Bill Hatch probes the symbiotic relationship between music and writing

I was trading messages with a newsthinking.com reader named William Hatch from California and he kept stunning me with his evocative comparisons between writing and music. (“…drumming gives heart and that’s personally important when you are covering political conflict. Paradoxically, it seems to soften you, keep you loose, melt the cynicism, rigidity and anger that writers can feel when they are covering people who lie and obfuscate for big fat tax-paid salaries…”).

Taking notes and making notes

He was touching on something that felt real: using one art form to inform another. Those of you who love music, especially those of you who play music, will recognize the potential to integrate one set of skills into another.

Bill has written magazine pieces since the 1960s, just finished four years as a daily journalist and is beginning freelance investigative work on natural resource issues. He graduated from Stanford in Classics, and says he has divided his life “between political campaigns, farming, some farm labor union work, agricultural consulting in western states, Mexico and Nicaragua, writing and music. The two things I didn’t quit were writing and music.” He’s a pianist and percussionist, and he now takes the stage:

WRITING AND MUSIC

By William M. Hatch

Why do music and writing have a symbiotic relationship for me?

Composition, performance, variety of form, play.

Composition. From childhood lessons in jazz piano I learned music had structure, was made of things called chords and scales arranged in progressions from which I, like all musicians, could improvise to make the tune my own.

In college, novelist N.V.M. Gonzalez, also a musician, taught prose composition by means of whatever analogy he thought would work. With me, a carpenter at the time, he alternated musical analogies with allusions to framing, dry-wall work and roofing. Editing was just another form of remodeling. If that didn’t work, he’d suggest playing compositions of Fernando Sor for Spanish guitar.

Performance. Writing a news story on deadline is like taking a solo in a band. It has to be new and it has to swing. I try to make myself find some new feeling in every story I write, like a jazz musician tries to find new feeling in an old show tune.

Variety of form. Musical structures — of a fugue or a sonata, the blues or the changes in a jazz tune — are treasuries of composed shapes, forms, and patterns. They are available in a borderline area of consciousness just beyond earshot. These forms can enter the mind to offer creative aid in the act of composition of a news story.

I think music stays on the borderline of consciousness when I am composing a news story because I am concentrating so hard on this composition in this craft at this moment that I have no conscious energy for another craft.

But, archaic as this may sound, the intensity of that concentration may act like a prayer to the Muses, all nine of them at once.

Play. The key of C-major, favored by most public organs, official spokespersons, elected officials, bureaucrats and the FBI, does not delight me. I like to flat a few notes in that scale with quotes in pungent native English as I compose my story for the night. This is play, the highest, least describable, most rewarding element of composition in any medium.

It takes practice but practice leads to play.

Working with words, I feel I am working with complex meanings that belong to the language and the world — I’m only renting them — meanings I’ve fought all my life to understand, control, marshal, organize. Music has a freedom of formal composition closer to painting than writing. Yet, I have three recordings — of Bach, Lester Young and Billie Holiday, and a Cuban group called the “Congo Kings” — I suspect influence my writing.

Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” is a study in the ceaseless tension and harmony achieved by multiple voices. Fugues are composed of separate, single-note lines that wind in and out of each other, tie themselves in knots of chords and fly in opposite directions. No one voice dominates for long. Some of the chords these voices make are melodious, others sound like something Monk thought up.

I believe the essences of some stories lie in just this kind of weaving in and out of separate voices. Listening for the essential feeling tone in these stories, a tone often both old and new, sometimes guides me to a lead and and a story shape.

When Lester Young plays his tenor sax while Billie Holiday sings, they make a duet of questions about phrasing, tone, lyrics, music, rhythm. You can hear them listening to each other as they question. I think their duet has helped me with a certain kind of apparently prosaic business feature, where the task is to bring individual lives and work into focus. I once found a 25-year love affair that took place on two continents, through several states and bad marriages, in a routine story on the opening of the Chinese restaurant. I found it because of being awake, following a hint and being open to something beautiful behind the anxieties of people investing their life savings in a small business.

Rhythm makes time conscious. Reporters, like all humanity, are caught in vast nets of time, each cord tugging, all cords binding. In “Congo Kings’ Jazz Descargas,” Afro-Cuban drum masters Camero, Valdes and Hidalgo play in the field of time itself. I think their play helps me escape chronology, give me more choices in sequencing and a chance at finding my own sense of the story’s time — its logic for me and the pace for telling it.

Finally, Pablo Casals’ lifelong affair with Bach’s six suites for solo cello strengthens my faith that practice leads to play.

“For 12 years I studied and worked at them every day, and I was nearly 25 before before I had the courage to play one of them in public,” he wrote. He only consented to play all six of them 35 years later. In his old age, he wondered, “How could anyone think of Bach as cold, when these suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry?”

EVERYDAY EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM

All journalism should be “explanatory,” but there are certain moments when you can work harder to give the audience a lesson–take readers deeper into a subject they are used to seeing addressed superficially.

Here are two examples, culled from two fields general-assignment reporters must routinely tackle: labor squabbles and the weather. Both stories are long–nearly 50 inches–but you could have written them with the same sensibility in 30 inches. Both were written by people with a degree of expertise in their fields, but a GA willing to make a half-dozen extra phone calls could have injected some of the same insight into the pieces.

In the first, business writer Nancy Cleeland examined a waterfront labor dispute. I liked the fact that she told the story through two separate tours of the same place, and was willing to struggle a bit to explain the oft-used but seldom-developed expression “rigid union work rules.”

MAKING WAVES ON THE WATERFRONT

By Nancy Cleeland

On one side of the table sits a tough, deliberative, tradition-bound union determined to protect some of the last great blue-collar jobs in America.

On the other is an increasingly powerful and impatient group of multinational corporations driven to move merchandise ever faster as transpacific trade explodes.

The gulf between them–which has grown through years of distrust, resentment and misunderstanding–at times seems as wide as the ocean that separates California and Asia.

That divide now colors every move in the high-stakes contract negotiations between the Pacific Maritime Assn., representing ocean carriers and stevedoring services, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Talks covering 10,500 dockworkers along the West Coast began a month ago in San Francisco, but have yielded little. The current contract expires at 5 p.m. Monday.

Each side has gripes: Ocean carriers claim the union operates under cumbersome, 40-year-old rules and has been slow to accept technological changes that could save them millions of dollars. Workers claim the shipping lines want to chip away at their strength by moving highly paid jobs to nonunion contractors, reducing health benefits and eliminating the union’s revered hiring halls.

Here’s where Nancy sets the stage for the depth of the piece:

Some of the toughest points, however, are ambiguous and emotional, and they cannot be resolved with a clause in a contract. That became clear during two recent tours of a major Los Angeles port terminal, guided alternately by representatives of management and labor with the intent of clarifying contract issues.

From the start, it was evident that these were starkly different cultures. High-level union officials debated for a week before agreeing to the tour and establishing ground rules. The PMA made arrangements in a day, with only one condition: The shipping line that opened its doors could not be named. “If we say anything that makes the union mad,” a supervisor said, “they can make life hell for us.”

The foreign-owned line operates one of the largest and most modern of 14 terminals in the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex. Covering 300 acres, it can accommodate three mega-ships at a time, each one carrying several thousand steel containers the size of railroad cars.

On a recent Thursday morning, the terminal hummed with activity. Trucks rumbled along lanes of containers, which were stacked three-high by machines resembling giant forklifts. At the water’s edge, long-limbed cranes plucked multi-ton boxes from ships’ decks, then set them down on a truck chassis with a thunderous boom. Two minutes later, the same crane dropped another load. Then another and another.

Here’s where she sets up the discussion of union work rules:

The scene was noisy, outsized and frenetic. Then, at 11:30 a.m., it came to a sudden halt. Time for lunch.

Industry consultant Frank Hanley, who was leading the management tour, chuckled and shook his head. He couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of the union’s power.

As the average U.S. workweek grew through the 1990s, and 24-hour operations and staggered shifts became routine, the ILWU managed to maintain work rules much as they existed a generation ago. They include a common hour-long lunch break, double-pay for night shifts and the guarantee of a work pace that the union calls healthy and sustainable, but the shippers deride as simply slow.

ILWU members are among the highest-paid blue-collar employees in the nation, with basic longshore workers earning an average of $80,000 last year, including overtime, and union foremen taking in $158,000.

“That’s not middle income, that’s upper income,” said Hanley, who once managed terminals in Hong Kong and Oakland for a U.S. ocean carrier, but left the company several years ago after it was bought by a Singapore-based freight line. Part of a wave of consolidations that shifted most major shipping lines on the West Coast to foreign ownership, the sale nudged many veteran employees such as Hanley into early retirement.

His task that day was to show how new electronic devices could speed up the freight-moving process, boosting productivity and profits and making way for the growth of international trade. The PMA says the union has blocked such technology to protect jobs.

First stop was the terminal’s main entrance. On an average day, trucks pass through its gates 3,000 times to deliver containers for export or, more commonly, empties that once carried consumer goods from Asia.

Each “gate move” must be documented, and the driver assigned to a spot on the crowded terminal grounds. How that transaction happens is one of the most contentious issues in the contract talks.

Shippers claim most of the information, such as origin, destination and contents of the container, could be collected electronically by optical scanners that read codes stamped on the side. But they say the union insists on manually keying in much of the data, and staffing the gates as they have for decades: with one highly paid clerk for each of the 10 entry lanes.

“Four or five could handle what 10 are doing today,” Hanley said, “but they won’t allow it.”

An incremental step, he said, was the installation of cabin-height printers at each gate, which allow truckers to tear off their own documents rather than taking them from a clerk. The union resisted that change for months, Hanley said. Meanwhile, clerks insisted on tearing out orders from the printers and handing them to drivers, who had to park and walk to get them. Those steps added 40 seconds to each transaction, he said.

Union representatives say printers now are being used as intended, and that they simply needed time to study the change.

“They have the right to introduce new technology. It’s already in the contract,” said Peter Peyton, a third-generation longshoreman. Section 15 of the contract that expires Monday states, “There shall be no interference by the union with the employers’ right to operate efficiently and to change methods of work and to utilize mechanical, electronic or other labor-saving devices.”

There are just two caveats: The technology can’t be used to make the work more difficult, or to move it outside the union’s jurisdiction.

Shipping lines say the union uses those conditions to block the technological changes they need. Workers say without them, the use of scanners, remote cameras and computers could allow shipping lines to move jobs to nonunion contractors in low-wage states. Peyton said the union has proved through the grievance process that several shipping lines have done just that.

Such fundamental disagreements marked each stop on the two tours and illustrated the reason negotiations have been so tough.

When Hanley discussed technology, it became clear that the shipping lines’ primary motivation is to sharply reduce the number of highly paid clerks employed at the ports. Although no union members would be fired, he said, some clerks might have to be trained in less desirable work.

Comments from an operations manager who went along on the tour, but asked not to be identified, also indicated a resentment of the union’s perceived arrogance. “The ILWU has never punched a clock,” he said in claiming that some members report late for work. Later, nodding toward a line of battered dock trucks, he said, “Look at the way they treat our equipment.”

The flip side of that resentment is a fear of the ILWU that is all but unknown in these days of shrinking union membership and weakened labor power. In a major dispute, the union could shut down the entire Western waterfront. But even a small offense could have subtle repercussions. For example, the manager said, union dispatchers with a grudge could assign less experienced “casual” workers to the terminal, slowing production.

For their part, union representatives said they merely want to be treated as respected partners in port development, not compliant employees. “If they listened to us, we could save them millions,” Peyton said.

Passing through the same terminal a week later, he pointed out several union-inspired innovations that have helped the shippers’ bottom lines, such as labor-saving quick-release locks on containers.

A college-educated computer aficionado who defies the stereotype of a burly dockworker, Peyton said terminal operators could boost productivity by installing a shared central computer system. They won’t, he said, because of competitive concerns. “One time, I had to wait two hours for three containers to come over from another terminal because the computers were incompatible,” he said. “Someone literally had to drive over to pick up the paperwork.”

Peyton, whose clerical job is a prime target for shipping lines, also challenged the idea that faster gate transactions would speed the flow of containers. He said it would just move congestion from outside the gates to inside the yard. “It’s already like dodge ball in here,” he said as trucks plowed past each other.

Ultimately, Peyton’s arguments came down to philosophy. Why shouldn’t dockworkers share in the bounty of global trade? Why is it archaic for a blue-collar worker to live comfortably and support a community’s economy? Why does high productivity trump solid jobs?

His grandfather worked the docks before the union was born in 1934. Through family lore, Peyton knows how dangerous and humiliating those days were. Men lined up on the waterfront to bribe foremen with money and offers of women. Once hired, they were worked to the point of exhaustion.

It wasn’t until many failed attempts, and finally a brutal strike in 1934, that the union was born and employers were forced to negotiate.

Union members along the coast commemorate that strike, known as Bloody Thursday, every July 5 with marches and speeches. Some ports close for several hours. In San Francisco, painted outlines mark the places where two bodies fell.

In the frenetic, cutthroat, fast-changing world of global trade, such reverence for history might be seen as a sign of everything wrong with the ILWU, proof that the union is archaic and inefficient.

To dockworkers, however, the past informs the future, and ultimately, they believe that’s what keeps their union strong.

The second example was written by Eric Malnic, Metro’s resident weather guru, putting Los Angeles’ drought into perspective:

DRY CYCLE MAY SPIN ON FOR YEARS

By Eric Malnic

If it doesn’t rain tonight, and it almost certainly won’t, Los Angeles will have just completed its driest year in history.

And at least one expert says that this could be only the beginning, that Southern California and the rest of the Southwest may be experiencing the onset of dry weather that could last a decade or more.

“I don’t think any El Nino’s going to come riding in on a white horse and drop a lot of rain that’ll rescue us from this drought,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographic meteorologist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “It looks like we’re in for a long, dry spell.”

Rainfall at the Civic Center since July 1, 2001, has been a scant 4.42 inches, less than a third of normal and the least that has fallen on Los Angeles since they started keeping records in 1877.

But is this a drought? That depends on your point of view.

If you’re a firefighter, it’s a drought, all right. Wildfires already are crackling throughout Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado, fueled by brush and trees desiccated by a four-year stretch of dry weather. This year’s is one of the earliest fire seasons ever, and it promises to be one of the longest and most devastating.

“I’ve been in this business 28 years, and I’ve never seen it so bad,” said Donald R. Feser, a U.S. Forest Service fire chief in the Angeles National Forest.

Ranchers and farmers dependent on timely rains for livestock feed and grain crops call it a drought, too.

“All the range-land guys are hurting,” said Rob Frost, a cattle rancher in the hills north of Santa Paula. “It probably will force some people out of business.”

But for typical urban residents of the Los Angeles Basin, it may not seem like a drought at all.

Meteorologists say the lack of rain we’re experiencing now is due to a shift in the high-altitude jet stream winds that propel most storm systems from west to east in the northern hemisphere.

Southern California usually gets most of its rain between September and March, when the jet stream tends to drift far enough south to drive these storms into the coastal mountains that stretch from Point Conception to the Mexican border, dropping rain in the valleys and snow at higher elevations.

This year, according to Tim McClung, a National Weather Service meteorologist, a persistent ridge of high pressure stalled over Northern California and the Great Basin, deflecting the jet stream–and the storms that ride it–farther north than usual.

The result: Rainfall figures shrink the farther south you go. San Francisco received about the normal amount of rain; San Luis Obispo got 67%; Santa Barbara, 50%; Los Angeles, 29%; and some areas near the Salton Sea, about 4%.

Here’s where Eric takes the reader deeper:

By itself, this year’s drought is troubling enough. But if Patzert’s theory is right–and Kelly Redmond, a research meteorologist at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, says it could be–the shortfalls are part of a prolonged dry cycle that could be cause for major concern, especially for those firefighters and dry-land farmers.

Studying records that stretch back more than a century, the two men have concluded that there are multiple cyclical phenomena in the Pacific Ocean–driven by forces not yet fully understood–that may have enormous influence over whether the weather is wet or dry in Southern California.

One phenomenon is the familiar El Nino-La Nina cycle, characterized by fluctuating surface ocean temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

During El Ninos, when these temperatures are relatively warm, the high-pressure ridges drift east, the jet stream drifts south and Southern California sometimes gets much heavier rain than usual. An example was the winter of 1997-98, when more than 31 inches of rain fell on Los Angeles.

During La Ninas, when the equatorial surface temperatures are relatively cool, the high-pressure ridges stall, the jet stream is deflected north and Southern California almost always gets less rain than usual.

El Ninos and La Ninas occur at irregular intervals and seldom last more than a year or two. After the drenching El Nino winter of 1997-98, the cycle reversed, and the next two seasons were both La Ninas, with below-normal totals of 9.12 and then 11.57 inches of rain in Los Angeles.

The 2000-2001 season, with 17.94 inches in Los Angeles, was somewhat above normal, but Patzert considers that a local anomaly since most other cities in Southern California were at or below normal.

And then came this year, the driest year ever. And it was neither El Nino nor La Nina.

“Clearly, there are other forces at work,” Patzert said.

These other forces, he said, apparently include a much longer cyclical phenomenon, rooted in the surface water temperatures farther north of the equator, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Patzert said that in the positive phase, these surface waters tend to cool in the north; in the negative phase, they tend to warm. He said these oscillations, which apparently affect the flow of ocean and wind currents, may influence weather in Los Angeles and the Southwest for periods that last as long as 20 years.

(You fans of alliteration will envy Eric for somehow finding a source who offers the beauty at the end of this graf:)

“In the 1950s and 1960s, rainfall was generally less than normal,” he said. “That was a negative phase. There was a positive phase in the ’80s and ’90s. But after the El Nino of ’97-’98, we went back into another negative phase, and I think we’re in that now. These negative phases, coupled with La Ninas, are the demon divas of drought.”

While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted another moderate El Nino next winter, Patzert said, any tendency that might have to increase rainfall probably will be overridden by the negative oscillation.

“This negative oscillation could last another five or six years, maybe even longer,” Patzert said. “There might be a wet year

here and there, but overall, it looks pretty dry.” Redmond is more cautious.

“Are we getting back to a period, like the ’50s and ’60s, when it was generally drier than normal? That’s an open question,” Redmond said. The period during which detailed data have been collected–mostly since World War II–is still too short to extrapolate with great confidence. State water officials argue that Patzert’s theory is based largely on conjecture.

“There’s no hard evidence that permits you to forecast that far ahead,” said Jeanine Jones, an engineer with the state’s Department of Water Resources.

The Forest Service’s Feser isn’t looking beyond this year. He’s concerned with the here and now. He said he knew there was trouble as far back as Easter, when a small blaze started in Susana Canyon, in the Angeles National Forest.

“The humidity was low and the winds weren’t bad, but that fire spread rapidly over more than 100 acres,” he said. “When a fire burns that well on a day not conducive to extreme fire behavior, that’s a bad sign.”

Feser said the problem was an extraordinarily low level of moisture in the brush that burned.

Under formulas used by firefighting agencies, the weight of that moisture is compared with the weight of the plant’s dry, woody fibers. The ratio is expressed in percentages–100% would mean the moisture in a plant equaled the weight of the fibers. Because plants are like sponges, they can absorb more than their dry weight, so figures over 100% are possible.

“Normally, that brush would be at about 150% by now, but it’s already down to between 70% and 80%,” Feser said. “We consider 65% the critical level, and we’re almost there already. By the end of the summer, it’ll be down to 50%, low enough to kill the whole plant. At that level, brush burns like gasoline.”

Dave Franz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, a nonprofit lobbying group representing about 95,000 farmers in the state, said the lack of rain in Southern California has cut back natural forage about 95% in Ventura County, where Frost runs his cattle. Riverside County farmers dependent on rain for their grain crops are hard hit, Franz said.

But Franz said most of the farmers in California–by far the largest agricultural state in the nation, with revenues in 2000 of more than $35 billion–either are situated far enough north to have had ample rain or have plenty of irrigating water.

And in Los Angeles, suburban lawns are likely to remain green. Because of what well may be the largest and most sophisticated water catchment, storage and delivery systems on Earth, Southern Californians should have plenty of water to keep their crops green all summer long. Thanks to ample supplies transported hundreds of miles from wetter areas, the likelihood of water rationing in most of Southern California is virtually nil.

Jones of the water resources department said that 60% of Southern California’s water supply is from elsewhere, brought in by the State Water Project, the Los Angeles Aqueduct and aqueducts from the Colorado River. The other 40%, she said, comes mostly from groundwater basins in Southern California that remain in pretty good shape.

“Rainfall in the north is close to normal, so there’s plenty of water for the state Water Project,” she said. “The Owens Valley is drier than normal, but the L.A. Aqueduct (which draws its water from the Owens Valley) is a pretty small contributor. The Colorado Basin storage system is down to 70% of capacity, but it’s a huge system, capable of storing four times the average annual flow.”

Overall, Jones said, the water supply in Southern California looks adequate, except for a few mountain communities, like Idyllwild, that are dependent solely on rainfall for their water.

“There shouldn’t be any major problems,” she said.

FINAL WORD: This will be the last new posting for the summer, at least. The site will remain running indefinitely so you can browse the archives at your convenience. But I’ve gotten sick of the sound of my own voice and feel like I need to shut up for a while. I’ll expand on this (I’m not that sick of the sound of my own voice) a little next week.

NYT vs. LAT on Supreme Court execution case offers lessons in sequencing and sidebars

I’d like you to compare the Los Angeles Times and New York Times stories of June 20 on the Supreme Court’s ruling that held the execution of mentally retarded murderers was unconstitutional.

Making sense of a landmark decision

These are good stories to break down because they put tremendous pressure on the writer to incorporate many things at once–context, perspective, impact, history, forecast…and scads more.

You’ll notice differences that can’t be dismissed judgmentally, in terms of right and wrong. In both versions, the writers were able to establish a logical, powerful flow. They simply used different sets of priorities to sequence their stories. This presents you with an opportunity to read both versions and ask: What would I have done? This is what writers need to do when they read: Examine everything that passes before them, weighing the variables so they can move with more confidence and speed when it becomes their turn in the ring.

Every reporter who tackles a deadline story like this looks at her first draft and realizes she has either crammed too much or failed to insert enough of the right material in the right order. She begins massaging it, and then realizes she has gotten the density right but gotten the sequence wrong. She begins massaging it yet again, and again, until she runs out of time. At 2 a.m. she awakens and realizes what she could have done better. The goal is to have that insight at 10 p.m., before you hit the “send” key, so you can get a good night’s sleep.

Let’s go through the stories; then we’ll look at how each paper handled a sidebar by another author that was published on the front page the same day.

We start with the L.A. Times. The first graf signals the writer’s desire to make you understand the constitutional rationale:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday declared an end to the execution of convicted murderers who are mentally retarded, saying the nation has reached a consensus that it is cruel and unusual to put to death a person with the mental age of a child.

The mathematical underpinning of the word “concensus.”

Eighteen states that impose the death penalty have passed new laws exempting prisoners who are retarded, the court said. In the last decade, only five states–most notably Texas–have executed killers whose IQs measured 70 or less, the standard threshold for defining retardation.

The writer is determined in the next two grafs to make you understand why the court found execution of the retarded is (1) cruel and (2) unusual.

“The practice, therefore, has become truly unusual,” said Justice John Paul Stevens, speaking for the court.

It is also cruel, he said, since those with a diminished mental capacity are more likely to act on impulse and less likely to consider the consequences.

The writer shows you the judicial extrapolation from that calculation:

The ultimate punishment of death should be reserved for the worst of murderers, Stevens said. Since retarded people are less culpable for their acts of violence, they must be “categorically excluded” from capital punishment, he concluded.

The impact:

Thursday’s 6-3 ruling extends to all of the 3,701 inmates condemned to death around the nation, as well as to future cases. California has by far the nation’s largest death row, with 603 inmates. A state prosecutor predicted that very few of them will be spared by the ruling.

The dissent, three grafs of it:

Justice Antonin Scalia read an angry dissent in the courtroom, accusing his colleagues of adopting the “arrogant assumption … [that they] have moral sentiments superior to those of the common herd.”

He mocked the “empty talk of a national consensus” on the issue and predicted that the ruling will cause chaos.

“The symptoms [of retardation] can be feigned ….This will turn the process of a capital trial into a game,” he said. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas joined his dissent.

The writer understands that what you’ve read so far begs the question: Just what is retardation? It will take five grafs:

Stevens said the court was reluctant to define mental retardation and left that task to experts, trial judges and state legislators.

However, his opinion relied on the standard used by the American Psychiatric Assn. and the American Assn. on Mental Retardation. These groups define mental retardation as a “significant sub-average general intellectual functioning.” Typically, “mild” mental retardation describes people whose IQ level is measured from 50 to 70.

This intellectual deficiency must be combined with a limited “adaptive function” at home, at school or at work. “The onset [of these difficulties] must occur before age 18,” the psychiatric association said.

This definition appears to exclude people whose mental ability declines sharply while in prison. But the uncertainty of who is retarded and how it is be measured will likely spawn a series of legal battles in the lower courts.

However, the high court’s opinion is firm in saying that once an inmate has been judged to be mentally retarded, the state may not impose a death sentence.

The impact of the ruling:

James Ellis, a law professor at the University of New Mexico who successfully argued Thursday’s case on a behalf of a Virginia inmate, Daryl Atkins, said “there aren’t any good numbers” for how many inmates may be affected by the ruling.

While some legal experts have estimated that up to 10% of the inmates on state death rows are retarded, state prosecutors say they believe the number is much smaller.

The background that tells how this issue evolved through the legal system: How did we get here?

In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that judges and jurors must consider mental retardation as a “mitigating factor” during a sentencing hearing, a reason to spare the life of the convicted murderer.

Moreover, many prosecutors do not seek a death sentence if the accused is retarded.

California does not by law exclude mentally retarded defendants from capital punishment, but state prosecutors say they do not believe many such individuals are on death row now.

“In sheer numbers, very few [of California's death row inmates] will be affected” by the ruling, said Dane Gillette, a California assistant attorney general who coordinates the capital cases. “But I suspect quite a few will file claims raising the issue. I think we will see a new interest in being tested.”

Since 1991, according to Amnesty International, 12 people whose IQs tested at 70 or below–or who were borderline mentally retarded–have been executed in the United States.

William F. Schulz, the group’s executive director, said Thursday’s ruling “has finally ushered the United States into the circle of civilized nations when it comes to such executions…. Our justice system has now caught up with the moral sensibilities of the American people.”

He referred to opinion surveys showing that, although most Americans support the death penalty, they oppose the execution of mentally retarded individuals by an overwhelming margin.

Focusing more narrowly on this case and the difficulties it posed:

But the case decided Thursday, Daryl Atkins vs. Virginia, 00-8452, also illustrates the difficulty of the issue.

On an August evening in 1996, Atkins and a friend had been drinking when they walked to a convenience store intending to rob a customer. They spotted Eric Nesbitt, an airman at Langley Air Force Base. Atkins put a gun to him, took control of his truck and drove him to a bank machine. After forcing Nesbitt to withdraw $200, Atkins drove him to a field and shot him eight times.

The jury….

Later, we get the background on how the “concesus,” so crucial to the logic of this ruling, evolved:

Thursday’s ruling marks the fourth time that justices have announced a categorical exclusion from executions.

In 1977, the year after they restored capital punishment, the justices barred death sentences for rapists and others whose crimes stopped short of murder. In the South at that time, a significant number of inmates facing death were not charged with murder.

In 1986, the court exempted those who are insane. In 1989, the court….

Here’s the New York Times’ version. The lead is similar, except that it tries to be more emphatic by saying the constitution “bars” execution, and using the adjective “landmark:”

WASHINGTON–The Constitution bars the execution of mentally retarded offenders, the Supreme Court declared today in a landmark death penalty ruling based on the majority’s view that a “national consensus” now rejected such executions as excessive and inappropriate.

The numerical foundation is here, but you will notice the writer does not get as quickly to the nuts-and-bolts constitutional logic, the explanation of cruel and unusual:

Of the 38 states that have a death penalty, 18 now prohibit executing the retarded, up from 2 when the court last considered the question in 1989. This “dramatic shift in the state legislative landscape,” especially when anticrime legislation is extremely popular, “provides powerful evidence that today our society views mentally retarded offenders as categorically less culpable than the average criminal,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the 6-to-3 majority.

The trade-off is that this version is better and quicker on the question of impact:

The decision, in the case of a Virginia man with an I.Q. of 59 who was convicted of committing a murder and robbery at the age of 18, could ultimately move 200 or more people off death row. Mental health experts believe that as many as 10 percent of those convicted of capital murder are mentally retarded, although states often dispute the claim in individual cases.

In fact, Virginia is disputing the evidence that the defendant in this case, Daryl R. Atkins, is retarded. The Supreme Court said today that it would be up to the states to develop “appropriate ways” to apply the new constitutional prohibition. The generally accepted definition of mental retardation is an I.Q. of approximately 70 or less accompanied by limitations on abilities like communication or caring for oneself.

The dissent:

The dissenters today, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, disputed that there was a real or lasting consensus against executing the retarded. In a dissenting opinion that he read from the bench, Justice Scalia said that 18 states out of 38 was only 47 percent, not even half.

In the absence of an authentic consensus, the majority had simply enshrined its own views as constitutional law, he said, adding, “The arrogance of this assumption of power takes one’s breath away.”

Further, he said, “there is something to be said for popular abolition of the death penalty; there is nothing to be said for its incremental abolition by this court.”

Chief Justice Rehnquist said the majority had improperly gone beyond looking at state legislative action to consider polling data and international opinion as well. “If it is evidence of a national consensus for which we are looking, then the viewpoints of other countries simply are not relevant,” he said.

The writer used some interesting international perspective:

The 15 countries of the European Union filed a brief on behalf of Mr. Atkins, as did a group of senior American diplomats who told the court that the practice of executing retarded offenders was out of step with much of the world and was a source of friction between the United States and other countries.

Amnesty International said that since 1995, only three countries were reported to have executed mentally retarded people: Kyrgyzstan, Japan and the United States, which the organization said had executed 35 mentally retarded defendants since the court allowed states to reinstate the death penalty in 1976. The court’s decision today “will provide the U.S. criminal justice system with a critical tool to uphold human rights standards,” the organization said.

The decision overturns a ruling of the Virginia Supreme Court.

Okay, here’s the constitutional logic on cruel-and-unusual. It comes later, but because it comes later the writer is somewhat less pressured, and feels free to let it run a little longer, and deeper–connected to the historical foundations of the concensus, which the L.A. Times version left to the end of the story:

While the justices disputed the outcome, there was no dispute on the basic analytic approach, unique to the Eighth Amendment, that depends on a sense of community norms to decide whether a practice violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. All agreed with the statement of Chief Justice Earl Warren in a 1958 case, Trop v. Dulles, that “the amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Rather, the debate was over whether the evidence supported the evolution that the majority discerned.

The court’s previous examination of the retardation question came in 1989 in a Texas case, Penry v. Lynaugh, in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s controlling opinion said that there was no current consensus against executing the retarded but kept the court’s door open to future developments.

The developments came quickly. From the original two states, Georgia and Maryland, the list of states exempting retarded people from capital punishment grew to include New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado, Washington, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri and New York, which excluded the retarded when it reinstated its death penalty in 1995. The federal death penalty, reinstated in 1988, exempted the retarded.

When the court agreed last year to revisit the issue, it did so in a case from North Carolina, but North Carolina abolished the death penalty for the retarded last summer, before that case, McCarver v. North Carolina, No. 00-8727, could be argued. The justices then substituted the case they decided today, Atkins v. Virginia, No. 00-8452. It appeared earlier this year that the Atkins case might become moot as well. In February, the Virginia State Senate voted unanimously to abolish capital punishment for the retarded, but the House decided to delay action until after the Supreme Court decision.

The advantage of what this writer choose is that you now have great context to appreciate the words of the justices:

Surveying this rapidly changing landscape, Justice Stevens noted that the numbers alone did not tell the full story.

“It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the consistency of the direction of change,” especially in a strong anticrime climate, he said.

Even most states that nominally allow executing the retarded were not actually carrying out such executions, Justice Stevens said, concluding, “The practice, therefore, has become truly unusual, and it is fair to say that a national consensus has developed against it.”

The opinion, joined by Justices O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, did not end there. Justice Stevens went on to consider whether there was any reason the court should disregard or disagree with the legislative judgments. He concluded that, to the contrary, the state judgments were supported by a review of various factors making the death penalty particularly inappropriate for retarded defendants.

“Some characteristics of mental retardation undermine the strength of the procedural protections that our capital jurisprudence steadfastly guards,” Justice Stevens said, adding that as a result, “mentally retarded defendants in the aggregate face a special risk of wrongful execution.”

Among the factors he cited were their “diminished capacities to understand and process information” and to reason logically and control impulses. These characteristics do not mean that retarded defendants who are competent to stand trial should not face criminal punishment, Justice Stevens said, “but they do diminish their personal culpability” and indicate that the usual justifications for capital punishment, retribution and deterrence, are less applicable than to defendants with normal intelligence.

The writer decides to explore whether this decision might affect the court’s eventual policy on execution in general:

This part of the opinion might have broader significance for the court’s death penalty jurisprudence, said one death penalty expert, Professor Michael Mello of Vermont Law School.

“It shows that a majority of the court is willing to take a fresh look at the real capital punishment, how the system really works,” said Professor Mello, a former defense lawyer who opposes the death penalty.

He predicted that the court might be open to….

Both papers ran sidebars on A-1, but with distinctly different voices.

The L.A. Times took a featury approach that attempted to show you the kind of person affected by the ruling:

Convicted killer Johnny Paul Penry, a longtime resident of Texas’ death row, loves coloring books and believes in Santa Claus.

Fellow inmate Doil Lane hates to be without his crayons.

“He sends me pictures all the time,” said Austin lawyer William Allison, who has represented Lane for five years. “Pictures of firetrucks and flowers and ice-cream trucks. All of his letters start with the exact same sentence: ‘How are you today. I am find [sic].’ ”

Penry, whose IQ scores range from 50 to 63, and Lane, who psychiatrists say has the mental capacity of a 6- to 8-year-old, may have finally won reprieves Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing the mentally retarded is cruel and unusual punishment.

But only now do we get to the meat:

The ruling is sure to spare some among the more than 3,700 prisoners on the nation’s death rows, although nobody knows for certain how many.

California has 603 men and women on death row, and the Department of Corrections says that at least two are “developmentally disabled,” a category that includes mental retardation as well as autism and epilepsy. As a result of a federal district court order, the state is expected to assess the mental capability of all of its death row inmates by the end of the year.

Some defense attorneys have estimated that as many as 6% of California’s death row prisoners are mentally retarded, but “no one knows” for sure, said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer.

Beyond saving the lives of some of the condemned, Thursday’s ruling is expected to set off a scramble in 20 states, including California, that have not previously prohibited the execution of retarded inmates.

The states will have to define mental retardation and handle what prosecutors expect will be a deluge of appeals from inmates who claim that they fit the bill.

“The opinion left it very much in the hands of the states how to deal with enforcement of this new restriction,” said Ward Campbell, capital case coordinator for the attorney general’s office in Sacramento.

He predicted a new wave of litigation in death penalty jurisprudence, causing delays in a system “that….

Was it worth it? The story starts off like a human-interest piece but then evolves into a piece that tries to give you a sense of how the states will respond. Would it have made more sense to just jump in and write a news analysis? The New York Times thought so. Here was how the top of its sidebar read:

The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that executing mentally retarded people is unconstitutional offered the states almost no guidance on who must be considered retarded and who gets to decide.

The decision will therefore spur vigorous legal activity on two fronts. In the courts, defendants accused or convicted of capital crimes will argue that they are mentally retarded. In the 20 states that currently allow the execution of retarded people, the legislatures will have to draft statutes establishing procedures to determine who is retarded.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent, noted that the mere possibility that the court would rule as it did yesterday had generated appeals from people on death row who had not previously argued that they were mentally retarded.

Despite questions about how the ruling will play out, defense lawyers hailed it as a landmark decision that limits the reach of capital punishment after years in which the Supreme Court’s rulings had made it easier to carry out executions. The lawyers said they viewed the ruling as a ratification of a national consensus against executing the mentally retarded.

“After 15 years of absolute drought, this case gave the court the occasion to add its voice to the ongoing debate about the system being broken,” said George Kendall, a staff lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Polls show that most Americans….

RECOMMENDED READING: A troubling court ruling for journalists, described last week in the New York Times:

Four reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer were fined $1,000 each yesterday and three of them were sentenced to community service for violating a trial judge’s order barring reporters from identifying or contacting jurors after a murder trial of a rabbi in Camden last fall.

The unusual order made a crime of a common news-gathering tactic, interviewing jurors about their deliberations, and threatened a penalty of six months in jail for contempt of court. Before he imposed more lenient penalties yesterday, Judge Theodore Z. Davis, of New Jersey Superior Court in Camden, called the case a conflict between two of society’s major institutions, the judiciary and the press, and scolded the reporters for defying the court.

“If the media has the right to basically say, `We don’t care about your order, we’re going to do it our way,’ it’s sheer anarchy,” Judge Davis said. “In life, as in law, a line must be drawn.”

Floyd Abrams, a Manhattan lawyer and First Amendment expert, called the ban on publication of a juror’s name after a trial virtually unprecedented and said the order barring communication with former jurors was “contrary to general rules adopted by courts elsewhere.”

He said that “the perpetuation of a news-gathering ban after the trial was over was unjustified” and a disservice to “deeply rooted First Amendment interests.”

The editor of The Inquirer, Walker Lundy, said the newspaper would appeal. “I am stunned that a reporter would be sentenced to jail for asking a question,” he said.

The order was issued in July by Judge Linda G. Baxter, who presided over the trial of the rabbi, Fred J. Neulander of Cherry Hill, on charges of arranging the killing of his wife, Carol, in 1994.

Later, Judge Baxter repeatedly refused to relax the order, even after she declared a mistrial because the jury was deadlocked. She said she was leaving the order intact to protect jurors’ privacy and ensure that an impartial jury can be selected for a second trial, now scheduled for September.

In April, New Jersey’s Supreme Court threw out the ban on naming the jurors but upheld the edict against contacting jurors until after the second trial, in order to protect the rabbi’s right to a fair trial.

Contempt proceedings started against the four reporters–Joseph Gambardello, George Anastasia, Dwight Ott and Emilie Lounsberry–soon after their bylines appeared on a front-page story on Nov. 16 that identified the jury’s forewoman and quoted an unnamed juror.

In a contempt hearing last month, three jurors and other witnesses testified that all but Mr. Gambardello had tried to interview jurors. Ms. Lounsberry and Mr. Ott were sentenced to 10 days of community service and Mr. Anastasia to 5 days.

A dummy’s guide to the hard-core basics

Writing coach Steve Buttry offers a handy checklist of all the easy stuff we continually forget. Print this out and carry at all times.

Posted June 17, 2002

So, I’ve decided to make a career change. I’ve decided to leave editing and go back to reporting. It will be the third time in my life I have junked an editing job and gone back to reporting. I mention this because, for all my confidence, I still find myself thinking, “Damn! It’s been nine years since I was a reporter–what do I do?” It was here that I ran into Steve Buttry, who has created a great bunch of tips for desperate–or overconfident–reporters, both of which I am about to become.

Steve, who is writing coach at the Omaha World-Herald, has broken our work down into four stages: Keeping a Sharp Focus, Writing the Lead, Sharpening the Lead and Keeping it Rolling. His tips are all obvious and they are all things that you have probably done–and then, in too many cases, forgotten to keep doing. Kudos to Steve for his elemental wisdom. He now takes the mike:

KEEP A SHARP FOCUS

To write a strong lede, you need to identify and understand the focus of your story. Using any or all of these techniques before you even start writing can help strengthen your story, especially the critical top few paragraphs:

Ask what the story is about
As you gather information and as you write, ask yourself frequently why a reader would want to read it. Bruce DeSilva of the Associated Press suggests asking these questions as you try to find the story’s focus: Why do you care about this? Why did you want to write this story in the first place? What touches you emotionally? Who is benefiting/being harmed, making money/losing money? How are readers being affected by what you have found? What is new here? When you know what the story is about, you know what you need to tell the reader at the top of the story.

Write a theme statement
Jack Hart of The Oregonian suggests that before you write the story, try writing a theme statement of no more than six words. This will help you identify the focus. As you write the lede, the nut graph and any difficult parts of the story, refer to the theme statement and make sure you’re maintaining the focus.

Write a headline
Writing a headline for your story might help find your focus. Or a logo, if it’s a series. Or a budget line. Whichever of these devices you use, you have to write a good one. As DeSilva says, “no ‘Unit Mulls Probe’ garbage.” After you’ve finished the story, take another look at the headline. Make sure the point that you addressed in the head is high in the story or you lost your focus.

Tell your story in three words
Bill Luening of the Kansas City Star recommends identifying your focus by boiling your story down to a three-word sentence: a noun, an active verb, and an object: “These generally emerge as themes, rather than a story focus, but they can lead to a theme statement. Maybe, if the story is a narrative, you can get them to outline the complication, development and resolution this way. The story of the Pied Piper then would be, Rats Overrun City. City Hires Ratman. Ratman Kills Rats. City Stiffs Ratman. Ratman Steals Children. Moral: Keep Your Word. Or…Flutists Kick Butt.”

Tell someone about your story
Especially if you are struggling to find the focus, you may find it helpful to tell someone about the story. For some people, conversation forces brevity and focus. DeSilva suggests the bus stop test used by Henry McNulty, former ombudsman at the Hartford Courant: “Suppose you are at a bus stop and someone leans out the bus window and shouts, ‘What is that story you are working on?’ The bus engine starts and begins to pull away from the curb. What are you going to shout?”

Find the surprise
Did something surprise you as you researched this story? Maybe that should be your focus.

Identify the emotion
Luening asks writers, “Where does the emotion lurk? Where, as a friend of mine here calls it, is the ‘emotional center’ of what they’ve discovered?”

Use story elements
You can find your focus by identifying the story’s most important elements. Is this a plot-driven story, or is character the most important element? Or setting? Or conflict?

Organize your information
Identify the most important points of your story and the information that most clearly supports those points. This should be the heart of the story and in many cases the total story. If you identify more than three or four points, you probably have too many. An outline may help you organize.

WRITING YOUR LEDE

Your lede sets the pace for your story. A brief, breezy lede invites the reader into a story with the promise of a lively pace. A ponderous lede invites the reader to move to the next story, in which case it doesn’t matter how long or how good the rest of your story is.

Start early
As you’re reporting, think about the lede. Are you observing an exchange that might provide a scene the lede? Did you just hear the fact that belongs in the lede? Don’t lock in on one lede so that you miss a better one that comes up. Use the reporting process as an audition for potential ledes. Write them down as they occur to you, either in your notebook or on the screen.

Write as you report
After your first interview or two, start writing. You may not have your lede yet, but starting to write gets your mind into the story earlier. Keep writing after subsequent interviews. Write each time as though this is the story. You may write two or three ledes before you’re finished with the story. But have you hurt your story if your seventh paragraph, or your 15th, has as much polish as your lede?

Avoid the blank screen
Too many writers spend too long laboring over the lede before they get started writing. If you don’t have a good idea for a lede, write a simple declarative sentence and get on with the story: “The School Board meeting discussed education Monday.” Yes, it’s dull. No, you’d never turn that in. But it may get you started and keep you from wasting time staring at the blank screen. Writing the story may help you find your lede. Then you go back and write the better lede.

Use story elements
Decide which is the strongest element in your story: plot, character, setting, conflict, theme. Your lede should focus on the strongest element. Or perhaps the lede should highlight the intersection of two elements: a character in conflict, perhaps. If plot is the strongest element, beware of starting at the beginning. Newspaper readers and editors may not read long enough to find out how it comes out. Consider starting at the climax, or at least at a critical moment that establishes the conflict.

Don’t forget the basics
If you’re stuck for a lede, ask which of the five W’s or How is the most important question for this story.

Expand on the basics
Maybe your lede lies not in one of the five W’s, but in a related question: How much? So what? What next? Why not? Who benefits? Who’s hurt?

Write without your notes
This is a helpful technique for your whole first draft, but it’s especially helpful in writing the lede. Notes can be a distraction. Go back to them later when you’re checking facts.

Get to the point
If you use an anecdotal or scene-setting lede that delays your explanation of the underlying issue, introduce or at least allude to the issue in your lede.

Entice the reader
Don’t treat your lede as a suitcase into which you will cram as much as you can fit. Regard it more like a g-string, brief and enticing. If your lede captures the essence of your story in a few words, the reader will read on to learn the facts. You don’t need them all in the lede. A long lede shows a lack of confidence, like you don’t believe I’ll read the whole story so you have to tell me as much as you can as fast as you can.

STRENGTHENING YOUR LEDE

Once you’ve finished the story, go back and strengthen your lede, even if it’s good and especially if it’s long.

Challenge every word.
However long your lede is, consider whether it could be shorter. If it’s longer than 30 words, it’s almost definitely too long. A lede that long has to flow smoothly to work, and few ledes that long flow smoothly. Try writing a lede of 10 words or fewer. Maybe you can’t for this story, but it’s always good to try. Especially if your lede is more than 20 words, challenge each piece of the lede and ask whether that actually has to be in your very first paragraph.

Challenge the verbs.
Are you using the strongest appropriate verb? Is it in active voice? Never use a form of the verb “to be” in your lede without trying some alternatives. Sometimes it’s the only accurate verb, but see if a stronger verb works. Challenge other weak verbs, such as have, do and get.

Avoid vague phrases.
If your lede starts with (or uses) vague phrases such as there are or it is, see if you can rewrite it with strong, specific subjects and verbs.

Keep it simple.
Ask whether you’re trying to tell too much in your lede. Are you answering all the 5 W’s, when a couple could wait till the second graf? Don’t try to cram everything into your lede.

Make one point.
Does your lede have multiple points? If so, perhaps you haven’t decided what the story truly is about. Decide which point is most important and write a lede that makes just that point.

Remember the news.
Does your lede get right to the news? Does it emphasize the news?

Stamp out punctuation.
Many of the best ledes have one piece of punctuation, a period. Regard multiple commas or dashes as red flags. See if you can write a smoother sentence with just one comma or none. If you have lots of punctuation in the lede, read it aloud so you can hear whether it’s choppy or whether it flows smoothly.

Minimize attribution.
Attribution lengthens a lede, as well as weakening it. Can you state something as a fact, rather than hedging it with attribution? If not, do you need to bolster your reporting, so you can write more authoritatively?

Subtract numbers.
If you use any numbers in your lede, their impact must be strong and their meaning and relationship must be immediately evident. If the reader has to stop and ponder the numbers, they don’t belong in the lede. (They may not even belong in the story, but in a graphic). Rarely could you justify using more than two numbers in a lede.

Challenge prepositions and conjunctions.
Identify each prepositional phrase in the lede and consider whether the information it adds is worth the words it adds. Can it be replaced with a single adjective or adverb? If your lede contains and, or or but, consider whether you’re introducing another element that you should save for the second paragraph.

Challenge adjectives and adverbs.
Consider whether the lede would be stronger without each of the adjectives adverbs. What do they add? Can you eliminate them by using more specific (and stronger) nouns or verbs?

Challenge phrases.
Can you eliminate a phrase without hurting the lede? Can you replace a phrase with a single word?

Write an alternative lede.
Write a shorter lede and evaluate the two side by side. Or write a lede taking another approach. Don’t accept a long lede without testing it against a shorter lede.

One hedge is plenty.
If you’ve hedged the central statement of your lede, with a “may” or “might,” do you really need to hedge again by attributing it? Consider whether you can write a stronger statement in the first place. Or at least consider whether you can make the hedged statement without attribution.

Don’t sweat the details.
An important detail might strengthen your lede, but many details bog down a lede. Tighten your lede by cutting details that can wait until later in the story. Rarely do you need both a person’s name and identification in the lede. If the name is not immediately recognizable to the reader, just use the identification in the lede. Or if the person is in the story as Everyman, just use the name and tell the reader later who he is.

Don’t get lost in process.
On many beats, particularly government and court beats, reporters must learn and understand lots of processes. Sometimes the reporter loses perspective and thinks the process is as important to readers as it is to sources. Readers care most about results. If your lede focuses on process, or includes some process details, consider whether it would be stronger focusing on results.

Try to make fun of your lede.
Did you write any obvious statements that will draw a “duh!” from the reader? Do you have any awkward juxtapositions or double entendres? If you know a smart-ass colleague who makes fun of such stories in the paper, enlist his aid by asking him to read your story in advance. If something does get by him, at least you know he won’t be the one making fun this time.

Focus on reader impact.
Does your lede tell the reader why this story is important to her? If not, should it?

Say what is, not what isn’t. Sometimes you have to tell the reader what isn’t, but usually you should tell the reader what is. If your lede has a not or a never, consider whether you can recast to say what is.

Punch quickly.
Examine the first few words of your lede. Are they strong? Do they get to the point immediately? Can you open with key words that immediately identify what the story is about?

Close with a kick.
Examine the last few words of your lede. Are they strong? Do they carry the reader right into the next paragraph.

KEEP IT ROLLING

You lede is just the first hook for the reader. The first few paragraphs make your case to the reader. Especially with a page-one story that jumps, the reader has plenty of reason to move on if you don’t make the point of the story clear and make the story compelling in the top several paragraphs.

Write without your notes.
You have most of the story in your head. You know what the most important points are. You remember the embarrassing contradictions, the clever quotes, the damning evidence. So tell the story, without the distractions of that mess of notebooks and faxes and photocopies. Flipping through notebooks can distract you from your focus. Of course, when you’re done, you need to return to your notebooks and other resources to ensure accuracy.

Keep the end in sight.
Decide where you want your story to end. Keep the end in view as you write, and use the information and anecdotes that lead you to that end by the most direct route.

First Five Paragraphs.
Gannett newspapers teach staff members to give stories a strong focus by making sure that the first five paragraphs cover these four elements: news, impact, context and human dimension. If that seems too formulaic to follow with every story, it’s still a valuable tool to use if you’re having trouble focusing your story.

For more on the “First Five Paragraphs” approach:
www.poynter.org/centerpiece/OCNWW/roberts.htm
www.gannett.com/go/newswatch/2001/march/nw0330-2.htm

Nut grafs.
Journalists disagree about the necessity (and sometimes the definition) of “nut grafs.” But this much is difficult to dispute: High in every story, you need to tell the reader why she should read this story today. A good nut graf often is the best way to achieve that. A nut graf may be an elaboration of the theme statement you wrote before even writing your story.

Stories that often need nut grafs include stories with anecdotal ledes, issue stories or controversy stories. The nut graf might place the anecdote in context or answer a question raised in the lede or explain what’s at stake in the controversy. The nut graf tells the reader why this story is relevant.

Work the nut graf into the story smoothly. You don’t want a “stop the reader” graf that interrupts the flow of the story or insults the reader’s intelligence.

Kate Long of the Charleston Gazette cautions against writing a nut graf that becomes flour in the brownie: “You’re eating this nice brownie, and suddenly you hit a chunk of dry flour. Young reporter is trying to satisfy the editor who (reporter thinks) insists on the graph, so he/she sticks in a dense paragraph that breaks the flow of the story.”

More on nut grafs:
www.notrain-nogain.com/Listsv/nut.asp

What happened to that annual promise to stop doing obligatory stories and start doing pieces that say something? Fifteen tips for renewal

Yo, beat reporters. Tired? Feeling like your beat sucks the life out of you with its obligatory nature? Wonder what happened to that annual promise to develop more enterprise off your beat?

How to be a more enterprising beat reporter

Here’s the hard truth: Balancing “obligatory” and “enterprise” on a beat is a bitch, especially if you are working in an environment in which productivity is the issue. Your beat ought to be a place where you use your mounting expertise to find more and more challenging opportunities. But the way many newsrooms are now structured, your boss cares less about enterprise and more about filling the “product.”

What can you do? You’ve got to inspire yourself–you’ve got to start coming up with better ideas, ideas so good you don’t mind putting in the extra hours, ideas so good they will make your boss see the light and spring you. You won’t win all your battles, but read the following 15 suggestions and excerpts on developing enterprise stories off your beat and maybe something will click. (If you start to get bored, just go to the botton and read Number 15–it sure worked on me.)

1. Anticipate when your beat fits into upcoming news events. Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, whose responsibilities include transportation, used a Sept. 11 angle to explore the circle of experts who interpret cockpit recorder tapes:

WASHINGTON — Until today, the U.S. government had never played the cockpit tapes of an air disaster for families who lost loved ones, insisting that the sounds would be too raw.

Now, families of the 40 passengers and crew of United Flight 93 will hear the 30 minutes of tension and chaos that preceded the crash of the jetliner into a Pennsylvania field Sept. 11. They felt they had a right to listen, to know. Their relatives apparently tried to take back control of the plane from four hijackers, and thereby thwarted another terrorist attack.

As they listen, the families will enter a zone normally inhabited only by a small corps of investigators hardened to bitter reality. Like coroners with headphones, the investigators seek to uncover the hidden causes of tragedies through painstaking analysis of the most minute clues.

They work from a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington that is stacked with mangled recorders, reminders of life’s fragility. The listening room itself is spartan. There is a table and chairs, with headphones at each seat. At the end of the table sits a large computer monitor, so everyone can see as an NTSB technician transcribes what is heard on the tape.

Investigators regard this room as the agency’s inner sanctum, a workplace in which they witness struggles that reveal both the harsh finality of death and the power of the human will to live.

“You are really very close to the soul,” said Malcolm Brenner, an NTSB psychologist who specializes in voice analysis. “Speech is very close to how a person thinks.”

Brenner believes he has gotten to know some pilots as one would a friend by repeatedly listening to snatches of the last half-hour of their lives to figure out how they died.

He listened hundreds of times over four years to the cockpit tapes of USAir Flight 427, which went down near Pittsburgh in 1994, killing all 132 aboard.

Finally, he was able to match a series of grunting sounds by the co-pilot with data replicating a malfunction of the Boeing 737′s rudder. The co-pilot was grunting as he fought to overcome an unexpected, catastrophic turn in what would otherwise have been a routine landing. Brenner’s work helped bring about a redesign of the rudder system on the airliner, the world’s most popular.

2. Use your beat to illustrate a microcosm of a national issue. Teresa Watanabe, a religion writer, struck as soon as President Bush introduced his notion of allowing faith-based institutions to qualify for more federal social-services funds. She found a religious organization that was using federal funds on a smaller scale and profiled it to demonstrate the contradictions:

Its motto signals that this is no typical government-funded employment agency: “We are praying for your success.” Literally.

Shield of Faith, a Pentecostal congregation in Pomona, received $250,000 in federal funds two years ago to run a job-placement service, the kind of church-state partnership that President Bush envisions dramatically expanding.

The agency’s staff members, who work across the hall from the church sanctuary, offer the usual resume-writing services, job leads and job fairs. But, under 1996 federal rules that lowered the walls between church and state, they also offer prayers and spiritual counseling. These activities, they say, are what give their down-and-out clients faith, hope and healing.

“Let’s pray that God anoints your resume,” job development coordinator Karen Burr said she tells her clients. “The Bible says trust your Lord. . . . Let’s acknowledge God in this process.”

When they aren’t working with clients, the two full-time and three part-time staff members employed under the Department of Labor grant sometimes do church business. On Tuesday, two staff members baptized a woman who walked in off the street, clapping, praising God and speaking in tongues.

The Shield of Faith program highlights some of the major questions facing Bush’s scheme, announced this week, to make it easier for religious groups to obtain federal social service grants: How much religion is permissible in government-funded programs? What role does faith play in the services? And how should enterprises be monitored for the mixing of church and state business?

White House aides have said details of Bush’s plan–which is effectively an expansion of the 1996 rules that apply only to the government’s welfare-to-work program–are to be drafted in the coming months. Court challenges appear inevitable.

Similarly, another religion writer, William Lobdell, noticed an interesting campaign stemming from another Bush initiative–the $600 tax rebate:

As tax rebate checks begin arriving in the mail this week, religious leaders are campaigning with a flurry of e-mail, letters, fliers and pitches from the pulpit to persuade the faithful to earmark at least a portion of the rebate for God.

They are exhorting congregants to see the checks, which range from $300 to $600, not as a windfall but as a godsend.

“President Bush says, ‘It’s not the government’s money, it’s your money,’ ” Father Loren Weaver of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Long Beach told his congregation, echoing the president’s familiar 2000 campaign line. “And we say, ‘It’s not our money, it’s God’s. Everything is God’s.’ ”

Weaver’s goal is small: He hopes for enough money to pay the incoming rector a better salary. But a congregation near Nashville hopes to raise $450,000 to ease its debt from members who sign over their government checks directly to the church. And leaders of Judaism’s Reform movement have asked Jews to protest the tax cut, which many liberals opposed in favor of social programs, by giving their refunds to the poor.

The refunds are the first tangible products of the 10-year, $1.35-trillion tax cut plan Bush signed last month. The 92 million rebate checks, totaling $38 billion, have begun to arrive at households. But to get that money, religious organizations must muscle out other interests.

Wal-Mart is offering to cash the checks and Home Depot is handing out interest-free loans until customers’ rebates arrive.

3. Subcultures are fascinating story vehicles. Use your beat to find them. After a bad commuter train accident, Mike Anton and Tina Borgatta profiled the bonds that grew between people who relied on public transportation. (Only in Southern California, of course, would this be remarkable.):

William Schroeder has forged some of his friendships in staggered encounters of an hour or so a day, the time it usually takes him to ride Metrolink 809 from his Riverside home to his job in Irvine.

Among these friends are Ron and Edna, Jenny and Lulu, regulars who sit in the same part of the train each morning and pass the time with a newspaper or small talk.

They were there Tuesday when a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train ran a signal and plowed into their little world, killing two people and injuring scores. Schroeder hasn’t seen the others since.

“All I know is their first names,” Schroeder, 37, said Wednesday morning as he boarded a bus in Riverside, a substitute way to work until the Metrolink line opened later in the day. “We had our little group on the third car. A lot of those people were injured. I don’t know where they’re at now and I’m worried about them.”

Train wrecks disrupt in myriad, and obvious, ways. People are killed or injured. Survivors relive harrowing moments and gut-wrenching scenes as their minds rewind to events they’d rather forget.

Less obvious are the disruptions to relationships, the shredding of gossamer connections among people who share nothing more than time, space and a commuter’s bench.

“It’s kind of a micro-community that we have in the last car,” Barrie Britton, a bandage covering a gash across the bridge of his nose, said as he boarded the bus Wednesday morning….

4. Use the “news analysis” sesnsibility to exploit your expertise. Here, education writer Amy Pyle (now a Sacramento Bee editor) used months of frustration to hold educational leaders accountable, writing with authority. The topic was a ridiculously expensive high school whose price tag kept changing:

Entering the world of the Belmont Learning Center, the new high school proposed for the edge of downtown, is like a lesson in new, new, new math.

Facts and figures swim endlessly before your eyes, always slightly different than the time before, never quite adding up.

Like the $87-million cost the Los Angeles Unified School District keeps citing, which doesn’t include $61 million in land costs or a host of other factors that could push the total cost to $171 million or more.

Or the fact that, despite district denials, Belmont would be by most measures the most expensive public high school ever constructed in California, costing at least 2 1/2 times the national average per square foot.

Or last week’s offhand suggestion by district supporters that building the school would get 10,000 children off school buses–when the absolute maximum is one-third that amount.

As outrage has built over the cost of the school, district officials have seemed to compensate by raising their estimates of the number of children the school would help. It is the kind of semantic shifting that infuriates critics of the mammoth school system, who say they can never get a straight answer to their questions.

The experience of Steven Soboroff, the new chairman of the school bond oversight committee, is typical. Soboroff, who now counts himself among the Belmont Learning Center’s top supporters, alternates between bouts of cheerleading and complaining that so many district estimates about Belmont don’t add up. Taking a calculator to years of numbers in public and private paperwork about the project reveals myriad miscalculations….

…Even the most politically persuasive reason for building the Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue campus regardless of price–that the expenditure would allow thousands of downtown area youngsters to attend school closer to their homes–turns out to be partly double-counting.

5. Add up those casual anecdotes you run into. There might be a story there. Watch what business writer Dave Wilson did with a series of offhand complaints that we all hear:

Paralegal Delene Waltrip once had one of those memories that never let loose of a phone number. Seared into the folds of her cerebral cortex were hundreds of 10-digit combinations for prosecutors, judges, clerks, family members, friends and takeout Chinese joints.

But the last time Waltrip needed a number on the fly, she drew a blank. She had to run out to her car and grab her cell phone, which automatically stores the numbers for incoming and outgoing calls.

“It drives me nuts,” said Waltrip, who helps build cases against swindlers and con artists for the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office. “I blanked out on my best friend’s number the other day.”

Like countless gadget-laden Americans, Waltrip’s increased reliance on devices such as pocket computers, speed dial and electronic databases has led to a mild case of technological amnesia. More and more people don’t remember mundane bits of information such as their parents’ address or their spouse’s work number.

Those data are stashed in the digital memory of their cell phones or their hand-held personal digital assistants. Most of the more than 100 million mobile phones in the United States come equipped with speed dialing, eliminating the need to punch digits. The 8 million PDAs keep track of birthdays, anniversaries and important meetings. And a whole slew of Web sites offer to remind users to do everything from buying milk to calling Mom.

…So far, the tales of technology-induced memory loss are purely anecdotal. But academics are starting to examine the phenomenon–some even suggesting that it’s the true melding of man and machine.

6. Use your beat to document changing demographics. Hugo Martin was assigned to a new buro in a primarily Latino community southeast of downtown L.A. He saw cultural meaning in a routine government conflict:

Since Hermila Sanchez and her husband, Miguel, painted their beige South Gate home a light turquoise with white trim, they have noticed some passing neighbors giving the small stucco house disapproving looks.

“I say if they don’t like it they can come help us paint it another color,” Hermila Sanchez said good-naturedly from her front porch.

Her neighbors may not have a say in the color, but the city of South Gate soon may. This predominantly Latino, blue-collar city in southeast Los Angeles County is considering imposing the kind of color and design restrictions that are usually found only in affluent communities such as Laguna Beach and Westlake Village.

At the request of Mayor Henry Gonzalez, the South Gate City Council will vote today on creating a citywide program that limits the colors of homes and businesses to a designated few–most likely not to include the turquoise of the Sanchez home, or the maroon, orange and purple that also dot the landscape.

Gonzalez said the proposed restrictions were prompted by several complaints from residents about garish colors on businesses and homes around the city.

“People are saying, ‘It looks like hell,’ ” he said.

Many homes in this town of 93,000 can best be described as the colors of sorbet: lime green, peach, raspberry and banana yellow. An automotive shop that has drawn the mayor’s ire is bright purple with white trim.

But the politics of color may turn into a cultural debate. Many of the property owners who have chosen the lively hues for their homes and businesses may be carrying over a tradition from Mexico or other Latin American countries where vivid colors are embraced and are an expression of individuality.

Similarly, William Lobdell found deeper meaning in the addition of new police department chaplains:

After Garden Grove’s newest police chaplain puts on his bulletproof vest, he stuffs two items into the pocket centered over his heart: an extra slice of body armor to protect against a kill shot, and a photo of Kwan Yin, as beloved by Buddhists as the Virgin Mary is by Catholics.

“Using both the Kevlar and Kwan Yin, I thought that was the way to go,” the Rev. Kusala Ratana Karuna said. “You can never have too much protection.”

Kusala, 51, a Buddhist monk, is one of two new recruits in the Garden Grove Police Department’s cutting-edge chaplain program. The 10-member volunteer force also includes a Muslim, a Mormon, a rabbi, pastors and priests.

Few if any police departments nationwide can match Garden Grove’s diversity of faith. Kusala is only the second Buddhist police chaplain in the United States, according to the International Conference of Police Chaplains. The other is in Rockford, Ill., where the Police Department has some Buddhist officers.

A major driver behind the yearlong revamp was Police Chief Joe Polisar’s desire to…

7. How do new laws affect your beat? Here, Patrick McDonnell, who covers immigration, takes note:

By nightfall, the line stretched half a block down Whittier Boulevard, the facial expressions of the assembled betraying expectation and wariness, fatigue and hope.

“Who knows?” said Irma Villa, accompanied by her husband and three children. “Maybe we have a chance.”

The uncertainty of Villa and several hundred others gathered outside the offices of One Stop Immigration & Educational Center underscore bewilderment nationwide about new federal legislation passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

The law could aid a million or more immigrants and their immediate relatives, experts say. For the fortunate, it could mean cherished green cards, which permit holders to live and work permanently in the United States and can lead to citizenship. That possibility has created considerable hope.

But the complex details of the law remain mysterious to many. Rampant misinformation in immigrant communities has made things worse.

8. Look for profile opportunities that connect the dots–allow you to write more sweepingly about specific issues on your beat that might get lost in everyday coverage. Here’s a profile I wrote when I was covering labor and workplace issues, in an attempt to focus the reader on the magnitude of death on the job in America. I found this guy who put a face on it–his face, and the faces of those whose lives he grieved:

CHICAGO — Want to know why so many American workers die needlessly on the job? Ask Joseph Kinney. It’s all he talks about.

First he’ll tell you of his days in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, how his officers were held directly accountable for the men who died under them, how that sensitized them. Then he’ll talk about businessmen.

“The trouble with corporate executives is that they don’t write enough next-of-kin letters,” he says in that flat, accusatory voice. “They don’t go and talk to grieving widows. They don’t go and teach little boys how to throw curve balls. They don’t go and give little girls away at weddings. Maybe if they were more in touch with the damage–just the social damage–we wouldn’t have this big a problem.”

Kinney, the most frequently quoted authority on worker safety in the United States, never planned on becoming a zealot. He was a livestock consultant who worked profitably with cattle. Today he works compulsively with ghosts. Ghosts like Robert Campbell, a carpenter who was crushed when a crane boom line snapped in Idaho. Or Charles Elliot, a rubber worker who was asphyxiated while working in a carbon pit in Kansas. Or Brett Von Herbulis, a construction worker who died in a cave-in while digging a trench in Florida.

The ghosts began coming into Kinney’s life four years ago when his 26-year-old brother, Paul, fell off some weak construction scaffolding in Denver, went into a coma and died. The family said it was God’s will. Kinney wouldn’t buy it. There was a reason here, he thought, and he was going to find it.

What he found was that 10 to 20 Americans die on their jobs every day and that the agency established to protect them, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, had become one of the worst casualties of the Reagan Administration’s war against government regulation. Businesses responsible for accidents were fined paltry sums. Criminal prosecution was almost nonexistent. Proposed regulations were rare and languished in the bureaucracy for years.

Kinney, an intense, plain-faced, potbellied man, looked around for an organization devoted to helping people like him. He couldn’t find one. So in mid-1987, he put his consulting business aside and started the National Safe Workplace Institute. He threw so much cold rage into the institute that….

In the same vein, Patrick McDonnell wrote a magazine profile of a suburban anti-immigration crusader in an attempt to more effectively explain a group of people that the media usually dismisses as kooks:

On a cloudless morning in Westwood, Glenn Spencer is talking about treachery. The new leaders of the United States and Mexico are poised to meet amid a feel-good public relations buildup that has enraged Spencer, self-styled crusader against what he calls Mexico’s reconquista of California and the Southwest. News reports breezily convey the prospect of relaxed borders, a new amnesty for illegal immigrants and expanded free trade. It is no less than treason to Spencer, a 63-year-old former computer consultant from the San Fernando Valley, now a brash evangelist in a holy war of his own design.

He has called his brothers and sisters to Westwood to rally in protest. “Stand up for America or kiss it goodbye,” he warned them in an insistent e-mail dispatched to thousands of “loyal Americans” nationwide, urging them to mobilize here. “This is your last chance, and the media will be there!!!”

Alas, no more than 60 make it to Wilshire Boulevard today. Some hoist Old Glory and placards proclaiming “Close the Border” or “No Deal With Narco State.” A cadre of mostly young men and women denounce Spencer’s legions as Nazis and fascists. Worse, the only broadcast medium present is Spanish-language television, which inevitably will portray Spencer as a Latinophobic demon. It is hard to shake the impression of an older generation tilting at windmills only a few years after standing triumphant.

Once, Spencer and his allies who yearn to shut the country’s doors appeared to have tapped into a political and social lodestone. With the backing of then-Gov. Pete Wilson, they championed the passage of Proposition 187, a landmark California ballot initiative that became a nasty referendum on the state’s demographic transformation. The message of “restrictionists” such as Spencer was unambiguous: The “invasion” of poor Mexicans and Central Americans was costing Americans jobs, dragging down public schools, despoiling the environment, spreading disease and exacerbating sundry other social problems.

Emboldened, Spencer transformed his Sherman Oaks basement into a full-time, high-tech command post to spread the anti-immigration gospel. He used the Internet and a privately financed radio show to circulate ominous warnings about Mexico’s “demographic war” against the United States. He proudly personified the angry white man of the shut-the-border crowd. Critics denounced his message as racist and delusional. Spencer paid them no mind. He foresaw millions of converts–only to see his temple founder.

The recession ended, the economy boomed anew, and with that the anti-immigration engine backfired; it had become too harsh for its own good and had lost its most potent fuel: high unemployment. Today, lawmakers and social scientists regularly celebrate the economic vitality and cultural verve that immigrants have brought to places such as New York City, Silicon Valley and Southern California. Now, Glenn Spencer seeks out new converts in states thousands of miles away, places where resentment against immigrants is only starting to build.

It is easy to dismiss Spencer as a purveyor of hate on the loony fringes of the immigration-control movement, a contrarian voice rejecting the tide of demographic inevitability so evident in the new census. Yet Spencer can also be seen as a man who gives voice to a crude but deeply felt discontent. He is the next-door neighbor who has gradually rebelled against the unsettling sense of change coming too fast. To his sympathizers, not all of them white, Spencer is the man courageous enough to breach one of L.A.’s biggest taboos: He identifies and articulates the collateral damage from mass immigration that has jolted established communities–and to hell with the high-minded, supposed benefits of immigration. Their unease is captured in one phrase: It’s like a foreign country.

9. Look for that special moment when your beat intersects with other beats. Here, higher education writer Ken Weiss found an ad in a college newspaper that led to a fascinating story in the field of medicine:

Slipping away from Harvard for a week last June, a PhD candidate named Rachel, a tall strawberry blond with a creamy complexion and blue-green eyes, jetted to San Francisco for an unusual tryst.

Awaiting her was a wealthy Bay Area couple, desperate for a baby, willing to pay Rachel thousands of dollars to help them realize their dream.

The middle-age husband and wife, who found Rachel through a San Diego broker, were attracted as much to her slender, 5-foot-11 frame and Norwegian ancestry as they were to her Ivy League pedigree.

“You look even more gorgeous than the pictures,” she recalled one of the pair saying.

The next morning, under general anesthesia, a needle poked into Rachel’s ovaries and harvested 17 eggs ripened by weeks of hormone shots. They were then fertilized with the husband’s sperm and implanted into the wife’s womb.

For her donation, Rachel made about $18,000, just enough to cover a semester at an Ivy League school. She was back in California again in February–this time in San Diego, to do business with another couple.

“I asked for a little more this time,” she said, “and they agreed to it.”

California has become the center of a flourishing egg-donation industry that increasingly recruits women from university campuses nationwide.

“Pay your tuition with eggs,” reads one of the ubiquitous advertisements in college newspapers. California brokers now recruit heavily from the nation’s top academic institutions–Harvard, Yale and Stanford–promoting their donors’ eggs on Web sites and in brochures as name-brand genetic material.

10. What pisses you off on your beat? What is simply wrong with the world? Amy Pyle was outraged by the shortage of textbooks that, in many people’s minds, had become a given in L.A. One reason we hadn’t written about the outrage before was that it was impossible to quantify. Amy realized that even anecdotally, the story demanded to be told:

Sophomore Angeles Herrera hurries down the halls of Fremont High School with a single slim notebook tucked under her arm.

She carries no textbooks because she has none.

Textbooks remain the essential guide to education, second in importance only to competent teachers. But book shortages have become so common in big-city high schools that Angeles doesn’t know she should expect more–that, in fact, state law guarantees her a text for every class.

Ask when she last had a textbook of her own and Angeles looks puzzled. Was it French last semester? Yes, she thinks so. And maybe algebra last year.

In the absence of take-home books, she spends chunks of valuable classroom time reading and copying from a class set of 30 books shared by up to 150 students daily. Sometimes there are not even enough of those to go around.

Angeles senses the void most acutely when she digs into her homework at night. “You don’t have the book for examples,” she said. When she gets confused, she telephones a classmate and they try to muddle through together.

Her plight is education’s tragic secret, one that threatens to undermine a generation’s literacy: Across the nation, students routinely make do without textbooks in one or more classes. Those in urban areas fare worse than their suburban cousins. California’s public school students are among the worst off, thanks to lower education funding, radically shifting education philosophies and a faster-growing, more transient public school population.

The problem remains hidden because it is rarely quantified. The 663-campus Los Angeles Unified School District can’t take stock because it eliminated its centralized book purchasing department in 1990 to save money.

Similarly, Patrick McDonnell wrote about a long line that had wound around the INS office so long that it had become a given:

Jorge Custodio is sprawled on a blanket near the Hollywood Freeway, bundled up against the chill as daylight approaches. He is neither homeless nor unemployed, but a middle-class, Internet-savvy homeowner and naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador.

“I left my homeland a long time ago, but now I feel like I’m back in the Third World,” an exhausted Custodio says near the end of a 13-hour vigil waiting for the downtown Los Angeles Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters to open.

At least 1,200 people like Custodio have gathered outside the INS offices by 6 a.m. in recent days, some of them beginning their camp-outs before sundown. They are executives and janitors, grandmothers and teenagers, all in need of working papers or citizenship or permission to bring loved ones to the United States, or some other service.

They seem resigned to one of Los Angeles’ worst breakdowns in governmental service, known simply as “The Line,” a doleful pageant that wraps around the block-square Federal Building like a serpent.

The Line has bulged even more recently as Monday’s deadline for certain legal-residency applications approached. That merely heightened its notoriety in the nation’s new-immigrant capital as a dreaded rite of passage and the worst of its kind in the United States.

For the INS, an agency long viewed as sloppy and heartless, The Line is a daily reminder of the consequence of emphasizing enforcement over service. As Congress has pumped more and more money into politically popular border-policing activities, other functions have suffered. Today, for example, half or more of the information booths at the agency’s L.A. headquarters are routinely unstaffed.

“Bottom line, it’s wrong,” admits Thomas J. Schiltgen, the 26-year agency veteran who heads the seven-county Los Angeles district of the INS, the nation’s busiest. “We have the worst possible conditions for our employees and the customers that we could possibly have.”

11. What do you think about when you go home? In other words, what part of your beat piques your curiosity as a person, not just a journalist? After a couple years on the workplace beat, I had written many stories about cumulative trauma injuries suffered by computer workers. But what was more intriguing to me was what being tethered to a computer did to people–including me–psychologically. That question defied statistics, and there weren’t many experts, and it took me another 18 months before I found the time to finish it–but it meant enough to my soul that I stayed with it:

Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard University business professor, once asked a group of office clerks whose jobs had recently been computerized to draw pictures of themselves at work.

The clerks variously portrayed themselves as chained to desks, clothed in prison stripes, trapped by walls, deprived of sunlight and food, wearing blinders, surrounded by bottles of aspirin, bleary-eyed with fatigue and frowning.

The stark, solitary stick figures spoke vividly about changes that computerization is making in the office–changes that represent a fundamental and potentially harmful shift in the nature of work.

Computerization without proper social and psychological safeguards is subjecting millions of office employees to a harsher, more isolated and more dangerous workplace, a growing number of researchers maintain.

Too often, clerical-level workers are forced to spend too much time glued to computer screens performing rote activities, or required to work at a pace dictated or monitored by a computer, experts say. As a result, they lose “social support”–normal office chatter and physical movement–and a sense of control over their job.

Those feelings and experiences may seem ephemeral, but psychologists regard them as a crucial buffer against stress-related illnesses such as anxiety and depression. They can often spell the difference between a deadening job and a bearable one.

Business and government are being called upon to rethink basic automation decisions of the past decade. Researchers believe that employers should relinquish their sole authority to decide how work is organized. They believe short-term productivity should be sacrificed in favor of employees’ long-term health.

….Such thinking amounts to the most serious reevaluation of the relationship between people and machines since the Industrial Revolution. It demands, in effect, that office workers be protected against the most enticing quality of the computer–its ability to drastically speed up the number of transactions a worker can perform.

12. Counterpoint the conventional wisdom. It interested me that a labor dispute focused on objections to overtime, when conventional wisdom told us most workers relied on it to survive:

EVERETT, Wash. — Facing furious deadlines, Margaret Nix worked 34 out of every 35 days on the Boeing Co.’s aircraft assembly line. Mandatory overtime, 12-hour days. She gained a pile of money. She lost a disgruntled husband. Then her teen-age daughter suffered an unrelated psychological breakdown.

One day Nix, who asked that her real name not be used, tried to coax the withdrawn girl to recall some of the family’s good times.

“Mom,” her daughter said, “you were never home.”

Such stories, drenched in guilt and anger, contributed to a 48-day strike last fall by 57,000 Boeing machinists. Some of the strikers carried picket signs demanding stricter limits on overtime with slogans such as, “Do your children know what you look like?”

Life at Boeing–where the company now promises to limit overtime to a mere 144 hours every three months–is an extreme example of the pressure overtime work can generate. Yet late in the afternoon each day in many offices and factories, the same kind of tension gurgles in the stomachs of hundreds of thousands of employees who pray that they won’t be asked or ordered to work overtime–and those who are equally hopeful that they will.

America’s work force has a love-hate relationship with overtime. On one side are people desperate for more money. On the other are people desperate for more personal time.

13. After the fire’s out, go back. Watch what happened here long after a nasty strike was settled and the media turned its attention elsewhere:

Eleven weeks after its pilots and flight attendants ended a 29-day strike, United Airlines continues to be plagued by a nasty little war of nerves between many of those who joined the strike and the far smaller number who crossed picket lines.

A substantial number of former strikers are engaged in a calculated campaign–endorsed by some leaders of their union, the Air Line Pilots Assn.–to ostracize the “scabs,” whose refusal to strike helped United maintain about 15% of its flights. That kept the pilots’ union from its strategically critical goal of shutting down the nation’s largest airline.

Patrick Flanagan, chairman of the union’s San Francisco council, explained the tactic in a letter written to pilots in his region five weeks after the strike ended.

“You must reprogram your interpersonal methods of operation” in associating with pilots who refused to strike, Flanagan wrote. “Our wrath and rage should be properly directed towards those who were willing to take our jobs.”

Compared to many labor disputes, the rage has been directed subtly. Still, it has created some surprising situations among a class of workers whose average salary is $90,000 a year, and who have been regarded as lukewarm to the concept of union solidarity.

For example, Ron Ashcraft is a co-pilot, which means that he flies in the plane’s right-hand seat, beside the captain. Protocol among pilots is that the captain allows the co-pilot to land the plane on alternate legs of a flight. But Ashcraft, who crossed the picket line, said that no captain who struck has turned the controls over to him since the strike ended. Union members admit that a small number of captains who supported the strike have vowed with a vengeance that they will never let a “scab” co-pilot handle the plane again.

14. Miss the story? Get it next time–plan ahead. This didn’t come off a beat experience but I always thought my editor made a sharp call: Los Angeles always has people shooting into the air on New Year’s Eve, and one year somebody got killed. My city editor told me on January 2 or 3: Write an advance for next New Year’s Eve. So I had about 360 days to save string, and it paid off with this story the following December 29:

The rural community of Cherryville, N.C., and the metropolis of Southern California will celebrate New Year’s Eve the same way this week–with loud bursts of gunfire.

The only difference is that in Cherryville the folks have enough sense to stage the centuries-old custom of “shooting in” the new year, a tradition they inherited from the town’s German settlers. A ceremonial musket-toting procession will go door to door all night, firing powder-filled caps into the air.

Here, by contrast, Rule No. 1 is that there are no rules. The firing will be spontaneous, continuous and uninhibited, as though it were 1888 rather than 1988 and millions of people weren’t densely clustered.

And the darndest thing will happen: the same bullets that go up in the air will come down.

They’ll come down from as high as 10,000 feet with enormous force, enough to easily penetrate the skin and sometimes to shatter bones, even after smashing through a roof.

If recent history is any guide, a dozen or more people in Los Angeles and Orange counties will be wounded by the random fallout of thousands of shots from pistols, shotguns and automatic weapons that turn the night into a war zone for about half an hour each year, starting at around 11:45 p.m.

Law enforcement agencies will ground their helicopters. Last year, even that didn’t help. Somebody who started celebrating early hit a flying Los Angeles police chopper around 10 p.m.

Police will be very wary about responding to calls of “shots fired,” in many cases refusing to do so unless there is proof of injury. Last year in Santa Ana the sheer volume of calls paralyzed police. So many calls came in that the department’s switchboard went into what officials called “electronic gridlock.”

15. Read “The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle” (published this month by RuggedLand). Historical novelist Steven Pressfield has written a 158-page book on the central problem in the writer’s life: Starting. Pressfield, whose books include “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” calls this principle “resistance.” Frustrated beat reporters who know they ought to be doing more enterprise work will understand immediately:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever resolved on a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever felt a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace or to preserve the environment?

“Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.”

Are you a beat reporter who is bogged down in dailies when you know there are great gobs of enterprise waiting to be done? Then you, too, know what Resistance is. Go beat it. Pressfield’s book is a start.

Six strategies to put a higher proportion of your reporting into your stories

The best way to write with authority is to make an extra phone call every hour. Authority is not a matter of style, it’s not even primarily a matter of writing. It’s a matter of reporting, of sweat. But once you live up to that obligation, there are a number of tricks you can use to give your copy a greater sense of command and perspective–to make it live up to the quality of your reporting.

'I want to write with more authority'

The half-dozen suggestions that follow are arbitrary and incomplete, but they create a baseline for you to work from. You could, if you had time, do a separate self-edit on each of these qualities. So just pick a couple and start with those. After a while you should feel yourself being able to integrate all six of these standards simultaneously. That, in turn, will help you look for and invent others.

1. COMPRESS YOUR LANGUAGE TO GAIN SPEED

Cut as savagely as you can to create a quicker read. Watch how well-placed trims make the top of this feature, a profile of the image-conscious L.A. head of the Nation of Islam, go faster and put you in the groove more quickly.

It first read like this:

The place was swarming with cops. Judges, attorneys, police commissioners turned out, too, in a tribute to Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks and his 37 years of service earlier this month at the Sunset Room in Hollywood.

Among this particular power elite, one man stood out as a puzzle: Tony Muhammad, Western regional minister of the Nation of Islam, was here to praise a police chief.

Yes, that Nation, those hard-talking advocates of Islam and black nationalism notorious for four decades of bad blood with law enforcement-a bitter history of raids and recriminations, shootouts and street battles. These are the guys who took on 75 LAPD officers in a 1962 shootout that left one dead and 22 injured. They hang a portrait in the lobby of their Vermont Avenue mosque not of Nation leader Louis Farrakhan, but of Oliver X. Beasley, a brother killed by sheriff’s deputies in 1990.

Yet as Muhammad stood at the podium, he praised Parks for helping him see the world beyond race. He thanked the chief for building bridges with his members. He hailed a new era.

”For the first time in history, there has been healing between the Nation of Islam and the Los Angeles police department,” Muhammad declared to the audience. ”We have been misunderstood in many circles, but now it is time for this city to begin to heal.”

Healing is not a word usually associated with the Nation of Islam…

Then top was cut by nearly 30%, from 241 words to 169 words, so that it read like this:

Among the judges, attorneys and police department brass who recently gathered to honor Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks, one man stood out as a puzzle: Tony Muhammad, Western Regional director of the Nation of Islam.

Yes, that Nation, those hard-talking advocates of Islam and black nationalism notorious for four decades of bad blood with law enforcement. These are the guys who took on 75 LAPD officers in a 1962 shootout that left one Muslim dead and 22 injured. A portrait hangs in the lobby of their Vermont Avenue mosque of Oliver X. Beasley, a member killed by sheriff’s deputies in another shootout in 1990.

Yet Muhammad came to the party this month celebrating Park’s 37 years of service as a welcome guest. He thanked Parks for building bridges with his members. ”For the first time in history, there has been healing between the Nation of Islam and the Los Angeles police department,” Muhammad declared to the audience.

Healing is not a word usually associated with the Nation of Islam…

2. USE YOUR OWN VOICE TO GAIN IMMEDIACY AND PRECISION:

A. The use of a question allows the writer to supply the punchy answer in the second graf in this off-the-news follow:

This month’s flap over whether Korans containing anti-Jewish commentary should be pulled from public schools underscores a question of growing prominence in today’s pluralistic times: How do you make sure ancient scriptures mesh with modern-day sensibilities?

The prevailing answer among scholars: You can’t. No scripture is politically correct–nor, many scholars argue, should anyone expect them to be.

New religious movements emerge precisely because the prevailing faiths are deemed flawed in some major way, says Reuven Firestone, a professor of medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. So if their scriptures rail against others as arrogant sinners, unbelievers, idol-worshippers and the like-well, that’s their job, Firestone says.

B. The writer hits you in the face with wedding dates in the first graf, then uses the second graf to summarize a little-noticed consequence of Sept. 11.

Oct. 26. Jan. 30. Sept. 28, 2002. Those are some of the days that would have flowered into weddings had it not been for Sept. 11. Instead, the terrorist attack left white gowns hanging in closets, awaiting a first fitting. It left homes where, each month, a copy of Bride’s magazine arrives to find no bride.

And it left fiances and fiancees facing a drastically revised future, with little of the legal protection for claiming benefits, estate money or any federal awards that widows or widowers have.

See how much more powerful that statement–the writer’s own definition of the story–is, compared to a simple anecdote?

Those who were betrothed are also left to navigate their loss in fragile solidarity with families that may have been prepared to welcome them, but that they had not yet joined. That tandem grief has been strained, for some by simple awkwardness, for others by battles over what was left behind.

Only now does an anecdote fit:

For Rachel Uchitel and the family of her fiance, who worked at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, the tension has fallen somewhere in between. “They lost their child,” Ms. Uchitel said. But, she argued, “My everyday life has changed. I don’t come home to the same person. I don’t even come home to the same home.” She insisted it would be no easier for a fiance or fiancee to move on than it would for any family member.

There is no count of how many engagements were broken by Sept. 11, but at Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost more than 600 employees, 44 fiances and fiancees have registered with the company’s relief fund. One of them is Susann Brady, a registered nurse who lives in Montclair, N.J. She was set to wed Gavin Cushny last Oct. 26, in a 12th-century church in Scotland where his late father had served as a minister.

C. Got obscurity problems? Writing about something your audience doesn’t think it cares about? Identify the heart of the story–the part that creates a common denominator–with a punch line, the same way you’d tell it to a friend.

CAIRO — When does an emir get to become a king? When he says so.

That may sound like some obscure monarchy joke, but it was in fact a historic moment Thursday in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain, where, with a stroke of his pen, Sheik Hamed ibn Isa Khalifa anointed himself king.

Of course, a king can’t be king without a kingdom, so map makers will have to get busy and rename the sliver of oil-producing sand “the Kingdom of Bahrain”–just like its big cousin next door, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But unlike Saudi Arabia, where the royal family rules with a heavy hand, this kingdom will incorporate elements of democracy, making it a standout in a region where, generally, rulers rule as they like.

In announcing his promotion, the fledgling king also approved plans to create a constitutional monarchy.

He called for the first parliamentary elections in more than two decades to be held in October and municipal elections in May.

“We are keen to resume democratic life as soon as possible for the glory of Bahrain, its prosperity and development,” his royal highness said in a nationally televised address Thursday. “Men and women will be allowed to vote and run for office.”

A few years ago, this country of just 650,000 people was in the grip of a violent uprising. Bombs rocked the capital, Manama, destroying banks, offices and hotels, and the jails were filled with political prisoners.

In 1974, the new king’s father, Sheik Isa ibn Salman Khalifa, had imposed an emergency law under which anyone could be arrested and held for up to three years without being charged. Over the years, thousands of people were arrested, locked up or exiled. He also suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament.

In 1999, the emir died and his son took over.

Hamed shook the nation to the core. He opened the jails and released….

D. Got an ongoing story? Exploit the fact that the reader has context. In the example below, the writer used a sweeping first line to create a sense of drama:

THE HAGUE–Slobodan Milosevic finally got his day in court Thursday, and he made the most of it.

Representing himself in his war crimes trial at the international court here, the former Yugoslav president unloaded an opening salvo portraying himself as the victim of a hypocritical Western conspiracy.

Milosevic denied the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, claiming that the thousands slain and hundreds of thousands driven out of Serbia’s Kosovo province three years ago were mostly victim of a civil war between Serbs and ethnic Albanian terrorists–and, later, NATO airstrikes.

Milosevic’s opening statement was an aggressive, essentially political attempt to turn the proceedings into a trial of the Western nations that he accuses of committing war crimes themselves during the 11-week bombing campaign and then “crucifying” him.

3. AVOID A CONTRADICTORY FLOW. This is a constant problem in more complex stories, and writers often blunder by forgetting that your story can be about only one thing. Many interesting, noble stories die when the writer lets a secondary point rob the story of momentum and purposefulness. The reader quits in frustration, asking himself: What’s this story about?

A. The story changes direction twice in five grafs. In the second graf (underlined) we see a despair turn to hope. Then in the fifth graf (underlined) we see hope turn back into despair. Which way are we going? The fifth and sixth grafs’ contradictory flow not only sends us in a different direction but does so with overly long sentences. Would you keep reading this story?

MILWAUKEE–Late for school, the 7-year-old girl was hurrying along South 18th Street, going as quickly as she could in her puffy snowsuit. The man appeared suddenly, wrapped his hand around her right wrist and pulled her behind a house. He raped her. Then he disappeared.

Six years later, at midnight on Dec. 2, the unknown rapist would have been forever free from punishment, saved by Wisconsin’s statute of limitations for sexual assault. Instead, he has been charged with rape and kidnapping.

His identity, such as it is, was revealed for the first time in the November arrest warrant: “John Doe, unknown male, with matching deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA] at genetic locations D2S44, D4S139, D5S110, D10S28, D1S7 and D17S79.”

In a novel effort to beat the statute of limitations on a pile of unsolved sexual assaults, an enterprising team of investigators and prosecutors here is testing the legal boundaries of DNA evidence. Instead of listing the traditional name or physical description used in a John Doe warrant, they are detailing the suspect’s most basic genetic makeup.

But the tale of one young victim’s second chance for justice also is a sobering story of the nation’s state-run DNA databanks–and, in turn, the FBI system designed to link them. Hobbled by a lack of funding, a mammoth backlog of samples and fundamental differences between systems, the promise of DNA databanks–perhaps law enforcement’s most promising tool since the FBI’s fingerprint catalog–is far from being realized.

Wisconsin is ahead of most states, and yet the semen from the girl’s rapist sat untested in a police property room for nearly six years. Now that the sample has been cataloged, Wisconsin still can search for the rapist in only 22 other states, since the rest don’t yet have the funding to tie into the FBI’s year-old Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

In the end, the girl, now 13, was the beneficiary of investigators with a heart-wrenching task: Go back to cases on the verge of expiring and decide which might be salvaged by an untested legal tactic, and which to write off for certain.

“We had to pick the ones where we had good evidence and the victim was still available,” said Det. Lori Gaglione, a soft-spoken, hard-boiled veteran of the city’s Sensitive Crimes Unit. “We had to choose.”

The girl didn’t know the man, or even where he came from. She knew that he was wearing jogging pants and that they were still pulled down when he told her she could go.

A detective took the semen sample from a sidewalk behind the house on South 18th and sent it across town to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory. There it would sit, untested except to verify that it was semen, for about 1,934 days–a length of time not at all extraordinary in the United States for cases without a suspect.

This is a difficult story to tell. The essence turns out to be the disparity between technology’s promise and practice. It would have been better to jettison the anecdotal lead to focus more directly on what the story’s really about.

B: Same problem: The story reverses itself twice–in the fourth and sixth grafs (underlined). The sixth graf makes you unsure whether the story is going. That second “but” should have been replaced by the nut graf:

It’s just after 8 a.m. as Mike Scanlan paces into Terminal 8 at Los Angeles International Airport, a rolled-up stack of flight schedules clutched in his fist, his eyes scanning like search beams. Thick-chested and spike-haired, with the wide stance of a policeman, Scanlan became United Airlines’ general manager in Los Angeles three years ago.

The station was in full flower then, a budding hub painstakingly nurtured to seize the biggest share of LAX’s departure board. For Scanlan, the post was the culmination of 30-plus years with United–the best gig imaginable for a self-described “airport rat.”

Back then, Scanlan’s morning patrol was guaranteed to provide a certain satisfaction, even on days scuttled by weather or human foul-ups. Signs of United’s ascendance were everywhere.

But on this Tuesday in mid-December, Scanlan turns onto the concourse and deflates. In what should be the heart of the morning rush, the gleaming expanse is utterly deserted.

“Look at this, it’s just awful,” he said. “We invested a lot of money here.”

But he has to move on, to shake off the sting, to complete the circuit every day, just as he must believe United will rebound from autumn’s wreckage.

In the months since Sept. 11, United has gone from an expansive behemoth to a company “struggling for its life,” in the words of its recently departed chief executive. The new era has chiseled out a smaller, humbler, more anxious community at LAX, where United once generated $1 in every $6 of its revenue.

United made deeper service cuts at LAX than at any other hub, slashing departures by more than one-third and scrapping its Western shuttle service.

C. Too long a windup robs your story of the very authority your reporting possesses. Here, the contradictory flow (underlined) make it difficult to determine what this well-intentioned and interesting story is actually about. It will eventually break into a narrative structure, but only after far too complex a windup:

In the beginning, just after the attacks, the leaders of the National Association of Home Builders, an industry group with 205,000 members, wanted simply to write a big check. Better to let an established charity dispense their millions to the victims, they said. What did they know about disaster relief?

But then came the stories about Red Cross foul-ups and United Way donations gathering dust. And so the home builders resolved to go it alone and distribute their millions directly to Sept. 11 victims through their own fund. They would use common sense, they told each other. Surely they could do it faster, with less red tape.

Alas, they had no idea how hard it would be to give away $10 million.

Today, after all their heated debates and feuding over whom to help, how to define need and how to guard against freeloaders, very little has turned out as planned. Their deadlines for delivering aid have been blown, and most of their money remains unspent. Their method for distributing relief checks is a convoluted bureaucracy in which a widow from New Jersey, for example, is expected to apply for help through a builders’ group in Staten Island.

Yet for all the missteps and amateurism, theirs is also a story of grit and perseverance, and in the end they brought a modest measure of financial relief to hundreds of families. If the home builders failed to coordinate their plans with other charities, they nonetheless agreed to direct much of their money toward a group of people–laid-off hotel and restaurant workers–who have been relatively overlooked. And if some money is going to those with no pressing financial needs, far more has made it to those facing foreclosure or fending off bill collectors.

The transformation of the home builders association from check-writers to social workers is hardly unique in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Dozens of charities have sprung from nowhere, raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

In this way, the example of the home builders is also a window into the strengths and weaknesses of a sprawling relief effort that is still struggling to distribute nearly $2 billion in donations, often through charities that are rookies to disaster relief. It is a messy, uneven effort. And yet there is so much money, so much good will that, amazingly, few legitimate victims appear to have slipped through the cracks.

As a reader, I was simultaneously drawn to the story at this point and frustrated. It engaged in so much foreshadowing that it was robbing itself of a forward momentum–almost shifting too much side to side, like a running back who is doing too much feinting when he ought to be moving up the field.

Today, the home builders acknowledge that they were unprepared emotionally and administratively for the outpouring of human misery unleashed by their efforts. Their fax machines were overwhelmed with….

4. SAY MORE OF WHAT YOU KNOW

A. Take advantage of that extra reporting by injecting more perspective grafs into your copy. The following example does it with an introductory phrase (a functional dependent clause, not a frivolous or overly long one), a clause in the forth graf and a seven-graf background sequence that unfolds in the middle of the story:

JERUSALEM–In a sign that Israeli military and diplomatic pressure is opening fissures in the Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat reportedly denounced his West Bank security chief, Col. Jibril Rajoub, during a violent argument Tuesday.

Palestinian sources described what appeared to be a serious rupture in relations between Arafat and one of his top officials. The Israeli military claims that the Palestinian Authority president’s ability to control militias and even his own security forces is weakening.

Arafat lashed out at Rajoub after the colonel’s officers did nothing to stop a mob in Hebron that freed 17 prisoners from the West Bank city’s jail Monday night, sources close to Rajoub said. The mob broke down the jailhouse doors and helped inmates escape after Israel launched airstrikes on a Gaza City security compound.

The Hebron breakout, captured on video by television news crews, embarrassed Arafat, who has been trying to convince the Bush administration and the European Union that he is cracking down on gunmen, said the sources, who requested anonymity.

Relations between Arafat and Rajoub have been strained recently by policy disagreements and by comments from some Israeli officials that they would like to see Rajoub replace Arafat.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government has declared Arafat “irrelevant” and refuses to deal with him. Israeli tanks have confined the Palestinian leader to Ramallah in the West Bank for more than two months as Israel has chipped away at the infrastructure of his regime.

The perspective segment begins here

As it has sought to weaken Arafat’s grip on power, Israel has increasingly targeted the many security forces that underpin his government. Israeli airplanes and attack helicopters have destroyed Palestinian police headquarters, jails and other security structures. Dozens of Palestinian police and security officers have died in the air raids, and more have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops.

Israel says it has struck Palestinian security forces when they have been involved in attacks on Israelis or have failed to prevent attacks. It also holds Arafat responsible for the attacks, even when they are carried out by groups opposed to the Palestinian Authority, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel says it will continue to hit Arafat’s security buildings until he takes strong measures against militants.

The pressure on Palestinian security forces has had the side effect of eroding the rule of law in Palestinian-controlled territories, where citizens say they can no longer count on the police to investigate crimes or capture criminals.

“The police spend most of their time trying to protect themselves these days,” said Said Zeedani, director of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights, a human rights group based in Ramallah.

From his office window, Zeedani can see Palestinian policemen sitting under the olive trees outside their offices in a converted apartment building they moved to after Israel destroyed their station. The officers are too frightened to work in the building, which they expect will eventually be targeted by the Israelis, he said. So they park their cars far away and sit on chairs under the trees.

Similar scenes can be found throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Security officers balance case files on their laps while sitting outside buildings they fear might be hit.

As a result, even egregious violations of public order are going unchecked by security services in the Palestinian-controlled territories, Zeedani said.

Most recently, a mob of about 200 from the Kalandiyeh refugee camp rioted…

B. Edit and re-edit to strike the proper balance between news and perspective. Watch how this story went through the wringer.

First version of lead: Good perspective in the first graf, but the facts come in the second graf:

Global Crossing Ltd.’s John Legere appears to have broken new ground in the ability of chief executives to pocket generous compensation packages even when their company is sliding into financial ruin.

Legere is drawing $1.1 million in salary as chief executive of the troubled Bermuda-based telecommunications giant and collecting as much as $3 million in severance pay after being promoted from its biggest subsidiary, Asia Global Crossing.

The 43-year-old Legere became the top officer at the fiber-optic network company four months before it filed the fifth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The company has been criticized for the lucrative pay packages it has granted to senior executives in recent years, even as its underlying business crumbled amid in the telecommunications meltdown.

Second version: The facts come up, but the perspective is demoted to the fourth graf:

Global Crossing Ltd. Chief Executive John Legere collected as much as $3 million in severance pay after being promoted from the troubled telecommunication company’s biggest subsidiary.

The terms of the payout, outlined in regulatory filings, come on top of a $3.5-million signing bonus given to Legere for joining Global Crossing four months before it filed the fifth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

As part of his new pay package, the 43-year-old Legere also had his salary doubled, to $1.1 million, and the $10 million balance of a $15 million loan from the subsidiary, Asia Global Crossing, erased.

The giant fiber-optic network company has been criticized for the lucrative pay packages it has granted to senior executives in re cent years, even as its underlying business crumbled amid the telecommunications meltdown.

Third version: By using a two-sentence first paragraph, balance between news and perspective is achieved:

Even as his company was sliding into financial ruin, Global Crossing Ltd. Chief Executive John Legere collected as much as $3 million in severance pay after being promoted from the telecommunication company’s biggest subsidiary. The payout is highly unusual and likely to fuel more controversy over the compensation that Global Crossing granted executives in the months before its downfall.

Legere’s severance package, outlined in regulatory filings, came on top of a $3.5-million signing bonus he received for joining Global Crossing four months before it filed the fifth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

The 43-year-old Legere also had his salary doubled, to $1.1 million, and the $10-million balance of a $15-million loan from the subsidiary, Asia Global Crossing, erased.

5. CUT DOWN THE SPACE IT TAKES YOUR ANNECDOTAL LEAD TO CONNECT TO THE NUT GRAF.

A. Suppose you decided to limit your anecdotal leads to two grafs–or to find another approach if the anecdote required more detail. You might create a tone of authority like this story, in which the first two grafs show us a contrast, and the third graf proclaims it:

WASHINGTON–Here was the U.S. military in Afghanistan: a bearded soldier riding horseback in a storm of desert sand, looking like something out of ”Lawrence of Arabia.” But instead of a dagger, he carried a global positioning system, a sophisticated radio transmitter and a laser for marking targets.

Flying 35,000 feet above him was a Vietnam-era bomber that had seemed headed for the scrap heap-until the Pentagon loaded it with smart bombs and linked its pilot with the guy on horseback.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has harnessed the most outlandishly modern of its capabilities to the seemingly obsolete, creating a new kind of fighting force capable of finding and demolishing a new kind of enemy.

Its success at combining old and new has been a transforming lesson for America’s military. For years, believers in the ultimate power of high-tech have wrestled for defense dollars with traditionalists who say you can’t win a war without boots on the ground. The Pentagon has learned from Afghanistan that it needs both-although Congress now must decide whether the country can afford both.

”We had these guys on horseback, literally, making the difference in these airstrikes. We had, in some cases, 50-year- old bombers flying above them,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an interview. ”But we took a 50- year-old bomber and combined it with horse cavalry and turned it into a 21st century” fighting force.

From training academies to military bases, from laboratories to shipyards, a new doctrine is emerging. It says that in a world where threats can come from anywhere, America’s military must train and equip itself to be nimble and mighty at the same time–and…

B. Here’s what happens when you don’t push yourself hard enough: Six grafs of anecdote lead us to an apparent nut graf which is merely a foreshadowing of the real nut graf, which also suffers from its failure to tell us what we’ve been watching. Only in the ninth graf do we learn the name of what we have been watching. What followed did a nice job of trying to tell the story through scenes–action–but the structure of the story almost certainly convinced many readers to give up before it fell into synch.

Standing on stage, Stan Winston braced himself to defend his latest creation–the fuzzy, dancing robotic teddy bear that starred last year in the film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”

Hundreds of his rivals and fellow members of the visual effects branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences sat before him. Their job on this night was to pick the three films that would be considered for an Academy Award.

Winston, the man behind the Terminator in “The Terminator” and the aliens in “Aliens,” had been here before. To win an Oscar, he first must win the crowd at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills and prove that no computer-generated demon or crashing Black Hawk helicopter holds a candle to Teddy.

“There are far more points of motion in Teddy than any dinosaur,” Winston bragged.

Out in the audience, Oscar competitor Dan Taylor–the animation supervisor who helped build the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park III”–ground his teeth. Minutes later, when it was his turn to stand beneath the 20-foot Oscar statue, Taylor was as catty as any Hollywood starlet.

“Our dinosaur could devour a teddy bear in one gulp,” he shot back. “Our spinosaurus kicks Teddy any day.”

Far from the red-carpet glamour and sequined sparkles of Oscar night in March is a down-and-dirty fight where the technicians behind the big screen’s illusions wage an increasingly high-stakes war. Their Oscar rules over robotics, miniatures, computer-generated visuals and wildly destructive explosions, which increasingly are the key to a film’s success. Their academy category, once an occasional honor, now sits on par with best actor and best picture.

The path to glory started last week at an annual ritual that, in un-Oscar-like fashion, is called the Bake-Off. It’s a rare process for the academy, whose top-tier categories such as best picture are nominated by voters from the comfort of home.

Unlike actors, directors and composers, whose work usually speaks for itself in a film, visual effects require hours of explanation about the grand illusions that, if successful, are invisible and spectacular at the same time.

Out of 248 films released in the United States last year, only eight of the flashiest are chosen to be here by an executive panel of academy voters who work in the visual effects industry. The nominees will have this one chance to explain their art, defend their science and proclaim their methodology better, quicker, faster than all those other cheap gimmicks on-screen.

The dress is always casual–most academy voters opt for rumpled khakis and Gap shirts–but the competition can be over the top. Although it’s fine to wear last season’s fashion, woe be it to anyone who dares to present last year’s technology.

This year’s Bake-Off–held in the packed 1,000-seat Goldwyn theater–drew hundreds of fans, who scrambled to grab a chair and cheer for their favorite computer scientists.

Before the debate began, one organizer picked up a microphone and made a plea to the crowd: “There are not enough seats for the people who have to actually do something tonight. Your wives…

C. A good one: This profile uses a one-graf image, a one-graf confirmation from the subject and a third graf that puts the anecdote in a larger context.

Peter Olson, the chairman of the Random House division of the media company Bertelsmann, once accepted a challenge to a shot-drinking contest from a young executive new to Bertelsmann. Colleagues discreetly filled Mr. Olson’s glasses with water, and he drank the young man under the table.

Asked about the story last week, Mr. Olson responded, “I do like to win.”

Mr. Olson’s competitive instincts have become the subject of much speculation in the book industry as Random House, the largest consumer publisher, has carried out a round of cost cuts, including scores of layoffs among editorial, marketing, sales and administrative staff. (Random House has not disclosed the exact number.)

Although last year was by all accounts a poor one for book sales, no other major publisher has cut back so pervasively. Mr. Olson has maintained that Random House is simply planning prudently for a long spell of dark days ahead, and he is just speaking frankly about it. But speculation about his motives among rival publishers, agents, authors and others in the industry has centered on Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann, its bottom-line approach to compensating division heads like Mr. Olson, and its plans for an initial public offering some time in the next few years.

Mr. Olson’s gloomy forecasts have seemed increasingly anomalous in the last few weeks…

6. KEEP AS NARROW A FOCUS AS YOU CAN. Read the first eight grafs of two versions of the same story: The Feb. 15 piece about the cloning of a cat.

First, the Los Angeles Times version:

WASHINGTON–Researchers in Texas said Thursday that they had produced the first cat through cloning, a button-cute, domestic short-haired kitten named CC for “carbon copy.”

Where every other cat in history has had two parents, CC’s genetic material comes from a single adult cat, named Rainbow. She was born through Caesarean section Dec. 22 in a laboratory at Texas A&M University.

As a scientific matter, CC’s birth confirms that cloning is a durable technology that can be applied to many species, and perhaps one day to humans. But the bigger effect may come from the fact that CC is the first companion animal to be created through cloning, paving the way for pet cloning to become a commercial service.

“We’ve cloned agricultural animals–cattle and sheep and goats. But this really brings it into daily human life,” said Philip Damiani, a cloning expert at the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans, which is also trying to clone cats.

A private company, Texas-based Genetic Savings & Clone, has the right to license the Texas A&M cloning technique. The company said Thursday that it would take at least a year to perfect the service. “We hope to keep it at about $20,000 to begin with . . . but the cost could be double that,” said General Manager Charles Long.

Hundreds of pet owners have already paid fees of $800 or more merely to save cells from their pets for cloning, suggesting there is a strong demand for the service.

“I think this is spiffy,” said Phyllis Sherman Raschke, of San Fernando, who has preserved cells from her late Cornish Rex, Sammy. “When you think of all the terrible things in the world, it’s kind of dingy to think of reviving a cat. But this is wonderful news.”

It is not to everyone. CC’s birth comes amid an emotional debate in Congress over whether to outlaw human cloning. Some scientists say any ban should be narrowly written so that cloning remains a legal tool in medical research. But CC could add to the sense that scientists, if not strictly regulated, will inevitably produce a human clone.

Now, the New York Times version, which is arguably better because it makes a firm judgment that the commercial consequences of cat cloning are what really matter. Its lead hits that fact harder (the LAT, by contrast, doesn’t deal with the $$ issue until the third graf). The NYT piece also deals with the ethical criticism sooner, in the sixth graf, compared to the eighth for the LAT. What the NYT sacrificed were some basic medical details. (The NYT notes in its fourth graf that some experts had long expected this advance.) Because the NYT had a stronger sense of purpose, it wins. Read for yourself and see what you think:

Scientists in Texas have cloned a cat, opening the door to what some experts say will be the first large- scale commercial use of cloning – to reproduce beloved pets.

The effort was supported by a company, Genetic Savings and Clone, of College Station, Tex., and Sausalito, Calif., which wants to offer cloning to dog and cat owners. It is investing $3.7 million in the project.

The study will be published in the Feb. 21 issue of Nature, a British science journal, but Nature released the paper yesterday because the result, although not the details of the study, had become public. News of the company’s success was first reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.

It was, some said, long expected.

“The commercial future of cloning is absolutely in animals,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. “To put it bluntly, human cloning will turn out to be of interest only to the vain or the desperate, and companies know this. There is no commercial company that I’m aware of that is really interested in human cloning. But on the animal side, there is tremendous interest.”

Yet there also is opposition and there are ethical questions.

The Humane Society of the United States issued a statement yesterday objecting to the cloning of pets, saying “it serves no compelling social purpose and it threatens to add to the pet overpopulation problem.”

Dr. Caplan said he had two concerns. “Are you preying on grief and desperation that pet owners often have when they lose a pet to promise them something more than cloning can deliver?” he asked.

RECOMMENDED READING: Sportswriter and novelist Dan Jenkins, in a Q-and-A from Golf Digest last year. (The entire article, including Dan’s biography, is at http://www.golfdigest.com/features/index.ssf?/features/his_owns_kkb4h9mc.html. Here’re my favorite parts:

Is there a secret to writing well?

Are you accusing me of writing well? I guess I’ve written successfully. I’m pretty sure that writing for publication is one of the most arrogant things a human can do. Your name is on it and you’re telling everybody how it is. It requires arrogance, confidence, ego, all that. It also requires self-assurance. Take writing golf. I believe that the longer you’ve been at it, and the more knowledgeable you’ve become, the more you can be definitive and opinionated. Your first obligation to the reader is to be accurate. Then if you can inform and entertain the reader at the same time–without straining a muscle–all the better.

I’ve been accused of drawing blood on occasion, and I’m sure I have, but, on the other hand, maybe they deserved it. All I’ve ever done is try to get at the truth of the matter. In any event–golf, football, baseball, whatever–there’s always a defining moment. The best writers are those who know how to recognize that defining moment and hammer it in their stories. I might add that the best writers know what to leave out.

Which means…

If it doesn’t fit the theme, save it for later or kill it.

Have you ever suffered writer’s block?

I had three kids in private schools in Manhattan at the same time, and then I had them all in college at the same time. I didn’t have time for writer’s block. I worked 12 years on daily newspapers before I was a magazine writer. That helped. You don’t have time to fiddle around and procrastinate on newspapers. You keep typing and tell yourself you’ll go for the Pulitzer next time. It was somebody wiser than me who once said the truest thing of all–that the two greatest motivations for a writer are poverty and deadlines.

You seem to have a knack for making it look easy.

It’s never easy. It’s hard work, it’s a craft. But it’s fun and it’s rewarding. I do write fast. I don’t try to be fast, it’s just my temperament. Deadlines did it, I guess. But I rewrite on books. Some chapters I’ll rewrite maybe 10 times. Others I may never touch after the first draft. Somehow I happened to get that one right–in my judgment. On a novel, I try to keep grinding to the end, then I’ll go back and stomp on it.

So what keeps you going these days?

I love what I do. The journalism, the deadlines, the books. The travel. The people. The conversation. I don’t believe in retirement. I believe when you retire, you die in many ways. I hope I’ll be slumped over my laptop or my desktop when they carry me out.

What would you like written on your headstone?

“Sorry if you couldn’t take a joke.” That would be the first line. Then I’d steal from my daughter and add, “Hey, it was only a sports event–it wasn’t child-birth.”

Shaky on percentages? Ratios? Rates? Averages? Take Jack Robinson’s refresher course

I can remember it as though it were yesterday: A good reporter, confronted with a story that had certain mathematical issues, confessed to me: “I’m not good at math.” She had no shame in her voice. She said it the way she might have said, “I’m not good at golf.”

Math for journalists

The difference, of course, is that we don’t pay reporters to be good at golf. We pay them to be good at making sense of the world–which includes expressing simple mathematical relationships. And yet, a frightening proportion of otherwise smart reporters turn sluggish when it comes to using the kind of math that they were supposed to have mastered in high school. You can tell them that the population of Nafius, Tex., rose from 44,555 in 1990 to 76,592 in 2000 and they’ll figure out the difference (32,037), but won’t be quite sure what to divide the difference by. (Answer: You divide the difference by the base, or original, number, 44,555, to calculate the percentage increase of 71.9%.)

If you’re one of those people who can’t make that calculation easily–or if you fear you might be one of those people–take 15 minutes and read the two-page primer on math for journalists developed by my colleague on the L.A. Times Metro Desk, Jack Robinson. Jack routinely uses an appreciation for math and statistics to help the rest of us see probabilities, ratios and percentages more clearly.

As Jack said last year in a presentation on math to a group of Detroit journalists: “It’s a powerful testament to the gulf between verbal and mathematical skills in modern America: We in daily journalism are deeply concerned with logic and consistency in words–but not in numbers. But treating numbers with the same care as words should be a natural extension of good journalism…Most of the math in daily papers is just elementary school stuff.”

He threw out this example: In 2000, the Associated Press reported, and hundreds of newspapers published, a remark by President Clinton when he signed a bill on domestic abuse.

“Every 12 seconds,” the President said, “another woman is beaten. That’s nearly 900,000 victims a year.”

Do the math yourself and watch what happens.

“One victim every 12 seconds means 5 per minute, 300 per hour, 7,200 in a day or more than 2.6 million a year–not 900,000,” Jack said. “One of the two numbers in the quote is wrong–and no reporter or editor caught the mistake.”

Scared you yet? Here’s Jack’s tip sheet:

PERCENTAGES

Percentages are more useful than raw numbers if you want to compare two things without regard to their differing size–for example, to point out that one city has grown faster than another, even though they are very different in total population.

To calculate X as a percentage of Y: Divide X by Y and multiply the result by 100.

Example: Sunnymeadows Elementary School has 35 students from non-English-speaking homes and a total enrollment of 250. The percentage of students who come from such homes is:

(35 divided by 250) x 100
= 0.14 x 100
= 14%

If X is larger than Y, the result is a percentage greater than 100.

Example: The average test score at East High School is 300 and the average at West High School is 360. Thus the score at West, as a percentage of the score at East, is:

(360 divided by 300) x 100
= 1.2 x 100
= 120%

Another way to look at this is to say West’s average is 20% higher than East’s.

To calculate the percentage change from X to Y, calculate the difference and divide it by X. Then multiply by 100.

Example: Citrus City’s budget was $12 million last year and $15 million this year. The percentage change is:

[(15 - 12) divided by 12] x 100
= [3 divided by 12] x 100
= .25 x 100
= 25%

Again, the change may be a decrease, resulting in a negative percentage.

Example: Last year’s corn crop was 5 million tons; this year’s crop was 4 million tons. The percentage change is:

[(4 - 5) divided by 5] x 100
= [-1 divided by 5] x 100
= -.20 x 100
= -20%

Remember that a 100% increase is a doubling, a 200% increase is a tripling, and so forth.

Example: Citrus Middle School reported 15 students absent on Wednesday and 45 students absent on Thursday. You can express this increase several ways:

–Absences tripled from Wednesday to Thursday.
–Absences increased 200% from Wednesday to Thursday.
–Thursday’s total was 300% of Wednesday’s total. (Note the wording: we’re comparing the two numbers, not talking about the increase.)

RATIOS AND RATES

A ratio describes how many times as large one number is than another.

To calculate the ratio of X to Y, divide X by Y

Example: Citrus City High School has 1,200 students and 60 teachers. The student-teacher ratio is:

1200 divided by 60
= 20 to 1

A rate describes a number in terms of how it fits into a larger population, usually expressed on a per-hundred, per-thousand or similar basis.

To calculate the rate of X cases in a population of Y, divide X by Y and multiply by a basis number (such as 1,000)

Example: Citrus City had a population of 50,000 last year and police reported three homicides. The homicide rate was:

3 per 50,000
= 3 divided by 50,000
= 0.00006

Then multiply by the basis number to express it in various ways:

–0.00006 x 1000 = 0.06 per 1,000
–0.00006 x 10,000 = 0.6 per 10,000
–0.00006 x 100,000 = 6 per 100,000

AVERAGES

An average, roughly speaking, is the midpoint of two or more numbers. Two kinds of averages are worth distinguishing:

A mean, or arithmetic average, is the most common kind.

To calculate the mean of X numbers, add up the numbers and divide by X

Example: Bill earned a B-minus, a B and a B-plus this semester. His grade-point average is: (2.7 + 3 + 3.3) divided by 3
= 9 divided by 3
= 3.00

A median, most often used to average dollar amounts to avoid distortion caused by a few extreme values, is the middle number in a series.

To calculate the median of several numbers, arrange them from smallest to largest and choose the middle number.

Example: Houses on Elm Street cost $124,000, $133,000, $154,000, $176,000 and $2,000,000. The median price is the middle figure, $154,000.

Repeated values count as separate numbers.

Example: The median of 85, 90, 100, 100, 100, 110 and 120 is 100.

Here are a few places on the Web you can go if you’re still hungry:

Bruce Garrison, University of Miami offers:
http://gehon.ir.miami.edu/com/classes/cnj216/math/v3_document.htm

An automatic percentage calculator for those who still don’t get it:
http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/conferences/sla2001/internettoolsjh/ToolsCalculators/percent.html

A math competency test for journalists, with answers:
http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/carstat/resources.html

A primer on math for journalists by Robert Niles of latimes.com:
http://nilesonline.com/stats/

Your final self-edit should hurt. If it doesn’t, you need to do one more.

The writers you admire, like great athletes, push themselves to the point of breaking. They don’t have to say “ouch” or wake up with cramping hamstrings the next morning, but they’re aware of the necessity for making themselves rewrite and rewrite and revise, at least one more time than they’d prefer to.

Going the extra mile before you hit the 'send' key

It’s this final, demonic, savage, self-punishing edit–the moments where you make yourself give your copy one more read for fat, sequential logic and perspective–that will set you apart from your colleagues. This is never fun, it always hurts, and it sometimes feels like a waste of time. If it doesn’t feel that way when you do your “final” self-edit, you should put your copy through one more round.

This one-more-check discipline starts out as a quest to shave fat off your copy–say, the last 5% of hidden fat. But the habit will evolve into a more sophisticated spirit, in which you also start to make your story leaner by making it more expressive and aggressive. You’ll find yourself using bolder approaches to say more in less space. You’ll give yourself permission to say things more directly, less elliptically, than you used to.

The fact that newspaper reporters have less space to work with because of budget cuts can be viewed as a tragedy. But it also forces us to confront a real-world truth: We run too many stories that have an obligatory feel, or too high a proportion of obligatory paragraphs. These stories and paragraphs aren’t important, and they aren’t interesting, and they suck away too much attention from stories that are–stories that, in some cases, should be even longer. This sense of obligation makes for a newspaper that lacks sufficient urgency, focus and directness. It feels self-conscious, stodgy, fat, middle-aged, cautious.

Our audience, meanwhile, has been going in exactly the opposite direction. It’s been educated by TV and movies (regretfully or not) to adjust to faster, more direct, more audacious forms of communication. It’s ready for a newspaper that expresses its intelligence directly, quickly, with a voice of decisiveness and authority and a love of pure storytelling.

It’s ready for this kind of voice:

FRESNO–In winter’s darkest months it hunkers down like a grumpy neighbor, an unyielding enigma wrapping cold arms around the San Joaquin Valley’s belly.

Tule fog is once again shrouding and shaping life in this vast land. Outsiders know it best through news reports of hundred-car pileups on the interstate. Lore has it the fog is a curse against the white man, the ghost of a lost lake drained by a century of agribusiness, but in fact it has been around long before a settler’s plow dug the valley’s first furrow.

An endless siege of valley fog can send the strong spinning into depression. It can put off the start of school in the morning and mask the movement of criminals at night. Golf dates fade away. Pesticides and pollutants find a ready harbor in the mists. Planes are delayed, workaday commutes become a nightmare. The National Weather Service office in Hanford is fittingly located on Foggy Bottom Road.

But the story of tule fog isn’t all gloom and doom.

The cold but frostless days and nights provided by tule fog prepare the Central Valley’s bounty of fruit and nut trees for springtime bloom. And some find solace from the hubbub of modern existence in the embracing mists. Tule fog makes life go slowly.

“There is a culture of the fog that people don’t often appreciate,” said David Mas Masumoto, an author and farmer, whose 80 acres of grapes, peaches and nectarines near Del Rey lie in the heart of the fog belt. “It creates a sense of solitude that makes you feel at one with the land.”

For those who don’t go slowly, the penalty is high.

On Jan. 3, a chain-reaction crash of 77 vehicles on fogbound California Highway 58 in Kern County left one person dead and 15 injured. A week later, tule fog contributed to six pileups on a Sacramento River bridge, killing two people and closing Interstate 5 for half a day.

Authorities have tried most everything–flashing lights to warn of fog, signs to help drivers gauge distance and urge slower speeds, pavement markers to signal looming stop signs, CHP-guided convoys down zero-visibility freeways. But the fog is never defeated for long.

Locals tell of driving with the window down, braving bitter cold to crane an ear for the sound of oncoming cars at intersections. Some grade the thickness of fog by how many telephone poles they can pick out in the gloaming. There are three-pole days, two-pole, one-pole. At zero, you’d best get off the road.

The truckers and farmers forced to ply the highways even in the thickest muck rue the outsiders who come speeding into the valley, into the thick of fog. Just ask the gang at Zingo’s Cafe…

That voice (it belongs to L.A. Times Sacramento Bureau reporter Eric Bailey) saves space by attacking the story–proclaiming it, not tiptoeing around it anecdotally. Imagine what a different newspaper yours would be if piece after piece came AT the story.

Imagine a newspaper full of stories that began like this:

Parents worry about their kids talking to strangers. They worry about the influence of violent movies, Marilyn Manson and the Internet. They worry about youth violence and crime. Then many of them get behind the wheel and put their children’s lives at risk.

About 160 children died in motor vehicle crashes in California last year, and three-fourths were victims of safety lapses, negligence and outright recklessness by the drivers-often their own parents-of the cars in which they were riding, according to a computer analysis of California Highway Patrol records.

An examination of statewide crash reports, from neighborhood streets to interstates, found that mothers and fathers frequently failed to take the basic precautions with their most precious cargo.

They did not buckle them in or, for small children, use child restraint seats. They let them ride in front seats, sometimes facing signs reading: ”WARNING! Children Can Be KILLED or INJURED by Passenger Air Bag.” They drove too fast, ran red lights and broke other traffic laws with youngsters in their cars.

Adult drivers walk away unhurt from many crashes while children suffer fatal or serious injuries…

Except, that wasn’t the way that story, published in my paper, actually started. There was one more paragraph on top. The real story began this way:

Osvaldo Rios was driving on the Long Beach Freeway with his 1-year-old daughter, Jessica, when he lost control of his Mercury Cougar and slammed into a big rig. Jessica, wearing a lap belt in the back seat but not strapped into a required child safety seat, died of head injuries when her side of the car took the brunt of the impact. The father told police he had removed the safety seat to make room for more passengers.

Parents worry about their kids….

Clearly a poignant illustration, but why put it on top when the combination of the next two graphs was so devastating and so direct? Why make the reader think this story is about Osvaldo Rios when he would not be mentioned again–and then only once–until the 29th paragraph of the story?

The actual first paragraph was an example of how we hedge our bets, how we sometimes seem afraid to say, on our own, what’s news–what’s reality, what’s important. When we begin doing that, we’ll save space. More importantly, we’ll gain more of the audience’s attention and hold it longer.

If we’re going to start a story with an example, or with a scene, it must connect directly to the guts of the story (See “Six Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Type that Anecdotal Lead,” posted July 9, 2001) and must be important enough for the writer to return to it.

The following story feels crisp, despite its complexity, because the writer does just that:

SANTA TERESA, N.M.-Plopped alone in the New Mexico desert, it seems an odd beginning for a new community-like a front door awaiting the rest of the house.

Yet this tiny border crossing, which opened permanently two years ago in a plain of yucca and wild rabbits, is at the heart of a lofty vision to create, from scratch, twin cities on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

If the designs of developers in both countries pan out, nearly half a million people someday will inhabit a new cross-border community of houses, shopping centers and industrial parks-all built around the promise of international trade through the new port of entry, which sits a wending, 25-minute drive from downtown El Paso, Texas.

The plans are perhaps the most dramatic example of efforts by communities across the U.S.-Mexico border to hitch economic development to new or expanded ports of entry at a time of exploding binational trade. Across the Southwest, at least 10 sites are being looked at for possible new ports for a variety of purposes, from easing truck congestion along busy trade routes to boosting cross-border tourism and shopping.

In Texas alone, two new international bridges opened this year and another is to open next year. A handful of others have received approval or are being reviewed by federal officials in Washington, D.C. and Mexico City. More modest proposals for ports of entry also are being pitched or examined in San Diego and Jacumba in California and San Luis, Arizona.

The pressure to punch new openings in the border comes as the U.S. government has bolstered barriers to bar illegal entries and drug trafficking along the frontier. In Jacumba, a remote eastern San Diego County town being studied for a possible port, the Border Patrol finished putting up a 10-foot steel border fence just three years ago.

The new and proposed ports are in large part a response to the rising flood of freight trucks shuttling goods-such as computer chips to Mexico and finished electronics back to the United States-that has created maddening backups at key crossing points…

The tightness is also forged by the lack of an obligatory quote. Reporter Ken Ellingwood’s own voice was stronger and more authoritative than any outside “expert.” The paragraphs build purposefully from that little border crossing in Santa Teresa, stretching the range of the story, combining detail and perspective. (Ken would return to the Santa Teresa port in the 13th graf to develop it further.) It would not be until the ninth graf that Ken would bring in an outside voice.

The story ran on A-1 at 46 inches, and like many stories it didn’t start out that way. But its evolution– the combined product of editing and space limitations–is a lesson in how stories can be improved by circumstances that, to the writer, seem adverse.

Ken explains:

I’d be lying to say it was my plan to quote sparingly and rely more on my own authority in the story about the drive for new border crossings. The fact is, I originally ladled on quite a few quotes.

The first version of the story had 13 direct quotes over some 60 inches of copy. The piece grew a couple inches to answer initial editor queries, but all the quotes stayed. I even had a slot saved for comments by a Mexican developer who ultimately refused to talk.

My editor, Paul Feldman, then suggested trimming. We cut seven inches–lopping five quotes in the process–and filed the story at about 55. Some of the cuts were needed to make up for growth because we kept adding stuff.

I’m embarrassed to say how expendable many of these quotes were. I had several ”validation quotes”–comments from border scholars, an Arizona mayor, a Texas developer that, when we got down to it, served mainly to say, ”Yep, this story’s right, all right.”

The border story lost a few voices, but this was not a piece that developed characters or tracked a fight where you needed to hear directly from protagonists. I wouldn’t go slashing quotes from just any story. But the truth is, many in this story simply weren’t essential.

Then, once budgeted, the story sat, pitched for A-1 but bumped again and again over several weeks because of tight space. Though the story, then at 57”, was hardly a heavyweight by traditional Times standards, the news hole wasn’t accommodating it, plus map and charts.

Paul relayed orders from above: Lose another 10 inches. We both went over the story in search of trims. Two more quotes got axed. We dumped several grafs of scene description. Paul suggested some of the cuts and I found some. It didn’t take long to agree on them. Six quotes survived in the 46-inch final version.

The really painful cut, chopped during the first round, was a six-graf closing chunk about a needy New Mexico town seeking economic rescue by applying for its own border crossing. I thought it was poignant, with a plucky life-on-the-border quote from the mayor. Instead we ended the story with a businesslike comment from a Mexican border official. It was a needed viewpoint and couldn’t be chopped. But it lacked the emotional punch of the other finale.

Having ranted against an extra graf earlier, let’s now concede that sometimes an extra graf on top can tighten the focus and make the story more purposeful.

Read this story….

On Thursday, archaeologists hired by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will dig into a parking lot to locate portions of an historic adobe’s foundation. Historians believe the adobe is where an 1847 peace treaty was signed ending the Mexican-American War in California.

Three years ago, a different section of the foundation was uncovered during construction of the Red Line station in Universal City. That portion will soon be reexamined and documented, MTA officials said.

New research is already shaking up old theories about the adobe. Historians hired by the MTA believe it was probably built by 1795-much earlier than previously believed-as part of the Mission San Fernando’s holdings.

If it were still standing, the adobe would be next to Lankershim Boulevard in the shadow of Universal Studios.

For years, it was known as….

…and now consider how much better the story read with this featurized focusing graf on top:

Each time the city’s subway diggers carve into the earth at Campo de Cahuenga in Studio City, the past has a funny way of poking back.

On Thursday, archaeologists hired by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will dig into a parking lot to locate portions of an historic adobe’s foundation.

Historians believe…

Featurized leads that distill or humanize a new development are great if you get to the point quickly enough, as the previous example did. Too often, though, we lack discipline. If you listen closely enough as you read the next flawed example, you can hear the audience collectively demanding, after the third or fourth graf of the featurized treatment: What’s the story about?

Forty-four-year-old Carol Adkins sits in a Florida apartment, fed intravenously through a tube to her stomach. Sometimes she opens her eyes, or bats a balloon with a stick.

These days she communicates by blinking her eyes; one blink is yes. Two is no.

Her family clings stubbornly to the hope that her condition — her doctors say she is ”post comative”– will improve, but any progress will take years.

(This where I first started wondering what the story was about.)

It costs an estimated $30,000 a month in medical bills to keep her alive, her attorneys say. She is supposed to live another 30 years.

(Now I assume the story is a profile of Carol’s unfortunate state.)

Twenty two months after she was crushed in her rented car in a freak pile-up involving a city maintenance truck on the Hollywood freeway, Adkins’ attorneys said Monday they have reached a tentative $19 million settlement with the City of Los Angeles.

(What? It’s about the settlement? Why did you mislead me like that?)

The payments will be made in cash in four installments–$11 million by the end of January, $3 million by July 31, 2000, $3 million in 2001, and $2 million in 2002.

The agreement has yet to be approved by the Los Angeles City Council. It is set to go before the Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday, and Senior Assistant City Atty. Dan Woodard said he hoped it would go before the City Council by the end of the week.

If approved, it will be the largest settlement ever reached with the victim of any personal injury case in city history, Woodard said.

There’s no reason to rewrite this top as a hard-news story, especially because the settlement hadn’t been approved yet, but isn’t there some compromise-you line editors and copy editors might want to try your hands at it-that could have merged the magnitude of the proposed settlement with the personal suffering? It’s unconscionable that the story didn’t tell you about the settlement until the fifth graf, let alone the significance of it until the eighth graf. The reader’s dilemma was shared by the copy desk faced when it wrote a headline. Its decision: “Record Settlement Near in Personal-Injury Case.” That’s flatter than the headline had to be, but it showed that the news had to be given equal billing with the poignancy. If you hate having that done to you as a reader, don’t do it to your audience.

The extra read helps refine the balance between your three primary variables: news, meaning and clarity.

The best news stories are often about new or complex or unexpected events–and that’s the problem. The writer and editor often try to cram more into the top than the story can withstand. Hence our sometimes-bulging sentences. So, in response, something gets pushed down, and then the story feels hollow, and the tradeoffs begin again.

What should get the most weight? First the news, then the meaning of the news. Let’s look at two rewrites.

FIRST VERSION:

Faced with a shortage of paramedics willing to work on ambulances, Los Angeles Fire Department officials plan to experiment with a new way to assign paramedics in the San Fernando Valley next year.

The lead is clear but it doesn’t tell you what the “experiment” is.

Fire Chief William Bamattre’s proposal would staff all advanced life-support ambulances with one paramedic and one firefighter trained as an emergency medical technician, splitting up the paramedic teams that now operate in pairs.

The second graf didn’t explain what an emergency medical technician is.

The shuffle will not only help bridge the shortfall, Bamattre said, it will avoid unpopular reassignments and cut response times–a politically explosive issue in the Valley.

Good perspective in the third graf.

Paramedics and firefighters oppose the idea, and contend it will hurt emergency medical care.

And while most big-city emergency medical service agencies in the nation–as well as those in every California county except Orange-use staffing systems similar to the one proposed for the Valley, many emergency medical experts and patient-care advocates side with the paramedics….

Lower down, this perspective appeared:

The controversy comes at a time when the Fire Department is called upon to save victims of car accidents, heart attacks and other medical emergencies far more than it’s summoned to battle blazes.

Today, nearly 80% of its calls are pleas for medical service…

FIRST REWRITE: This brought into the first graf the elimination of two-paramedic ambulance crews–it explained what the “experiment” was. But it was a hefty 34 words long and still left you guessing “compared to what?”

The Los Angeles Fire Department is preparing to test a controversial paramedic deployment plan in the San Fernando Valley that calls for eliminating two-paramedic ambulances, a move that critics say will compromise emergency care.

As opposed to the first version, it quickly explained what emergency medical technicia are:

Fire Chief William Bamattre wants to staff ambulances with one licensed paramedic and one emergency medical technician. Such technicians receive one-tenth the training of a paramedic. In the most serious emergencies, a second paramedic assigned to a fire truck will meet the ambulance at the scene, a so-called “one plus one” system.

Trouble is, it’s not until the next graf that you understand the “why” of the plan, which the first version caught in the first graf

The plan is designed to help alleviate a shortage of paramedics assigned to ambulance duty and will reduce average response time in the Valley by about 1 1/2 minutes, Bamattre said.

The firefighters union, two professional associations representing firefighters and paramedics, and many emergency care experts say the new deployment plan will hurt emergency services by doing away with the all-important “second pair of eyes” that they say is critical in the first minutes of emergency treatment….

SECOND REWRITE: Was there a way to come at the story more effectively–to get the sense of the change, the reason for the change and the criticism in the first graf? Remember our old, rarely used friend, Miss Two-Sentence Lead Paragraph? Let’s invite her to the dance, something neither version has done so far:

The Los Angeles Fire Department is preparing to break up its two-paramedic ambulance teams in the San Fernando Valley. Fire officials say the move will cut response times, but critics–including many paramedics–warn that the change will compromise emergency care.

A consequence of that lead graf was making the concession to leave the EMR discussion for the second graf:

Fire Chief William Bamattre wants to staff ambulances with one licensed paramedic and one emergency medical technician. Such technicians receive one-tenth the training of a paramedic.

And then–higher than either of the first two versions, and using stronger perspective–an explanation of the issues that make the proposal more controversial than it might appear on the surface:

The controversy is rooted in a cultural change within the Fire Department. Although the department now handles more medical calls than fires, a growing number of paramedics prefer the less demanding regimen of fire companies.

RECOMMENDED READING: The stripped-down, disciplined clarity we’re after was on display in Bill Keller’s Jan. 26 op-ed piece in the New York Times, constructed as a Q-and-A on the Enron scandal. Next time you write a news story, or a news analysis, try to bring this kind of explanatory sensibility to it. Bill obviously enjoys more range, but there’s plenty to steal here. The questions are in bold-face for easier reading:

I saw this week that President Bush is “outraged” by the Enron scandal, and I know I should be too, but there’s a lot I still don’t get. For starters, what kind of company is Enron, exactly?

Enron is a new-economy company, a thinking-outside-the-box, paradigm-shifting, market-making company. In fact, it ranked as the most innovative company in America four years in a row, as judged by envious corporate peers in the annual Fortune magazine poll. It is also, at this point in time, a bankrupt company.

I meant, what does Enron do?

“Do?” Ah, a quaint old-economy question. You’re probably one of those people who like the new no-cell- phone cars on Amtrak. Enron does a lot of things, but mainly it buys and sells energy.

What’s so innovative about that?

When Enron got started, natural gas and electricity were produced, transmitted and sold by state-regulated monopolies. They were often plodding and inefficient. Enron used Wall Street magic to transform energy supplies into financial instruments that could be traded online like stocks and bonds. These contracts guaranteed customers a steady supply at a predictable price. This may be a good place to pause for an Enron Lesson. The company did stupid and venal things, but introducing the laws of supply and demand into the energy system was smart business and is, by and large, good for customers. One sad side effect of this scandal is that some good ideas may be discredited by association with Enron.

So where did Enron go wrong?

As often happens with buccaneering entrepreneurs, it got a case of hubris. It figured if it could trade energy, it could trade anything, anywhere, in the new virtual marketplace. Newsprint. Television advertising time. Insurance risk. High- speed data transmission. All of these were converted into contracts–called derivatives–that were sold to investors. Enron poured billions into these trading ventures, and some failed. It turned out Enron was good at inventing businesses, but terrible at the tedious work of running them, judging by some appalling internal management audits discovered by The Times’s Kurt Eichenwald. For a time, Enron swept its failures into creative hiding places, but ultimately the truth came out, confidence in the company collapsed and you now have a feeding frenzy.

How did it hide its mistakes?

To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate imaginary revenues. Here’s one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later. But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115 million in exchange for Enron’s profits from the movie venture over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit.

Um, I’m not sure I follow that…

Neither did the Canadian bank, which now holds a lot of worthless Enron i.o.u.’s. Enron also seems to have baffled the accountants at Arthur Andersen, the bankers at J. P. Morgan, the Wall Street geniuses who touted Enron stock, and those C.E.O.’s who kept voting Kenneth Lay, now abruptly retired, the mastermind of the year. Also (with some exceptions) the business press.

Did Enron break the rules?

Whether it broke the law is yet to be determined. Various prosecutors are undoubtedly reviewing the statutes on accounting fraud, insider trading and illegal destruction of documents, among other crimes. But rules were for sissies. These were invincible innovators, who sneered at rules. In that respect, they were the quintessential 90′s company.

What’s that supposed to mean?

The company embodied the get-obscenely-rich-quick cult that grew up around the intersection of digital technology, deregulation and globalization. It rode the zeitgeist of speed, hype, novelty and swagger. Petroleum was hopelessly uncool; derivatives were hot. Companies were advised to unload the baggage of hard assets, like factories or oilfields, which hold you back in the digital long jump, and concentrate on buzz and brand. Accountants who tried to impose the traditional discipline of the balance sheet were dismissed as “bean-counters,” stuck in the old metrics. Wall Street looked to new metrics, new ways of measuring the intangible genius of innovation, and the most important metrics were the daily flickers of your stock price. Above all, everyone was looking for the killer app.

“Killer app?”

You are clueless. The killer application was the world-beating opportunity. (Mr. Lay called that Blockbuster deal “the killer app for the entertainment industry.”) As often as not, the killer app was not a new product or service, but a beautiful loophole. In the new- economy best seller “Unleashing the Killer App,” the first example is a guy who realizes that gas stations in Germany are exempt from the country’s rigid early-closing laws for most stores. Voila! German gas stations become virtual shopping malls. By the way, in the 90′s, expressions like “killer app” were widely believed to have an aphrodisiac effect.

So it was about sex, after all?

Oh, absolutely. Wall Street was the new Hollywood, risk was the new testosterone, Lou Dobbs was Leonardo DiCaprio. Accountants called themselves consultants and bought Miata convertibles. And how cool was Enron? About two years ago a Fortune magazine writer likened utilities and energy companies to “a bunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lombardo. . . . Suddenly young Elvis comes crashing through the skylight.” In this metaphor, the guy in the skin-tight gold-lamé suit was Enron. The writer left out the part where Elvis eats himself to death.

That reminds me, is it true what they say about the name “Enron”?

Mr. Lay wanted to call it Enteron, until they realized that was a biology term for the digestive tract. In hindsight, Enteron seems right for a company of such ungoverned appetites. Though I prefer my wife’s name for the company: End Run.

Did Enron buy political influence?

Please. That’s not the way things work in Washington. Enron bought access. Money just got it in the door to make its case. (The case it made probably went something like this: If the government does things Enron’s way a lot of people will get very rich and they will be very, very grateful to the wise leaders who made it all possible.) If you’re asking whether the Bush administration did favors for Enron, sure it did – and so, by the way, did the Clinton administration, and both parties in Congress. Attention has focused on a number of fascinating loopholes lawmakers and regulators secretly customized for Enron. But –and here’s another Enron Lesson–most of what Washington contributed to the glory of Enron it did in plain sight. Politicians demonized government regulation, and methodically dismantled the safeguards set up in previous downturns to protect little investors. They promoted the cult of stock-market speculation, even calling for Social Security funds to be fed to Wall Street. They cut taxes and all but stopped auditing tax returns. I’d say Enron’s campaign donations, about $6 million over the past dozen years, paid off better than most of its other investments.

Isn’t that what free markets are all about–getting government out of the way?

Yes and no. Free-marketers believe in reducing regulation. Enron believed in reducing regulation of Enron. Enron was perfectly capable of lobbying for the federal government to take over the electric power grid from the states–hardly a free-market position, but one that would have made life easier for Enron. It lobbied for tighter regulation of air pollution, because it had figured a way to make money trading emission credits. And at the end Enron sure seemed to be fishing for a bailout. More important, a central tenet of capitalism is that people who run companies are subject to the discipline of the marketplace, as meted out by the shareholders. That can’t work if the shareholders are lied to about the condition of the company. Another Enron Lesson: The louder someone yells “free markets!” the closer you want to look at his files (assuming they have not been shredded).

But the administration didn’t bail out Enron at the end, right?

No, the administration declined to climb aboard that sinking ship. A final Enron Lesson: When business and politics meet, Kenny Boy, it’s not a relationship, it’s a transaction.

What happens now?

A witch hunt, of course. In the end, with any luck, Congress will stop some of the money sloshing around the political system, and restore a bit of law and order to the wild frontier. But first, a few burnings at the stake. My wise friend Floyd Norris says there’s a basic law of the market: When you get rich, it’s because you’re smart. When you get poor, it’s because somebody cheated you. Just as Enron embodied the stock-market delirium on the way up, it will, now that the euphoria is over, be the scapegoat for all those smooth talkers who convinced us dummies that we could be rich.

How one masterful feature writer psyches himself for battle

Well-crafted disaster stories remind us how exhaustive reporting provides more real drama than dramatic language. The density of detail allows the writer to create one terse sentence after another, coming like waves, pounding the reality of the disaster into your soul with specific images.

Details, details and, while you're at it, some more details, please

Like this:

CAROLINA BEACH, N.C.–Hurricane Bertha smacked the Carolina coast Friday like the back of the devil’s hand, hurling its 35-mile eye across Cape Fear, blinding the beachfront with rain and wrecking homes and businesses with 105-mph winds that flung shards of glass through the streets.

Pay particular attention to what happens in the second paragraph:

Skies darkened. Trees tumbled onto power lines and plunged thousands of people into a blackout. Riptides and 9-foot breakers crashed into boardwalks. A pleasure boat struck a major bridge and shut it down. One woman died in storm-whipped traffic, and six other people were hurt at Camp LeJeune, a Marine base near the North Carolina shore.

You’ve been reading the work of Richard E. Meyer, whose work as a Times national reporter speaks to a near-religious appreciation of detail. Rick explains:

Details are what put readers right there, where it happened, when it happened, in the shoes of the people I’m writing about. (Relevant details, of course. Irrelevant ones don’t belong.)

When I’m doing rewrite on disasters, I like to pack the second and sometimes the third paragraph with the details that give this kind of immediacy. But it works just as well, sometimes even better, with feature pieces.

I try to remember the senses. A lot of what we know comes to us through our senses. Just watch Sesame Street. We learn four by seeing four apples, hearing four bells, feeling four fuzzy peaches.

So when I interview, I go through a litany of the senses.

Here are some questions from an old interview and the results in a feature story I wrote.

Q: Tell me about when you were a little girl and your grandmother came to visit. Picture her in your mind. What do you see?

From the story:

Nana would arrive wearing a housedress and black shoes with laces and little heels. She carried a black vinyl purse with gold-colored clasps and black straps. Her hair was white. She tied it in two braids, which she pinned on top of her head.

Q: When Nana chewed out your father for whipping you, what did you hear?

From the story:

She would haul herself up, double her fist and yell: “If you ever hit anybody again with that belt, I’ll take it and put it around your neck.” . . . Joe Horwat would squirm, back away and flee into the garage. Julia could hear him throwing tools and spitting into the kerosene can where he washed car parts. She would chuckle.

Q: Julia, when your father came to visit you in the hospital, what did you smell?

From the story:

She could smell the grease and his Lucky Strikes. She thought about the garage at home, and she wanted so much for him to pick her up and take her with him.

Q: When he leaned down and kissed your forehead, what did you feel?

From the story:

She felt strength in his kiss. It was firm, even rough: a man’s kiss.

Q: When the nurse came in to clean your teeth, what did you taste?

From the story:

She could taste a cotton swab, along with two fingers.

- – -

Details. Get them all. Not just black shoes. Black shoes with laces and little heels. Not just cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. Details. Details. Individually, they are very important. But taken all together, they are more important still. They help you convey your subject to your readers not just at the level of what can be seen and heard and smelled and tasted, but taken all together they help you convey your subject at the level that Henry James called the “felt life.”

Which is to say, they give your readers feeling for your subject that they just can’t get otherwise.

Rick’s April, 2000, reconstruction of a Tennessee school shooting, a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing, was another example of his devotion to detail. Here’s the beginning, as the mother in the tiny town of Frankweig first hears that there has been a shooting, and that her son is somehow involved:

The telephone rings at the Rouse home in Tight Bark Hollow.

It is a small house, shingled and solitary, huddled among the oaks and the hickories. Cheryl Rouse sits at a desk in the living room. She turns from her computer and picks up the phone.

“Hello?”

In this instant, her life divides into before and after.

“Aunt Cheryl, you’ve got to come to school right now!” It is her niece, a freshman. “Aunt Cheryl!” she says, loud and fast. “Either Jamie’s been shot, or he’s shot somebody!”

“What?”

“Jamie has shot somebody, or he’s been shot.” The line is silent. “Jamie,” her niece repeats. “Jamie Rouse. Your son.”

Jamie is 17 and a senior. He and his brothers, Jeremy, 14, and Adam, 7, attend Richland, a regional elementary and secondary school in Lynnville, about 20 minutes away.

Cheryl is a wisp: 5 feet and 2 inches, 98 pounds. She is 40 years old and has dark hair, flecked with gray, and deep brown eyes. Her husband, Elison, has been on the road for two days driving an 18-wheeler somewhere in the South. In the half-hour since the boys have gone to school, she has taken a shower, put on jeans and a sweatshirt and sat at her Compaq 386 to work on an inventory of shock absorber parts for Gabriel Ride Control Inc. over in Pulaski. Her hair is still wet. She is barefoot.

She runs to the bedroom, grabs some socks and tennis shoes. She finds her purse, and she races out the door. It is getting colder, but she does not put on a coat. Jamie has the Chevy pickup, so she runs on. The chill air blows through her damp hair. Her tennis shoes crunch on the gravel. She turns an ankle and stumbles but regains her footing and keeps running. It is a short dash now to the home of her husband’s mother. Panting, Cheryl knocks. She feels a stab of guilt. She cannot look Jamie’s grandmother in the eye.

“Jamie shot someone at school, and he’s been shot,” Cheryl says. “Beth called and said. I don’t know any details. That’s all I know, is what she said.”

She takes her mother-in-law’s car and turns right on Tight Bark Road, then left onto Beech Hill Road, past the Church of Christ where she and Elison attend every Sunday and on Wednesdays as often as possible. Two more right turns, then a left onto Buford Station Road. Dozens of cars pass her going the other way. Kids, all of them, leaving the school. Something is definitely wrong. She grips the wheel. Her knuckles are white. She feels shaky, a little weak. She had felt her blood drain during the phone call, and it has not come back. A right turn on Highway 31, and she pulls into the driveway at school.

It is 8:30 a.m., a half-hour after classes usually start. Richland has 1,400 students and teachers. Hundreds are outside. Some are crying. She parks in the first space she can find and runs through the main doorway. It opens onto a lobby and the administrative offices. Students and teachers are milling about. Some are in tears. Straight ahead is a hallway. Its doors are closed. She looks to her left, up another hallway. It is sealed with yellow tape. The tape says: Police Crime Scene, Do Not Cross.

“Who are you?” someone demands.

Softly, Cheryl Rouse gives her name.

“This is the perpetrator’s mother,” a man says. Everyone looks. The significance of the word “perpetrator” does not sink in. Cheryl says her niece has called to say that Jamie has shot someone and that he has been shot.

Another man takes her to an office. “Somebody’ll come and talk to you in a little bit.”

“What about Jamie?” she asks.

Jamie Rouse: “It was too late for me. It was just too late. In order for me to change, I had to be broken. It got to the point where my mind wouldn’t be molded. It had to be broken.”

Like most mothers, Cheryl has a routine. She sets her alarm for 5:30 a.m., gets up, makes coffee and drinks a cup. Only then does she awaken her eldest, Jamie. Next she wakes up Jeremy and finally Adam. While she takes Adam to meet his bus, the two older boys get dressed. On this morning, Jamie puts on black jeans and a black T-shirt, emblazoned with a picture of the heavy metal band Pantera. As Jeremy leaves for school with a cousin, Jamie reaches for a Remington Viper .22-caliber rifle on his gun rack. He goes to his father’s closet and takes down a brick of cartridges. It holds 500 rounds. Jamie uses a lot of bullets squirrel hunting and target practicing, and Elison buys them by the brick because they are cheaper. There are 443 rounds left. They are Winchester long-rifle, high-velocity bullets. Jamie slips 10 into a clip. He takes the Viper, the clip and the rest of the bullets outside, and he tucks them out of sight near the house.

Cheryl returns from the bus stop and sits for a moment in her brown cloth recliner. She says goodbye to Jamie as she always does. “Have a good day. See you this afternoon.” This morning, however, he does not reply with his usual “Later!” Instead, he stops just inside the front door. With a hesitation that will haunt her forever, he turns to look at his mother. “Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll go now.”

As he steps onto the narrow porch and starts down the stairs, Steve Abbott calls. Steve is one of his best friends. Jamie is still in the yard. Cordless receiver in hand, Cheryl goes to the door. She shouts to wait. Her voice barely carries in the misty morning, through the sycamores and the dogwoods. Jamie takes the phone. Steve asks when he will be at his house to pick him up for school. A little early, Jamie replies. In fact, he is on his way. He returns the telephone to his mother, and she takes it back inside. With Cheryl out of sight, Jamie goes to where he has hidden the Viper.

“It was semiautomatic, but I liked the way it looked too. That was the one I wanted. It didn’t look like an old-timey [gun]. It looked like a modern gun. I mean, that’s the way it was. Black.”

Jamie places the rifle, the clip and the bullets onto the seat of the family pickup, and he drives out of Tight Bark Hollow. Seventy-five miles south of Nashville, the hollow is named for an early settler so stingy that people said he was tight as the bark on a tree. Jamie stops in the nearest town, Frankewing, population 300, where Steve Abbott is waiting. Jamie puts a Morbid Angel CD into his new Sony Discman and turns it up:

Hatework . . .
My work
Hatework . . . and the Earth’s left burning
I call death . . . death is answering me.

Steve Abbott sees the gun, the clip and the ammunition on the seat. The night before, he remembers, Jamie had told him he was going to kill a girl at school, the principal, a coach and a state trooper who had given him two speeding tickets. Steve eyes the rifle. “Who is that for?” he asks. Jamie replies, “It’s going to happen today.” Steve has heard Jamie make threats before, even against a girlfriend and his own brother Jeremy. But Jamie has never done anything. Besides, Steve knows him: They have worked together on cars, hiked in the woods, played Super Nintendo. Gun or no gun, he thinks, Jamie is a friend–not a killer.

On their way out of Frankewing, they stop at a BP station. Jamie stocks up on Marlboros. With the rifle across his lap, he drives toward Lynnville, population 357. He turns on Abernathy Road and stops at the hillside home of another friend, Stephen Ray. The radio is turned up loud. Stephen walks up and rags them about it. Then he sees the gun and the bullets. The day before, he remembers, Jamie had said something about getting a cop and stealing his car. Stephen thought Jamie was kidding. He poked him and said, “I’ll help, if I can drive.” Now Stephen asks, “Who are you going after?” Either Jamie or Steve–the music is too loud to tell–laughs and replies: “Hobbs and whoever gets in the way.” Wayne Hobbs is the high school principal. Stephen Ray does not believe it. He replies: “You’re crazy.”

Jamie suggests to Steve Abbott that they switch places. Steve drives the Chevy pickup back down Abernathy Road. With Stephen Ray trailing in his car, Steve turns right on Buford Station Road. Jamie holds the rifle in his lap. Steve hears him say that now he can shoot the trooper, who usually parks in front of the Richland campus. Steve starts to wonder, even to worry. Jamie has to be joking, just acting big. When they turn right on Highway 31, they will be able to see the school. It is a collection of single-story tan brick buildings with gray trim and covered walkways, sprawled alongside the road. Steve will later say that if there was a cop, he would have turned south away from school. The trooper is not there. So he turns north, toward campus. Maybe now, Steve thinks, Jamie will drop whatever is bothering him and forget about it.

Steve pulls the pickup into the main entrance for students. He turns left to park where he usually does, up by the football field. “No, wait,” Jamie says. “Park over here in the front.” It is Jamie’s truck, so Steve leaves it, nose out, alongside several cars on a strip of grass in front of two portable classrooms, near the north doors to the school. Jamie grabs the rifle and jumps out. The clip is in. Only now, Steve will testify later, does he believe that Jamie is going to do something.

Steve hurls his door open and climbs out.

“Jamie!” he yells.

But Jamie keeps walking.

“Jamie!” he yells again and again.

Jamie does not stop.

Steve gives chase, but he gets scared. He freezes up, slows down. He tries to run. Jamie is more than 20 feet ahead of him.

At 7:55 a.m., on Wednesday, Nov. 15, 1995, James Elison Rouse walks into the north hall at Richland School. He has brown eyes, black hair. It is cropped in back and on the sides, but it is a foot long on top and tied in a ponytail. He has a high-average IQ of 115. He is 5 feet and 7 inches, and he weighs 122 pounds. He has a deep voice, short strides and a hunched-over gait. He is carrying his Remington Viper .22-caliber rifle with the cartridges in its clip.

“I don’t remember feeling angry. I wasn’t feeling nothing. Like I said, I don’t remember feeling anything. Period. Empty. Hollow. I guess that ‘empty’ would be probably the best word. I was just–I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t feeling anything, that’s the point. All day. I mean, you know, I was empty the whole day. Just nothing.”

He walks through double doors and down the hallway. It is noisy. He walks to the right, a foot or two from the cinder-block wall. It is lined with steel lockers. He walks by four classrooms. They have students and teachers inside. He walks with his head up. The pace is normal. He walks with the butt of the rifle tucked up under his right arm, like a hunter carrying a gun through a field. Some students walk in front of him, others walk behind, still others pass him going the other way. Some notice his gun. They think it is a joke. One of them notices his face. It is blank. Jamie does not speak.

Carolyn Foster and Carol Yancey, teachers with classrooms diagonally across from each other, are talking about cooking. It is Carolyn’s turn to host Thanksgiving dinner for her extended family. She has asked Carol for a recipe. “I have [it] this morning,” Carol tells her, and they go into Carolyn’s classroom to make a copy. They step back into the hall and are going over the directions when Jamie walks by. They are the first teachers he sees. Both look up. Carol Yancey thinks, “What are you doing with that gun?” A student hears…

- – -

This story began as an effort to dissect a school shooting months after the Columbine High shooting. Rick researched past shootings and plucked this one, in which Jamie Rouse went to prison for killing a teacher and a student at his high school in 1995. He figured that because the case was no longer in litigation, the family might be more inclined to talk.

It didn’t come easy. Rick began by simply showing up and knocking on the family’s door. He asked the mother if she’d help him reconstruct the tragedy. They started talking. He warned her he’d be around for a long, long time. They kept talking. Months later, the family’s other children started talking. And then the father. And then, eventually, in prison, the killer himself. The story was published as an eight-page special section.

Rick recounted his odyssey at a lunch gathering of several dozen Times reporters and editors. Some observations:

The stark narrative needed no nut graph.

Space limitations often require a foreshadowing mechanism because you don’t have enough room to let the story play out. But here, “you don’t want to give the story away. I wanted the reader to discover it the way I did.” That explains why the audience doesn’t understand the full cruelty of Jamie’s father until the second half. “The story let you discover [the parents'] own involvement [in Jamie's behavior] as they became aware of it…It let you discover their guilt as they did.” Rick credited his editor, Kit Rachlis, for championing the no-nut-needed approach.

Why did the family consent to having its story told?

“When you come in as a stranger and not judgmental…when you open yourself up to whatever they have to say…you can be a psuedo-shrink. There’s a lot of catharsis.”

How many times did he have to take his subjects through the same ground to get the right details?

Several times, usually. “I worry about getting down layer after layer. You base your questions for the second layer on what you learn in the first.”

On his economy of language:

I’m not big on adjectives and I hate adverbs even more…I long ago fell in love with a simple declarative sentence.” In the interest of showing rather than telling, verbs are the strongest tool.

Why did Jamie’s father agree to be interviewed after refusing for months?

“He got curious about what his wife was telling him” about her interview experience. In what Rick sensed was an effort to keep control, the father would only talk while driving the truck he used to haul steel–and insisted that Rick help him unload. “I did it for 2 ½, 3 months…eventually I could load and unload a truck in an hour.”

The experience built empathy: It was the father who eventually suggested that Rick interview Jamie in prison–something both parents had insisted would never happen. “All the trucking with Daddy, we’d be riding at 3 a.m. in Indiana and he’d get emotional and have to pull over, and he’d eventually say, ‘You know, you ought to ask Jamie that question,’” and I’d say, ‘That’s a good idea.’ It fell in my lap.” It took weeks of negotiations for prison officials to let Rick conduct the interviews without a guard.

Did he use a tape recorder as well as a notebook?

Yes, and the tape transcriptions filled more than 60 three-ring binders.

How the hell did he organize that?

Times researcher Anna Virtue devised a computer-based method to separate the narrative into chronological and topical segments. For example, the father’s recollection of Jamie’s first five years were in one file, the mother’s in another.

There are two prime forces that drive a story, Rick said: (1) The chronology, which provokes this reaction: “What happened next, Agnes?” And (2) the rising and falling fortunes of the protagonist, or in this case the family, which provokes this reaction: “Oh my God, are they gonna make it or aren’t they?” He initially structured the story to consist of 14 chapters, with “turning points” at the front and back of each, but reluctantly abandoned that strategy for a simpler structure when the newspaper moved up the deadline to coincide with the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre.

Was it hard to write the story after forming that close a bond with the family?

It’s a fact of life. You have to create that bond to get the story. “Then you have to do the opposite of that to write the story.”

How did the father react to his portrayal?

“I sent him a copy, and I called the house, and I got him on the phone…there was this silence on the other end. Then he said, ‘Well it was OK…I had to put it down a couple of times…But you know, it’s the truth.’ And man, that’s all I needed to hear.”

Why those final cuts you make (or are too vain to make) make such a difference in hooking the reader

One of the most rewarding qualities of good writing is its sense of urgency. That’s more than a feeling-it’s the determination of the writer to increase the m.p.h.–to cut down the time it takes her story to encircle the theme and let the reader know where hell he’s headed. This work usually takes place in the final stages–that extra self-edit that our best writers and editors use to set themselves apart from the rest of us.

Speed thrills: Improving your story's pace

I. For starters, check out how Business’ P.J. Huffstutter put you in the shoes of a woman with the world’s worst commute and established the economical and sociological context for this strange behavior:

The shrill scream of the alarm clock wakes the darkened Toluca Lake home, rousing Laura O’Brien at her usual hour–3:30 a.m. The real estate broker rolls out of bed with a groan and takes the first step of her daily 1,000-mile journey into commuter hell.

Going to work means leaving her Los Angeles suburban home and boarding a Southwest Airlines plane for San Jose. Every day. For the last three years, O’Brien has spent each weekday in Silicon Valley working on real-estate deals for high-tech companies. The time-strapped 42-year-old finds empty office space for her clients to lease–and anything else they need to set up shop.

Two grafs–and only two grafs–to meet Laura and her burden. Now to the question of what Laura represents:

As the glimmer of Internet wealth in Northern California sparks an explosion of gold-rush dreams, the ordinary acts of everyday life have become extraordinary challenges for modern workers. In this dot-com age, an average workday means pulling a 12- or 14-hour stretch at the office. Time off has become an outdated concept. And going to the office can mean boarding a commercial airplane.

That such commutes even exist is an irony in today’s wired culture, as technology has long promised to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Yet in an age of videoconferencing and e-mail, corporate America has realized that the most crucial business relationships must be nurtured in person, not by modem.

Only now, in the fifth graf, do you get more on Laura herself:

O’Brien, who works for real estate giant CB Richard Ellis Inc., will fly more than 200,000 miles this year. For O’Brien, the daily commute is the central force of her life, around which everything else revolves. Her health. Her identity. Her relationships.

The foreshadowing allows the story to move into its day-in-the-life narrative style by the sixth graf:

O’Brien’s husband, Peter, is still asleep this Wednesday morning. As he peacefully snoozes, she makes dozens of calls and checks piles of e-mail from contacts in Asia and Europe. Fingers dancing over the keyboard, she pauses to snatch up a cup of espresso and…

What’s most impressive about this lead is what’s not there–any number of small, evocative details that would have painted an even deeper picture but at the expense of slowing you down before you decided whether or not to stay with the story. This is a crucial balancing act–detail vs. perspective–in profiles that seek to tell us how the world works.

II. Another example was Dexter Filkins’ high-velocity writing about Afghanistan’s plague of land mines. The essence of the story was the collective horror-no one anecdote could tell it. So Dexter encircled the story in three grafs. He used a five-word notion to quickly engage your imagination, a litany of quick nameless examples in the second graf, and a litany of staccato observations in the third. That’s only 98 words–check out how much they accomplish:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Everywhere, the city is booby-trapped.

A woman returns to her home after five years in a refugee camp, opens a door and loses her life. A bus crammed with wedding day revelers runs over a mine and 45 die. A farmer wades into his field, walks around, loses a leg.

Six years after the shooting stopped in this city, the mines are still claiming victims. So are old grenades, unexploded shells and even bombs that look like toy butterflies. Children play among the mines, women step around them. A few times a week, another one explodes.

Most things you do to your copy to make it read faster also make it read clearer. On the Flesch reading-ease evaluation program, which rates stories on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the easiest to understand, Dexter’s first three grafs scored a 69. That’s more than twice as easy a read as the average Times story. It’s equal to a 6th-grade reading level; most of our prose reads at 12th-grade complexity or above.

Now, having swiftly placed you amidst the danger, Dexter draws you in even deeper with one boy’s story:

Rohibullah Amidullah, 16, was swimming in the creek that runs through town when his foot came down on something hard. An old land mine exploded, and Rohibullah’s left leg blew apart below the knee. His buddies, still soaking from their swim, carried him to the hospital.

“I thought I had stepped on a stone,” said Rohibullah, his stump wrapped in a bandage.

A quarter-century of modern war has turned Afghanistan into the most heavily mined country in the world, a junkyard of unexploded…

III. Does speed require jettisoning anecdotal leads? Not always. Chuck Philips found a way to illustrate the music industry’s technological backwardness, but it required him to use short sentences and strip all unnecessary detail-in short, to write in a practically smart-ass voice:

Next month, after two years of planning, the world’s biggest record company will unveil its answer to Internet piracy.

Seagram’s Universal Music Group will start selling digital downloads on the Web, hoping against reason that fans will cough up $2 each for songs they still can easily download elsewhere for free.

It’s a Hail Mary shot that few executives believe will work.

Universal’s “bulletproof” technology is too unwieldy and too expensive, costing more to operate than fans want to pay for the music itself. But worst of all, it’s really not bulletproof. Sources inside the company say the encryption code is likely to be hacked and rendered obsolete before the corporation ever makes a penny on its investment.

Still, all the music companies have similar plans.

This is just the latest blunder by the music industry, which has managed to miss every major development on the Internet. And Seagram isn’t the only laughingstock online. EMI, Time Warner, Sony and Bertelsmann also are flailing in cyberspace.

Now, that’s five set-up grafs until the payoff (“This is just the latest blunder…) but those are not traditional L.A. Times grafs. They use only 126 words (less than eight words per sentence) and they’re small words (averaging five characters). The simplicity (7th-grade reading level), structure and conversational tone make a complex topic understandable.

(For those of you interested in testing your work against the Flesch scale, it’s included in Microsoft Word software. From your PC, hit “Tools,” then run the story through the “Spelling and Grammar” check. PS: Make sure your “Options” within “Tools/Spelling and Grammar” have a check by the “Show Readability Statistics” box. It’s easier than it sounds.)

IV.It’s not only your choice of words that allows you to generate great speed. It’s the way you conceptualize the story. When Israel elected a new president, Mary Curtius wanted to explain the symbolism of his Middle Eastern roots. She went to his hometown, where we could see the impact at ground zero:

KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel–Nowhere in Israel was Moshe Katsav’s election to the presidency welcomed with more joy than in this hardscrabble southern town that he calls home.

Katsav’s upset victory over Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres this week is not just the biggest thing that has happened here, Kiryat Malachi residents said. It may also be the biggest thing that has happened to the nation’s have-nots-primarily immigrants from Middle Eastern countries and their descendants, who make up 40% of the Jewish population of Israel but have long felt locked out of its corridors of power.

”Today the Berlin Wall that separated the people artificially has fallen,” said Rabbi Yosef Azran, a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, after its members helped Katsav secure his election.

The first two grafs–three sentences–told the story. The sentence length was long (33-word average) but the language was bold and efficient. Look, for example, at the second sentence of the second graf, and its concise definition of the “have-nots.”

V. Speed is a key ingredient in what is often appreciated too generally as “style.” Watch how much gets done in very little space in Faye Fiore’s pre-GOP convention piece about Texas:

1. The story establishes the extreme character of Texas as the story theme:

HOUSTON-When God was handing out bluster and bravado, Texas must have been first in line because everything in Texas is bigger and better than anywhere else. Just ask a Texan.

2. It fills in the details that were hinted at in the lyrical first graf:

They have the biggest sky, tastiest barbecue, best flag, friendliest people, lowest taxes, most oil, prettiest sunsets and, for good measure, they invented the two-step. In Texas, tourists don’t walk around in T-shirts that say ”I Love Texas.” Texans do.

3. It creates the essential contrast that under girds the story-the two sides of Texas’ image–using the same kind of clipped, specific images that made graf 2 work. Look how punchy Faye makes the second sentence, a verb hitting you about every seven words:

But a different picture of the Lone Star State has emerged in the fevered pitch of the presidential campaign. This Texas is an abyss where capitalism breeds without social conscience, the air is dirty, children go without health insurance and the execution chamber is an assembly line of mean-spirited vengeance.

4. Having created the contrast, the story explains how the issue weighs not only on both candidates but on the state itself:

The presidential race has been almost as much a test of Texas forbearance as it has of the state’s governor and GOP presidential nominee-to-be, Gov. George W. Bush. The months-long hyperscrutiny has underscored and sometimes magnified the state’s every flaw-as Al Gore, the presumed Democratic nominee, sought to do during a trip to the state Thursday.

5. Here’s another detail-vs.-perspective moment: A lot of writers would have felt obligated to quote Gore at this point, but Faye knows the greater good lies in first showing how the Democrats’ obsession with making Texas an evil empire has spread into popular culture:

Texas is now a benighted standard by which awful things are measured. The state that practically invented the frontier spirit, where law and order reign and ”Don’t mess with Texas” stickers are state-sanctioned graffiti, is late-night fodder for Jay Leno monologues:

”Bush has a new bumper sticker: ‘Vote for me or I’ll have you executed.”’

”Everybody celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in a different way. Like in New York, it’s the big parade. In Chicago, they dye the river green. And in Texas today, they executed a leprechaun.”

”The entire state now stands as proxy for W. Bush, under attack for political reasons,” crabbed Molly Ivins, a syndicated Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist. ”The rest of the country likes to look down on Texas as a nest of yahoos, racists and rednecks.”

Let’s keep going. Only in the 9th graf is it time to focus on Gore:

A Democratic Party Web site advises unvaccinated tourists to stay out of Texas, given a new federal report that shows Houston has the lowest immunization rate for children among major U.S. cities. And Gore, during his stop in San Antonio on Thursday, decried the state’s low ranking in several health, education and social-service categories.

”This is a wonderful state, but I think it should be a state where it is just as easy to raise a child as set up an oil rig,” Gore said.

11. Now it’s time for the story to compare perception to reality:

Texas is neither the backwater its detractors claim nor the jewel its natives tout. But it’s a bit of both.

Texas is home to the world’s largest medical center, in Houston, yet one-quarter of its residents have no health insurance. It has one of the best university systems in the country and one of the worst high school dropout rates. It is at the forefront of the technological economy, yet medieval scenes of poverty play out along its borders.

It is ”Star Wars” and Charles Dickens all wrapped up in a land mass the size of France, a state with…

VI. Speed comes only through painful, often courageous decisions. Mark Arax’s recent profile of L.A. powerbroker Eli Broad was an elegant read, but that craftsmanship rested on a key decision about what to leave out.

Mark explains:

How do you profile someone who has been profiled in major newspapers and magazines a dozen times, a man so wealthy and formidable that none of his friends or enemies can speak in an honest or original way about him?

You damn well hope he says something interesting.

This was the riddle when confronted with Eli Broad, the billionaire insurance man and philanthropist who seems to pop up everywhere in Los Angeles. One answer might have been to forget about him, but that was hard to do on the eve of a Democratic National Convention he had helped deliver to the city.

A quick peek at the clips showed that the same five or six power brokers were quoted in nearly every Broad profile, saying pretty much the same thing. Broad’s own quotes seemed stuck on a single eight-track. One anecdote about him buying a well-known painting for millions and then charging the purchase to his credit card (so done to donate the frequent flier miles) appeared five times in various tellings.

Pete King, my editor, wondered if a micro approach might work. Broad had gotten nearly everyone to forget about his previous life as America’s biggest home builder, the man who did more to sprawl Los Angeles than anyone else. Wasn’t there just a slight bit of contradiction in his missionary zeal to now revive a downtown that had suffered in the march of all those subdivisions?

By focusing on this paradox, and using a tour of L.A. past and present with Broad as guide, the story had a chance of offering up something different. Still, the challenge was to get Broad off cruise control, not an easy thing to do.

Freed up from the obligation of interviewing his friends, colleagues, associates–getting quotes that other journalists had already gotten better–I was able to spend extra time preparing for our interview.

The offbeat questions seemed to perk Broad up. He talked for hours about his parents and their Socialist politics, the summers he spent as a kid in the Catskills attending Workmen’s Circle camps, his role in sprawling Los Angeles and the ills of such growth. And the device of the tour not only helped capture his outsized energy and ego but provided a simple narrative line.

Even so, before I sat down to write, my old school training gnawed at me. I didn’t possess a single comment from someone other than Broad. I picked up the phone and made a few obligatory calls. Every quote I got seemed a leftover from someone else’ banquet. I decided to keep these comments in the notebook but the effort wasn’t wasted. The gist of these interviews helped bolster the story’s authority and voice. What I had, in the end, was Broad. He had managed to tell on himself.

The piece was barely more than 60 inches. In most writers’ hands it would have been 50% longer. Mark’s decision to find a distinctive story theme and ride it-not falling prey to second-rate, obligatory detail-made the difference. Historically, we have published inflated profiles out of a sense of “responsibility” or “completeness.” Editors have tortured reporters with questions or considerations that only editors–not normal readers–would ask about. Inevitably the effect is to make the piece bog down or tail off. We are not writing for the ages or the sages. We are writing to shed enlightenment within harsh confines of space and time. In that environment, it pays to increase the tempo of your song.

Here’s what Mark’s sounded like:

1. Establish the contrast:

In another life, before Eli Broad became a billionaire insurance man and savior of downtown, before he helped deliver the Democratic National Convention to Los Angeles and loomed over the city’s art and philanthropy like J. Paul Getty’s ghost, he reigned as the King of Sprawl.

2. Detail the first life:

From the late 1950s to the late 1980s, Broad built more houses across suburbia than any man in America, changing the face of big cities from California to New Jersey. No builder did more to spread Los Angeles from sea to mountain to desert than Broad. He lured baby boomers to the land of one- hour commutes with four-bedroom ranch houses, wall-to-wall carpet, fully equipped kitchens, two-car garages and an orange tree in every yard–a dream had for $25,990.

3. Detail the current life:

These days, the 67-year-old chairman of SunAmerica, a financial giant that sells insurance and mutual funds to baby boomers turned gray, pours his considerable energy and fortune into reviving a downtown eviscerated by decades of suburban growth.

4. His observation:

”It’s a paradox. Yes, it’s a paradox,” he said. ”But it isn’t penance.”

5. Overview of the change in a broader context:

Even in this land famous for third acts and deathbed conversions, Broad’s life is remarkable for its transformations. He has emerged as arguably the city’s most powerful unelected leader through a series of incarnations, four distinct lives that would seem to add up to a profound contradiction. But to hear Broad describe it, as he guides you on a dizzying back-seat tour of his life–and not coincidentally the life of Los Angeles from midcentury forward-it all seems like an easy evolution.

6. Parallelism illustrates the four lives and the contrasts within each:

The boy who attended Socialist camp in the Catskills grows up to be a billionaire five times over and a liberal with no love for unions. The man who made his first fortune on the low art of the stucco tract house becomes one of the nation’s foremost collectors of modern art and a patron of the finest architects. The man whose far-flung subdivisions sucked life out of the core of Los Angeles now devotes his life to turning downtown into a rival of Manhattan. The man who built his first house in Huntington Beach and his last in Moreno Valley–a legacy encompassing hundreds of miles of freeways and shake roofs and strips malls-hosts a convention of Democrats who have declared war on sprawl.

We are then plopped into Broad’s black sedan and taken on a tour of downtown, until the 20th graf, where Mark begins the biography:

It was easy once to underestimate him. He was the only child of a house painter and a seamstress barely removed from the Jewish ghettos of Lithuania. He grew up in a six-story walk-up in the Bronx where secrets were spoken in Yiddish and…

Serious about getting better? Pick one technique from our list and work on it–every stinking day

While you were making your New Year’s resolutions, did you pledge to improve at your job? Was it a big, fuzzy promise? (“I will be in the paper more often with more dailies…” “I will be in the paper less often and do more A-1 stories…” “I will try harder to help my reporters…”)

The 15-minute workout

The world gets in the way of those kinds of resolutions most days. So, instead, how about promising to do something practical–something you could actually do every day? How about promising yourself to steal a small amount of time every day—let’s say 15 minutes—to do one thing that will make you better? For example, you can vow to apply one additional minor refinement to every story you do, if you tend to do a lot of them. Or, you can create a daily habit (such as more one phone call a day to build a potential new source) that doesn’t depend on whether you’re writing.

Last year, in a variety of seminars throughout California, I asked each participant to pledge 15 minutes a day to a particular personal cause that would make him or her better. Here, for your consideration, are some of the ideas I heard:

1. One more read of my copy to cut fat.
2. One more read to hone the perspective graf
3. One more read to try to make a “report” sound a little more like a “story.”
4. Think more about story structure before writing, rather than heading for the keyboard and “discovering” the story while writing it.
5. Polishing the language that connects the anecdote to the nut graf
6. More one more call to a source who will allow me to write with more authority/confidence.
7. Writing a theme statement that guides my writing.
8. (From an editor) Read stories earlier in the day so I have time to ask for a rewrite rather than trying to fix them myself.
9. One more read to eliminate mediocre quotes
10. Spend more time preparing interview questions.
11. Read my story aloud before filing it.
12. Interview a person affected by the government story I’m writing.
13. Read one great newspaper story a day.
14. Translate jargon
15. (From an editor) Do a better job of explaining the changes I want to make.
16. Write better transitions to explain why a new theme is being introduced in the story
17. When I self-edit, envision an audience that has Attention Deficit Disorder.
18. One more read to reconcile detail with the larger question of what is essential.
19. Try harder to humanize crime stories
20. Make sure I know beginning and end of story before I start typing.
21. Probe the senses
22. One more read for sentence length.
23. Use my own voice instead of an anecdote
24. Improve endings by injecting a sense of anticipation.
25. (From an editor) Encourage my writers to take chances
26. Examine whether each graf plays a specific and unique role
27. Make sure the ending resonates back to the beginning
28. Start over when my first draft requires it
29. If the lead won’t come, try writing the body.
30. (From an editor) Read the whole story before forming a judgment
31. Write subheads in longer stories as a way of reminding yourself to write in chunks/scenes
32. (From an editor) Make sure in prewriting consultation to reach a consensus on the theme of the story
33. Stop worrying what “they”–bosses–will think of it. Use your instincts
34. Ask yourself repeatedly: “What happened?”
35. When interviewing, ask enough questions so subjects are forced to put themselves into a scene, giving you more opportunities to present them in action
36. Do a post-mortem on your story once it’s in print

Some of these considerations can eat up more than 15 minutes, but many the can be accomplished quickly. They’re presented as a reminder of the endless number of calculations we make—or should make—every day. Getting better may start with a general promise, but inevitably you’re going to have to sweat the small stuff.

Pick one, or perhaps two, qualities and devote yourself to them for a month, or until they become part of your hierarchy of habits. Then add another, and another, and another.

Let’s take an example: Number 6—”I promise to spend an extra 15 minutes a day doing one more interview to help me write with more confidence and authority.” Let’s combine it with Number 13—”I promise to read one great newspaper story a day.” The reading can help you discover specific qualities of authority, studying how the writer accomplished it. Let’s take the L.A. Times’ Page 1 examination of the sloppiness of America’s vote-counting process, and see what we find (with my reader’s observations in italics at the end of each graf):

Because ballots can be bought, stolen, miscounted, lost, thrown out or sent to Denmark, nobody knows with any precision how many votes go uncounted in American elections. (Hmmm, the punchiness of that dependent clause is interesting—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, five verbs in a row. I could steal that trick…)

For weeks, Florida has riveted the nation with a mind-numbing array of failures: misleading ballots, contradictory counting standards, discarded votes–19,000 in one county alone. But an examination by The Times in a dozen states from Washington to Texas to New York shows that Florida is not the exception. It is the rule. (Hmmm, each of the three sentences in that graf got progressively shorter, which seemed to have a focusing effect…)

State and local officials give priority to curbing crime, filling potholes and picking up trash. That often leaves elections across the country underfunded, badly managed, ill equipped and poorly staffed. Election workers are temporaries, pay is a pittance, training is brief and voting systems are frequently obsolete. (Hmmm, I love the way specifics fly at me, building a case, and there’s no attribution…)

“You know why we never paid attention to this until now?” asks Candy Marendt, co-director of the Indiana Elections Division. “I’ll tell you: because we don’t really want to know. We don’t want to know that our democracy isn’t really so sacred. . . . (Hmmm, love the directness of the quote; she’s right in your face…)

“It can be very ugly.” (Hmmm, quote breaks to a separate graf for impact…seems a little hyped but it’s a trick worth thinking about…)

The examination shows: (Hmmm, nice set-up… anticipates that I’m ready for a tour around the nation…good speed…)

–New York City voters use metal lever-action machines so old they are no longer made, each with 27,000 parts. Similar machines in Louisiana are vulnerable to rigging with pliers, a screwdriver, a cigarette lighter and a Q-Tip. (Hmmm, look how quickly that second sentence moved, just the essentials. I’ll bet if I were writing it I would have wasted another sentence on how the rigging was actually performed….)

–In Texas, “vote whores” do favors for people in return for their absentee ballots. Sometimes the canvassers or consultants, as they prefer to be called, simply buy the ballots. Failing all else, they steal them from mailboxes. (Hmmm, there’s that three-sentence trick again: narrower, narrower, narrower….)

–Alaska has more registered voters than voting-age people. Indiana, which encourages voting with…

Focusing on a primary quality often allows you to stumble into a secondary quality that serves as a building block. Let’s say you were cruising the Chicago Tribune’s web site on Nov. 19 and happened to begin reading Part I of a four-part series about a day in the life of O’Hare Airport, which won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. You might have been looking for tricks to more authoritative writing, only to realize that the top of this story gained its authority by using the power of sensory description (Promise No. 21) in favor of quotes (Promise No. 9):

The air smells like stale hamburgers and unbrushed teeth.

It smells like cold coffee, like sour beer. It smells like exhaustion.

The air smells as if it has been inhaled and exhaled by too many people for far too long and they are breathing it still, snoring and snuffling, sighing and murmuring as they sprawl about O’Hare International Airport like refugees from some invisible war.

Everywhere you look there are bodies. Stretched along tables and the conveyor belts of X-ray machines. Curled up on baggage carousels, slumped against walls and draped along benches. There are people slung out on the floor, their faces inches away from swinging feet, and people draped around one another like sculpture, trying to find comfort in the curve of a shoulder or bend of a back.

Some feign or force themselves into sleep, shutting out the fluorescent lights, the blare of “Monday Night Football” on television sets they can’t turn off, the incessant beep of motorized carts. Others stare, glassy-eyed, at lightning flickering against the dark, rain-spattered windows, thinking about meetings unmet, vacations postponed and children who went to bed unkissed.

There are almost 6,000 people at O’Hare tonight. They are all supposed to be somewhere else. (Yet another promise is about to be fulfilled, No. 5, on better anecdote-to-nut coordination. Watch how the story moves toward it from this graf.)

They are stuck here instead, in an airport that once prided itself on being the world’s busiest and now is notorious for making more of its passengers late than any other airport in the country.

In many ways, the transformation of O’Hare from sleek symbol of the jet age to the bus station of the skies parallels the changes in air transportation itself: from fine china and travel suits to foil-packed peanuts and cutoffs, dirty diapers jammed into seat pockets and security guards stationed behind the customer service desk.

Almost 700 million passengers now fly…

Raise your right hand and repeat after me: “I promise to spend 15 minutes a day doing (fill in the blank) to get better at (fill in the blank).” Remember, there are only two kinds of journalists…