Blogger Mary Ward offers a breakdown of seven  networking sites for journalists.

Mary: Without the abundance of social networking sites available, many sites are staking their claim by catering to certain groups.  Some cater to scientists and others to journalists.  Not every subgroup will have its own social networking sites, but even the popular social networking sites can still be used to further journalistic endeavors.

MySpace–MySpace is one of the big social networking sites.  While it has no focus on journalism it can be used to make connections with other members who have an interest or experience in journalism.  Of course, like most such sites you can post blogs and share your opinion on anything at any time.

FaceBook–FaceBook is a site with similarities to many others.  You post your information and your picture and you can make connections with other members of the site.  You can use your status message to promote blog entries on occasion to garner more attention for them.  You can seek out friends on this site who have similar interests to create a network of friends to share thoughts and ideas with.

LinkedIn–LinkedIn has more of a professional member base which makes it a social site different from Myspace.com and Facebook.com.  It also offers the benefit of connections being made based on some real connection to an individual.  You can keep track of your true connections in the field of journalism without the clutter of random people trying to be your friend on the site.  This is another site that can be used to promote your blogs.

Twitter—Twitter is the social networking site du jour.  Everyone is constantly checking and send out Tweets so that no event or thought is missed or left without a flurry of comments.  Nothing is too trivial or too private it seems.  Journalists can tap into the vast Twitter fan base to share thoughts, feelings, and to promote blogs or other articles.  Compelling and humorous Tweets can gain an army of followers who can be informed of any journalistic endeavour you undertake whenever you wish.

Ning–Ning.com allows you to seek out a social network related to journalism or a subdivision of this broad field.  Or you can take another approach.  If you cannot find satisfaction with the social networks that are already in existence then just start your own using this website.

Nuzgeeks.com–Nuzgeeks.com is simply a social site for journalists, students, and other journalism oriented individuals to connect with each other.  It includes videos, blogs, and group topic discussions among other features.  It is truly a social network for journalists.

About the blogger: Journalistcenter.com (in which Mary is a partner) is a social site for journalists, reporters, and editors.  It includes chances to share internationally as well as opportunities for jobs in journalism and job training.

These 7 social sites for journalists run the gamut from general social networking sites to those specifically created for those in this field.  Each has its place in forging connections and spreading written works and news.  Journalism has benefited from all these sites as the written word of countless journalists may now be seen whether they work for major publications or not.

Mary Ward blogs about how to choose among journalism degrees.

A speech to put the L.A. Times’ bloodbath into perspective

Dear Pals,

I woke up this morning needing a battery charge, something to remind me that there is still a kind and knowing heart beating in a world controlled by Sam Zell and his simple-minded idiots. I read the list of old friends departing the Los Angeles Times, a depressing number of whom were laid off. God, I was blue. The Tribune Company and Zell have taken a very good newspaper and set it on the path to becoming a very adequate newspaper in record time. It makes you want to give up.

Then I got an unrelated e-mail from a friend who works with cancer patients. It was a copy of a speech that North Carolina State basketball coach Jimmy Valvano gave in 1993 at ESPN’s awards dinner. Everyone knew Valvano was dying of cancer; he would be gone within weeks. Here is what he said in accepting an award named after tennis legend Arthur Ashe:

‘Don’t Give Up. Don’t Ever Give Up.’

Thank you. . . I can’t tell you what an honor it is, to even be mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Ashe. This is something I certainly will treasure forever. . . I’m going to speak longer than anybody else has spoken tonight. That’s the way it goes. Time is very precious to me. I don’t know how much I have left and I have some things that I would like to say. Hopefully, at the end, I will have said something that will be important to other people too.

But, I can’t help it. . . People ask me all the time about how you go through your life and how’s your day, and nothing is changed for me. . . I’m a very emotional and passionate man. I can’t help it. That’s being the son of Rocco and Angelina Valvano. It comes with the territory. We hug, we kiss, we love. When people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it’s the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special

I rode on the plane up today with [Duke basketball coach] Mike Krzyzewski, my good friend and wonderful coach. People don’t realize he’s ten times a better person than he is a coach, and we know he’s a great coach. He’s meant a lot to me in these last five or six months with my battle. But when I look at Mike, I think, we competed against each other as players. I coached against him for fifteen years, and I always have to think about what’s important in life to me are these three things. Where you started, where you are and where you’re going to be. Those are the three things that I try to do every day. When I think about getting up and giving a speech, I can’t help it. I have to remember the first speech I ever gave.

I was coaching at Rutgers University, that was my first job, oh that’s wonderful (reaction to applause), and I was the freshman coach. That’s when freshmen played on freshman teams, and I was so fired up about my first job. I see Lou Holtz here. Coach Holtz, who doesn’t like the very first job you had? The very first time you stood in the locker room to give a pep talk. That’s a special place, the locker room, for a coach to give a talk. So my idol as a coach was Vince Lombardi, and I read this book called “Commitment To Excellence” by Vince Lombardi. And in the book, Lombardi talked about the fist time he spoke before his Green Bay Packers team in the locker room, and they were perennial losers. I’m reading this and Lombardi said he was thinking should it be a long talk, or a short talk? But he wanted it to be emotional, so it would be brief. So here’s what I did. Normally you get in the locker room, I don’t know, twenty-five minutes, a half hour before the team takes the field, you do your little x and o’s, and then you give the great Knute Rockne talk. We all do. Speech number eight-four. You pull them right out, you get ready. You get your squad ready. Well, this is the first one I ever gave and I read this thing. Lombardi, what he said was he didn’t go in, he waited. His team wondering, where is he? Where is this great coach? He’s not there. Ten minutes he’s still not there. Three minutes before they could take the field Lombardi comes in, bangs the door open, and I think you all remember what great presence he had, great presence. He walked in and he walked back and forth, like this, just walked, staring at the players. He said, “All eyes on me.” I’m reading this in this book. I’m getting this picture of Lombardi before his first game and he said “Gentlemen, we will be successful this year, if you can focus on three things, and three things only. Your family, your religion and the Green Bay Packers.” They knocked the walls down and the rest was history.

I said, that’s beautiful. I’m going to do that. Your family, your religion and Rutgers basketball. That’s it. I had it. Listen, I’m twenty-one years old. The kids I’m coaching are nineteen, and I’m going to be the greatest coach in the world, the next Lombardi. I’m practicing outside of the locker room and the managers tell me you got to go in. Not yet, not yet, family, religion, Rutgers Basketball. All eyes on me. I got it, I got it. Then finally he said, three minutes, I said fine. True story. I go to knock the doors open just like Lombardi. Boom! They don’t open. I almost broke my arm. Now I was down, the players were looking. Help the coach out, help him out. Now I did like Lombardi, I walked back and forth, and I was going like that with my arm getting the feeling back in it. Finally I said, “Gentlemen, all eyes on me.” These kids wanted to play, they’re nineteen. “Let’s go,” I said. “Gentlemen, we’ll be successful this year if you can focus on three things, and three things only. Your family, your religion and the Green Bay Packers,” I told them. I did that. I remember that. I remember where I came from.

It’s so important to know where you are. I know where I am right now. How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. You have to be willing to work for it. I talked about my family, my family’s so important. People think I have courage. The courage in my family are my wife Pam, my three daughters, here, Nicole, Jamie, LeeAnn, my mom, who’s right here too. That screen is flashing up there thirty seconds like I care about that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I’m worried about some guy in the back going thirty seconds? You got a lot, hey va fa Napoli, buddy. You got a lot.

I just got one last thing, I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you’re emotions going. To be enthusiastic every day and as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm,” to keep your dreams alive in spite of problems whatever you have. The ability to be able to work hard for your dreams to come true, to become a reality.

Now I look at where I am now and I know what I want to do. What I would like to be able to do is spend whatever time I have left and to give, and maybe, some hope to others. . . .We need your help. I need your help. We need money for research. It may not save my life. It may save my children’s lives. It may save someone you love. And ESPN has been so kind to support me in this endeavor and allow me to announce tonight. . .we are starting the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research. And it’s motto is “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” That’s what I’m going to try to do every minute that I have left. . .I’d like to think, I’m going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year! I know, I gotta go, I gotta go, and I got one last thing and I said it before, and I want to say it again. Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever. I thank you and God bless you all.

Those who took buyouts, those who got fired, those who are left behind comprising a shrunken, skeletal staff–and to the rest of us readers shocked by what has happened to the L.A. Times, take a deep breath and repeat after Coach V: Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.

On the web: http://www.jimmyv.org/

What? He recorded a CD? Best of all, it comes with money-back guarantee

If you’re intrigued with the blurb on the right side of Newsthinking’s March 11 home page devoted to promoting my CD, here’s the explanation. It grew out of some demo songs I recorded at home and then re-recorded with studio cats in Nashville. You can read the whole story in the New York Times.

The Newsthinking blurb will also take you to my MySpace page , which has 6 of the tracks and the CD’s liner notes.

To hear all the songs, click here.

To read my essay on the links between songwriting and newswriting published on the Poynter website April 23, click here.

I’ll gladly buy back the CD if you’re disappointed. If you love the outlandish, the neurotic, the heart-felt…if you like alt-country or rock ‘n’ roll, this one’s for you.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING

Translated from a Dutch alt-country website:

The 58-year old Bob Baker gives up his job as an editor with the Los Angeles Times, puts together a music demo at home and travels to Nashville twice to record his songs with the help of studio musicians. When the CD is finished, he writes an interesting article for the New York Times about the making of “Low Expectations” (self-released). To summarize: The pros dedicate a few sessions to Baker’s songs, who initially fears losing control of his work, but soon starts to realize that they are taking advantage of opportunities that he himself had not yet seen. The singing process is a dramatic experience for Baker, but after some cutting and pasting in the mixing room, the songs are finally ready. Baker’s doubts don’t disappear until he listens to the songs on his car stereo while cruising through his own neighborhood. And what does he hear? A successful recording that defines his style as a rocker similar to Dave Edmunds or Dan Baird. In a way, it’s a little disconcerting that professional studio cats can so easily crank out a fun rock record. But of course that has everything to do with Baker’s writing, who knows that rock ‘n roll is all about nonsense with a serious twist. This results in songs such as “Handicapped,” about a young man who requests a handicapped parking permit for a broken heart. Or the Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis-inspired “I Got an E-mail from a Female,” where the protagonist tries something with a minor girl.

The story of how Walter Mitty met Conway Twitty

This has nothing to do with journalism, other than the fact it involves a story that was published in a newspaper.

I have this hobby: I write songs and make recordings. And finally I liked what I did enough to seek out some professional help, thinking maybe I could sell some songs. I went to Nashville, hired some pro session players, and suddenly my songs, originally recorded on a home digital recorder, sounded like actual songs.

I chronicled the experience, submitted it to the New York Times in November (after giving my old paper, the LAT, first dibs that it chose not to exercise), and, voila, yesterday the NYT published it and put a couple of songs on its Web site to illustrate the gulf between my demos and what the pros were able to do.

Pardon me while I ram my hobby down your throat

The top of the story:

WHEN WALTER MITTY MET CONWAY TWITTY
March 25, 2007

I’m standing inside a darkened eight-by-eight-foot recording booth in Nashville, staring into a microphone. A window looks into a small studio where the musicians I’ve hired are exchanging ideas in shorthand. I can hear them through my headphones (“Bob, come in one bar later on the vocal”), but I can’t see much. I feel vulnerable and excited. I wonder if this is what plastic surgery is like. After all, these specialists are nipping and tucking one of my most intimate parts: my song.

The song is “Finally Made ’Em Dance,” a ballad sung by a musician to his inspirational mother. I had never been able to record it satisfactorily on the $400 eight-track home digital recorder I bought last year. As an amateur songwriter I love my eight-track because it lets me perform all the parts: no arguments in this band. But I am a sub-amateur musician who knows, at best, nine guitar chords. I can create a song of potential beauty, but after years in denial I admitted I needed cosmetic song surgery to realize that beauty.

And so, at 58, I shifted some retirement money to the life’s-too-short side of the ledger and headed from Los Angeles to Nashville, carrying a CD of “Dance” and four other songs. I would make a demo that sounded professional, right down to my singing. I kept my expectations low; I’d be happy if one pro said, “Good song.”

If you are a NYT subscriber, you can get the story elecronically. Here’s the link, replete with old and Nashville versions of two songs.

If you’re not an NYT subscriber, you can find the same package through the International Herald Tribune. Here is the link to the IHT site.

If you’re so drawn to my prose that you simply have to keep going, the rest of the story follows.

Also: You can hear four of the Nashville recordings by clicking this link.

Okay, picking up the story where we left off: “. . .I kept my expectations low; I’d be happy if one pro said, ‘Good song.’”

My guru on this journey was Steve Tveit, general manager of Omnisound Studios, housed in a small, boxy, steel-blue-painted brick building on a plain street a few blocks from Music Row. Mr. Tveit is one of my favorite in-laws (he’s married to my wife’s niece) because he’s been able to make a living in the music business, even if it means driving a ’97 Dodge Neon without a CD player.

I had joked for years about recording in Nashville with my own band of earnest L.A. amateurs. But this time, perhaps because I sounded serious, he suggested: Just bring yourself. You can hire the same session men the record companies use.

Which was how I found myself sitting in a studio conference room at 9:15 on a Saturday morning with Chris Leuzinger, a touring and session guitarist who has played with country artists from Garth Brooks to Shania Twain to Tim McGraw to George Strait. Mr. Leuzinger, the hired bandleader, had received my CD via Mr. Tveit. On a legal pad he had ”charted” the five songs, using what’s called the Nashville number system, a time-saving trick that assigns a number to each chord in the do-re-mi musical scale, making it easier for musicians to change keys without rewriting the chart. We listened to my originals one by one.

Mr. Leuzinger, a friendly, soft-spoken man with short, gray-tinged hair, turned off the CD player and asked me to sing the bridge of ”Finally Made ‘Em Dance” while he strummed his acoustic guitar. He wanted to recommend a change: ”I held the end of the bridge at G instead of E minor because the next verse starts with E minor.”

I nodded knowingly, unable to remember the chord progression of my own song. ”You know,” Mr. Leuzinger said, ”if any of the changes we make, if anything feels wrong to you, just speak up. Nobody has an ego about it or anything.”

Many of Nashville’s smaller studios increasingly record recreational or aspiring musicians like me. It’s an outgrowth of several trends. In the days when country music was dominant, and record labels were setting up offices in Nashville and spending heavily, studios had plenty of work. But when country sales began to fall a half-dozen years ago, and digital equipment let many people construct home studios, there was not enough record label work to go around. Studios had to cut their day rates and engineering fees to keep business.

Today, Mr. Tveit said, 20 to 25 percent of his business is ”custom.” There’s the surveyor from New Mexico who visits occasionally, the band from Iceland, the Iraq war veteran, the Scranton TV news anchor. Some use the same computer software as the studios to create and edit their music.

Others, like me, need the richness of collaboration that comes only when you throw a bunch of players in a room. I may be Time magazine’s person of the year because, like my computer-literate co-honorees, I control more of my life in the digital world than I ever imagined. But control doesn’t equal talent and human synergy, and in the making of music, talent and synergy transcend technology.

And so here we were in the studio. The other musicians trickled in for the three-hour 10 a.m. session: the veteran keyboardist Bob Patin, who uses a computerized rig that can replicate endless instruments; the electric guitarist Mike Durham; the bassist Dow Tomlin; and the drummer Wayne Killius. I was paying them each $181 for the session, the American Federation of Musicians’ scale. (As bandleader, Mr. Leuzinger received $332.) They set up their instruments while good-naturedly teasing one another, then funneled into a conference room to read Mr. Leuzinger’s charts and listen to the homemade version of my first song, an angst-filled rocker called ”I Breathe Your Name.”

There was little discussion once my version ended. The musicians simply headed around the corner into the studio. I closed the door to my booth and put on my headphones. As the musicians recorded, I was supposed to sing a ”scratch track,” one that would not be used but would let the band know when the singing would occur. The real singing — me with just the recorded instrumental tracks — was booked for three more hours at 2 p.m.

Relax, I told myself. Don’t throw your voice out. But as the musicians began playing, with Mr. Patin tagging an eerie two seconds of synthesizer to the top of the song, I became too excited — about the precision, about the snap, about the tightness, about the way the lyrics themselves were heightened by the quality of playing. How could I hold back? I sang hard. I would pay for this later.

The band got the song on the second take. Then began an overdubbing period negotiated with Mr. Tveit, who was engineering the session. Mr. Leuzinger wanted to layer another acoustic guitar. Mr. Durham wanted to add some electric guitar licks.

This was the drill: Listen to a cut on my CD, go into the studio and perform the song, and then make fixes with the engineer. I got used to the musicians joking around as they listened to my originals. They literally had heard all this before. They could suggest or infer the needed style, instrumentations and strategy with as little as a grunt.

”A lot of things we do,” Mr. Patin said later, ”happen without being discussed.”

The band slowed down my next one, ”I’m Handicapped,” a mile-a-minute song in which the singer claims he is entitled to special parking places because his heart is broken. I summoned my courage to ask over the microphone if we could speed it up a little, and the band complied on the next take. Mr. Durham overdubbed some loopy riffs.

As he did that, I explained my misgivings about tempo to Mr. Killius, the drummer. ”It’s not always a matter of speed,” he said. ”Sometimes you just play with more force” to make a song feel faster.

Now came ”Finally Made ‘Em Dance.” The first take was faster than my original, but didn’t have a groove. The musicians noodled. Mr. Durham started fooling around with what Mr. Tveit called a ”chunking” riff, what Mr. Durham described as an attempt to make a song about dancing danceable. It worked.

Mr. Patin was playing a piano fill that created a drama within the song that I’d never imagined. (He’d add an organ during overdubbing.) The song gave me the same kind of goose bumps as when I recorded it for the first time last spring. I could have left the studio right then and declared victory.

I looked at my watch. We had an hour left to get the last two songs.

No problem there. First, we did a Little Richard-inspired ”I Got an E-Mail From a Female,” in which Mr. Patin rocked out on a studio acoustic piano. We finished with another ballad, about a man who dreams that he has insomnia. Somebody threw out the name of a Bob Seger song, and the arrangement that emerged — acoustic guitar underneath an electric lead that mimics the lyrics — thrilled me. The musicians had discovered something new in each song.

We had 10 minutes left. I shook hands with Mr. Leuzinger and thanked him. ”Good songs,” he said, and I chose not to interrogate him.

Now it was time for me to sing, for keeps.

I Grabbed a quick hamburger outside and headed into another small booth, armed with my lyric sheets. Through the big horizontal window was a console that hid Eric Tonkin, who was going to engineer the vocal tracks.

The magic I’d felt seemed to be seeping away. I was nightmarishly off-key and singing from my throat rather than my diaphragm. I was getting about 80 percent of each note, only to hear the rest of it turn sour. Mr. Tonkin was encouraging. He needed me to sing three or four versions of each song so he could cut and paste the best moments into a finished computer vocal track.

I felt I was letting down the band, to say nothing of my surgically enhanced songs. The musicians had left me this elegant instrumental palette and I couldn’t reciprocate. I was tired. I was mispronouncing words.

I couldn’t get the timing right on a line in ”Finally Made ‘Em Dance” that anticipates a delayed drum stroke. I couldn’t scream an authentic Little Richard scream in my e-mail song. I couldn’t effectively double-track my voice on ”I Dream I Have Insomnia.”

”Happens to everybody,” Mr. Tonkin said cheerfully. ”We’ll fix it.” Fix it in the mix: the same cliché I good-naturedly used as a newspaper editor when a reporter turned in a rancid effort.

I tried sitting on a stool instead of standing. That helped a little. But I’d been singing without a break for an hour and a half, and I was beat. Tomorrow Mr. Tveit and I would return and watch Mr. Tonkin mix me to heaven.

I walked into the studio Sunday afternoon and headed for the mixing room, where Mr. Tonkin had been sitting at the console for hours, using editing and tuning software to work on the music and vocal tracks. The first thing I heard was a snatch of music from ”I Got an E-Mail From a Female”: perfect. Then I heard my voice straining — and failing — to utter a clear, Little Richard-like ”Whoooooooooo!”

Mr. Tonkin told me not to worry, went to another of my vocal tracks where I had come closer to getting the shout right, and moved three copies of it onto the master vocal. He moved a phrase in ”Finally Made ‘Em Dance” about a beat beyond where I’d sung it so it was finally in sync with the music. He and Mr. Tveit snipped most of my double-tracked vocal on ”Insomnia” so that the second voice was heard far less frequently. I watched Mr. Tonkin make fix after fix on song after song, and each time the vocal improved, although the change was sometimes too subtle for me to articulate why.

We took a CD of my five rebuilt songs to Mr. Tveit’s home, where we played it for his wife and daughter and my wife. All I heard were the vocal flaws. The homemade demo I brought to Nashville contained better singing than playing; the one I heard now was the opposite. Or maybe this too is what plastic surgery is like: You look in the mirror and say, ”That’s not me.” The next day maybe you accept what you see — or, in this case, hear.

As I flew back to Los Angeles the next day, I played the new arrangements 20 times on the plane. I began to hate my vocals less and less. They began to feel like part of the songs.

My wife and I caught a cab home. I put the luggage inside, took my CD out of the portable player, grabbed my car keys, walked outside and started driving around the neighborhood. This was the only laboratory I trusted: the car stereo.

On went the CD. Up went the volume. Down went the expectations. Out of the speakers came songs so brilliantly reconstructed that they seemed like somebody else’s compositions. Again and again I played them, until I could no longer distinguish between what the session cats did and what I did. They were just songs. ”Good songs,” I said to no one in particular, and headed for home.

–30–

The genesis of a must-read education column

Yeah, I know the L.A. Times is in turmoil. But it continues to publish wonderful enterprise stories, and a new addition I have fallen in love with features the work of a Times Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing, Bob Sipchen.

Sipchen now writes a weekly column in the California section called “School Me,” dedicated exclusively to public education in Los Angeles. He is insightful, confrontational and fair-minded, determined to hold the educational bureaucracy accountable.

Wanna keep your readers? School 'em

For any editor trying to figure out what his paper can publish to make itself indespensible to readers, do this: Shuffle your cards, free up a tough-minded reporter and make him or her an education columnist. There’s a power of focusing a column this narrowly that gives it much more punch than the typical general-interest column.

Bob answered some of my questions about how this experiment germinated, but first read a sample of his work. (More will appear after the Q-and-A:

WHEN PRINCIPAL’S A GRIZZLY, CAMPUS LIFE CAN BE A BEAR
By Bob Sipchen
Oct. 2, 2006

Nivi Lifshitz tells the story of her unfortunate introduction to the Los Angeles Unified School District like this: She answered her cellphone on her daughter’s first day of school and was greeted by a scream — “This is the worst-behaved child I’ve ever encountered in my life!”

Only later did the caller identify herself as Woodland Hills Elementary School Principal Anna Feig, Lifshitz says. The kindergartner, Feig told her, had crawled under a table and refused to come out. It seems her teacher, new to the job, had called the principal for help and Feig hauled the child into the office. The little girl spent three of the next four days outside the principal’s office — once, Lifshitz swears, for refusing to use the correct crayon color.

In later meetings, the mother says, Feig shouted that their child was not welcome at her school unless she started taking Ritalin — an allegation the principal denies.

The parents kept their daughter home and looked for another school, even though the software developer and her musician husband, Joerg, had just doubled their rent by moving to the neighborhood — largely because of the school’s high test scores.

When I finally meet the girl, she’s standing with her father outside another Woodland Hills school. She transferred there after what the parents portray as nasty battles with Feig and a week of nonresponse from the district. The girl, wearing a plaid shirt and white pants, chatters cheerfully as she tosses her vinyl Bratz backpack into her father’s Prius, then pulls herself into her child seat.

This pleasant and precocious demeanor has been rattled, her parents say. She has drawn pictures of the principal as a monster, she has imaginary phone conversations in which she asks the principal not to yell, she has nightmares about Feig.

Given this portrait I drop in on the principal with caution, fearing she’ll turn me into a toad with one blistering stare. I find, instead, a small, almost fragile-looking woman dressed in leopard print, with leopard-print jewelry. She’s seated in a cluttered office, the focal point of which is a purple leopard-spot chair.

Before I’ve finished introducing myself Feig accuses me of misrepresenting the nature of my visit. Then, sensing my befuddlement, she softens.

“I know my reputation,” she says. “I also know the good things I do.”

After a short visit, Feig says she has a meeting, and I move outside the school’s gates. Nestled in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and shaded with lots of mature trees, the beautifully maintained campus is the nicest I’ve visited in L.A. Unified. The parents — many of whom say their children attend on permits available to students who live outside the school’s immediate neighborhood — rave about the academics, the attentiveness of the teachers and the high level of parental involvement. They brag that it’s run like a private school — that Feig, as several say using the same phrase, “runs a tight ship.”

I’ve been chatting with child-herding, stroller-pushing moms (and a few dads) for perhaps an hour when Feig approaches. Apropos of nothing, she says: “I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the face.”

Pressed, she says that as principal, she’s always the scapegoat for parents who can’t bear to hear honest assessments of their children.

She can’t discuss individual students, she tells me, then repeatedly brings up the unnamed child in question, saying that even though the girl was extremely disruptive, Feig longed to help her and keep her at the school — if only her mother weren’t so resistant. Feig has decades of experience in L.A. Unified and has been at Woodland Hills Elementary for 11 years — a longevity no other principal was able to achieve, she points out.

I ask why the others fled.

“Because of the parents,” she says.

There’s a teacher truism, it seems, that “south of the Boulevard” parents (i.e., those who live on the richer, hillier side of Ventura Boulevard) are aggressive and demanding.

As Feig leads me on an impromptu tour, she buttonholes teachers and says: “Tell him about the parents.”

Most concur that although the majority are wonderfully helpful, a minority are unpleasant and, as Feig phrases it, “don’t understand boundaries.”

Before Feig arrived, a couple of teachers say, “parents controlled the school.”

“I love Anna,” says Pam Martens, a teacher of 41 years. “Anna will defend us like a mother bear.”

As I leave, I remind myself that the best teachers and administrators have been goal-oriented mavericks who aren’t afraid to offend as they cut through the bureaucracy and simply get things done. But that night Woodland Hills Elementary begins to seem like the realm of some suburban zombie tribe with a dark secret to keep.

“People are scared,” parents and teachers practically whisper into the phone, most pleading for absolute confidentiality as they describe a volatile “tyrant” who rules by browbeating, intimidation and humiliation.

Parent C.J. Josefzon, one of more than two dozen parents and teachers I talk to, was so enraged with the way Feig treated his son that he picketed the school with a sign reading: “Stop the Terror.”

Denise Miller, a fifth-grade teacher, says that when she first arrived at Woodland Hills, she admired Feig as a tough leader. Her view began to change, she says, as she watched the principal ruthlessly weed out students and parents who might somehow undermine Woodland Hills Elementary’s reputation as an academic powerhouse.

“She sanitizes the school,” Miller says, explaining that Feig finds reasons to yank the permits of students who don’t fit her mold. “They just disappear.”

What really turned her against Feig, though, she says, was watching her frighten and embarrass students. “I won’t let my kids go alone to Anna’s office.” Many teachers won’t, she says.

Why don’t her colleagues speak out?

“They don’t want to injure the grizzly bear.”

Feig denies cherry-picking students and says she would never embarrass children.

“The only time I raise my voice,” she says, “is if a teacher comes to me and says, ‘Scare them.’ Or, if I’m attacked, I raise my voice.”

Feig downplays her attention to testing, but no one disputes the results. In a district where the average Academic Performance Index growth score is 658, Woodland Hills Elementary this year scored 951. That’s an extraordinary number, even considering the advantage that comes with drawing from an area with relatively few children who qualify for a free or discounted lunch or have trouble speaking English. Some schools in the district approach 100% in each category. Woodland Hills Elementary’s numbers are strikingly low, even compared with nearby elementary schools’.

Perhaps a mile away, at Lifshitz’s kindergartner’s new school, the percentage of children on free lunch programs and nonnative English speakers is a very low 17% and 10%, respectively. At Woodland Hills those figures are 3% and less than 1%. Lifshitz and her husband are well aware that their daughter’s new school scored almost 100 API points lower than Feig’s. But the last three weeks have put obsession with test scores in perspective, they say.

Their daughter is happy at the new school. The teacher, Lifshitz says, “never, ever, raises her voice at the kids.” Not that her daughter has been a perfect student. But, Lifshitz says, she does smile proudly on those days when her teacher sends her home with stars for good behavior.

—-30—-

Here are Bob’s written responses to my questions:

Whose idea was the column?

The column was my idea, years ago when I was an editor. I wanted to have someone else write it as part of a series to be called Laptop LA. The idea: Columns written by reporters on laptops as they explored various realms: Schools, Crime and Punishment, Health Care, etc. I almost got [former education reporter] Sandy Banks to do the one I thought was most important-education-when I was editing Current [The Times' Sunday opinion section], but she slipped away. So I’m giving it a shot myself.

What were your marching orders?

I talked to [Times California editor] Janet Clayton about this a while back when she was boss of the editorial pages. We were in total synch. We both agreed that the Times was among the institutions that shared blame for the sorry state of education in Los Angeles. When [former Times editor-in-chief] Dean [Baquet] invited me into the California section, Janet helped me to refine the mission.

What was your biggest concern going in?

The biggest is that people, despite what they say, may not really care enough about education to read a weekly column on the subject.

What were you most confident about?

There are great stories to tell and problems to expose.

What’s been the payoff so far?

Lots of readers are telling me they’ve become followers of the column and plenty are calling and e-mailing with stories from the schools that they think deserve telling. This includes teachers, parents, taxpaying citizens and the occasional student. Also, I’m told that the column and the blog I do with a fantastic June USC grad, Janine Kahn (www.latimes.com/schoolme) has become required reading in certain education and political decision-making circles.

What do you feel you still need to improve?

I’ll always be able to learn more about education. Plus I’m still getting the hang of a weekly column-the tone, the ratio of reportage to reflection, the length, etc.

How have you balanced journalistic fairness and objectivity with the more subjective but enticing structure of a column?

I can’t imagine a form of journalism that doesn’t put fairness right alongside accuracy and pursuit of the truth as the highest, values. So I struggle mightily to be fair. But ultimately I can take sides. Being a columnist is a huge advantage when dealing with bureaucracies. If someone’s obfuscating, dawdling or intentionally stonewalling about something, a reporter often is left twiddling her thumbs-the story’s just not there. I can make a solid column out of that dawdling -and readers (as well as teachers, parents etc.) have responded with a level of gratitude that’s very rewarding. Because in a sense, the obstructionism gets to the heart of what’s wrong with education.

Anything else you think would help education writers and editors, who in my experience chafe under a belief that the audience considers education boring?

It’s very easy to get sucked into the cult, to find yourself believing that all those acronyms and excessively polysyllabic theorems have a special meaning accessible only to a very special class of initiates. I sometimes have to slap myself in the face and chant loudly: “You’re writing about people with human needs and goals, petty and profound.” People are passionate about schools and we can’t let the soul-deadened careerists who too-often control the agenda triumph in their self-interested desire to keep the public from paying attention to education. Clarity in this stuff is like caffeine-it wakes people up and may even addict them.

—-30—-

Two more “School Me” columns evolved from the one you read. Here they are:

UNION RESORTS TO CODE OF SILENCE TO STIFLE THE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PRINCIPAL
October 30, 2006

Some of the smartest, hardest-working and most caring people I know are public school principals.

That said, education reformers have complained for years that the Los Angeles school district’s bureaucracy either ignores complaints about bad principals or shuffles crummy principals off to other schools. “The dance of the lemons,” it’s called.

A recent e-mail from the union representing administrators in Los Angeles schools offers disturbing insight into why principals who have no business being on campus sometimes continue to reign.

My Oct. 2 column discussed a kindergartner’s troubles with Anna Feig, the principal at Woodland Hills Elementary School. Some parents and teachers praised Feig as a strong leader who “runs a tight ship,” while others called her a tyrant who they say intimidates and retaliates against those who cross her.

Two days later, Mike O’Sullivan, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) e-mailed his colleagues, calling that column “a piece of journalistic garbage that unfairly trashed the reputation and character of one of our outstanding elementary principals.” Attached to his missive was a copy of a letter to the editor of The Times by the union’s administrator, Dan Basalone, who said I had “demeaned one of our finest principals” and recommended that “no administrator agree to any interviews” with me.

O’Sullivan didn’t return my calls and Basalone hung up on me after I insisted that we talk on the record.

If I were a principal, I’d be embarrassed that the supposed leaders of a professional organization would defend someone without an investigation, let alone declare her among the district’s finest.

In the days after that column, School Me’s blog exploded with comments so voluminous and vehement that it is inconceivable that the union bossmen were unaware that the principal in question is controversial.

Since then, I’ve received dozens of e-mails and talked to dozens of pleasant, decent-sounding people who, without a trace of irony, describe Feig as, among many other things: “a monster,” “extraordinarily rude,” “a bully,” “beastly,” “one of the nastiest persons I’ve ever met” and “a despot” who is “as close to pure evil as I’ve ever seen” and “belongs in prison for her treatment of these children.” Parents and teachers, current and former, report filing complaints almost from the moment she arrived at the West Valley school a decade back. They advised high-level administrators about an array of concerns, including their belief that the principal plays fast and loose with the permit process determining whether some students can attend the school. At least one critic wrote to the district questioning the ethics and legality of the way the school counts tardies and absences to avoid losing attendance money.

When I talked to Feig for my previous column, she dismissed her critics, mainly as parents who didn’t want to hear the truth about their children or wanted to run the school themselves.

She did not return calls for this column. A woman in the school’s office said Feig would not talk to me on advice of the AALA.

Many parents are convinced that cowardice and cronyism within the district explain why Feig hasn’t been removed.

District 1 Supt. Jean Brown has been in her position for only 18 months. She says that since she’s been there, all complaints against any administrator have been recorded, referred, investigated, and that parents receive a response. The associated administrators group, she said, has a role in any discussion of discipline. No principals have been fired during her tenure. But in many cases, “They have received training, mentoring, coaching…. Changing behaviors and leadership skills is something we take very seriously,” she said, adding that confidentiality considerations preclude her from discussing any individual, including Feig.

In our hastily aborted chat, Basalone said, “It’s not your job as a journalist to do her evaluation.” Thank God for that. But I do feel a moral obligation to pass on a small sampling of what I’ve heard to whoever is responsible for that task.

Siri Maness said that she pulled her kindergartner out of Woodland Hills this year — after four days — because, she says, Feig insisted that the student has anger management issues. Maness claims the principal rudely threatened to suspend the child and then pointedly reminded her that the school asks each parent to donate at least $400 per child per year. Apparently because of AALA’s advice to Feig, I couldn’t discuss this matter with her.

A common complaint of parents I talked to is that Feig issues snap medical and psychological diagnoses of children (her husband’s a pediatrician, after all) and essentially demands that some students seek prescriptions for such hyperactivity medication as Ritalin — a pill college students abuse to boost their concentration and test-taking ability.

Rossina Gil, for one, had a conference with the principal and her son’s kindergarten teacher earlier this year about Feig’s belief that the boy should be on medication — something other professionals recommended against, she says. The teacher, Gil says, reported that the boy was “right where he should be in class.”

Gil says she’ll never forget Feig’s response: Imagine how much better he could do if he took the meds. Feig, again, wouldn’t return my calls.

Woodland Hills’ test scores are among the highest in the district. Parents, current and former, say that Feig acts like a college recruiter, encouraging smart public and private school students to apply to her school. They say they’ve contacted the district alleging that the principal tries her best to get rid of students who might hurt the school’s test scores, either by making their lives miserable or, when possible, finding a reason to pull their permits — pawning at least some low-achievers off on other principals.

Jay Fernandez, a firefighter, says that in 1999 he and other parents formed a group to look into, among other things, what they perceived to be a disproportionate number of minority students who had had their permits yanked. The district, he says, assigned a civil rights investigator to the case but refused to tell parents the outcome.

Karen Hunt says her two children had nightmares because Feig made them feel like second-class citizens when they didn’t do well on the standardized tests. Four years ago, when one son tested as highly gifted, Feig took him in front of the class and announced that he was an example of someone who really wasn’t very smart but could do well on tests if he applied himself, the boy told his mother.

Jennifer Tidstrand says that a few years ago she called the district after several run-ins, including one in which Feig “hauled her son into a hallway and made him cry.” Tidstrand was promised her concerns would be kept confidential. She says that within days, however, Feig wanted to know why she had reported her to the district. Feig, again, wouldn’t talk to me about any of this, apparently on the advice of AALA.

“The happiest day for both me and my son was the day he left” the school, says Michael Smith. Jorge Solorzano says he and his wife moved to Woodland Hills specifically for the school’s test scores and moved again specifically to get away from the principal.

“For years,” says Richard Kzemien, “LAUSD has remained deaf to the numerous pleas coming from the community to have her removed. The system’s relentless insensitivity to this problem is one more example of just how serious an overhaul LAUSD really needs.” Most parents, including some of Feig’s critics, love the school. And plenty defend Feig, saying she treats their children well and that they’ve never witnessed her alleged misbehavior. Fair enough.

But what about those callers and blog commenters who acknowledge but shrug off Feig’s “ruthlessness” as if it were a necessary evil, tell teachers who disagree with Feig’s behavior to “LEAVE” and suggest that parents who object to the humiliation of 5- to 10-year-old children are raising “frail wusses”?

To those Feig stalwarts who complain that I’ve paid too much attention to a “vocal minority,” I offer a vegetable parable. Last month millions of people enjoyed the health benefits of California spinach. Should this paper have ignored the relative handful who keeled over retching or dead from E. coli?

Basalone — who didn’t bother to contact the kindergartner’s parents or, from what I can tell, anyone but Feig before writing his letter — maligned all Times reporters, saying we’re “wolves in sheep’s clothing and can’t be trusted.”

O’Sullivan blustered: “Mr. Sipchen has an agenda that is inimical to our purposes and he deserves to be shunned by anyone he contacts.”

Such buffoonish rhetorical thuggery is particularly ill-advised. Most principals probably recognize, after all, that it’s not in their best interests as public servants to spurn those of us who serve as surrogates for taxpaying parents. As for our conflicting purposes, that’s the single point O’Sullivan got right. My “agenda” is to play a small role in assuring that children get a good education.

This union’s purpose is … what?

—-30—-

SCHOOL REFUSES TO OPEN ITS DOOR ON HALLOWEEN
November 6, 2006

It’s Halloween, but I can tell from a block away that the buffed-out gents guarding the door of Dominguez Elementary School aren’t in costume. Nope, they’re wearing real L.A. School Police uniforms, complete with handguns and cuffs. Officers Ross and Steward politely tell me they were dispatched to keep me off campus at the request of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I politely remind them that I have every right to be on the public school campus and back up my assertion with a memo from outgoing Supt. Roy Romer.

They ask me to please wait for representatives from the local district office to arrive. I nod, and watch as parents and children in fairy and superhero outfits shuffle through the door. Romer seems to have understood that transparency is a benchmark of good government and an absolute requisite for reform. He made inroads in educating his subordinates about the law. But as I stand chatting with the friendly cops, I’m reminded of something school critic David Abel says when he wants to send district mucky-mucks into conniptions. L.A. Unified, he declares, is East Germany before the Iron Curtain fell.

I suspect that this latest outbreak of petty bureaucratic power-tripping may stem from something I wrote last week. In that column, I chided the principals’ union, Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, for reflexively coming to the defense of a principal about whom I’d heard (and keep hearing) a chorus of complaints. Union President Mike O’Sullivan and administrator Dan Basalone told their colleagues to shun me.

As it happens, a few days before the column ran, a teachers union leader at Dominguez had invited me to the school to talk with his colleagues at an after-school meeting. He suggested I attend the annual Halloween parade as a way to get a look at the Carson campus. But someone from the district told Dominguez’s pleasant assistant principal, Amita Dave, not to let me on campus.

My children have put in a total of 32.5 years with this school district. I’ve probably attended more Pumpkin Fests and Harvest Carnivals than first-run movies. I loved them. But not so much that I’d subject myself to billy-clubbing or — worse — bureaucratic browbeating to attend another.

On the other hand, I don’t think most parents, teachers and Times readers expect journalists to let themselves be bullied by public servants in need of a remedial civics course. Public access is critically important to any democratic institution. And public schools? These are the places we entrust with our children. Any teacher, principal, lunchroom aide or self-proclaimed Big Shot who thinks we’re going to send our kids through those gates without plenty of public scrutiny should be fitted for a dunce cap. Aside from parents’ narrow experience with their own children, reporters are the only eyes, ears and noses people have to alert them when something smells — which may be why the urge to keep journalists in the dark runs so deep.

Bad rules, for example, allow bureaucrats to protect stinko employees and hide their own incompetence with the phrase “that’s a personnel matter.”

And plenty of educators think they have the authority to decide what people are entitled to know about public schools. Charlene Hirotsu, at Thomas Starr King Middle School, for instance, is just one of the administrators who have told me I’m welcome on campus so long as my reportage is “positive.”

Meanwhile, the fact that administrators migrate from the school district to union jobs and back encourages cronyism. And cronyism breeds swaggering tyrants prone to delusions that they are above the law. Who knows? Some may even imagine they can blackball journalists who don’t toe the line.

Fortunately, the California Penal Code and the California Evidence Code are clear in stating that reporters have a statutory right of access to public schools. As the California Newspaper Assn.’s handbook on public access notes: “The Legislature expressly recognized the right of certain individuals, including journalists, to visit school grounds for ‘legitimate’ purposes and mandated that the legitimate exercise of constitutionally protected rights of free speech and expression not be infringed.”

Soon after arriving in the district six years ago, Romer showed that he understood the direct link between openness and reform by issuing a memo pointedly reminding everyone that a principal cannot keep a reporter off campus unless there is “reasonable and credible justification” for thinking the journalist’s presence will disrupt or threaten campus safety. Merely worrying that educational activities could be threatened by a reporter’s presence does not give a principal the right to say no, the memo says.

Of course, the district is notorious for not always getting word out to the troops, which may explain why Karen Saunders, one of two administrators who show up to try to keep me out of Dominguez, is unaware of the law or of Romer’s memo.

What’s ironic is that spending time on a campus usually softens one’s view of public education. When the district’s emissaries finally “allow” me on campus — did they really think those embarrassed-looking law enforcement pros were going to bust me for exercising my right to attend a Halloween parade? — what I saw was swell. Although I question the fiscal responsibility of assigning district handlers to ride herd on a reporter at an event featuring the tune “Purple People Eater,” the three of us did have fun watching Supermen, scarecrows, Barbies and one dashing young Sherlock Holmes parade across the blacktop.

The incoming superintendent is good at firing up students with motivational chants. Maybe he can take a similar approach with the people who work for him.

Vince Carbino, principal of the Santee Education Complex in South L.A., has a slogan that might help folks understand the importance of public access and scrutiny.

Carbino strikes me as an effective educator (though I’m not done reporting yet).

Wouldn’t it be great if the new superintendent asked every employee to chant the motto Carbino’s mother impressed upon her boy:

“Excellence fears no observation.”

…Read Joe Nocera’s column about the odyssey of Sandler O’Neil & Partners

This story stopped me dead in my tracks because I remembered how the overwhelming losses at this investment banking firm came to symbolize the devastation of 9/11. And then I realized I had not thought about the company for, say, 59 months–the price you pay, sometimes gladly, for living on the West Coast. If you feel desensitized, Nocera will pull you back.

If you read only one 9/11 story...

AFTER 5 YEARS HIS VOICE CAN STILL CRACK
By JOE NOCERA
New York Times
Sept. 9, 2006

Time passes. Time heals.

A few days before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I went to see James J. Dunne III, the managing partner of the small investment banking firm Sandler O’Neill & Partners. Sandler O’Neill, you may recall, was one of the hardest hit firms that day. Its primary offices were on the 104th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center; of the 83 employees (out of a total of 171) who were in the office that awful morning, only 17 made it out alive. Among the 66 who died were two of the three men who ran the firm: Herman Sandler, the co-founder, and Christopher Quackenbush, who headed investment banking.

Jimmy Dunne was the junior member of the ruling troika. He had been spared because he was on a golf course in Westchester County that morning, trying to qualify for an amateur tournament. Truth to tell, before 9/11, he was more focused on golf than on work. At 45, he had one foot out the door.

But I learned that only later, and it came as a surprise. The Jimmy Dunne I met shortly after 9/11 was more committed to his work than anyone I’d ever known. Thrust into a role he had never expected and had never prepared for — not just to lead Sandler O’Neill, but to save it — he embraced his task with an unnerving intensity.

Back then, he was everywhere, doing everything: comforting grieving families, hiring equity traders (the equity desk lost 20 of its 24 traders), asking for help from competitors to get into deals, writing eulogies for dead partners, going on CNBC to refute a report that the firm was going out of business, figuring out how to rebuild the computer systems, and on and on.

There was something so raw about him then, so fierce, as if his life truly depended on rebuilding Sandler O’Neill. I remember especially how openly emotional he could be. He would start talking about Mr. Sandler, who had been his mentor, or Mr. Quackenbush, his best friend forever, a man who helped him quit drinking in his 20’s — and his eyes would well up while his voice would start to crack. He always seemed on the verge of losing it. But he never did.

Five years later, Jimmy Dunne met me in his paneled office on Third Avenue and shook my hand. His hair was whiter than it used to be, and he’d gained a little weight. What was most apparent, though, was that the overpowering intensity that had characterized him after 9/11 had lifted.

Once we sat down, he immediately launched into a recitation about how much stronger the firm has become in recent years, with 255 employees, vastly improved research and a better mergers and acquisitions department. Though, he quickly added, things were more difficult this year because the “flat yield curve” was making trading profits tougher to come by.

I had to smile. So did he.

No one will ever accuse Jimmy Dunne of being the perfect boss. “He’s not always the most patient listener, and he can be brutally blunt,” said the firm’s co-chief operating officer, Michael Lacovara, who joined a few years ago. “And I think he believes he can do anybody’s job as well as they can do it themselves.” But, added Mr. Lacovara, “if on Sept. 12, 2001, he hadn’t felt that way, we wouldn’t be here today.” Mr. Dunne turned out to be the exact right person to lead Sandler O’Neill out of the abyss.

“What he did was a little akin to Rudy Giuliani,” said Marc Maltz, the managing partner of the Triad Consulting Group, which worked with the firm, providing both organizational and psychological assistance for two years after 9/11. “He made decisions that gave people confidence. Once Jimmy worked it through in the first 48 hours and concluded that the firm would rebuild, he gave it the kind of leadership that was necessary.”

There were two instinctive decisions he made in particular that would prove enormously beneficial over the long haul. First, he and several other surviving partners — who were also thrust into new leadership roles — made the snap decision that despite its crippled state, the firm would do right by the families of its deceased employees. It extended full benefits for five years for all the families. It set up a foundation to pay for the education of the 71 children who lost a parent who had worked at Sandler O’Neill. It offered years of psychological counseling not just to surviving employees but to family members of the deceased.

And in 2001, it paid out salaries and bonuses as if the employees were still alive and working. It also paid out the deceased partners’ capital to their families, even though that depleted the firm’s own capital. Indeed, as it completed deals or did trades in the latter part of 2001, it shared the proceeds with the families of deceased partners who had been working on those deals before 9/11.

These acts of generosity created a tremendous amount of good will for the firm. It motivated employees and caused clients and competitors and just about everyone else to rally around it. But that’s not why Mr. Dunne took that path. Lots of small firms like to say they’re a family, but at Sandler O’Neill it was actually true. “It really was a firm founded by friends who hired friends,” Mr. Maltz said. More than anything else, the culture of the place drove Mr. Dunne’s decision.

Mr. Dunne’s second decision, equally instinctive and heart-felt, was to cast the rebuilding of Sandler O’Neill in moral terms. Partly, Mr. Dunne used the “they can’t do this to us’’ rhetoric, and partly he made the case that rebuilding the firm was something the deceased would want the survivors to do. But just as important, it gave the living a way to connect with one another, to do something after 9/11 that felt purposeful and important. “The organization had such a deep sense of moral purpose,” marveled Mr. Maltz, who has written several papers about the underpinnings of Sandler O’Neill’s revival.

Karen Fishman, one of the 17 employees who got out of the south tower before it collapsed, said: “Work was a way to deal with what happened. You needed to be with people who experienced what you experienced. You didn’t want the firm to go away, because you needed it.”

As with many Sandler O’Neill survivors, Ms. Fishman was suddenly handed new responsibilities. She buried herself in her work, sometimes thinking, after a 12-hour day, that she hadn’t worked hard enough. But as the firm got stronger, those feelings lifted, and she began to feel instead that she should spend more time with her children. So in 2003, she left the firm. Time was passing. Time was healing.

Mr. Dunne believes that the decisions he and the other new leaders of the firm made back then gave them a confidence they hadn’t had before. And that also helped Sandler O’Neill become a bigger, stronger firm. “It was like we were in a cave, and we were making decisions without having any idea what other firms were doing,” he said. “And then we saw others doing the same things we did. Usually when you are a small firm, you wait to see what the big firms are going to do. But we didn’t wait for anyone’s lead. And I think that has given us the confidence to believe that there isn’t a piece of business in our niche that we shouldn’t compete for — and get.”

Today, of course, the number of employees hired since 9/11 vastly exceeds the number who were there that day. Still, I was astonished to discover that 74 of the 105 employees who worked for Sandler O’Neill on Sept. 12, 2001, are still there. But there’s not much of a gap anymore between the new people and the old ones, as there inevitably was for the first year or so. And for the most part, even the old-timers now view 9/11 as an event that has slowly receded into the past.

“I don’t need to go back there,” said William Hickey, who now helps run the firm’s M.& A. department. “I think about my friends all the time, but I don’t think about the event itself.”

Indeed, the person who probably dwells the most on 9/11 is Mr. Dunne himself. Over time, the firm took down from the walls the many letters of support and grief it had put up after 9/11; Mr. Dunne’s own collection came down last of all, and only at the urging of his sister, who told him that the time had come for him to do so.

But he hasn’t taken them all down. In his office, he has several framed letters, including one from Mr. Quackenbush’s brother, written shortly after the attack, urging him to rebuild the firm. Sandler O’Neill commissioned a sculpture with the names of the deceased employees, and placed it in the lobby of its office. But after a few years, some employees came to feel that it was too omnipresent a reminder of an event they were trying to move beyond. So Mr. Dunne had it moved to a small alcove just outside his own office, where he, at least, can see it every day.

Most of all, Mr. Dunne still feels a sense of moral purpose. It’s just a little different now. Whereas rebuilding was once a way of honoring his deceased partners, now he feels something else. “What are our responsibilities to all the people who helped us or took an interest in seeing us do well?” he said. “We got letters from a farmer in Iowa and a teacher in South Korea. They took the time to say that they respected what we were doing. I feel a large responsibility to the world for helping us survive.”

Not long ago, Mr. Dunne gathered his partners together and told them he wanted to extend the benefits to the families for another three years. Not a single one dissented.

Why did you do that? I asked him. “We did it because we feel fortunate,” he replied, “more fortunate than when we first did it five years ago. It just felt like the right thing to do.”

His voice suddenly cracked, just as it used to before the passage of time.

Some readers are inspired. Others urge Bob to take his head out of the sand

I thought you might be interested in some of the responses I’ve gotten to the “It Just Doesn’t MATTER” screed of November 9. Some of the writers are named, some are not, others are semi-anonymous.(I saved my fave for last.)

Well, maybe it DOES matter

A New England reporter: Nice job saying what needs to be said about what ails newspapers. I’m. . . watching in astonishment as management drives us into the ground. I’m sick of the excuses: “How are we going to attract young readers?” or “Well, you know, the economy, cable television, talk radio, blogs, blah, blah, blah.”

There seem to be a lot of people in this business who either should have gotten out a long time ago or never really had it in the first place. They don’t have a feel for substantive news. They seem bored by it all. What’s sad is that it really could be different, with the right leadership.

–A Midwest reporter:Thanks for writing this. I — we — needed it. When I talk to young reporters, I always advise them to try writing a story they would read. We all should do it.

A Northeast reporter: It’s become almost painful how little swinging for the fences we’re doing. it’s like the gatekeepers in the glass offices haven’t figured out that the blogworld and the instant opinion world can be an opportunity for outlets that can do authoritative work.

There were, as there should be, dissents. Like this:

Vicky McCargar, Associate Technology Editor, and Dave Rickley, Production Editor, Los Angeles Times:Your passionate call for great journalism calls to mind the old paradox of journalism: Is a story a story if it hasn’t been printed?

That koan started morphing in the 1990s to this: Regardless of medium, if a story hasn’t been published, is it a story?

Individual newspapers had a lot of autonomy in the days of the family-owned chain, but media consolidation has turned us all into “business units” of a larger entity. It’s all about sharing, which is all about delivery. That, we think, is an important point to understand if you want to talk about presenting great journalism to the world. Consider:

–The information landscape is a lot more competitive than it was when we all started out in this business. There’s plenty of content out there, and some of it is even great journalism. If we can’t deliver stories, photos and graphics to the right place, at the right time and in the right form, customers will use someone else’s.

–Great journalism is expensive. Media companies are very interested in sharing the results for a couple of reasons. First, that great journalism will enhance all the other newspapers and web sites that publish it. Second, it distributes the costs; more bang for the buck. Hire a great reporter in market A, run his stuff in markets B, C, D and E, and that content just got cheaper. (Not to mention, the reporter in market A gets to continue to write great stories, because there’s now a wider demand for them.)

–Newspapers are still very much wired to a print mentality. Given our time-honored propensity for pushing deadlines, that means that most of the great journalism we’re producing is unavailable to others until late in the print cycle. The math is simple. Papers on the West Coast are two or three hours behind the print deadlines of their corporate brethren. If customers can’t get the stuff they want before 2:30 in the morning, they’ll use someone else’s. Here’s the point: A lot of newsroom processes must undergo a total overhaul.

Paper is an excellent, convenient medium, and great journalism will continue to appear on it. But print has to be viewed as a part of an information whole, not a series of processes that converge on the pressroom at midnight. Like it or not, reinventing the paper comes down to technology. If we want to continue to educate, enlighten, provoke and delight readers with our “unpredictable magic,” we need to embrace technology–harness it, conquer it, exploit it–and use it to share the magic. If we can’t do it, it will be done for us, and we’ll cease to control it. And if we can’t figure it out, people will read someone else’s magic.

A Southern California reporter: Do not concur. It DOES matter… especially when the corporate bean counter taps you on your shoulder and the $10 an hour rent-a-cop gives you 10 minutes to clean out your desk… Nothing could matter more at that moment.

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as a newspaper with a (forced upon us) presence on the web… instead we must evolve into a multi-media news gathering entity that embraces every source of legit information technology in existence.

I am 40… and NONE of my friends read a print newspaper… and they are all college educated middle class professionals… they get their news on TV or the web…

It doesn’t matter how good our product is if no one sees it… We don’t have to die. It is time to collectively pull out heads out of the sand and embrace change.

An L.A. reporter: Those fightin’ words struck me as powerful and inspiring… I can’t wait to keep busting balls on my current project right after breakfast.

A New Jersey editor-in-chief: I posted it on my bulletin board outside my office.

A “news-focused entrepreneur” from Fairfax, Virginia:I wonder. . .whether stimulating reporters to write better is enough. Print newspapers are heading south and in my humble opinion othing is going to change that — it has to do with the medium, not the content. Their online offsprings are in — potentially — better shape, what with the soaring popularity of online ads. However, my “potentially” caveat is cover for what happens when the online version loses the reporting subsidy of its print parent (an inevitability). With so many different online news sources available, consumers seem to view the news story as a total commodity. Regardless (well, not quite regardless, but close) of how well the stories are written, and how much depth is provided, readers seem to be quite willing to flip from source to source.

Some argue that if a news source dramatically steps up its quality, the market will follow. But will it? Many viewers stop at the headlines, and few venture past the lede. How much quality can show forth in the headline and lede only? Probably not enough to pull off a hockey stick rise from the commodity glob.

A corporate-communications specialist: You and people like you focus on the stories, while everybody else seems focused on the means of delivery of those stories. I’ve seen this a thousand times, this chasm between people obsessed by the product — that would be you — and people obsessed by the process. All the conference calls, all the meetings, all the endless e-mails — process trumps product every time. You know why? Because if you’re in the pipeline business, you don’t have to worry about what flows through that pipeline. You just rent the pipes, and what flows through, flows through. In this case, the duelling pipes are print and on-line — and everybody has discounted what’s flowing through them because the fight is about the pipes. It’s a shift in the basic notion of what has more value: This is The Age of The Pipes.

Picture this: Michaelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci at war over which is better, paintings on canvas or frescos. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? That’s because both processes work in their own way — both MEDIUMS work. It should be the same with your biz: not print vs. online but print AND online, each with its own market and sensibility. If the folks who ran your business were smart, they would explain it that way to The Street: we got print, and we got online, and we got broadcasting — we got it all, because people are different and they like it the way they like it. God, in that world of discrete media, the fiery sense of righteousness that informs your point of view would define print and the crazed, get-it-now attitude would define online. But why the people who run your industry insist on accepting Wall Street’s view of print vs. online as opposed to print AND online is beyond me.

Editorial cartoonist Kate Salley Palmer: “Your “mantra” is the best thing I’ve read yet about the situation. It . . . perfectly describes the way we political cartoonists feel. We are like the moth in Don Marquis’s “The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel” –trying to break into a light bulb and fry himself on the wires.

Archy the cockroach reports to Marquis that he questioned the moth’s sanity, But the moth described his love for the beauty and excitement of fire. Moths know that if they get too close it will kill them, but feel that it is better to be happy for a moment than to live a long time and be bored. So they wad all their life up into one little roll and then they shoot the roll. That is what life is for, insists the moth:

“we are like like human beings
used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves.”

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

I know this subject is more complicated than I made it sound. But I also know that there is a limit to any good editor’s or reporter’s tolerance for literal-world economics. What we do requires a peculiar pathology, a weird sense of aggression, a potentially dangerous lack of patience and a healthy (well, more often unhealthy) disdain for common sense. If I wanted a job where I had to wear a tie every day and do the logical, reasonable, prudent thing required to elevate my corporation’s earnings per share, I wouldn’t have gone into the newspaper business. Once you take the insanity out of newspapers, they cease being newspapers. Once you try squeezing a 30% profit out of them, they cease being newspapers. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote, from the great cartoonist Jules Feiffer:

Be warned of the good advice of others. Be warned when they tell you that your attitude is immature. Be warned against all “good” advice because “good” advice is necessarily “safe” advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility–one of the crushing problems of our times.

Recommended reading: New York Times business columnist Joseph Nocera’s Nov. 12 piece put a microscope on part of the issue we’ve been discussing: when can newspapers can get away with charging for stories on their web sites? This is not merely an interesting column, it’s a textbook lesson in explanatory technique. Personally I’m sick of this topic but this story broke down my resistance with its sequential logic and sympathetic ending.

TRYING TO WEAN INTERNET USERS FROM FREE
By Joseph Nocera

People hate, hate, hate to subscribe to things on the Internet,” Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, said a few weeks ago.

Mr. Gates was sitting in the 14th-floor boardroom of The New York Times, speaking to a small gathering of executives, editors, editorial board members and reporters. Rather painfully for us, while he was making a broad point about consumers and the Web, the specific example under discussion was TimesSelect. That, of course, is this company’s nearly two-month experiment to, well, see if people will subscribe to things on the Internet.

Or at least to see if they’ll pay a subscription fee to read New York Times columnists online. For years now, The Times has largely posted its content free, relying on advertising to generate revenue. With the TimesSelect program, however, the columnists have been put behind a wall.

Newspaper subscribers can still read the columnists online free — though they have to sign up for TimesSelect to do so. But those who read The Times only online must now pay $49.95 a year (or $7.95 a month) to get their fix of Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich and the newspaper’s other columnists, myself included. (TimesSelect subscribers also gain access to the newspaper’s archives and some other online-only goodies.)

From the start, TimesSelect has been controversial. Part of the opposition comes from that segment of the digerati who tend to believe that information on the Internet should be free as a matter of principle. Others simply don’t want to pay for something they’re used to getting free. Twice in the last month or so, I’ve had the odd experience of having wealthy Wall Street guys I’ve interviewed for this column ask me to e-mail it to them because they refuse to subscribe to TimesSelect.

There are other, more philosophical, objections as well. Mickey Kaus, an unrelenting critic of TimesSelect who writes the popular kausfiles blog for the Slate online magazine, told me recently that he had no particular objection to paying for Internet content. ”What I object to,” he said, ”is the idea that The New York Times is essentially saying that its columnists’ opinions are so much superior to everyone else’s that they are going to charge for it.”

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who writes a blog called PressThink, said he believed that the move would wind up hurting the columnists. ”What is the product?” he said. ”It’s influence.” With so much of the political conversation now taking place online, he said, Times columnists would inevitably be less influential if only paying subscribers could read them. This view is shared by some of the columnists themselves.

So it was a bit of a surprise, after all the sturm und drang, to see the early results of The Times’s online subscription experiment. They’re not half bad. In a news release issued Wednesday morning, the company reported that since it began in mid-September, TimesSelect has generated 270,000 subscribers, half of whom already subscribed to the newspaper (and hence get the new service free) and half of whom were plunking down cold, hard cash.

To be sure, that is a far cry from the million-plus people who spend as much as $600 a year to buy the dead-tree version of The Times, and it’s not even remotely close to the 20 million-plus ”unique visitors” who come to the Times Web site each month. But it’s something. Martin Nisenholtz, who is in charge of digital operations for The New York Times Company, told me that the numbers were ”at the high end” of expectations.

It is far too early, of course, to predict whether TimesSelect will ultimately succeed. The roughly 135,000 online-only subscribers could represent a new willingness on the part of consumers to pay for newspaper content online — or not. But what I’ve wound up wondering is whether, even if it is a roaring success, TimesSelect — and other online subscription models that are bound to follow — will be enough to stop the erosion of the economics that underlie newspaper journalism. I’m not terribly sanguine.

Mr. Nisenholtz said that The Times had always assumed that it would eventually find a second revenue stream. ”Advertising is always going to be cyclical,” he said. ”And businesses that have only one revenue stream tend not to be as healthy as those with multiple revenue streams.”

It is hardly a surprise that a newspaper company executive would want to generate subscription revenue as well as advertising revenue: that’s the way it has always worked in the business. Today, for instance, 27 percent of The Times’s revenue comes from circulation, and 66 percent from advertising. (The other 7 percent come from things like syndication.) Indeed, in the world of paper and print, a healthy paid circulation helps generate ad revenue, because advertisers like to see that readers care enough about a publication to pay for it.

But on the Internet, general interest publications charge for content at their peril. The Wall Street Journal has largely pulled it off — it has 764,000 subscribers to its Web site, and it even charges people who subscribe to the actual newspaper (though at a reduced rate).

But The Journal is the exception to the rule. In 1998, Slate magazine put its site behind a paid wall. It was a dismal failure — ”the worst year in Slate’s history,” recalls the editor, Jacob Weisberg, who was then a writer for the site. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried to get readers to pay for some of its online sports content; it gave up after a year. For two years, The Los Angeles Times charged readers for its online Calendarlive section; it threw in the towel in May.

These efforts didn’t work because they generated too few subscribers to interest advertisers. Calendarlive was particularly misguided because the movie and other entertainment listings it produced were exactly the kind of content advertisers love. Which also helps explain the series of choices The New York Times has made. Like many newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Times focused on generating large numbers of viewers that it could deliver to advertisers. To do that, it needed to keep its content free, even if it meant that some readers were bound to give up their newspaper subscription and go to the free Web site instead.

And then, when the company decided that its Web operation was strong enough that it could experiment with a second revenue stream, it chose to use its columnists as the guinea pigs for basic economic reasons.

For starters, the Op-Ed columnists in particular are popular with readers, so there was a decent chance that consumers might be willing to pay to read them. In addition, though, moving the columnists from free to paid brought the least risk of cutting into advertising revenue. You’ll notice that the company hasn’t put New York Times movie reviewers, who are also quite popular, into TimesSelect. Movie and entertainment pages are as important to New York Times advertisers as they are to Los Angeles Times advertisers.

From a purely business point of view, this all makes a reasonable amount of sense. TimesSelect strikes me as a worthy experiment, even with the obvious downside for the paper’s columnists, who don’t have the readership they had before going behind the paid wall.

Besides, at a time when newspapers are struggling — with circulation down at many newspapers, and readers and advertisers increasingly moving to the Internet — The Times has to do everything it can to find ways to maximize the amount of money it generates from its Web site. So does any newspaper that wants to continue doing ambitious journalism. When journalists criticize TimesSelect, Mr. Nisenholtz said, they seem to forget that the primary goal is to find a business model that will make it possible to continue paying for serious journalism, which at The Times costs over $200 million a year.

This, though, is precisely where I become discouraged. Look at what happened to the music industry, which tried — and has largely failed — to sustain its pre-Internet revenue as the Web destroyed its business model. It has ham-handedly tried to beat back technology with litigation, but no matter how many courtroom victories it reaps, the technology keeps winning in the marketplace.

Or look at what is happening to telephony, or film, or all sorts of businesses that are undergoing wrenching change thanks to the rise of the Internet. Margins shrink. Revenue drops. Profits dwindle.

From where I’m sitting, it sure looks as if the same is happening in the newspaper business. The ruthless efficiency of the Internet, for instance, is changing the way ads are paid for. In print, an advertiser places an ad and pays for it — end of story. Online, most ads generate revenue only when readers click on them. And the rates are much lower.

William G. Bird, a Citigroup analyst who covers the newspaper business, says that 6 percent of all newspaper ads are now online. He compared it to taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another. But here’s the painful twist: ”For every dollar coming out of the dead-tree pocket,” he said, ”only 33 cents is going back into the online pocket.”

Doesn’t TimesSelect — which, remember, costs $49.95 a year — suggest that down the line, there will be a similar contraction in circulation revenue? And that’s if the experiment succeeds! Yes, as more readers gravitate to the Web, distribution and paper costs will surely be reduced. But it’s highly unlikely that those savings will offset the hit to revenues.

Esther Dyson, who edits the influential technology newsletter Release 1.0, compared the Internet’s effect on newspapers to the effect of the open source movement on the software industry: ”It doesn’t steal your business,” she said. ”It erodes it.”

As a business journalist, I’ve tended not to worry a lot about music executives trying to salvage their broken business model. My general view has been that if they can’t adapt to disruptive technologies, then they probably deserve their fate. But in the six months I’ve been in the newspaper business, I’ve learned to have some sympathy for those who are staring down the barrel of the Internet.

It’s not fun.

A new mantra for the next time Chicken Little crosses your path

I wrote this as an introduction to a presentation I was supposed to give last month to a gathering of assignment editors in Indianapolis. Unfortunately (or maybe not) I had to slash most of it because of time constraints. But I remembered it a couple days ago when the latest round of morbid newspaper circulation figures came out. So here it is, in full, including a new mantra for our times.

'It just doesn't MATTER'

Good morning.

Funny, you don’t look like corpses.

If I believed everything I’d been reading about the hopelessness of our business, I would have stayed in Los Angeles. What’s the point of trying to get better at something that so many smart people say is irrelevant?

The right wing says we’re too biased. The left wing says we’re too passive. The boggers say we’re irrelevant. The stock analysts say we’re too “mature.”

From the New York Times, October 10: “The industry faces a wave of job cuts. . .New York Times, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Daily News Baltimore Sun, Newsday. . . Ad revenue is flat, costs are up and circulation is eroding. Beyond the industry’s economic woes, the future is clouded by the rapid expansion of the Internet, leaving newspapers in an identity crisis as they try to come to grips with fundamental changes in the industry and society that are significantly curbing their growth.”

Los Angeles Times, same day: “The buyouts and layoffs have dispirited many newspeople because they come at a time of steady declines in circulation and advertising.

“The falling morale sometimes is cast in vivid terms, as when Philadelphia Inquirer metropolitan columnist Tom Ferrick Jr. protested the 75 job cuts ordered by Knight-Ridder Inc., his paper’s corporate parent.

“‘They say Knight-Ridder doesn’t have a plan. Actually they do,’” Ferrick said in an interview. ‘They are going to jettison the old, shoot the young and … torture the survivors, which, come to think of it, seems to be an industrywide plan.’”

Most of the people who own newspapers have tried to focus-group or re-design themselves out of this mess. The idea that most people in most newsrooms are working at half of their intellectual potential. . . the idea that our papers are about half as interesting every day as they could be. . . the idea that that’s part of the solution is regarded as. . .so. . .quaint.

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of listening to our obituaries. I ACCEPT death: Everybody dies sometime. If newspapers are going to die, as most “smart” people seem to think, let’s go down swinging. Let’s go down like the Texans at the Alamo. Let’s publish the best, most interesting, most audacious stories we can, on our own terms. Let’s not be businessmen. Let’s be artists. Let’s put our art–the stories we love to write, edit and publish–on the market and see who buys it.

Let’s be all the things we love to read. Let’s astonish our audience. Let’s stop asking our readers what they want. Let’s remember, as Frank Capra, the great director, once said, that “the audience doesn’t know what it wants–until it sees it.”

Unless we want to change the questions we ask. Like: Would you subscribe to a paper that published one story every day that made you think about something you never thought about before? (Later thought: Like the New York Times’ lead Science page story Nov. 8 about the vast difference in the amount of time different animals sleep, and what it might mean to humans.) Or gave you something to talk about with your wife or husband over dinner? Or was so riveting it made you 10 minutes late for work?

Nothing I am going to say to you today or tomorrow has anything to do with the “survival” of newspapers. It has to do with: Can you, as an editor, be better tomorrow than you are today? Can you figure out a way to use the best part of yourself a little more often with each interaction with each of your reporters, so that the best part of you touches the best part of him or her a little more often? There’s no instructional manual or tip sheet or research-driven findings about how to do that because only you know that individual reporter, and only you know YOU–your personality, your hopes and fears, your inhibitions, your gifts.

I was trying to explain to somebody recently how frustrating it had been to think about writing a book on line editing: It’s so personality-driven. Most of the time when I was a line editor I approached my job as if I were a social worker and my job was to make my “clients” feel like they couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and come to work every day. But that was just a personal idiosyncrasy, a trick, since most of the years I was an editor I really wanted to go back to reporting. You ask a dozen good editors about how they do their jobs, you get a dozen different metaphors.

Today and tomorrow, don’t worry about the fate of the industry. You can’t change that. Think about, instead, a Bill Murray summer-camp movie called “Meatballs,” in which he was counseling a group of boys who were going to compete against another, far more privileged camp. The night before, Murray’s character gives the kids a pep talk:

“Even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to 10 days; even if God in Heaven above points his hand at our side of the field; even if every man, woman and child joined hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn’t MATTER because all the really good-looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk because they’ve got all the money! It just doesn’t MATTER if we win or if we lose. It just doesn’t MATTER.”

In the same vein, it doesn’t matter if our newspapers make 15% profit or 30% profit. It doesn’t matter what Wall Street says. It doesn’t matter if circulation goes up or down. All that matters is, like the Texans at the Alamo, you fight as hard as you can as long as you can. All that matters is: What did you to do today to get better? What did you learn? What did you teach? What did you promise yourself you’d do better next time? There is vastly more honor in answering those questions than in trying to convert an institution steeped in unpredictable magic into a “successful” consumer product.

A first-person tale of the price of self-deception

Several weeks ago a conceit fell upon me. It went like this: I had been solicited by the New York Times to write a short profile on a very smart screenwriter named John August, best known for writing “Go” and the forthcoming script of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” My conceit was, I had written a piece that didn’t sound like it belonged in the soberly brilliant NYT, and I wanted to see if I could sucker them into printing it.

Conceit bites writer!

This turned out to be a mistake No. 1. (Mistake No. 2 was allowing a factual error to creep into the piece, which I’ll confess as we get into the text.) The piece that was published looked nothing like what I submitted. This is not a protest–I had my reasons for what I tried to do, and I failed. But I thought from my disappointment I might share with you what happens when your piece undergoes major surgery.

The first version I turned in was obsessed with the concept of “cool.” I really, really liked John August, who is very smart, appropriately humble and earnest–a guy who simply seems comfortable with himself. Nothing about him is classically “cool” but there were numerous aspects of his life that intrigued me. I knew I needed to choose one aspect to lead the piece, but I didn’t want to. So I tried to substitute “cool” as an organizing principle.

Here’s what happened. (My comments in caps or bold-faced in parenthesis.)

VERSION ONE

Screenwriter John August is cool because in his mid-20s he wrote “Go,” a riveting if unsuccessful 1998 movie that started with a young supermarket clerk’s attempt to pay rent by selling drugs and exploded into three intersecting stories filled with stunning wrong turns.

Mr. August is still cool because, a few months short of 35, he retains a boyish earnestness that Hollywood usually strips from its participants before swallowing them. When he uses “a dream come true” to describe being chosen by director Tim Burton to adapt “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which opens July 15, he means it.

Mr. August walks out of the living room of his mini-mansion in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire district, returns with a 1977 postcard and takes you back to the third grade in Boulder, Colorado.

His teacher, he explains, asked everyone to write a letter to a famous person. President Carter was the most common choice. August, having already read “Charlie,” wrote to its British author, Roald Dahl, and received a response: “A letter from England, which was so cool.” (A bit later someone would break the news to the boy that the card was a form letter.)

Mr. August is also cool because he loves creating stories in which characters inhabit what he describes as a “second world.” In adapting “Charlie,” which stars Johnny Depp as candy baron Willie Wonka, Burton wanted a script that followed Dahl’s text more faithfully than the 1971 film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder. The book offered no guidance about Willie’s boyhood. So August made him the son of a renowned, candy-hating dentist.

In one flashback, Wonka’s father throws his son’s Halloween candy into the fireplace; in another flashback, Wonka finds one piece spared from the flames and bites in. Then, Mr. August wrote in the script, the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” begin to play, and “we begin a spinning perspective shot that would leave Hitchcock jealous. In little Willie’s eyes we see a reaction. He’s like Isaac Newton getting beaned by the apple…”

Mr. August is also cool simply for the way he describes the “weird ah-ha moment” at age 10 when he discovered screenwriting. He already liked to write, he said, but while watching a rented tape of the black comedy “The War of the Roses” it occurred to him that “everything they were saying and doing was written someplace. So I tried to write down the dialogue and find out what that was like…I thought maybe I could be one of the guys who did that.”

(The error in that last paragraph is that August was 19 when that movie came out, not 10. Had I looked up the release date I would have caught the discrepancy. August later told me he just got his numbers mixed up, that the actual experience was valid. I was too trusting, and it engendered laziness.)

He studied advertising and journalism at Drake University in Iowa, attended a summer film program at Stanford and was accepted at USC’s prestigious two-year graduate program in film production, arriving with what he describes as “a hell of an inferiority complex; everybody else seemed to know so much more than I did.”

He conquered that by graduation. Then a trio of breaks fell his way in about a year and a half of the late ’90s: He sold “Go,” which eventually wound up at Columbia Pictures, which hired director Doug Liman, who’d made another cool picture, “Swingers.” Then his new agent sent him a copy of “The Big Fish,” a fanciful Southern novel about a dying, larger-than-life father written by David Foster Wallace.

Mr. August fell in love with the novel.

“As I was flipping pages I was adding characters and moving scenes around.” He’d lost his father at about the same age as the novel’s son. “I knew how to do dying when the story is about more than dying.”

But before he could write the screenplay Columbia asked him to join the dozen or so writers who were trying to salvage a remake of television’s “Charlie’s Angels.” Co-star and co-producer Drew Barrymore was a fan of “Go.”

It is another mark of Mr. August’s cool that he has no regrets for having said “Yes” with an exclamation point. He loves “Charlie’s Angels” the way only a kid nourished by stylized ’70s TV can. “Where other people are well-read, I’ve seen so much television.” He favored a duality: Three women (Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Lu) who were “incredibly proficient on their jobs, and giant dorks when they were off the job. Because comedy isn’t about cool people; comedy is about dorks and idiots.”

He worked on the first “Angels” remake and its sequel. Meanwhile, director Burton was brought into “Big Fish” and developed a fondness for August’s ability to write sweetly without falling into the ditch of sentimentality. “With families, you can go trough years of therapy and not know what it’s about,” Burton said. “His script touched on that abstract nature…his great gift is capturing those things that are quite difficult to discuss.”

Says August: “You avoid being sappy by being honest but optimistic.”

Burton called on August to write the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” adaptation, which August said he finished in four weeks, “changing my style a bit to sound like Dahl wherever I could.

Meanwhile the diversity of his work caught up with him. In 2004 he was nominated as best adapted screenplay by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “Big Fish”-and nominated for worst screenplay for the “Charlie’s Angels” sequel by a Hollywood group that honors what it calls “raspberries.” “Did you actually read the screenplay?” Mr. August asks his critics rhetorically. Screenplay is “the only category where you’re not looking at what the writer did, you’re guessing about what the screenplay must have been like. If they’d read the screenplay for the second ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ they might have liked it.”

Mr. August is also cool to aspiring screenwriters because he shares his wisdom on a web site he built. (“I’ve always been a big techno-geeky nerd.”) On a recent Spring morning he could have been toying with a script he is writing and hopes to direct, or with a musical adaptation he won’t disclose, or a movie he is co-producing for Jerry Brukheimer based on the video game “Prince of Persia.”

Instead, as he does every day, he went to www.johnaugust.com, and decided which nuts-and-bolts question to answer. He selected a query from a British screenwriter who was uncertain whether to revise spelling and slang when he submit a script to American studios.

By 8 a.m. August had dashed off this advice: “..If you do set it in America, with American characters, you’re probably better off using American spellings throughout. That way, there’s no weird disconnect when Tyrell starts talking about “gang colours….Having said this, a UK writer shouldn’t worry about being too British. Or Scottish. Or whatever. There’s a long history of talented filmmakers crossing the Atlantic to work in Hollywood (and vice-versa). You shouldn’t try to sublimate your natural writing style to match some mythical American standard.”

“He has a great generosity of spirit,” said Howard A. Rodman, who chairs the division of writing at USC’s Schol of Cinema-Television. Mr. Rodman said Mr. August once visited a seminar of six students and spent three hours showing them how to build a script with index cards. “I can think of very few alumni who are regarded by USC students with that level of enthusiasm and respect.”

Mr. August is gay but says sexual orientation “has never been a big issue” in his work,” and doesn’t expect it to be. He believes he learned to be a student of human detail by spending the first 20 years of his life “observing the world and trying to model my behavior to look as straight as possible. It’s sort of this psychological ‘CSI’ you’re doing on a daily basis; you’re always looking for motivation…I suspect ever gay screenwriter has a big gay catharsis movie inside them, but then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie and there’s not a pressing need for you to do yours.”

Mr. August is cool, finally, because he’s convinced he’s not. “After ‘Go,’ I wanted to make sure I was not [pigeonholed] as the guy who did teenagers causing havoc…When I first sat down with people, they were expecting somebody with tattoos and multiple ear-piercings. I’m just a pretty sedate Midwestern guy; I’ve never felt remotely cool.”

Mr. August (he uses his middle name because he got tired of spelling his last name, Meise) lives with his partner of five years, Mike Douglass. They are expecting a baby, being carried by a surrogate. The child is due-even this is cool–in August.

I SHOWED THAT VERSION TO A COUPLE FRIENDS AND THEY THOUGHT I WAS IGNORING AN INTERESTING CONTRAST–AUGUST WAS MORE UN-COOL THAN COOL, EVEN BY HIS OWN DESCRIPTION. BUT I WAS DETERMINED TO MAKE “COOL” THE BYWORD, SO I DECIDED TO USE AUGUST’S DEMUR IN THE SECOND AND THIRD GRAFS:

Screenwriter John August first became cool when, in his mid-20s, he wrote “Go,” the stunning if commercially unsuccessful 1999 movie in which a grocery clerk who tries to pay her rent by selling drugs sets an explosion of wrong turns.

Mr. August will have none of this. He remembers taking meetings after “Go” with producers who “were expecting somebody with tattoos and multiple ear-piercings. I’m just a pretty sedate Midwestern guy; I’ve never felt remotely cool.”

Which is what makes a guy cool. Ignore the appearance–6-feet tall, 170 pounds with a shaved head (“I don’t want to be one of those guys who thinks he’s not bald when it’s pretty clear he is”) and a pleasant countenance. Mr. August is still cool because, a few months short of 35, he retains a boyish earnestness that Hollywood usually strips from its participants before swallowing them. When he uses the cliché “a dream come true” to describe being chosen by director Tim Burton to adapt “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which opens July 15, he means it.

(Then back up to the original . . . .)

Mr. August walks out of the living room of his three-bedroom home in Los Angeles’ lush Hancock Park district, the byproduct of polishing scripts like “Charlie’s Angels,” and writing unproduced ones like “Barbarella” and “Tarzan.” He returns with a 28-year-old postcard and takes you back to the third grade in Boulder, Colorado.

His teacher, he explains, asked everyone to write a letter to a famous person. President Carter was. . . .

AND THAT WAS THE VERSION I SHIPPED TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, WHERE A LINE EDITOR TOLD ME THE WRITING WAS LOVELY–BUT JUST NOT FOR THE NYT, WHERE MOST SUBSCRIBERS ARE NOT “COOL” AND WOULD GET CONFUSED BY THE BOMBARDMENT OF THAT TERM.

THE EDITOR ADVISED THAT I FIND SOMETHING MORE SPECIFIC ABOUT AUGUST TO START THE STORY–HIS WEB SITE WAS INTRIGUING. SO, I OFFERED, WAS HIS WRITING THE “CHARLIE” SCRIPT, WHICH PROVIDED THE TIME ANGLE. “WHICH DO YOU WANT?” I ASKED. “YOUR CALL,” SHE SAID, WHICH WAS EXACTLY WHAT A GOOD EDITOR SHOULD SAY IN A MOMENT LIKE THAT. I FELT DEFEATED BUT NOT CRUSHED.

SO I CHOOSE THE WEB SITE AS THE TOP. I JUST MOVED IT UP FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY AND USED A CHEAP TRICK TO CONTRAST THE WEB WITH ALL THE OTHER STUFF ON AUGUST’S PLATE (INCLUDING “CHARLIE”):

John August, one of Hollywood’s most in-demand script polishers, could have been toying with any number of personal projects on a recent Spring morning: there was a script he is writing and hopes to direct. There was the musical adaptation of a book. There was a movie he is co-producing for Jerry Bruckheimer based on the video game “Prince of Persia.” There was his upcoming vacation/script-research in China. And looming over all of it was July 15, the day his adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp, opens in theaters.

Instead, as he does most every day, Mr. August sat down at his computer and logged on to www.johnaugust.com, where he regularly shares his wisdom with aspiring writers who pelt him with questions like: Should I pay to enter a pitch fest? Should I take a job rewriting a bad movie? How much parenthetical emotional guidance should my script give an actor? Does “based on a true story” have any legal weight? What kind of printer do you use?

On this morning Mr. August selected a query from a woman asking about legal rights involved in adapting a friend’s discarded memoir for a screenplay-unbeknownst to the friend. Mr. August told the woman she was on shaky grounds legally, then added: “I think you’re a pretty crappy friend. So what if [her friend] can’t write a good memoir? That doesn’t give you the right to make the movie version…without consulting him first. My advice: tell him what you did, and show him the script. Maybe he’ll love it. Maybe he’ll hate it and stop being your friend. I can’t say I’d blame him.”

(A couple hours on the web and a few interviews allowed me to put his site into perspective.)

There are scores of web sites run by screenwriters, most of them of limited credentials, and a few others run by pros geared to working writers. Mr. August’s site, by contrast, draws an audience more reminiscent of USC’s film school, where earned a graduate degree little more than a decade ago. The site reflects not only Mr. August’s talent for explanation but his enjoyment of it, and reveals him to be, in his words, a “big techno-geeky nerd”: He built and administers the site by himself.

(Then a little bit about his career arc. . . )

Mr. August, 34, has won a reputation for versatility by writing “Go,” the riveting 1999 commercial flop about disaffected youths directed by Doug Liman (“Swingers”)and a much-praised screen adaptation of the novel “Big Fish,” directed by Burton, in 2003. In between, Mr. August has made enough money to afford a spacious home in L.A.’s pricey Hancock Park district as a script doctor on projects including “Charlie’s Angels” and yet-to-be-made scripts including “Fantasy Island and “Barbarella.”

For all that success, www.johnaugust.com has a decidedly humble, nuts-and-bolts sensibility. Send Mr. August an e-mail about whether to use location “slug lines” (INT. OR EXT.)when two people are conversing from different locations and he’ll answer: “Behold the magic that is ‘INTERCUT.’ Then you don’t have to keep doing the location slug lines.” To cheer the struggling masses, Mr. August posts a list of the 11 full-length scripts he has sold or written on spec that have never been shot.

Mr. August started giving advice through the web site IMDB’s “Ask a Screenwriter” feature in 2000, then set up his site two years ago and transferred his IMBD advice there. The result is an archives with more than 400 entries. Mr. August, who jokes that operating the site “is an excuse not to work,” describes it as “one of those pay it back, pay it forward things.”

Mr. August retains a boyish earnestness that Hollywood usually strips from its children before swallowing them. When he uses the cliché “a dream come true” to describe being chosen by director Burton to adapt “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” he illustrates it with a 28-year-old postcard from the third grade in Boulder, Colo.

His teacher asked everyone to write a letter to a famous person. President Carter was the consensus choice. Young John, having already read “Charlie,” wrote to its British author, Roald Dahl, [cq] and received a response.

In adapting “Charlie,” director Burton wanted a script that followed Dahl’s text more faithfully than the 1971 film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder. However, the book offered no guidance about Willie’s boyhood. So Mr. August, fond of characters who inhabit what he describes as a “second world,” made him the son of a renowned, candy-hating dentist.

In one of the script’s flashbacks, Wonka’s father throws his son’s Halloween candy into the fireplace; in another flashback, Willie finds one piece spared from the flames and bites in. Then, the script says, the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” begin to play, and “we begin a spinning perspective shot that would leave Hitchcock jealous. In little Willie’s eyes we see a reaction. He’s like Isaac Newton getting beaned by the apple…”

Mr. August said he discovered his craft-to-be at 10 while watching a rented tape of the black comedy “The War of the Roses.” It occurred to him that “everything the actors were saying and doing was written someplace. So I tried to write down the dialogue and find out what that was like.”

He studied advertising and journalism at Drake University in Iowa, attended a summer film program at Stanford and was accepted at USC’s prestigious two-year graduate program in film production, arriving with what he describes as “a hell of an inferiority complex; everybody else seemed to know so much more than I did.”

He conquered that by graduation, and in the late ’90s a trio of breaks fell his way in about a year and a half: He sold “Go,” which eventually wound up at Columbia Pictures. Then Mr. August’s new agent sent him “Big Fish,” a fanciful Southern novel by Daniel Wallace about a dying, larger-than-life father. Mr. August fell in love with the book. “As I was flipping pages I was adding characters and moving scenes around.” He’d lost his father at about the same age as the novel’s son/narrator. “I knew how to do dying when the story is about more than dying.”

But before he could write the screenplay Columbia asked him to join the dozen or so writers who were trying to salvage a remake of television’s “Charlie’s Angels.” Co-star and producer Drew Barrymore was a fan of “Go.” Mr. August said “Yes” with an exclamation point. He unapologetically loves “Charlie’s Angels.” “Where other people are well-read, I’ve seen so much television.” He vowed to write an affectionate, “giant hug” to the show he’d grown up with, celebrating the Angels’ duality: Three women (Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Lu) who were “incredibly proficient on their jobs, and giant dorks when they were off the job. Because comedy isn’t about cool people; comedy is about dorks and idiots.”

Meanwhile, director Burton was brought on to “Big Fish” and developed a fondness for Mr. August’s ability to write sweetly without falling into the ditch of sentimentality. “That was the tricky thing he did very well,” Burton said. “My vomit meter was on high alert…With families, you can go through years of therapy and not know what it’s about…His script touched on that abstract nature…his great gift is capturing those things that are quite difficult to discuss.” Says Mr. August: “You avoid being sappy by being honest but optimistic.”

Burton next called on Mr. August to write the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” adaptation, which Mr. August said he rushed out in four weeks, “changing my style a bit to sound like Dahl wherever I could.”

(I marked two grafs as optional trims because the assignment had been 1,200 to 1,400 words and I, of course, wrote more.)

NEXT GRAF OPTIONAL TRIM

Some fans of Mr. August pine for more of his “Go” sensibility and less of his fascination with pop culture icons. They took some satisfaction last year when he was nominated in the best-adapted-screenplay category by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “Big Fish” and nominated in the worst-screenplay category for the “Charlie’s Angels” sequel by a Hollywood group that honors “raspberries.”

END OPTIONAL TRIM

(Now we come back to the personal detail.)

Mr. August is 6 feet tall, 170 pounds with a shaved head. (“I don’t want to be one of those guys who thinks he’s not bald when it’s pretty clear he is.”) He is also gay; he and his partner of five years, Mike Douglass, [cq] are expecting a baby, being carried by a surrogate, this summer.

Mr. August says his sexual orientation shaped his talent for human detail far more than it shaped his choice of story themes. He said he spent the first 20 years of his life “observing the world and trying to model my behavior to look as straight as possible. It’s sort of this psychological ‘CSI’ you’re doing on a daily basis. You’re always looking for motivation.

LAST GRAF OPTIONAL TRIM

“I suspect every gay screenwriter has a big gay-catharsis movie inside them, but then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie and there’s not a pressing need for you to do yours.”

THE EDITOR WAS VERY HAPPY WITH THAT STRUCTURE BUT FELT THE ENDING WAS WEAK. IN THIS SHE WAS RIGHT. I NEEDED TO FIND A WAY TO RESONATE THE BEGINNING-TO CREATE A FEELING OF COMPLETENESS. THIS WOULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED, BUT HERE IS A CHRONICLE OF THE ATTEMPTS:

I SUBMITTED AN ENDING THAT PLAYED WITH THAT “COOL” VIBE:

Some fans of Mr. August’s early work dismiss his pop-culture fascination and pine for the cooler, edgy sensibility of “Go,” in which a grocery clerk (Sarah Polley) sets off an explosion of wrong turns and colliding storylines when she tries to stave off eviction by selling bogus hits of the drug ecstasy. Mr. August cautions against stereotypes, remembering meetings after “Go” with producers who “were expecting somebody with tattoos and multiple ear-piercings. I’m just a pretty sedate Midwestern guy. I’ve never felt remotely cool.”

The “Go” crowd took some satisfaction last year when Mr. August was nominated in the best-adapted-screenplay category by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “Big Fish” and nominated in the worst-screenplay category for the “Charlie’s Angels” sequel by a Hollywood group that honors “raspberries.”

“Did you actually read the screenplay?” Mr. August rhetorically asks his critics with no apparent rancor. Screenplay, he reminds them, is “the only category where you’re not looking at what the writer did; you’re guessing about what the screenplay must have been like.

“If they’d read the screenplay for the second ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ they might have liked it.”

MEANWHILE THE STORY PROCEEDED UP ANOTHER RUNG OF EDITING. THIS WAS INSTRUCTIVE TO ME BECAUSE OF A FLOURISH THE NYT HAS–THE USE OF SEVERAL CLAUSES WITHIN A SENTENCE, ELOGATING AND ENRICHING THE SENTENCE SOMETIMES, MAKING IT FAT AND UNWIELDY OTHER TIMES. (SORT OF LIKE WHAT I JUST TYPED.)

I’LL SHOW YOU WITH CAPS HOW THE EXTRA CLAUSES WERE INSERTED INTO THE SECOND GRAF. THIS VIRTUALLY SABOTAGED THE PARAGRAPH–A CRUCIAL ONE, SINCE IT ITRODUCED US TO THE WEB SITE:

But INSTEAD, AS Mr. August sat down at the computer IN HIS SPACIOUS HANCOCK PARK house–WHERE HE LIVES WITH HIS PARTNER OF FIVE YEARS, MIKE DOUGLASS–he logged on, as he does most every day, to www.johnaugust.com to let aspiring writers pelt him with questions. Should I take a job rewriting a bad movie? How much guidance should my script give the actors? Does “based on a true story” have any legal meaning? What kind of printer do you use?

On this morning, Mr. August selected a query from a woman asking about legal rights involved in adapting a friend’s discarded memoir. . .

COOLER HEADS WOULD REMOVE SOME OF THAT CLAUSE OVERKILL. BUT THE ENDING REMAINED A PROBLEM TO THIS NEW EDITOR. SHE SUGGESTED–CORRECTLY–THAT THE ENDING HAD TO ALLUDE BACK TO AUGUST’S WEB SITE. LUCKILY FOR ME, A COUPLE DAYS EARLIER AUGUST HAD CHRONICLED A WEIRD SCENE AT A LOCAL TAKE-OUT JOINT. I SUBMITTED THE FOLLOWING ENDING, APOLOGIZING FOR THE FACT THAT IT WOULD AKE THE STORY LONGER.

THE ENDING CAME AFTER THE GRAF ENDING “‘Big Fish’ and nominated in the worst-screenplay category for the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ sequel by a Hollywood group that honors ‘rasperries.’”

Mr. August’s greets that dichotomy with a smile. He can afford it. On his side are a number of film executives who prize not only his talent but his ability to work well with difficult directors and a mounting fan base on his web site, increasingly charmed by August’s ability to find writing lessons everywhere-even in a confrontation outside a neighborhood take-out chicken restaurant.

Mr. August posted that story a couple weeks ago. [5/7] It seems he’d been picking up dinner when he saw a man holding tight to the roof rack of an SUV while the female driver tried to drive away. “Here’s my thought process,” he typed the next morning and listed 16 questions or impulses that shot through him as he watched the action: the woman was on the cell phone; the man kept knocking on the windows; he was saying “I need to talk to you?” But wasn’t saying her name-does he really know her? Where is the nearest police station? “I bet he’s a parking attendant and she drove off without paying.”

Then, “John August Concerned Citizen slowly reverted into John August Screenwriter,” Mr. August wrote, “as I tried to construct scenarios to explain what had just happened. The parking lot attendant theory made the most sense…but the other scenarios – Furious Boyfriend, Eerily Calm Stalker, Random Psycho – also seemed to fit.

“After watching this scene unfold, I wasn’t even sure what ‘genre’ it belonged in. If you put Will Ferrell in the guy’s role, clinging to the side of an SUV, then it’s a comedy. Hugh Grant, and it’s a romantic comedy. Sean Penn, and it’s a thriller. (Unless Sean Penn’s playing retarded, then it’s “I Am Sam.”)

“As I was driving home a few minutes later, I kept mulling over the scene – though part of me was busier contemplating actors and their career choices. Sean Penn used to be funny, damn it. C’mon, Spicoli!”

(The last graf was a tortured attempt on my part to allude to August’s own characterization higher in the story.)

Clearly, to use Mr. August’s standard, this was more fun than playing a video game.

OKAY, HERE IS HOW THE STORY RAN ON MAY 22 IN THE ARTS AND LEISURE SECTION. YOU CAN READ IT COMPLETELY IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GREATER DETAIL, OR YOU CAN CHECK OUT THE ENDING, WHICH I FELT WAS NO LESS TORTURED THAN MINE. MORE ON THAT AFTER THIS FINAL VERSION):

LOS ANGELES — John August, one of Hollywood’s most in-demand script polishers, could have been working on any number of projects on a recent spring morning. There was the script he is writing and hoping to direct. There was the musical adaptation of a novel. There was a movie based on the video game ”Prince of Persia,” on which he is serving as an executive producer for Jerry Bruckheimer. And looming over all was July 15, the day his adaptation of ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp, opens in theaters.

But instead, as Mr. August sat down at the computer in his spacious Hancock Park house, he logged on, as he does most every day, to www.johnaugust.com , where aspiring writers pelt him with questions. Should I take a job rewriting a bad movie? How much guidance should my script give the actors? Does ”based on a true story” have any legal meaning? What kind of printer do you use?

On this morning, Mr. August selected a query from a hopeful screenwriter asking about legal issues involved in adapting a friend’s discarded memoir — unbeknownst to the friend. Mr. August told the correspondent she was on shaky ground legally, then added that he found her appropriation of her friend’s memoir a little — well, unfriendly. He said he told her: ”My advice: tell him what you did, and show him the script. Maybe he’ll love it. Maybe he’ll hate it and stop being your friend. I can’t say I’d blame him.”

There are scores of Web sites run by screenwriters, most of them with limited credentials, and a few others run by pros and geared to working writers. By contrast, Mr. August’s site — free, like most of the others — draws an audience reminiscent of the University of Southern California’s film school, where he earned a graduate degree a little more than a decade ago.

The site reflects not only Mr. August’s talent for explanation but also his enthusiasm for it. It reveals him to be, in his words, a ”big techno-geeky nerd”: he built and administers it himself.

Mr. August, 34, has won a reputation for versatility with scripts like ”Go” (1999), the cool and chaotic look at disaffected young people directed by Doug Liman (”Swingers”), and ”Big Fish” (2003), the fanciful family tale directed by Mr. Burton. In between, Mr. August has earned enough as a script doctor to buy that expensive house, which he shares with his partner of five years, Mike Douglass.

For all the success, www.johnaugust.com has a decidedly humble, nuts-and-bolts sensibility. To cheer the struggling masses, Mr. August posts a list of the 11 full-length scripts he has sold or written on spec that have never been shot. He jokes that operating the site ”is an excuse not to work,” and that it’s ”more fun than video games.” But he also calls it ”one of those pay it back, pay it forward things.”

Mr. August is 6 feet tall and 170 pounds with a shaved head. But he retains a boyish earnestness, which Hollywood usually strips from people before swallowing them. To describe his feelings at getting the ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” job, for example, he unselfconsciously invokes a cliche: it was ”a dream come true,” he says.

And then he retrieves a 28-year-old postcard. His third-grade teacher, in Boulder, Colo., had asked everyone in the class to write to someone famous. Most kids went for President Jimmy Carter. Young John, having read ”Charlie,” wrote to its author, Roald Dahl. The postcard that arrived shortly thereafter seemed like a treasured reward: a personal note from the man himself. Eventually, someone broke the news that it was no more than a form letter.

Mr. Burton wanted his film to follow Dahl’s text more faithfully than had the 1971 version, ”Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder. However, the book offered no guidance about Willy’s boyhood. So Mr. August playfully made him the son of a renowned, candy-hating dentist.

In one of the script’s flashbacks, Willy’s father throws his son’s Halloween candy into the fireplace; in another, Willy finds one piece spared from the flames and bites in. Then, the script says, the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of ”All Along the Watchtower” begin to play, and ”we begin a spinning perspective shot that would leave Hitchcock jealous. In little Willy’s eyes we see a reaction. He’s like Isaac Newton getting beaned by the apple.”

Mr. August said he discovered his craft-to-be at 10, while watching a rented tape of a black comedy, ”The War of the Roses.” It occurred to him that ”everything the actors were saying and doing was written someplace. So I tried to write down the dialogue and find out what that was like.”

He studied advertising and journalism at Drake University in Iowa, attended a summer film program at Stanford and was accepted at U.S.C.’s prestigious two-year graduate program in film production. After graduation, in the late 90′s, three breaks fell his way in about a year and a half: he sold ”Go”; his agent sent him ”Big Fish,” a Southern novel by Daniel Wallace; and Columbia asked him to join the dozen or so writers who were trying to salvage a film version of the 1970′s television series ”Charlie’s Angels.” Mr. August said yes with an exclamation point. He set out to write an affectionate ”giant hug” to the show he’d grown up with, celebrating the Angels’ duality: three women (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Lu) who were ”incredibly proficient on their jobs, and giant dorks when they were off the job.”

”Because comedy isn’t about cool people,” he said. ”Comedy is about dorks and idiots.”

Meanwhile, Mr. August had fallen in love with ”Big Fish,” which tells the story of a larger-than-life father through his son’s eyes. The narrator is about the same age that Mr. August was when his own father died. Mr. Burton was brought on to ”Big Fish” and developed a fondness for Mr. August’s ability to write sweetly without falling into the ditch of sentimentality.

”That was the tricky thing he did very well,” Mr. Burton said. ”With families, you can go through years of therapy and not know what it’s about. His great gift is capturing those things that are quite difficult to discuss.”

Mr. August said his sexual orientation has helped him notice things others miss, because for the first 20 years of his life, he said, he was ”observing the world and trying to model my behavior to look as straight as possible. It’s sort of this psychological ‘CSI’ you’re doing on a daily basis. You’re always looking for motivation.”

But he’s not especially eager to write a gay-themed picture. ”I suspect every gay screenwriter has a big gay-catharsis movie inside them,” he said. ”But then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie, and there’s not a pressing need for you to do yours.”

Some fans of Mr. August’s work pine for more of his unconventional ”Go” sensibility and less of his fascination with pop culture icons. They took some satisfaction last year when he was nominated in the best-adapted-screenplay category by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for ”Big Fish” and nominated in the worst-screenplay category for the ”Charlie’s Angels” sequel by a Hollywood group that honors ”raspberries.”

Mr. August regards this dichotomy with a smile. He can afford it. On his side are not just the film executives who keep giving him work but also the acolytes on his Web site, who get to listen in as he finds writing lessons everywhere. A few weeks ago, he was picking up dinner at a fast-food place when he saw a man holding tight to the roof rack of an S.U.V. while the woman driving it tried to pull out of the parking lot.

”Here’s my thought process,” he typed the next morning. First, he recalled, he wondered if the man and woman even knew each other. Was he harassing her? Was she skipping out on the parking charge? Then, ”John August Concerned Citizen slowly reverted into John August Screenwriter,” he wrote, ”as I tried to construct scenarios to explain what had just happened.” He thought through a Parking Lot Attendant scene, a Furious Boyfriend scene, an Eerily Calm Stalker, a Random Psycho.

Then he tried to decide what genre it was: ”If you put Will Ferrell in the guy’s role, clinging to the side of an S.U.V., then it’s a comedy,” he wrote. ”Hugh Grant, and it’s a romantic comedy. Sean Penn, and it’s a thriller.”

And if you put John August in the observation deck, it’s yet another learning opportunity

I disliked the cuteness of that ending. I thought it was tepid. I disliked the fact that I wasn’t consulted about it. But gradually I came to recognize an essential truth, to be filed away for an essay that will be called “How to Get Edited,” and it goes like this: I brought all this upon myself. As far as the ending went, my last attempt at it sucked as badly as they one the NYT grafted on. As far as my first submission went, I tried to get away with an intellectually dishonest style (“cool” is simply not what this guy is about). I deserved to have the story taken out of my hands. I deserved to have it end with a sentence so lacking in perception or vitality that, as one friend said, “Bob, it’s not grabbing me.” I offer this confession to all my brothers and sisters who have been edited more than they would like: It’s fun to write for yourself, and sometimes it feels good just to take a stab at it, but remember, there’s a price to be paid.

Bob rejoins the ranks of reporters, halts new postings and reveals why

Dear Friends,

I’m going to stop adding new postings to the site, while keeping the site active to allow you to continue browsing the archives.

I have been posting on the site weekly since May, 2001. Originally this was a short-term marketing effort aimed at drawing attention to my republished book, which came out in June of that year. (I know, you don’t make enough to spend $32 on a book. I don’t blame you. The publisher specializes in college textbooks, meaning it has a captive audience). But I received enough positive comment to keep loading up something new each week. I realized I had gotten hooked far beyond my original intent when I packed my laptop on a trip to Hawaii in July, 2001, determined to keep posting every week.

Our affair could not last, but the archives will

But nobody is worth listening to all the time, and as I mentioned at the end of last week’s posting, I feel like I’ve run out of new ideas. I’m also coming to the end of a nine-year stint as an editor and/or writing coach, a position which gives you time and opportunity to comb the woods for good and bad examples of writing, and helps shape your philosophy. Beginning in September, I’m returning to reporting. (I wanted something new, so I’ll be an entertainment writer at the L.A. Times, attempting to focus as much as I can on stories about how entertainment and society influence each other.)

Line editing is not fit work for a long-term career. It should be done in short spurts, like military service or social work. The first time I did it, I lasted 2 1/2 years and I went back to reporting. The second time I did it, I lasted 3 1/2 years and went back to reporting. This time, through a variety of circumstances, it lasted twice as long as I had planned, and I wasn’t strong enough to assert myself until this year. I looked at the clock and realized that if I didn’t jump off the diving board soon, I’d never be a reporter again, and I wasn’t prepared to leave the business without one more crack at it. All the love and respect I have for reporters comes from my own experiences of overcoming the pain and fear that are etched into the process. Much of that struggle had become abstract to me, and it made line editing feel stale.

One of the things I plan on enjoying about returning to reporting is being responsible for my own improvement. In that mindset, the role of a commentator on other people’s work is impossible (without being a hypocrite or an asshole, or both).

So, enjoy the archives. As long as my software registers signficant use, I’ll keep the site running. Thanks for your engagement and your commitment to the simple art of continued improvement. I’ve had the blessing of editing some terrific reporters during the last nine years, and their dedication reinforced my belief in a slogan that appears on this site’s logo: There are only two kind of reporters: bad ones, and those who are improving.

Bye,

Bob