynching, Allen finds, is the rawest wound of all, more recent than slavery, more terrifying than segregation, less widely known than either.

Even Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who as a young black man was beaten by state troopers in Selma, Ala., and marched in the backyard of the Ku Klux Klan, wasn’t prepared for what Allen made him see. “Despite all I witnessed during the height of the civil rights movement,” Lewis writes in a brief forward to Allen’s book, “and all I experienced of bigotry and hate during my lifetime, these photographs shocked me.”

One of the angriest outbursts can be found in Allen’s book, in one of the essays he solicited. Hilton Als, a black staff writer for the New Yorker, chose to write less about the photos, as Allen and his publisher asked, than about the whites who asked him to write about the photos.

In other words, Allen.

“What is the relationship of the white people in these pictures to the white people who ask me and sometimes pay me to be Negro, on the page?” Als writes. “When they look at these pictures, who do they identify with? The maimed, the tortured, the dead, or the white people?”

XI. Allen’s finest moment: It’s a speech at a historically black college. It takes 35 grafs, and it unfolds in three mini-sections. The first one establishes the tension.

And yet, no matter where Allen goes, there isn’t room for all the people who want to see.

On a sweltering night in mid-July, Allen is the featured speaker at Fisk University, the historic black college in Nashville. A crowd of nearly 200 is on hand, nearly all students and professors, nearly all black. Some are here for Allen’s speech, some for his photos, and some for the question-and-answer session later, which is expected to be heated.

While Allen paces in the wings, going through his speech one last time, the audience sits rigidly in folding chairs, staring at the empty lectern, like a jury staring at an empty docket. In the background, courtesy of the university, a portable stereo plays “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s funereal lament about lynching:

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh.

The graphic lyrics, the anguished quality of Holiday’s voice, the oppressive summer heat–everything serves to increase the tension as Allen walks slowly to the front of the room. He clears his throat, shuffles his papers, and begins in a whisper.

As a prelude, he spends a full five minutes eulogizing Mary English, the black housekeeper from his childhood, who died not long ago. “She was the love of my life,” he says. “I hope you will sense more than a suspicion of her voice and spirit in our conversation tonight.”

The crowd stirs, restless.

Allen begins.

XI (b). Now 18 grafs, in which Allen tries to explain his quest in deeply personal terms to people who have reason to doubt his intentions. J.R. lets him tell, in great detail, the story of one lynching victim:

He talks about what it means to be a Southerner, to love the beauty of the land while hating its history to the core. The land is a liar, he says, because it makes you forget the ugliness lurking just beneath, the thousands of lynchings that are always there, that must never be forgotten.

He talks about the South’s “unhurried rural lanes,” its “dark untangled waters.” Beneath it all, he says, are the “mutilated and bloated bodies.”

He gives a brief roll call of the dead, then quickly focuses on one lynching in particular, in Waco, Texas. He talks slowly, deliberately, trying to make everyone see.

The victim, Jesse Washington, was 17 years old, a sharecropper. In the spring of 1916, while sitting on his porch and whittling a stick, Washington found himself surrounded. He was under arrest for the murder of a white woman, his employer’s wife.

Washington led a narrow life, Allen says, the life of all blacks at the time in that part of Texas. He didn’t know there were 63 churches around him. He didn’t know there were marvelous schools and universities. He didn’t know–he probably wouldn’t have believed–that Waco was sometimes called “The Athens of the South.”

Today it’s even harder to believe these things of Waco, Allen says, because of what happened to Jesse Washington.

There was a trial, of sorts. While thousands outside the courthouse bayed for the teenager’s death, his lawyer offered no defense. The jury found Washington guilty, and he was dragged from the courthouse, delivered into the hands of the waiting mob.

Farms went untended that day, Allen says. Businesses closed. Half the population of Waco–more than 15,000 people–filled downtown. They scrambled to high ground and stood on wagons and hung from the windows of buildings to get a better look at Washington, a metal chain wrapped around his neck, being dragged to an oak tree outside City Hall.

“There,” Allen says, “another mob was making a bonfire with wooden crates.”

Stripped of his clothes, Washington was kicked, spit on, then pelted with bricks. Pieces of his flesh were gouged out with spades. The mayor and the sheriff and a local photographer named Gildersleeve all looked down from the mayor’s second-floor office as the mob threw Washington onto the bonfire and began to roast him.

Washington lost consciousness briefly, Allen says, but he came to when someone in the mob castrated him. He fought desperately to escape, pulling at the chain around his neck and trying to rise.

“For this they hack off his fingers,” Allen says, “leaving him to slap grotesquely at his restraints.”

Both Allen and his audience are weeping now. But Allen presses on.

In a photo of the lynching, Allen says, “one can see a large bearish pale-skinned man wearing a blacksmith mitten, keeping tight the chain. Another man holds writhing Jesse on the heap of flaming crates with a long pole. The large pale man and an accomplice pull the chain and hoist the blistering body–of an American boy–high above the heads of the closest spectators. A wild cheer erupts.”

Allen learned about the death of Washington from a postcard. A young white Waco resident sent the postcard to his parents, proud that his face was among those in the photo. On the back, the young man wrote: “This is the barbecue we had last night. Your son Joe.”

XI (c). And finally, in 12 grafs, the last section, that begin with the question on everyone’s mind, the question you as a reader might still wonder about, the question J.R. wants to give Allen one last chance to put to rest. Notice how, in the last sentence (“…but not all…”) he avoids an overly simplified conclusion:

A woman in the second row, her cheeks streaked with tears, stares at the ceiling.

“Why?” Allen says. “People ask all the time: ‘Why? Why did you collect these horrific photos?”

He clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. He runs a hand through his sparse blond hair.

“In humble admiration of the work of Emmett Till’s mother,” he says, referring to Mamie Till, who insisted on an open-casket funeral after her son was lynched in August 1955, to show the world what lynching looked like. “Putting a face on murder and racial hatred in America for the entire world to see, we published this book. For the need to have an outlet for my own disgust and anger at the status quo, I have relentlessly pursued these photos. With every image acquired, and every face of the gawkers and killers that is brought to light, I sense a quieting of the hounds that have dogged me since childhood.”

His voice thickens.

“For every victim that lies pasted in some racist family’s photo album,” he says, “or stored in a trunk with grandma and grandpa’s Klan robe, or still pinned to the wall of a service station in some holdout sorry-ass little town–if we can acquire and place their photos in an accurate, respectful context, identify and record them for the first time, I feel some slight awareness of what is meant by resurrection.”

As the word “resurrection” floats in the muggy air, hovers like a line of music, Allen acknowledges finally what drives him, as a Southerner, as a white man, as a human being.

“Sometimes, when working with these images, I search the faces of the whites. I tremble with anger at the legacy they left me to claim.”

He grips the lectern.

“I know that, possibly, in another time, it could be my face fixed in the photographer’s chemicals. Gloating so stupidly. Gazing out at me now.”

He takes a step back, his glasses fogged with tears, a look of relief on his face. He’s explained himself, at last. He’s made them, and maybe himself, see.

For a moment, the room is perfectly still and quiet. Then most of the people in the audience–but not all–rise to their feet and applaud.

Or, for the socially minded: Keeping that blind date interested through dinner

Every story is your first meeting with the reader, another effort to seduce–to get a stranger to come along with you, to convince him or her to trust you, to keep reading, reading, reading until the last line.

As the evening begins, you must develop an air of anticipation, but without too much mystery. Your blind date, after all, has no reason to offer you blanket trust. So you present, in general terms, a sense of what the journey will be like, confident that if the pace of the evening is right you will hold your date’s interest all the way to the end.

The technique you’re employing is foreshadowing. Done properly, it distills the key elements of a story well enough to explain why the story’s worth reading, yet holds enough back to preserve internal plot points or sub-issues later in the story. It can be done in one phrase, one graf or several, depending on how you judge your audience’s level of need, their patience–and how talented a seducer you are.

Foreshadowing your key sub-themes

Foreshadowing is an excellent variable to consider as you look for additional ways to refine your self-editing skills. In the same way you ask yourself: “Does my story contain enough perspective?” you also want to ask more deliberately: “Is the story complex enough to benefit from foreshadowing…and how much?”

Some examples of stories I thought employed this sensibility effectively:

1. Foreshadowing in a narrative treatment.

You may have a great yarn that can be told chronologically, but 98 times out of 100 you’re going to have to construct a set-up. Sometimes you pull a key moment from the middle of the story and begin with that. Other times you begin by summarizing the tale right out of the block, then beginning the more detailed chronology.

This Wall Street Journal story recounted Hollywood’s failure to make a movie out of a popular but quirky novel. The writer foreshadowed the essential quandary with tremendous speed and efficiency: four grafs (293 words). Then he threw in a subhead to underscore the rest of the structure–chronological, using individual years as subhead signposts–and was off to the races. Here’s the top:

In 1980, producer Scott Kramer acquired the rights to “A Confederacy of Dunces” for $10,000, and began trying to turn the hit book into a movie. Nineteen years, seven producers, six scripts, five studios, a lawsuit, and at least a half-dozen deaths later, Mr. Kramer is still trying.

A darkly comic novel that has sold more than 1,250,000 copies, “Dunces” is the tale of Ignatius J. Reilly, a corpulent 30-year-old self-proclaimed Medievalist who lives with his long-suffering mother, and roams the depths of New Orleans, grappling with an unforgiving modern world. Its author, John Kennedy Toole, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, 12 years after his suicide. The book was published only after Mr. Toole’s mother, Thelma Toole, pestered Southern novelist Walker Percy to read the manuscript. Mr. Percy pronounced it a “great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions,” and prevailed upon Louisiana State University Press to publish it.

But the tortured tale of “Dunces” in Hollywood has Falstaffian dimensions of its own.

There has never been a shortage of talent who wanted to make it happen. The late John Belushi hoped to play the novel’s 300-pound antihero, Ignatius, as have at various times Dom DeLuise, Jonathan Winters, John Malkovich, Robin Williams, the late John Candy and the late Chris Farley. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” director Michael Apted and Harold Ramis, director of “Caddyshack,” wanted to direct. Six screenwriters have attempted adaptations. Shirley MacLaine still wants to play the mother. Yet for all the burning desire to translate one of the most acclaimed novels of modern times into film, “Dunces” has become snarled in an increasingly convoluted web of “creative differences,” ego clashes, rights disputes and pure bad luck that shows why movies don’t get made in Hollywood even more often than they do.

1980: The First Glimmer (That’s the first subhead, as the chronology begins in detail with the same character who led off the first graf:)

Scott Kramer was 23 years old, working as an assistant producer at 20th Century Fox, when an editor at LSU Press first slipped him some chapters from the “Dunces” manuscript prior to its publication. Mr. Kramer seized upon the novel, excited by what he saw as rich material…

You’ll often see writers use this structure (albeit less artfully). It resembles a double loop, or a figure 8: First, you loop quickly around the confines of the story, touching on the points that make it interesting. Then, once that foreshadowing is completed, you draw a longer loop that takes the reader narratively through the phenomenon. It’s almost like telling the story twice, but through two different prisms and at two different paces.

2. Foreshadowing to let the reader know she’s beginning a value-added story.

Some of the best news-features use one event to explore a host of social implications. They give the reader more than she might have bargained for. These stories often benefit from a structure that lets us know that the main event is connected to a series of other issues or questions. There is no formulia for this. You simply have to experiment to find language that quickly broadens the landscape. You have to be ambitious. You have to create a context the reader can use to prepare himself for a deeper examination.

The top of this story, written in 1999 by Jesse Katz about the upcoming execution of a female murderer, sought to prepare you for a discussion of nuances, contradictions and tough choices. It wanted to tell you by its voice (notice the string of questions in the third graf) that you might have to wrestle with your conscience as you read the story:

GATESVILLE, Texas–The debate over Karla Faye Tucker’s execution next month has everything and nothing to do with her sex.

Fairness dictates that it should not be a factor, that if we are to have a death penalty, it must apply equally to women as well as to men. The laws of Texas, home to the nation’s most active death chamber, make no mention of gender in determining which killers should be condemned. It certainly made no difference to Tucker’s two victims, both of whom died from a pickax in their chests.

But if it is so irrelevant, why has only one American woman been put to death since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976? Why has Texas, responsible for one out of every three U.S. executions, failed to execute a woman since the Civil War? Why has conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, a death penalty proponent, publicly pleaded for Tucker’s life? And why have reporters from around the world lined up to interview her–”this sweet woman of God,” as a “60 Minutes” piece recently gushed.

“If it was Karl Tucker instead of Karla Tucker, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation,” said Victor Streib, dean of Ohio Northern University’s College of Law and an expert on female executions. “Nobody says it, because it’s not politically correct, but there is a gender bias in the system–a double standard for women and men.”

Women, of course, do not kill as often as men. And when they do, their crimes tend to be mitigated by domestic conflict–striking back at an abusive husband, for instance–as opposed to the predatory slayings for which the death penalty is usually reserved.

Even so, the numbers remain skewed. Women account for one of every eight people arrested for murder, but only one of every 50 sentenced to death. They account for one of every 70 people on death row, but only 1 of the 432 actually put to death in the last two decades–the exception being North Carolina grandmother Velma Barfield, a serial poisoner who was executed in 1984 for slipping roach killer into her fiance’s beer.

Tucker does not say that her Feb. 3 execution should be halted because she is a woman. Rather, she says it is because of the kind of woman she has become during her 14 years behind bars–caring, repentant and deeply religious, a born-again Christian married to a prison minister, who together believe they can help save souls as lost as Tucker’s once was.

“This is not about me trying to save my life; this is about the power of God almighty to change a life,” she said during an interview at the women’s death row here in Central Texas, which houses seven of the nation’s 48 condemned women. “The world may not agree with that. They may not think I deserve that. And quite frankly, I don’t deserve that. But it’s a free gift from God. He gave it to me and I received it. We all have the ability, after we’ve done something horrible, to make a change for the good.”

Now you’re hooked, not merely on the question of whether Tucker should be executed, but the social issues swirling around her. The writer has convinced you this is a value-added story. He’s convinced a higher proportion of potential readers to stay with the story, and, having done that, is free to start Tucker’s odyssey from the beginning, convinced we’ll follow him anywhere.

3. You can use a more limited form of foreshadowing to telegraph the fact that an interesting tangent awaits the reader later on.

Edmund Sanders was writing a Business-section profile of a banker whose life included some surprising personal misfortune. Read the top and watch for the underlined material in the seventh graf that made the promise:

Ten years ago, John F. ”Jack” Grundhofer was one of California’s most prominent bankers, but he packed his bags when it became clear he’d been passed over for the top job at Wells Fargo Bank. The Los Angeles native moved to frosty Minnesota in the middle of winter to take command of a smaller, ailing bank.

But ever since, the hyper-competitive Grundhofer has been fighting to get back home.

He made an unsuccessful bid for Los Angeles-based First Interstate Bancorp in 1995. Three years later he tried to buy San Francisco-based Wells Fargo but was rebuffed.

Now, undeterred, the 61-year-old chairman of Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp is gobbling up small California institutions in a bid to cobble together a third major franchise to take on the state’s leaders, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

In the last six months, Grundhofer has bought two San Diego banks-Bank of Commerce and Peninsula Bank-and Newport Beach-based Western Bancorp, which operates Santa Monica Bank and Southern California Bank. The purchases boosted U.S. Bancorp’s deposits in California to nearly $6 billion and catapulted it from the state’s 13th-biggest bank to No. 6.

”This is a bit like a homecoming for me,” Grundhofer said in a recent interview, during one of his increasingly frequent California trips to schmooze with potential customers, oversee branch integration and reestablish old business ties.

A 30-year banking veteran, Grundhofer is respected and feared as a persistent, scrappy businessman who has been toughened by personal tragedies, including his kidnapping and his daughter’s near-fatal shooting. He began his career as a repo man at Union Bank, but hopped on the management track after an angry car owner shot at him.

His California gambit has not gone undetected by the state’s top banks, especially not by his former colleagues at Wells Fargo.

At a recent Wells Fargo management meeting in Southern California, Grundhofer was declared one of the bank’s top enemies. Executives worry…

The choice Ed had to make was: how much foreshadowing that high in the story was appropriate? He could have merely used the line “who has been toughened by personal tragedies.” Or he could have added one or two more grafs at that point. I liked his compromise. It got my attention, without departing from the necessity of developing the theme of the story: Grundhofer’s financial importance. Later, when the story moved into a chronology of Grundhofer’s rise, Ed would expand on the personal bumps, keeping the promise that the foreshadowing graf made.

4. Sometimes you can foreshadow by using extra language for the sake of emphasis.

Remember, we’re on a date. We’re engaged in seduction. As long as you keep your date interested, you can do anything you want. Suppose the Italian restaurant we’re going to really is terrific. Regale her with a few extra menu details along the way.

When James Bates was profiling the new chief exec of the Los Angeles Dodgers for the Sunday Magazine, he wanted to drive home a great contrast: The new boss, a rich entertainment-industry honcho, was walking into an exceedingly unrewarding job, motivated mostly by a sappy, lifelong love of the Dodgers. The story was going to work only if you understood how beleagured the Dodgers were, and how the new prez lived and died with the ballclub’s fortunes. A classic show-don’t-tell mission. So James spent nine grafs hammering home the odds against Daly, asking in so many words why the hell anybody from the entertainment business would want the far less pleasant challenge of running an underperforming, overpaid baseball team:

New Dodger chief Robert Daly squints into the glare above Chavez Ravine, looking through the glass walls of his office, just a pop fly from the foul pole marking left field. “This is my field of dreams,” he says.

Some field of dreams. On this day, Dodger Stadium is a field of dirt. Lots of it, thanks to a $50-million make-over that must be finished before the Cincinnati Reds show up on April 14 for the home opener. No green anywhere, just rolled sod and dirt excavated from the hill where Walter O’Malley 40 years ago carved out what today is baseball’s fifth oldest stadium. Where 56,000 voices once cheered Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters, Fernando Valenzuela’s shutouts and Kirk Gibson’s miracle home run. Now there echoes the drone from two bulldozers and a tractor and an annoying high-pitched beep warning people to move. One bulldozer scrapes infield dirt from second base to third, moving so slowly that a one-armed catcher could throw it out.

The renovation at field level is much like the one taking place three sections up in the office Daly has occupied since late October. For nearly two decades, Daly was at the pinnacle of Hollywood power as head of the giant Warner Bros. studio. Now he’s abruptly thrown himself into repairing the city’s storied baseball franchise. How hard will that be? The Dodgers haven’t earned a World Series trophy since Ronald Reagan was president. Last year’s losses: $22 million. Despite pricey new seats behind home plate and a new row of luxury boxes, soaring player salaries mean that ending up in the black this year will be harder than winning all 162 games.

Daly also inherits a team that alienated fans the moment it passed from the familial stewardship of the O’Malleys two years ago into subsidiaryhood, becoming a tiny speck in Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, aimed at enhancing his cable TV operations. Now Daly is chief executive officer of the team, and plenty of fans believe it’s not a moment too soon for a change. Last year, Murdoch’s News Corp. and its Fox unit outspent nearly every other team owner, yet the Dodgers still lost more games than they won, finishing an embarrassing 23 games out of first place. If that wasn’t enough, fans suffered through watching Mike Piazza–one of the most popular Dodgers in recent times until he was unceremoniously traded–in the playoffs wearing a New York Mets uniform.

Daly’s coming summer couldn’t be more different from the ones he spent on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where he and his inseparable co-chief Terry Semel reigned for nearly 20 years. Theirs was the world of “Batman,” “Lethal Weapon,” “The Matrix,” TV shows like “Friends” and “ER” and music from Madonna, Alanis Morissette and Metallica. Daly and Semel were on a first-name basis with Clint, Julia, Mel, two Toms, Jodie, Arnold, Steven, Sly, Barbra and any other star or director worthy of a private trailer on a movie set.

Stars loved doing movies for “Bob and Terry.” The two execs could be taken at their word and the talent could count on being pampered with things like free Range Rovers or being chauffeured in Warner’s Gulfstream IV jet. After the two shocked Hollywood by announcing that they were leaving, the stars crowded the courtyard at Mann’s Chinese so Daly and Semel could cement not only their handprints on Hollywood Boulevard but also their place in Hollywood history.

All the more puzzling why someone like Daly at age 63 has answered Murdoch’s siren call. He doesn’t need the job. The millions he earned over the years are measured in triple digits. The old Warner Gulfstream IV? He and Semel bought it. Daly could just as easily be raising horses, chickens and pigeons on the $6.4-million, 17-acre ranch he and his wife, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, bought last year in Malibu.

Yet here he is, spending up to $36 million of his own money to buy 10% of the team so he can become chairman of a business 1% the size of the one he ran before. He’s an autonomous managing partner, but every fan he encounters won’t hesitate to tell him what to do. Outside of the entertainment business, virtually no one knew or cared that Daly ran Warner Bros. Now, to the opinionated Dodger fan, he’s both the genius who traded for emerging superstar outfielder Shawn Green and the idiot who got rid of pitcher Ismael Valdes and second baseman Eric Young. Some of the 30 or so letters he gets a week even complain about things like the Dodger Dogs mustard.

“What do I worry about? I worry about letting people down,” Daly says. “I really feel an obligation here not to let people down.”

Only when the second segment of the story began were we allowed to see the reason for Daly’s career change:

It’s Oct. 3, 1951. at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Daly, age 14, and his classmates are transfixed, hanging on every word from the radio their teacher has allowed in the classroom. The Dodgers are on the verge of the World Series. They’re leading the rival New York Giants 4-2 with two on and two out in the last of the ninth. The final Giant hitter, Bobby Thomson, is the last hurdle. “All the kids were listening,” Daly recalls. “We were all Dodger fans.” To understand Daly’s love for the team, you first must understand how utterly devastated he was to hear what happened next. “Thomson hit the home run and the room was silent.” The famous homer sent the Giants to the Series instead. “It was crushing.”

It’s Oct. 16, 1985. Daly is sitting in the Warner seats behind the first-base dugout watching the Dodgers in the playoffs against St. Louis. No sooner has he finished telling another Warner executive that he may attend the Series than Cardinal first baseman Jack Clark hits a home run and, in Warner Bros. lingo, that’s all, folks. Daly spends an hour sitting in a car in the stadium parking lot, as depressed as he’s ever felt.

Baseball fans come in many shapes. There are those who enjoy an occasional game, especially if the locals are having a good year. There are those so devoted that they can’t sleep at night without knowing how the boys did. And there are those who are obsessed with every detail about every player, every game, and whose own self-images are so tied up in the fortunes of the team that friends occasionally wonder about them. Brooklyn had a lot of that third type, Daly among them.

It was an intelligent trick. There had already been numerous published allusions to Daly’s love of the Dodgers, but how did you show it? Jim’s ability to characterize the depth of the contrast between crummy job and heartfelt motivation foreshadowed the emotional truth, and the emotional depth, of the story.

5. Foreshadowing an unconventional story structure

When Lee Hotz was writing a complex story on how the brain controls language, he essentially wove two stories together: neurobiology, and a single operation that humanized recent discoveries. Once the story developed, he planned to use alternating chapters. But to begin the story, he had to foreshadow both themes so you were ready for the journey.

Here are the first 13 grafs. Watch how the fifth and 13th grafs (underlined), in particular, inform you that you’re about to see microcosm (one man’s fate) and macrocosm (medicine) blended together:

In every human thought and reflection, there is a word.

For Paul Sailer, the essence of all his words is concealed in the cells along a pastel furrow of brain tissue behind his ear, just to the left of the surgeon’s probe.

On this day, Sailer, 32, lies on an operating table with his head clamped firmly in a surgical vise, in a subbasement of the UCLA Medical Center. His skull is open. His brain pulses as he breathes. The exposed tissue steams in the cool dry air.

A brain tumor is slowly crushing his left temporal lobe and with it, his capacity to make sense of words and sentences.

Only a few weeks ago, Sailer, a newly wed electrical engineer at Point Mugu Naval Station, was in training for a mountain bike marathon.

Now, to save his life, Sailer must risk the uniquely human ability to express his thoughts. The surgeon’s chance of preserving both life and words depends on a revolution in neurobiology that for the first time is revealing exactly where nouns, verbs, sentences and the concepts they articulate are rooted in the brain.

In this moment, everything that science has learned about the human brain and its most complex behavior is concentrated in a surgeon’s hands, a psychologist’s probing questions and the courage of a young man on an operating table.

On the surface, the tumor cells in Sailer’s brain look no different than normal cortical tissue. There is no language organ in the brain and no easily discernible tissue where words or grammar reside. There are only microscopic threads of cells and synapses.

For surgeons schooled in the anatomical shorthand of the body, with its emphasis on clearly defined organs, nerves and circulatory systems, this profound decentralization almost comes as a shock.

Language is nowhere and yet everywhere.

But a high-speed brain scanner at UCLA, used during pre-surgical planning to image mental activity, can see what the human eye cannot. It reveals the cells in Sailer’s brain that are responsible for language–”eloquent cells,” his surgeon calls them–as a constellation of pinpoints of light; the tumor as a shadow across a swathe of brain tissue.

In one crucial area, the shadow has embraced the light.

When this operation is over, some portion of those eloquent cells will be gone. But without the operation, the unchecked growth of the tumor could easily silence Sailer’s mind well before it proves physically fatal.

The decisions made during the next 10 hours by the surgeon, Dr. Gregory J. Rubino, are choices measured in millimeters. They may not only save Sailer’s life, but also salvage his link to the world around him, his ability to give form to his innermost thoughts and emotions. The operation may save what some believe is the foundation of the conscious mind itself–its ability, through language, to shape its own inner dialogue, to know itself.

That was followed by a typographical break, and then the first chapter on the science of language:

Bees dance. Whales sing.

Without a stumble, the average person can produce about 150 words a minute, each word…

At a loss for words, baboons employ a rich vocabulary of curtsy and bow. Even bacteria can signal their intentions with the crude semaphores of primordial chemistry.

Indeed, nature has given almost every creature a way to get its meaning across; yet only human beings are endowed with such a complex and elaborate means of making their desires known.

Lee’s foreshadowing underscored his appreciation that the hardest chore in this story was not figuring out what to tell his readers, but how.

RECOMMENDED READING: Thomas Friedman’s July 20 column in the New York Times. I offer this in sharp contrast to the sloppy way newspapers usually describe the nature of anti-globalization protests. The riots outside the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 revealed a news media often confused by the complex mixture of causes that assembled. It violated a simple rule: When you cover a protest, you sure as hell better explain exactly what the protesters are mad at. Read Friedman’s column, which follows, for your own education on a key issue, and also as an example of explanatory technique:

Throughout history, successful social protest movements have had one thing in common–a clear, simple message and objective. Whether it was the women’s rights movement or the anti-Vietnam-War movement, the mere uttering of the name immediately conjured up who the protesters were and what their objective was.

The striking thing about the protesters at gatherings from the Seattle W.T.O. meeting in 1999 to this week’s Genoa G-8 summit is that they tend to be called just “the protesters” or “the anti-globalization protesters,” which in neither case conjures up much of anything. To be against globalization is to be against so many things–from cell phones to trade to Big Macs–that it connotes nothing. Which is why the anti-globalization protests have produced noise but nothing that has improved anyone’s life.

What is intriguing about the Genoa summit, though, is that many of the serious activist groups that have participated in past protests have come to recognize that breaking McDonald’s windows or just saying “no” does not a protest movement make.

They have come to recognize that if they have any hope of harvesting the attention they have drawn to the problems of globalization they have to decide exactly what they are protesting against, because the protesters actually fall into two broad categories: those who think the issue is whether we globalize and want to stop globalization in its tracks, and those who understand, as I would argue, that globalization is largely driven by technology–from the Internet to satellites to cell phones to PC’s–which is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small, whether we like it or not, and therefore the issue is how we globalize.

Up to now, these two groups have been mixed together: Anarchists and leftover Marxists who are simply looking for ways to undermine capitalism in a new guise and protectionist unions exploiting well-meaning college students to stop free trade are thrown together in the streets with environmentalists who believe trade, growth and green can go together; anti-poverty groups that understand that globalization, properly managed, can be the poor’s best ladder out of misery; and serious social welfare groups that have useful ideas about debt relief and labor standards in a globalizing world.

Because the whether we globalize groups tend to be more noisy and violent, they have increasingly drowned out the how we globalize groups. In doing so they have created the misimpression that “the people” believe that globalization is all bad and can never work for the poor, when, in fact, it has both empowering and enriching features and disempowering and impoverishing features, and it all depends on how you manage it. If you think globalization is all good or all bad, you don’t get it.

Fortunately, many of the serious how we globalize groups and government leaders are no longer willing to cede the moral high ground to the most idiotic whether we globalize groups, and what you’ve seen around Genoa is, for the first time, a split between the two.

Some serious groups, such as Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, Jubilee 2000 and Oxfam, have been distancing themselves from violent protests and insisting on codes of conduct. “The political space around big international meetings has been hijacked by those who want to commit violence,” Justin Forsyth, policy director of Oxfam, told The Financial Times. “It is counterproductive. They are taking the spotlight off those who want positive change.” Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said people had been “far too apologetic” toward the violent protesters: “If the public knew their views, they’d disagree with them.” And President Bush rightly declared: “Those who protest free trade seek to deny [the poor] their best hope for escaping poverty.”

This split between the whether we globalize forces and the how we globalize forces is an important strategic moment that should be nurtured–not for its own sake but to actually make some progress. The serious protesters have made their point that it matters how we globalize, but they can make a difference only if they design solutions in partnership with big businesses and governments. The moment is ripe for a world leader who can bring them together.

COMING NEXT MONDAY: A series of extended “How-I-Wrote-The-Story” essays by reporters (along with the full story) that gives you an intimate look at specific writing and conceptualization techniques. First up: How a reporter’s thirst for detail brought meaning to her editor’s assignment to “define what we mean by ‘middle class’”

How to get more out of those moments between the last scrawl in your notebook and the first stroke at your keyboard

In April, I asked you to pledge 15 minutes a day toward getting better, and gave a you a bunch of suggestions to choose from. (“The 15-minute workout,” April 30) This week, try steal an extra 15 minutes during your prewriting process–between your reporting and writing stages–to refine the way you answer the obvious but essential question: What is my story about? Why the hell did I decide to do this story? Where did I wind up?

This question, however you ask it, needs to become a natural extension of your writer’s personality. To to get you going, here are three individual perspectives on prewriting. The first suggests you create a formal oral stage, especially on longer, more complex pieces. The second gives you a list of helpful conceptualizing and organizing techniques you can try, and the third shows how focusing harder on a specific variable–in this case, sentence length–can pay off.

I. The importance of giving good oral

‘Prewriting’ from three perspectives

Sportswriter David Wharton was ready to write a piece that felt cinematic, shifting from New York to New Mexico and concluding in L.A.. It was the story of a University of Southern California basketball player who came from a poor New York background, and a woman in New Mexico who salvaged him. In preparing to write the piece, David went to a book on film technique for inspiration. Before he talks about what he learned, read the top sections of his story:

The trip from New Mexico takes seven hours of driving, flying, then more driving. She comes every other week to watch a young and struggling USC basketball team.

”Her?” an usher at the Sports Arena asks. ”That woman is in her own world.”

Diane Taylor stands just under five feet tall. She is middle-aged and suitably dressed, a gold cross hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She always sits behind the bench and everyone knows her by the odd-looking stick she carries.

The size of a cane, it is covered with bells and bangles, and there is a cymbal attached on top. It is the kind of contraption a fan might rattle after dunks and three-point baskets.

”My boombah,” she calls it. And once the game begins, Taylor pounds that stick.

She pounds it on the floor, hard enough to startle people sitting nearby. She pounds it for reasons that have little to do with basketball.

People wonder about that woman.

From there, the story moves to the other protagonist, the player:

His voice settles between a whisper and a growl, his eyes half-lidded, as he tells his story. Elias Ayuso starts long ago, long before he became a sharpshooting guard for the Trojans, running the court with the jangle of the boombah in his ears. He was 8 when he left Puerto Rico with his mother and brothers and sisters, on their way to becoming another immigrant family in the South Bronx.

”The guy who lived below us, he had some problems with drug stuff,” Ayuso says. ”I don’t know if he owed money or what but they wanted to kill him. They threw a firebomb into his apartment.”

It was late at night and Ayuso was watching television with his family.

”The hallway was nothing but smoke,” he says. ”We couldn’t take the fire escape so we got everybody and we covered my little brother’s mouth and we just ran down the steps.”

They lost everything. People from the next building brought out old clothes but the best they could find for Ayuso was a blouse and baggy pants.

”They dressed me in girlie clothes,” he says.

The next few years, as his family drifted through shelters and low-rent hotels…

That second section soon ends with Ayuso drifting into trouble, and then proceeds to the third section, where Taylor and Ayuso will intersect:

What does it take to save a kid? What can salvage a child who learns to connive and brawl the way other children learn to brush their teeth and do their homework? Before Taylor attempts tries to answer the question, she has a story of her own to tell.

It goes back to a Pennsylvania mining town called Carbondale, where she was a little girl from an Irish-Italian family as big as it was poor. There wasn’t money for a doctor’s visit when she fell ill and she recalls coughing so loudly on the street that two well-dressed women stopped. to watch.

”Go home,” one of them said. ”You’re disgusting.”

Decades later, the 49-year-old woman clenches her hand into a fist and says, ”I remember thinking that no one would ever treat me that way again.”

The memory made her tough as nails, fiery as her red hair. It….

Eventually, Ayuso winds up in the New Mexico town where Taylor has settled. The story describes how she helps him get to USC and continues her commitment to him.

Here’s Dave:

Some stories require no nut graph or statistics, no quotes from experts. They are tales, pure and simple. The moment I heard about Elias Ayuso, I figured he’d make for that kind of story. As a teen, Ayuso robbed and stole on the Bronx streets. When his brother and friends were killed, he got scared and talked his way into a program that sent him to a foster family in New Mexico. He saw it as a way to stay safe, nothing more. But he ran into a feisty woman who set about trying to change him.

As I gathered information for this yarn, I found myself telling it to colleagues in the office and friends around the dinner table. And that was how I decided to write the piece, as a blend of oral and written storytelling. I then stole a trick from scriptwriting guru Robert McKee.

In his book “Story,” McKee suggests writers outline their screenplays step by step, each scene briefly described on its own index card. With the outline complete, the writer tests his idea by sitting down with a willing listener and reading it aloud.

We’ve probably all done this with full drafts of articles, but his exercise comes much earlier in the process.

”If a story can’t work in 10 minutes, how will it work in 110 minutes?” McKee writes. ”It won’t get better when it gets bigger. Everything that’s wrong with a ten-minute pitch is ten times worse on-screen.”

His method is, of course, far more involved. He has theories on what makes for a good scene and how stories should progress, all of which makes his book worth buying, even for writers, such as me, with no intentions of attempting a screenplay. But for the purposes of the Ayuso story, I focused on the act of testing my outline.

In many ways, it was the same as reading a draft. When the story moved, my words snapped one after another. When the narrative lagged, I felt uneasy. My kind listener was there to reinforce these perceptions, to tell me which parts of the tale interested him most or not at all.

At the end of an hour (my first try, it went a little long), I had a feel for my priorities. I had a grasp on the story early enough to direct both the reporting and the writing.

I’m not sure the exercise translates to articles on issues or institutions, but it sure helped with a good old-fashioned tale.

II. Thirty tips for finding the focus

Don Murray, a much-admired writing coach, first offers 16 strategies for those moments when, as he puts it, “the reporting is done, but what do all these notes mean?” Murray’s drills for finding the focus of the story include Dave Wharton’s oral strategy (#4) and begin with my favorite question:

1. Answer the question “What’s the story about?”

2. State the single dominant meaning of the story in one sentence or less. It may be changed by the experience of reporting and writing.

–The statement should not be a label, such as “War.” It should be a title that limits the subject, helps the writer focus on it and may even establish the voice with which the piece will be written.

–The statement should have what Virginia Woolf called “the power of combination.” It should contain the tensions within the story: “They had to destroy the village to save it.”

–It may help to list the elements of the story that relate to the statement. Everything in the story must advance that single meaning.

3. Rehearse this statement of focus, in your head and on paper, while working on the story.

4. Tell an editor or a colleague about the story, to hear what you say about it.

5. Draft the end of the story, to give yourself a sense of destination.

6. Draft the lead of the story, to reveal the direction and the voice of the story.

7. Free-write, as fast as possible, a discovery draft or discovery grafs, to reveal the meaning and the voice of the story. They can be any part of the story as long as they reveal tone, mood, voice. Am I sad, joyous, incredulous, detached, warm, cold? Do I smell earth or engine oil or chalk dust?

8. Listen to what your voice is telling you about the meaning of the story. The intensity, rhythm and tone of voice often reveal meaning.

9. Put down what the reader needs to know about the story. How will this story serve the reader?

10. Form is meaning. Try on different approaches to the story, such as narrative, profile, inverted pyramid, interview, problem-and-solution.

11. Rehearse the story, in your head, and on paper, to hear what the story means.

12. Look at the story from different point of view.

13. Focus in writing may be achieved the way focus in photography is achieved: by adjusting the distance. Zoom in close, stand way back; move back and forth until the story comes into focus.

14. A revealing detail may give the story focus: Look for the significant detail that reveals the central meaning of the story. That detail may be a fact, a quote, an action, a scene, a name, a face, a place, an act committed, an act not committed. Look for the image that reveals–the specific that controls the vision of the piece.

15. Look for the anecdote (the little story or parable that combines character, dialogue, action and place) that reveals the significance of the story–that shows rather than tells the reader.

16. You work for a newspaper. What’s new?

Murray follows that up by offering 14 solutions to the next, and often more vexing problem: Once I figure out what the story’s about, how do I order it?

1. Ask the questions the reader will ask, and put them in the order they will be asked.

2. Decide on the information your reader needs to know, and the order in which the reader needs to know it.

3. Give information in the lead that makes the reader ask a question. Answer it with information that sparks a new question. Continue until all the questions are answered.

4. Draft as many possible leads–a dozen, two dozen, three dozen–as quickly as possible.

5. Pick a starting point as near the end as you can.

6. Seek a natural order for the story: narrative, chronology, inverted pyramid, problem-and-solution, follow-up, a visit with the protagonist, a walk through the place you’re writing about.

7. Draft a lead and indicate three to five main points and an ending.

8. Draft many endings as quickly as possible. Once you know where you’re going, you may see how to get there.

9. Diagram the pattern of the story.

10. Write an outline.

11. Write out the thread that holds the story together.

12. Clip together the notes on each part of the subject. Move the piles around until you discover a working order.

13. Play with the key revealing specifics to see what pattern they form.

14. List all the items in the story down the left side of the page, and then move each important item into one of three columns, labeled “beginning,” “middle” and “end.” (Draw arrows or number the items.)

Here’s how this kind of prewriting thinking plays out in real life: Jesse Katz had long wanted to profile a famed Mexican ranchera singer named Vicente Fernandez. But by the time he did it, Fernandez had suffered a tragedy: his son had been kidnapped. Now there was a problem: two competing themes. Would adversity make the story stronger, or messier? The published piece was a long, magazine-like piece that successfully shifted back and forth between biography and the father’s odyssey of trying to find his son. Jesse recounts the struggle for balance:

Writing about Vicente Fernandez presented me with two competing challenges: (1) It had to be intimate and intricate enough to satisfy readers well-versed in his life and music, and (2) it had to be simple and universal enough to lure readers who had never heard of the man and cared little about his music. As human misfortune has a way of doing, the kidnapping of Fernandez’s son last summer provided me with the dramatic device I needed, a narrative that helped bridge the gap between his mostly Latino fans and the Los Angeles Times’ predominantly gringo audience.

From the beginning, though, it was a delicate balancing act. Too much kidnapping and you end up with a long, long crime story. Too little kidnapping and you end up with a long, long feature. The trick (which eluded and haunted me during most of the writing) was to parcel out the kidnapping just right, setting the action in motion and then stepping away, heightening the tension and again digressing, back and forth, until the story reached its denouement. In the best scenario, the kidnapping would be like a thread; it would keep the suspense alive while also buying me time to weave in Fernandez’s biography, the history of his music and other explanatory sections that might otherwise have derailed the story’s momentum.

My first decision was where to start. Do I explain who Fernandez is and why he is important, then introduce the crime? Or do I start with a blow-by-blow description of the crime, then introduce Fernandez? Either way, the answer would set the tone of the story, signaling to the reader just how much weight should be put on the kidnapping. My solution was to combine the crime with the music–that is, to introduce the kidnapping in the context of Fernandez’s life as a performer. Would he cancel his next show or would he sing? How could he go on? How could he not? By setting it up that way, I was able to get the drama rolling, without turning the piece into a crime story. The kidnapping was relevant only to the extent that it revealed something about Fernandez, and about Mexico.

I also made a decision, early on, not to reveal anything about the kidnapping’s resolution. I did not say whether Fernandez’s son was alive or dead, free or captive. I did not indicate how long he was held or whether a ransom was paid. At the end of my introduction, I just left Fernandez hanging, wondering if and how his son would be returned. I suppose there was something gimmicky about that–and it never could have worked if the details of the crime had been widely known in this country–but the withholding of information did help maintain the forward march of the narrative and ensured that I would have enough kidnapping material to parcel out later on.

Even with this forethought, I labored to find the right balance. In my earliest drafts, I gave too much weight to the kidnapping; Fernandez–and why he is somebody we should care about him–got overshadowed by the gory details. Not only did this leave the piece feeling hollow, but I thought it was unfair to him as a subject: We essentially ignore the man for his entire career, then acknowledge him only when he is the victim of a crime. In later drafts, I overcompensated; I wove in so many background and perspective grafs about him and his music that the thread of the kidnapping got lost. Not only did that leave the piece full of dead spots, but it felt dishonest: I had left the kidnapping unresolved at the beginning and I had an obligation to the reader to come back to it sooner and more often.

In a frantic, eve-of-deadline gambit, I tried something I had never done before. I printed out the whole thing, all 24 pages, and laid it out on my living room floor. Then I took a pair of scissors and began cutting out the kidnapping sections. I imagined them to be the fuel that sustained this marathon of a story. Too close together and it combusts; too far apart and it runs out of steam. I ended up spending several hours juggling those pieces, paring down some sections, beefing up others and, in a couple of places, creating entirely new sections. It made me nervous–my story was literally in shreds–but the ability to visualize the physical distance between the kidnapping passages turned out to be the tool I needed.

I was finally able to see the story unfold, measuring its pace with my eyes, not just my ears.

Here is an excerpt from within the body of the story:

…Vicente Fernandez is Mexico’s greatest living singer. Four decades after his start on the sidewalks of Guadalajara, he inspires the appellations of a Sinatra or an Elvis: El Numero Uno. The People’s Son. El Rey, King of the Mexican Song. On stage, he wears an embroidered sombrero, an engraved pistol and a skintight leather cowboy suit. His sideburns are long and his mustache is narrow. His music is called ranchera, the folk anthems of the rural heartland. Backed by a mariachi of violins, trumpets and guitars, he embodies Mexico at its most romanticized–the Mexico of horses and maidens and tequila and cockfights, of honor, love, heartbreak, survival. Since 1966, he has released 54 albums, all in Spanish, and sold more than 43 million copies, nearly half in the United States. Invisible to much of America, even to much of Southern California, he is as revered in this country as in his own, embraced here by a parallel nation of expatriates.

The 20,000 fans who paid $37 each to see Fernandez in Pico Rivera last May surely would have excused him–if they had known about the kidnapping of Vicente Jr. But Fernandez was determined to keep it a secret. His motivation was partly pragmatic. The captors had warned him not to do anything that might alert police. By his own nature, though, Fernandez was not inclined to cancel: he needed to perform, to tap into the mystical bond he shares with his fans, his gift to them and their gift to him, a lifeline that, now more than ever, he could not bear to lose.

”Whoever did this took the most important thing in the world from me,” he said at the time. ”I’m not going to let them take the second-most important thing.” Coming from another singer, that might be dismissed as show-biz bluster. But Fernandez, like his music, operates on an epic plane, without irony or artifice. He speaks with an ear to posterity, taking the bromides of an old-school entertainer and infusing them with the weight of proverbs. ”The people,” he would explain later, ”shouldn’t have to suffer for me.”

So, on Memorial Day weekend in the equestrian grounds of Pico Rivera–and, later, in Dallas and Miami and Minneapolis and San Diego–Fernandez strode onto the stage like an ageless toreador, pride and poise concealing any twinge of weakness or doubt. He is not a large man, just shy of 5-foot-8 and slim enough to slip into 31-inch jeans. Before each show, hunched in his wool Aquascutum of London trench coat, he looks almost fragile; his eyes are dark and his cheeks sunken, his pallor that of a hotel room. But in his suede traje de charro–the uniform of the singing cowboy–the metamorphosis could not be more sudden or complete. His chest inflates. His shoulders elevate. His jaw snaps to attention. He compares the sensation to being wrapped in a Mexican flag, custom-made and hand-stitched by his personal tailor. Some outfits are spangled in antique coins, others in gold filament. The leather comes from the hide of unborn calves.

As soon as Fernandez opens his mouth to sing, an even more remarkable transformation occurs. His speaking voice, a fixture of dozens of grade-B movies he starred in during the ’70s and ’80s, resembles a bullfrog’s, raspy and tight. But once the horns break into a rollicking two-step or the strings signal a mournful waltz, Fernandez’s throat turns into something round and buttery, revealing a baritone of operatic dimension and control. It is instantly recognizable, thick and rich and smooth, embellished with tremors and tears, guffaws and whimpers, bending and cracking, from aching falsettos to swaggering roars. He has never taken a singing lesson and has no patience for warmup routines. He scoffs at lozenges, sprays and teas. His only trick, he likes to say, is that he sings from the heart: in mid-song, he will stop the music and drop his microphone, the purity of his voice–unamplified and a cappella–turning the crudest arena into a cathedral.

III. Think about improving or altering a single technique before you begin typing

Read the top half of sports columnist Bill Plaschke’s column and watch how his determination to radically vary the length of his sentences contributes to his evocative style. The number of words in each sentence is shown in bold type at the beginning.

20 From the moment he stepped into that foreboding land between Slauson and Vernon, David Meriwether just knew people would point.

7 He just knew there would be stomping.

7 He just knew there would be chants.

22 Monday afternoon, amid the dusty haze of history that hangs thick in the legendary Crenshaw High gym, David Meriwether was proven right.

2 And wrong.

24 When he was introduced as a junior guard for the Crenshaw High basketball team before the first official practice, more than 1,000 students pointed.

7 While cheering and whooping and high-fiving.

19 When he ran to the court to join the state’s most celebrated high school basketball program, there was stomping.

6 As everyone danced on the bleachers.

18 And yes, by the time he walked into the blue-and-gold embrace of teammates, there were chants:

4 ”Milk! Milk! Milk! Milk!”

26 Leave it to a bunch of silly teenagers to compose the perfect nickname for this rich, refreshing break from our city’s tired sirens of conflict.

16 Meet David Meriwether, the first white male basketball player in the 30-year history of Crenshaw High.

8 The students have, and they overwhelmingly accept him.

7 His teammates have, and they like him.

13 The coach has, and he thinks Meriwether has a chance to be good.

29 ”This is cool,” Meriwether said Monday, bouncing off the shoulders of buddies, posing for giggling girls, looking at home in a place as foreign to most whites as Mars.

2 Yeah. Cool.

26 To understand the importance of the enrollment of a single student in a high school of about 2,760, it should be understood who doesn’t enroll here.

2 Whites don’t.

13 You can literally count the number of them at Crenshaw High on one hand.

4 David Meriwether makes four.

21 During his first two weeks of school, he was consistently bumped in the halls by gang members and questioned by classmates.

Ask Bill what he’s trying to accomplish and he puts it this way:

Like many journalists, while I report with my eyes, I write with my ears. One way I attempt to keep a good rhythm is to vary the length of my sentences.

Sometimes, as crazy as it sounds, it’s as if I try to turn my 25-inch story into a drumbeat.

Looooong sentence. Short. Short. Looooong sentence. Short. Short.

It’s never that structured, of course. But that’s sometimes how it works out.

I think in these weird terms because I always read my stories aloud to myself as I’m doing the final edit before I send them in. I want them to ”sound” interesting.

Most of us would agree that one long-winded discourse after another is not interesting, whether you are hearing it on a podium or at a party. I’m thinking, why should it be different in a story?

I don’t think this means you have to also break up those sentences into different paragraphs, the sort of one- and two-word graphs that my readers have chided me about. Sometimes I think I use my short paragraphs as a crutch, relying on typography to provide drama that my writing may lack.

You can vary sentence length within long paragraphs and, for me, it’s just as effective. As long as I keep the beat.

Normal stories often can’t sustain such radical changes in pace, but even if you throw the reader just one change-up within a single story, it gives the writing more power.

Consider this paragraph from the middle of a routine story about a Marine shot to death at a bus stop while home on leave. (The words-per-sentence cadence is 7/4/3/22/6/3/7.):

There, Giovanni exchanged stares with another teenager. Glowering led to words. Words led to punches. Giovanni had the upper hand, witnesses told police, when his opponent backed away and reached for a zippered binder he was carrying. His hand emerged with a gun. He fired once. Giovanni crumpled to the sidewalk, mortally wounded.

Now, I can hear some of the legal-affairs and environmental and governmental writers in the audience saying defensively: “What the hell does this have to do with what I write about?” Co’mon–you know. What Bill Plaschke does, you can incorporate (less often and less dramatically) into any story. You guys and gals whose stories average 28 words per sentence will be amazed at the clarity you achieve if you force yourself (and you will have to force yourself, at first) to create 8- or 10-word sentences every other paragraph–no matter what the topic is. It will make you use two (or three) sentences instead of one. It will make you throw away some of those dependent clauses and 13-word explanations that you set off with dashes.

Take a look back at Dave Wharton’s feature about the basketball player and his mentor: The section you read averaged less than 14 words a sentence without sacrificing a lyrical flow. The key is alternation: a 25-word sentence, a 6-word sentence and an 11-word sentence get you that 14-word average. Should our environmental stories average 14 words a sentence? Pretty tough. But suppose we determined we’d cut that 28-word-per-sentence average down to 22? A cadence of 26/12/27/10/31/16 gets you that. (Which reminds me of the old city editor who called over a young reporter known for his wordy writing, handed the reporter a box full of tiny pieces of paper with black dots and said: “These are periods. Start using more of them.”)

The key is to think a little bit more about how you want to sound, not just what you want to say. That tempers our determination in complex stories to cram facts into each sentence beyond the capacity of the structure to tolerate them, or the reader’s capacity to understand them. Pay, for starters, 20% more attention to the rhythm of your words before you start typing. Think about your story as a piece of music, not just a lyric sheet. Pay a little more attention to the drums.

Finding ways to take the reader deeper by the halfway point

Admit it, you’re lead-obsessed. We all are. (This newsletter is.) There’s good reason: The lead not only determines whether a reader joins you for the ride, but it foreshadows many aspects of the journey and creates a rhythm for the writer to follow. But this obsession too often saps our concentration on the middle of the story-that place where the story gathers itself for the stretch run, where the difference between thin and full-bodied stories is decided.

One quality the middle of your story ought to have, particularly if it is a news feature, is a passage that takes the reader to a deeper, more intense understanding of the story. If you’re writing a story with a protagonist, the middle is the place to stretch out an anecdote that reveals him or her. If you’re writing a story with three or four characters or events that are part of a trend, the middle is where you choose one experience or event and peel back the layers. This is less a statistical calculation (we’re not talking about an exact middle) than a sensibility that defines the middle third of the piece.

Building stronger middle sections of your stories

A story by Hector Tobar about the spread of Spanish-language radio stations to middle American towns is a good illustration. The lead sent us on our way:

LIBERAL, Kan.-The Friday afternoon deejay has been known to miss his show because he’s at his other job, pounding nails at a construction site. The newscaster spends most of her day selling jewelry. And the guy running the station is simply glad to be there: It beats his last job, working behind the counter at an auto parts store.

So it goes at KYUU, the little ranchera station on the prairie, 1,000 watts of Spanish-language music and talk beamed 24/7 to the beef workers, housewives and young homies of southwest Kansas.

If black thunderclouds start to build over the high Plains and the wind kicks up, one of the station’s half-dozen staff members will rush to the microphone to transmit a tornado alerta. More often they broadcast the quirky musings of deejays like El Chulo de la Mañana, the Handsome Morning Guy.

KYUU is one of the newest outposts in Spanish-language radio’s long march across the United States…

The first 21 grafs set up a picture of these stations, gave us a quick look at the kind of people who operate them, the distinctive promotions they use and made brief references to two specific stations beyond KYUU.

And then it was time for the middle, and to take you deeper, with a 14-graf mini-profile of one DJ at another station:

In Rupert, Idaho, the local Spanish-language station, which calls itself La Fantastica, rises from a beet field on the edge of town. Former Mormon missionary Benjamin Reed holds court weekday afternoons as a Wolfman Jack-style deejay called El Chupacabras, the name of the mythical goat-devouring creature that was a 1990s boogeyman in the Caribbean and Mexico.

“Chupacabras, please play something by Los Temerarios,” one female caller asks.

“Of course,” Reed answers. As the song “I Did You Wrong” plays, Reed asks into the telephone: “What station has your sound?” (“Cual es la que suena?”)

“La Fantastica y El Chupacabras!” the caller shouts back. For Reed, an Idaho native who became fluent in Spanish while living in Argentina, becoming El Chupacabras is the fulfillment of a long-held ambition. After 14 years in English-language television and radio, he’s finally getting a chance to emulate his heroes, deejays like the legendary Pepe Garza of Que Buena, a Los Angeles station.

“Even though I was born here, I identify myself as Hispanic culturally,” Reed says. Slipping into Spanish, he continues: “The gringo is a closed person. A Latino is more open, warm. Working here is my dream job. Sure, I’m in a small market. Sure I’m in a beet field. But there’s so much freedom. When I’m on La Fantastica I become a different character.”

In English he’s simply Benjamin Reed, the host of a talk-radio show on KFTA’s sister English-language station, KBAR. But in Spanish, which he speaks without a noticeable accent, he is “Ben-ha-meen Roberto Reed!” He flavors his show with the sound effects that are the calling card of Latin American radio, a cacophony of “stingers” and “lasers,” and many echoes, all generated by turning the knobs on a machine.

“You’re listening to La Fantastica-a-a-a…”

“I want it fast, hard-paced. I try to get that out of my jocks too,” says Reed, who is training a handful of locals to be disc jockeys. “In Spanish, you get to do the fun stuff that people used to do on AM.”

Moments after Reed goes on the air, the phone starts to ring off the hook inside KFTA’s claustrophobic control room. From all around the towns that surround Rupert, the Spanish-speaking people of southern Idaho’s Magic Valley call in with requests.

“People out there are working hard. They’re in the fields, they’re milking cows,” Reed says. “But when they hear me, they feel they have a friend.”

The next morning, when Reed takes up his other job at the English-language talk-radio station, the mood couldn’t be more different. He tries to strike up a conversation with his listeners about Elian Gonzalez and Janet Reno, taking a conservative tack. No one bites.

“No is one calling,” he says on the air. For a moment, he turns surly. “It’s kind of frustrating. I guess they’re part of the 60% of the public that’s apathetic. They don’t care what dictator Reno is doing.”

Most Spanish-speaking listeners in southern Idaho don’t know that Reed has this other radio persona. They aren’t much inclined to listen to English-language radio, which is dominated locally by country music and syndicated talk-radio programs. KFTA has the Spanish-language audience all to itself.

And, with that, Hector transitioned back to the station that was the anecdotal lead…

But in southwest Kansas, KYUU in Liberal does face some local competition from another Spanish radio station, KZQD, Radio Libertad.

…for 14 more grafs about KYUU’s heritage and struggles, which would end the story.

Hector said he was attracted to Benjamin Reed on KFTA because “he brings something unique to the story-someone’s love for another culture. It adds texture and depth to the story. It doesn’t just advance the thesis. It offers a deeper picture of the world the story’s about. And it’s an illustration of the surprises you find when you’re reporting one thing and find a tangent.”

It illustrates, too, why in some cases we need to publish long stories. Hector’s piece was 77 inches-long for a discussion of yet another example of the spread of Latino culture, but appropriately long because of the insight the reader gained by meeting Benjamin Reed in the middle of the journey.

Slow down and ask yourself: Just what does the reader bring to my story?

What’s wrong with this story?

SAN DIEGO–The man who became the first person to legally receive Laetrile imports in California is dead just short of his 75th birthday–a victim of the cancer he hoped the drug could halt. Ray Carnohan of Pacific Beach died of cancer of the pancreas late Saturday, three weeks after winning permission from a federal judge to bring the controversial apricot extract into the United States from Mexico. He is believed to be the first Californian to have been granted permission to import the substance. Carnohan, a furniture dealer, had told newsmen . . .

Your 'givens' ain't like mine

On the story goes, describing Carnohan’s motivation for using the drug. Interesting piece, except for one chunk of information the reporter knew very well, yet didn’t put in the story. It should have followed the second paragraph:

Laetrile is banned by the federal Food and Drug Administration as ineffective in cancer treatment.

Once again, a “given” has sabotaged a story.

To guard his sanity, a reporter has to establish some frame of reference, some set of “givens” that hold true in the world. The trouble is, one reporter’s given may well be a subscriber’s key fact–a piece of information crucial to the reader’s full appreciation of a story. The reporter, feeling the information is too obvious to mention, will leave it out.

The failure to add the perspective phrase or paragraph–the language that attempts to gently explain the significance of a story in terms of related events or opinions that had been voiced in the past–explains why we have conversations like the one you’re about to overhear, as the editor reads the Laetrile death story in its original form, walks over to the reporter who wrote it and asks him to make the change we suggested:

Editor: “Say, Jim, you don’t explain here specifically that Laetrile is illegal.”
Reporter: “Aw, everybody knows that.”
Or: “Well, the story implies that much.”
Or: “Well, hell, we can’t spell out everything. We have to give the reader some credit.”

What makes the perspective graph such an elusive little devil is the fact that it is often not conspicuous by its absence. For example, a California newspaper’s veteran political reporter writes an excellent analysis of the battle among Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates for endorsements from organized labor. As far as detail and an explanation of how the labor endorsement process is structured, the article is fine. But it doesn’t address the question of what specific benefits candidates receive from a labor endorsement: additional volunteer workers, money, and the precious mention of the candidate’s name in the newsletter that unions send to each member prior to the election.

Obvious? Yes–to the reporter, the candidates he covers and most union members. But how about the rest of us? How about one sentence, three or four paragraphs from the top, beginning something like:

“A major labor endorsement usually provides a candidate with…”

Here are a couple of recent examples from the New York Times, which prides itself, justifiably, on probing unusual and fascinating crevices of life-crevices whose appeal lies in the fact that much of the information is new to many of the readers.

Watch how failure to explain a “given” produced breakdowns.

The first story revealed the existence of a tape recording made in the hours after President Reagan was shot in 1981. It described tense conversations among government leaders, moving in the fourth graf to a meeting conducted by Richard V. Allen, then Reagan’s national security adviser, who tape-recorded the discussion:

…The taped discussion makes clear that [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig’s famous televised comment to reporters in the White House press room about being in charge was one he first made in the secure confines of the Situation Room.

“Constitutionally, gentlemen,” Mr. Haig told reporters, “you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order . . . As of now I am in control here in the White House, pending return of the vice president.”

The underlined language begged to be explained. Where was the vice president? It’s been 20 years-do you remember? It would be 308 more words before you found out.

First, the story made another reference to the missing vice president in the next graf, quoting Haig as saying in the meeting:

“So the . . . the helm is right here. And that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.”

From that point, the story kept you in the dark for another 264 words as it took you through Allen’s recollections of the discussion, the lack of information about would-be assassin John Hinckley and the location of secret nuclear attack codes-nearly four paragraphs. Only then did you finally get your answer:

…One [set of codes] had been carried by an officer with the president. A second was with Vice President George Bush, who was flying back from Texas, but had no secure voice communication with the Situation Room.

The second story was a sports column about a pro football owners meeting. I’ll let you read it graf by graf, with italicized approximations of how I reacted as I made my way through it:

There may not be many black coaches and executives in the National Football League, but enough to induce thought-provoking discussion and action. At the owners’ annual meeting in Palm Desert, Calif., last week, everyone noticed.

Oh, a race story. I like race stories. It’s clear that the writer has a racial angle in mind, so I will follow the story to the second graf in anticipation:

The league’s new edict that bans bandannas and stocking caps was, in part, the result of a rancorous exchange between Bob Wallace, a St. Louis Rams senior vice president, and Dennis Green, the Minnesota Vikings coach and a co-chairman of the league’s competition committee. Both men are black.

Hmmmm. There must be a connection between the race of the coaches and the significance of the bandanna ban, but I can’t figure it out yet. I’ll give the story one more graf:

The exchange took place in front of the full complement of owners, coaches, club executives and league personnel. The closed session undertook a sensitive, serious and even personal tone.

Grrrrrr. I’m frustrated. What’s the writer trying to tell me about the racial significance of headgear? I would normally quit reading but since I’m already doing a section on “givens” in the newsletter, I’ll keep reading as a test to see if this can be an example.

Green, who has not allowed Vikings players to wear bandannas or stocking caps in his 10 years in Minnesota, gave a speech about image, how he would not let his own child wear them and asked the group would they allow their children to wear them. He asked what the value in them was. If the image they project is O.K., he asked, why do only a few of the league’s hundreds of black players wear them? Would they allow their daughters to date a man with a bandanna?

Aaaarrrrrrrgh. Would someone please tell me (1) what’s wrong with bandannas and (2) what being black has to do with it?

It would be 711 more words-in a 928-word column–before the writer clued me in on the racial symbolism of bandannas:

Bandannas and stocking caps are linked to the hip-hop rap culture and also to gangs.

That was the next to last graf.

As you construct a perspective phrase or paragraph to combat these “givens,” be ambitious. Compare these two versions (perspective underlined) and see how much harder the second story works to frame the significance of what you’re reading.

First, the L.A. Times version:

Silicon Valley’s economic slowdown claimed a high-profile figure Monday as San Jose Mercury News Publisher Jay Harris resigned in protest over plans to lay off employees to meet Wall Street profit targets.

In an e-mail to newsroom employees, Harris, 52, said he hoped his departure would cause the paper’s parent company, Knight Ridder Inc., to “‘closely examine the wisdom’ of the profit targets we’ve been struggling to find a way to meet.”

Harris’ resignation came as Knight Ridder, the second-largest U.S. newspaper company, said it expects first-quarter earnings to fall 15 cents to 20 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial had expected Knight Ridder, based in San Jose, to earn 71 cents a share, down from 74 cents in the period a year ago.

Other newspaper publishers have warned of lower profits in the first quarter because of a slowdown in advertising revenues, including Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and New York Times Co.

Two weeks ago, Harris warned employees that…

The New York Times’ same-day story put it this way:

Jay T. Harris, the chairman and publisher of The San Jose Mercury News, announced yesterday that he was quitting his posts and warned his corporate bosses at Knight Ridder that their profit targets for the financially squeezed newspaper risked ”significant and lasting harm to The Mercury News as a journalistic enterprise.”

Journalists at the newspaper in California’s Silicon Valley, who had been nervously anticipating layoffs that Mr. Harris warned of earlier this month, were stunned to hear instead that he had quit. News of his strongly worded explanation for his resignation ricocheted around the newspaper industry, a business that has been grappling with a sharp decline in advertising revenue, particularly in the larger markets.

Mr. Harris’s action was hailed by many journalists who believe that newspaper companies too often choose to serve their shareholders at the expense of their readers and viewed with sorrow by at least one Wall Street analyst who saw it as a sign of some journalists’ stubborn refusal to accept financial realities.

The push-and-pull at Knight Ridder between cost-cutting and maintaining the investment in journalism is not unique to the company or even to the newspaper business. Other industries that rise and fall with economic cycles, like semiconductor manufacturing, are faced with the same choices between meeting profit margins and reinvesting in the product in tough times. So Mr. Harris’s action may well resonate far beyond the profession he joined three decades ago as a reporter.

Mr. Harris’s e-mail dropped into his employees’ in-boxes shortly after….

Coverage of a dramatic military maneuver in the Mideast illustrated the same kind of gap, this time in favor of the L.A. Times. Our version was superior because it explained not only why the maneuver was dramatic, but important. Our version appreciated that many readers who were drawn to this story (which led both papers) might not have been paying close attention in the past:

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip-In a blaze of rocket fire, Israeli tanks, bulldozers and ground troops seized Palestinian territory Tuesday, for the first time taking back land that Israel vacated seven years ago. But under harsh U.S. condemnation, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reversed course and 18 hours later abruptly ordered its troops to withdraw.

The capture of a small northeastern sliver of the Gaza Strip came as part of an escalating response to persistent Palestinian mortar fire at Israeli targets and followed Israeli retaliatory air strikes against Syrian positions in Lebanon over the weekend. Syrian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas killed an Israeli soldier Saturday.

Hostilities on the two fronts have inflamed regional tensions and prompted diplomats to plead for calm.

Tuesday’s actions in the Gaza Strip marked the third time in a week that Israel’s military had moved in force against Palestinian-controlled territory as the Jewish state battles a 6-month-old uprising. But this was the first time Israeli troops took up positions and announced that they would remain as long as necessary to stamp out the violence.

International criticism came quickly.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an unusually stern reprimand, called for an immediate Israeli pullout and described the incursion as ”excessive and disproportionate.”

”There can be no…

By contrast, the New York Times did not deal with that perspective until the 24th paragraph of a sidebar. The New York Times’ lead story was deeply concerned with the U.S.’ diplomatic response to Israel’s actions. But its failure to explain the nuanced historical significance of Israel’s action-to effectively treat it as a given-made it difficult for the casual reader to appreciate why the U.S. government was so outraged by what Israel did.