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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.

I started reading Scott Gold’s Los Angeles Times story on Nov. 26 and was ready to find a reason to go somewhere else. I’d read stories like this; I’d reported this: The rebirth of a gang-invested park.

But then Scott pulled a trick on me and started aiming and hitting me with a beautiful succession of…

…details.

This was not a monster project, just a piece in a series the The L.A. Times is running about impoverished South Los Angeles in an attempt to demystify it.

I started to feel seduced by the use of detail, starting with the snippet about the  rec-park executive approaching a gang leader to ask for help reclaiming the park. I became more attached at the descriptions of the gangs’ lack of father figures.  I got a more intimate feeling when a gang member described his upbringing.

I can’t say this is an award-winning story. But I can say it is compelling one, and if you compare one of your better stories against this one, try to analyze who reports for detail and who uses detail better—you or Scott?

Here’s the story to read, followed by some remarks by Scott about the genesis and execution of this story.

By SCOTT GOLD

Not so long ago, South Park looked like Club Med for gang members.

The neighbors had given up on the little park — ceding it, almost entirely, to the 5-Trey Avalon Gangster Crips. Gangsters smoked pot in the gym and bounced their gambling dice against the concrete steps outside the rec center. There was no grass, and, in the mornings, junkies littered the dirt with syringes and tiny, colorful balloons that had been emptied of heroin. There were no youth sports teams. There was one child — one — enrolled in the preschool program.

“It was,” said Brian Cox, the park’s senior recreation director, “not a park.”

Four years ago, a police crackdown and a decline in violent crime created an opening. Workers planted grass and hung nets from the rusted basketball rims. The park, tentatively, began to rebuild. But to accomplish any sort of rebirth, city officials were forced to admit that they needed help of a different sort.

They needed the gang.

They needed Blue.

His real name was Parie Dedeaux, but he’d always been known as Blue. No one ever had explained it to him. He’d grown up nearby, and he’d been a heavy hitter in the Avalons for two decades, since before he could drive a car. He commanded an inordinate amount of respect on the streets, officials said.

“Before we could get the kids to come back, we had to get those guys to allow the kids to come back,” Cox said. “We could pretend otherwise. Or we could start to work with them. What are you going to do? They ain’t leaving.”

So Blue, instrumental in claiming the park for the gang, would now play a pivotal role in giving it back — an unlikely partnership that would lead to a remarkable resurrection.

Deserted as youths

Blue recently sat in the empty bleachers at South Park and offered a passionate and articulate defense of the gang life, which can be an unsettling thing to hear.

He grew up just a few blocks away, near Avalon Boulevard, back when the area was known as South-Central — before City Hall figured out that the name had become shorthand for urban decay and changed it to South Los Angeles.

He is 38 now, with a barrel chest and Popeye forearms that belie the gray hairs in his goatee. In the gang world, he and his contemporaries are of a specific age. They were the first to become men during the truly terrible years in South L.A. 20 years ago, when crack cocaine came through like a tempest and gangs were averaging a killing a day.

Everyone, he said, seemed to desert them at once. Many of their parents were lost to drugs; his own mother was murdered and his father was addicted and absent, like most of the fathers he knew at the time. The police, he said, became cruel and combative. The schools offered little hope. The factory jobs on Alameda and Slauson — the jobs that had lured his grandparents from Louisiana, like thousands of other African American families — were gone. Blue and his friends had hustled a little cash by offering to pump gas for customers at the local stations; soon, even that was taken away, as crackheads kicked the boys out and took over.

“We didn’t have a man at home. I never had a single man walk through the door and say, ‘I paid the light bill today.’ None of us did,” Blue said.

“So now your mom is getting high. The lights get turned off. The house is getting stinky. We all looked at each other and said: ‘Well, I guess it’s just us now. We ain’t got no malls, no colleges, no jobs. But everybody wants to be a part of something. All we could do is claim . . . this.”

He stretched his arms wide; he meant the park.

A steep decline

It became a headquarters of sorts for the Avalons, and some of them soon began selling the same drugs that had sullied their lives a few years before. The park began a precipitous and notorious decline.

“They owned the park,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Cathy Emestica, a 14-year veteran who has devoted much of her career to South Park and its regulars. “You couldn’t come in or out unless they let you.”

Four years ago, shortly before Cox took over, an Avalon took a shot at a cop. The bullet missed, but for the LAPD, it was the last straw.

The department took the unusual step of erecting five surveillance cameras at the park. Emestica began monitoring the everyday crowd: addicts fresh from the methadone clinic; dealers; gangsters who stared up into her cameras, alternately waving or flipping her the bird. The pace was relentless; in the first year and a half, the LAPD made 1,140 arrests.

Cox, sensing a shifting tide, had begun cracking down. No more pot in the gym. No more dice outside his office. The park started filling up on weekends. It was time to talk to Blue. They sat in the bleachers one day, just the two of them, staring into the caramel-colored dirt in the empty infield on the other side of the fence.

“I’m going to be real with you: I don’t condone what you do,” Cox told him, carefully. “But we’ve got to come to common ground.”

It was a tense conversation, but one that Blue was ready for.

He looked around. The park had been his proving ground, the place where he’d darted between the shaggy palm trees that formed a once-proud promenade leading to the swimming pool. Where he’d earned his first taste of respect behind the rec center, in a little shady spot where the boys went to resolve their disputes. Through all the pain that came with growing up in the neighborhood, the park had been one of the few constants in his life. It had, in a very real sense, sustained him. And now, he realized, he could repay the favor.

“We’re tired,” Blue told Cox. “We got to find a new way.”

So Blue went legit.

A ‘double life’

Truth be told, it wasn’t that much of a stretch.

For years, until he got laid off in a downsizing, Blue had been leading what he called a “double life” — working a respectable job in hardware sales, something he chose to shield from the Avalons as if it were a badge of shame. He cashed in his 401(k) and bought exercise equipment, including a heavy punching bag, which the park allowed him to install in a small courtyard near the office, mostly for the Avalons’ use.

The park also gave him a key to a dank storage room; Blue bought a hot plate and a microwave and began preparing breakfast for the park’s homeless residents.

He also launched a tradition called “Spread Friday.” Each week he and his friends make a goulash of sorts, using only ingredients that are also available for purchase inside local jails: ramen topped with smoked oysters and canned beef, honey, jalapeños and crushed Doritos, tossed inside a garbage bag and doled out to all takers, who are surprisingly many — and eager. The meal, said Blue — who in his 20s served 22 months in prison for robbery — is a reminder that life will always be better on the outside.

Once Blue had signed off on the notion of the Avalons cooperating with the city — or at least allowing the community unfettered access to the park — the floodgates opened.

Using grants and money routed from City Councilwoman Jan Perry’s office, the park built a playground, replaced the gym floor and refurbished a band shell. The park launched a series of music performances. During the first concert, featuring blues and jazz, “everyone held their breath,” Cox said. Nothing happened. So at the next show, Cox asked Blue and his comrades — “the big, bad Avalon Crips,” Cox said with a grin — to provide security. It worked without a hitch.

Today, there are talent shows, tutoring programs, toy giveaways at the holidays. An aerobics class has exploded in popularity; more than 200 women are registered, making it one of the city’s largest park programs for adults. The class is so large that the instructor had to develop hand signals to telegraph dance moves. There are more than 700 children enrolled in classes and sports programs. And there are 18 kids in the preschool.

“Do we still have our problems? Yeah, of course we do,” Cox said. “This ain’t Westwood or Brentwood, and it ain’t never going to be. But we made it work.”

By last year, it was time for the final chapter.

Blue learned that a football program called the Demos was losing its permit to practice at another nearby park. He wanted to bring the program to South Park. Here, that was a radical idea. Many of the players’ fathers were from rival gangs: Pirus, Outlaws, Blood Stone Villains.

“You guys have shot at each other,” Cox told Blue.

“I’ll make it safe, homie,” Blue told him. “I’ll do it.”

‘Showtime!’

It is a Saturday morning in November, early enough that the fog hasn’t yet burned off. The Demos will play six games today — six age brackets — against the mighty Compton Vikings. Blue has been up since 6 a.m. washing uniforms, and as he climbs out of his 1975 Buick Skylark, which is the color of asparagus, he is already champing at the bit.

“Showtime!” he screams.

The city rolled the dice on Blue, and so far he has delivered. At first, parents who brought kids in from other neighborhoods sat in their cars with the engines running during practice. Eventually, they ventured out.

There are now 300 kids in the program — among them Blue’s 11-year-old son, P.J., a running back, and his 7-year-old daughter, Paris, a cheerleader.

On this morning, the first person Blue encounters is Vernard Payne, whose white “P” on his cap says what no one needs to say out loud: that he is affiliated with the Pueblo Bishops gang. Blue and Payne are Crip and Blood; here, they embrace.

“Once you root for my son . . . ” Blue explains.

” . . . It’s over,” Payne says.

“It’s like rehab for gangsters,” Blue says.

Blue walks in as though he’s the mayor, beaming, teasing, high-fiving. “It’s on!” he shouts.

“The mouth is in the house,” someone mutters.

The league is not for the faint of heart. The players’ helmets are gouged and duct-taped, their socks and sleeves full of holes and bloodstains.

“Wake the . . . up!” a coach shouts after Compton makes a big gain on a busted play — he’s talking to a 7-year-old. Another boy seems to wilt under his oversize helmet and misses a tackle. “Tear his ass up!” a coach screams at him, the veins on his neck taut beneath a tattoo of a roll of money.

The early games do not go well for the Demos; Compton seems able to move the ball at will. Blue tries bribery; he offers to buy players hot dogs if they recover a fumble. When that doesn’t work, he bumps his offer up to $5.

Blue erupts when P.J. storms 30 yards on a kickoff return. But when the Demos throw an interception on the next play, Blue hurls his bag of sunflower seeds to the ground.

“We’re out here to win!” he yells. “You’re playing like little punks!”

Soon, though, perspective regained, Blue finds himself in the center of a scrum of players, firing them up for the next game. He has many roles in the league, chiefly that he is its head booster.

“Whose house?” he bellows.

“Our house!” the boys shout.

“Where we from?”

“East side!”

“Where?”

“East side!”

It’s the last bit that always gets to him, he said later.

In the parlance of South L.A., “east side” has long referred to gangs east of Main Street. All of a sudden, the words mean more.

They mean that the east side now gathers in peace, if only once or twice a week, and if only to watch kids play football.

“I’m not just part of a gang. I’m part of a community,” Blue said. “It’s the first time I ever felt that. I’m part of . . . this.”

He threw open his arms again, and fell silent, which doesn’t happen often.

“We’re in the middle of the ghetto,” he whispered. “You hear that?”

Then he smiled, knowing full well that the only thing you could hear — at least for now — was the sound of a lawn mower on the new grass, and the birds in the trees.

HOW I WROTE THE STORY:

scott.gold@latimes.com

I’m been reporting from South Los Angeles for almost a year now for a series of articles looking to reassess the place of this storied, troubled neighborhood in the structure of the city, following a period of transformative change. This article, about the resurrection of South Park, was our 14^th installment. We’ve treated this series as a project with a small “p” – a modern, nimble undertaking that would wed longer narratives like this one with quicker pieces where we break news, as well as multimedia presentations for the web. That’s a lot of elements, so we’ve known from the start that we would need to find ways to make each element in this series stand out – and stand up on its own.

The best way to do that is to take readers into corners of South Los Angeles they’ve never seen before, and hold up a mirror to elements of this neighborhood that brush against the conventional wisdom. And the best way to do all of that is to report, report, report and then report some more until we can offer the public a level of detail that makes it difficult to turn away – even in such a famously fractious and diffuse city, where your life can look nothing like the life of someone who lives a half-mile down the road.

This story was unusual in that the park itself was a central character, in a sense – the only true, faithful companion of a man named Blue, who has spent the better part of two decades as a heavy-hitter in a gang called the Avalons. Both of these “characters” – Blue and the park – needed to resonate to make the story work. And it would not be enough to offer a familiar, bleak story of either one – of a park in the interior of Los Angeles that had fallen into disrepair, nor of a man who grew up in rotten circumstances and then became a gang member. So we needed details. We needed to know exactly what the park was like just a few years ago – gang members throwing their gambling dice against the steps leading to the rec center office, the pitiful fact that there was a single kid enrolled in the preschool. And we needed to know everything about Blue. It wasn’t enough to say that he now feeds the homeless and the junkies after turning over a new leaf. We needed to know this: “Each week he and his friends make a goulash of sorts, using only ingredients that are also available for purchase inside local jails: ramen topped with smoked oysters and canned beef, honey, jalapeños and crushed Doritos, tossed inside a garbage bag and doled out to all takers, who are surprisingly many — and eager.” And it wasn’t enough to know that Blue recently started a youth football program. We needed to know that here, in the heart of the city, even this kind of marked progress comes with rough edges. We needed to see a coach yelling at a 7-year-old: “‘Tear his ass up!’ a coach screams at him, the veins on his neck taut beneath a tattoo of a roll of money.” In the end, it was an imperfect story in an imperfect business. But I do think that because of that detail, we were able to explain, reveal and surprise, which is a pretty good standard.

Got a good example of detailing? Send it to Bob via Newsthiking.com

“This is the  best book on newswriting I’ve ever read.”

“The three major strengths are a wonderfully conversational and at times irreverent writing style, a truly fresh angle on teaching newswriting—nobody else has looked at the “inner game” in this way—and excellent use of graphics. . . This is the only text I’ve seen that explains the writing process, which is the toughest thing to communicate to students…It’s exactly what we’ve needed in our writing courses.”

– Dr. Stanley T. Weardon,  Director of  Communication and Information director of Kent State’s School of Communication Studies

“Far ahead of its time in documenting the  ‘pre-writing process.”

“No nonfiction editor or writer can reach maximum potential without mastering those fundamental truths.  So if you missed them the first time, I commend them to you now. It’s never too late for a classic.”

–Author Jack Hart, former feature-project editor and writing coach, the Oregonian

“Newsthinking” Table of Contents

“Newsthinking” consists of ten chapters organized by the individual steps a reporter puts each story through

1. Your Stance:  Focusing your powers of attention to handle the daily flood of new information
2. Leads:  An introduction to “feedback” and “filters,” and a journey inside the mind of a reporter who has perfected them
3. Sequencing:  A mental strategy for putting the overall story’s facts in order
4. Knowing the Reader:  He’s impatient. He’s in a hurry. What are you doing to grab him?
5. The Perspective Paragraph:  The bane of a thousand dead editors
6. Your Inner Voice:  Exploiting the styles of silent speech
7. Tapping the Right Brain:  Drawing on the “magic” of your writing
8. Creativity: The objective side of “magic.” While you’re fancifully searching for that unique approach, here’s how to make sure you’re headded in the right direction.
9. Schizophrenia in Editing:  Dr. Jekyll, the reporter, meets Mr. Hyde, the editor
10. Coping with Pressure:  How to spot it and how to keep your balance

Bob Baker has slashed the bookstore price of “Newsthinking: The Secret of Making Your Facts Fall into Place” from $55 down to $19.95 (plus shipping and handling.)  The book — the only book devoted to mental organization for journalists — will be available in December, but you can purchase it in advance.

Bob’s book, “Newsthinking,” for an astonishing price.

The free market was charging $55 for “Newsthinking: The Secret of Making Your Facts Fall into Place.” Now you can have it for only $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) if you buy it through my website. Pay Pal will handle your credit-card purchase.

Discount rates:                                Price Each / You Save:

For 5 to 10 copies:                           $18.95 / $1 discount or 5% savings

For 11 to 15 copies:                         $15.95 / $4 discount or 20% savings

For 16 to 24 copies:                         $13.95 / $6 discount or 30% savings

For 25 copies and above:                 $10.95 / $8 discount or 40% savings

For bulk discounts, please click the appropriate PayPal link below, then enter your desired quantity within the discount range at PayPal. Thank you!
 
 
 
 

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I hated it.

A reporter would break his neck for hours or days, come up with first class information and then write a second class story. A piece that missed the point or was far too wordy or just didn’t live up to its potential. He or she would romp into the newsroom, gleefully bellowing the juicy details, sit down at the keyboard, and an hour or two later I’d be reading the copy, shaking my head and asking myself, “What was all the fuss about?”

Of all the frustrations I encountered as an editor, that kind of disappointment was the worst.

“You didn’t think!” I’d complain. But the reporter could just as easily have shot back, “What the hell do you mean, exactly?”

I hope this book is the answer. I hope it teaches you how to think more aggressively, creatively and ambitiously  when you write a news or feature story.

Newsthinking by Bob Baker

This book is devoted to improving the prewriting process- the thought process all reporters and other writers go through before they hit the first computer key. It is an intense examination of those moments in which you make your facts fall into place. This is newsthinking, where the genius of great writers -their creativity, their imagination, their willingness to take risks -unfolds. Much of it is subconscious, but most of it is also structured. The reporter or author or magazine essayist you admire may appear to be an artist who launches his impulses from a deep, mysterious font, but in fact he is producing his mastery in a laboratory. With the sophistication of a scientist, he has built and refined a complex set of thought strategies: a system in which nothing is left to chance, where each sentence and paragraph is automatically and rigorously tested.

He knows that writing is not merely an aesthetic ballet in which words dance onto paper. Writing is thinking.

All good writers understand this, but they also know that the process is an intensely personal one built on layer after layer of habits so deeply ingrained and complex that they defy simple description. How can any writer tell you, in five or ten minutes, how he thinks a story through? As a result, many reporters–especially the successful ones–adopt the pose of artist rather than mechanic, and it’s hard to blame them. After all, we merely admire proficient mechanics; we marvel at artists.

The goal of this ¬book is the same in 2009 as it was when it was first published 28 years ago: to cut through that facade by revealing to you the thought processes and mental attitudes a highly skilled reporter uses to sort through thousands of facts and organize them into literate, perceptive and creative copy. Whether your goal is to write newspaper stories or blog analyses or commentaries or biographies or publicity releases for a community organization, you will profit by building that same sort of system for yourself. If all newspapers died tomorrow, as we are being warned they will, the new “platform” would still make the same organizational demands.

Newsthinking, the inner game of newswriting, is a marvelous performance, a testament to the human brain’s capacity. And yet it is almost never analyzed. It is one of those achievements regarded as “natural” by those reporters who write well and as “magic” by those who don’t.

Whom should we believe? Both sides sound logical: Newswriting is natural, a blend of hundreds of mental and physical steps ordered and monitored. by the brain. And it’s magical- at least, when you’re working at the peak of your game and the words are flowing and the creative impulses are coming out of nowhere and the story writes itself, it seems like magic, right?

Forget it. If you want to keep thinking like that, you’re settling. You’re squandering your talent. You’re taking the easy way out.

Because writing, while one of the most complex mental and social acts a human can perform, is nevertheless a definable skill like any other. You improve it by making more efficient use of your inherited attributes. The people who best succeed at increasing their efficiency are those who concentrate the hardest on doing so.

Sadly, among most reporters and editors there is little emphasis on either concentration or improvement of writing, and it shows. The quality of writing in the average publication or web site remains woeful.

To avoid getting caught in that quagmire, you have to stop concentrating on merely the results of good writing -the examples they show you in most textbooks. You have to begin thinking about the causes–the thought strategies that created those polished samples. To do that, you need a massive injection of vision and imagination. Because the only way to improve your prewriting process -your ability to organize information and make the right choices -is to look inside yourself.

There is no physical evidence here, no scrapbook of story clippings; instead, you must visualize the stages of mental preparation you now go through, and then begin strengthening them into a more thorough, more efficient information processing system
Even the least skilled reporter works according to some kind of subconscious mental formula, some crude, unspoken plan by which he decides how to conduct an interview, what questions to ask, when to take notes, how to use his memory, test his creativity, write his leads. The trouble is, this unskilled reporter has no idea that his mental processes are shallow because he seldom talks to another reporter about the inner game. He rarely compares, so he rarely learns. But we will.

We will show you, for one thing, that the mental development of any story- news, feature, obituary -follows a general chain of thought. Some of the steps in this cycle of information processing may seem obvious to you, but what’s more important is the unity among them. The steps- we have nine elemental ones- are an obstacle course that no one ever runs perfectly or without variation. What’s so enticing about writing is finding out how close to perfection you can come. As you study the steps, you’ll realize that you- and most other working newsmen and women–are far, far away from your optimum level. By the time you finish this book, you should never again have to worry about competing against another reporter, because there will be a new, more challenging target to take aim at: your own potential.

Let’s start by introducing you to your brain.

Take a few minutes. Look around your newsroom or journalism classroom and find the best writer. Watch her type. Why is she better? Why, if all of you collected the same information before writing a story, would hers be the one that an editor would run?

The answer lies in the brain. Or, if you wish to use a broader term, in the mind. That skilled reporter’s brain has organized the thinking and writing process into a highly efficient series of steps–a far more refined process than the one you use. From there, her brain has learned that basic structure so well that many of the steps begin to come in clusters–she doesn’t have to worry about performing them one step at a time.

Remember, we are not talking about her physical capacity; you don’t increase the number of muscle fibers in your arms when you do three sets of ten curls a night; you merely increase the strength and endurance of your existing muscles. In the same way, that reporter has developed her ability to organize a story not by increasing the number of active nerve cells in her brain (adults can’t do that), but by improving the extent and subtlety of the nerve cells’ interconnections and their readiness to fire.

That’s not magic.

But that’s why she appears to have a “quick mind,” to “jump” several thoughts ahead in crucial situations. Her brain has learned to combine a series of steps in her basic composition process without having to monitor the feedback step by step. That’s what allows her, for example, to read through a city budget and quickly glean the correct lead, while you move more slowly, not as sure of what you’re looking for, lacking that sense of structure between each thought.

That’s why her stories always feature good transition between paragraphs, while yours keep being rewritten. That’s why her stories always seem to provide the correct perspective on an event, while the copy desk. has to do so much inserting in yours. That’s why her leads are always crisp and never butchered by the desk. That’s why her features are usually bright and creative, as though a separate voice–not the usual bang bang bang, hard news voice–were composing them.

Now, when we walk across the room to ask this reporter to explain how she does all this, we run into an eighteenth century German philosopher:

“When the psychical powers are in action,” Immanuel Kant says, “one does not observe oneself, and when one observes oneself, those powers stop. A person noticing that someone is watching him and is trying to explore him will either become embarrassed, in which case he cannot show himself as he is; or he will disguise himself, in which case he does not want to be recognized for what he is.”
And so by the time we finish asking that reporter just how it’s done, she is ready with answers like:

“I dunno, it’s just there”
Or: “Some days, it’s just workin’.”
Or: “I never know what I think until I see it on the screen.”

What you’re hearing is, “It’s magic. I have it, you don’t. Tough luck.” We’re back to where we started. It’s the kind of attitude–even when voiced kindly–that explains why some very good reporters turn out to be mediocre editors: They can’t teach because they have never understood their own processes.

Remember, even magic has structure. Psychologists and engineers have been studying human skills since World War II, examining people like assembly line workers, executives and athletes in an attempt to answer the misleadingly simple question “How does he do it?” In each area, they have tried to break down the broad components of a skill that had been largely taken for granted, trying to explain how the brain issues commands to the body and then regulates the action. They have learned the basic techniques man uses to achieve “skilled performance.”

One of the most significant conclusions, derived from studies of complex industrial processing operations, is that the skilled operator appears to build a “conceptual framework” or model of the mental and physical processes he is using and the manner in which they function. He uses his imagination to construct a mental picture of the way he does his job. Often, he can’t put it into words without a tremendous amount of effort, but that doesn’t bother him. All he wants is a standard–a sense of how it should feel to do the job the right way, whether it’s running a loading dock, assembling part of a jet plane wing or sorting mail for a Post Office route.

And that’s what we’re after here: to force you to build and then streamline a model of your writing process, to make you conscious of the need to program your reporter’s mind the same way a computer is programmed.

Your central task is the creation of a series of mental “filters,” one for each step in your prewriting process. Each time you prepare a story, each decision–each rough outline, each question, each new fact–will be run through several or all of the filters.

Depending on how proficient you become, this review may take seconds or long, painful minutes. But it is the only way to aim for excellence. Your filters are your standards, tests of completeness that each fact and impulse must undergo. The order in which you subject your facts to your filters is yours to choose; it is an intimate, personal test. So are the kinds of filters you decide to create. The filters described in the following chapters represent a good starting point, but don’t be afraid to augment or change them. What’s important is to begin formally developing this kind of process, to experience it, to examine it, to know what it feels like when you’re working at full blast and to know when you’re off, when your system needs to be strengthened–when the sophistication of that computer program inside your head has to be increased. As the process of subconsciously routing each story through your filters and monitoring the results becomes more automatic, you can begin taking more risks, ever confident that your chain of standards will test the experiment and reject it if it doesn’t work.

Remember the battlefield: Newswriting is not “writing.” No more than shooting a basketball at your front yard hoop is like playing in a basketball game with nine others. Or strumming a guitar is like playing in a band in front of three thousand people. “Writer” connotes the sun, reflecting on the forces around it. The reality of “newswriter” is the asteroid, being tugged at violently from every angle–sources, bitchy competitors, bitchy editors, bitchy readers, deadlines, space limitations and the emotional fragility those pressures create.

You may love it, but that’s not enough. You have to consciously define your skills by these pressures. You have to examine your talents and build them with the goal of bringing order out of chaos. Quiet and air-conditioned as our newsroom feels, our craft remains etched in noise and sweat and the millions of pieces of news and non news that have to be handled. Conquer them or they will kill you.

Your newsthinking must be tailored to the reality of news. We want to create a system that heightens the unity between your newswriting skills and your brain’s natural talent for making rapid fire choices and double checking the results. With this writing process, you judge each piece of information as soon as it arrives: “Does it belong in my story?” you demand to know, the same way your brain and nervous system constantly screen out useless data that would otherwise bombard your senses. The information that qualifies for your story is analyzed and combined by passing through the filters. Choices are continually being made, in much the same way as your brain initiates, monitors and regulates behavior through “yes” and “no” impulses fired by its nerve cells
. Does that sound cold? Remember, your brain is your life. You and your writing are an extension of it. It contains an amazing wealth of power, logic, efficiency and creativity. The known scope of its resources has grown furiously as neurology and psychology merged in the past few decades. “We are the privileged onlookers in a Copernican phase,” one British journalist said, “when men are putting their conscious experience into orbit around the brain. We may be waiting for the Isaac Newton of the nervous system who will reveal what holds this (mental) universe together.”

Even in a profession as literal-minded as ours, you have a stake in such lofty perspective. New discoveries by brain and mind researchers have helped us to define the structure of our magic and our potential to improve it. A quarter-century ago, a kind of cult built up around the study of the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Most of us are aware we have two cerebral hemispheres, often performing widely different functions. The left side handles speech and numbers and perceives the world strictly by the chronology in which events happen. The right side is “holistic”–it expresses itself by nonverbal, subjective, intuitive impulses and allows you. to understand relationships between parts and wholes.

Applied to newswriting, the popular right hemisphere theory maintains that when a reporter writes a good feature story, she uses the right half of her brain to develop a creative angle. She then “shifts” to her left hemisphere, using it to convert that angle into words and analyze the results, then moves back to the right side for further inspiration, then back to the left side to check it out, and so on.

Is that what really happens in your brain? Can you control it? Scientific opinion is mixed, but the separate talents of the dual hemispheres are clear–the potential is there. Why wait for science to catch up if envisioning that kind of back and forth process between your logical and emotional sides helps you write better features?

That’s the cutting edge: The more clearly you perceive the way your mind collects, shuffles, reshuffles, retrieves and then spits out the components of your stories, the more you’ll write with perspective, authority and speed. You’ll do it because you’ll feel, subtly, the chaotic flood of ideas narrowing into a line of thought that will suddenly race from your head to your fingers and produce the story. You’ll know something about why it happens, and you’ll know something about how to make it happen more often.

The chapters that follow are organized by their importance in the prewriting process, not necessarily by the sequence in which you will use them, Part of the agony and wonderment of newswriting is that nobody can predict the order in which these steps will come into play. You’re like a mathematician who must invent a new equation to solve each new problem because the variables are always different.

Each individual’s strengths and weaknesses will dictate which stages he needs to concentrate on more. Some reporters who have had trouble writing feature stories may ultimately find the “creativity” filter their most important one. Others may rely most heavily on the “self editing” filter, Briefly, here’s where we’re going: Chapter 1 examines how to develop the arrogant stance needed when you begin sifting information. Next come two chapters on fundamental thought strategies that come into play as you move closer to typing: Chapter 2 will illustrate the construction of a mental filter to test your lead paragraphs. Chapter 3 will deal with the development of a “sequencing” filter, which will monitor whether all of the story’s facts have been put in proper sequence.

From there, we will concentrate on supplemental filters that will force you to continually ask yourself whether you have made the story relevant to the reader (Chapter 4); whether you have supplied the proper factual perspective (Chapter 5); whether you have made good use of your “inner voice” in composing the story (Chapter 6); whether you have pushed your creative resources hard enough (Chapters 7 and 8), and whether you have remembered to edit your own copy carefully (Chapter 9). Finally, in Chapter 10, we’ll discuss the impact of pressure—a perpetual enemy in newsrooms–on your work.

At the end of most chapters, you’ll be referred to specific parts of the book’s appendix. The appendix consists of excerpts from a Los Angeles Times monthly newsletter on writing I created and edited from 1998 to 2001. The excerpts are examples of good and bad writing techniques, primarily from my old newspaper, along with a number of insightful essays on specific techniques by my colleagues. Moving from the end of one chapter to the relevant appendix entries gives you a taste of real-world journalism. Or, you can save the appendix for one full meal at the end of the book.

Before we begin, however, a bit of guidance:

Rule Number 1: There Are No Rules

If you remember nothing else, remember Rule Number 1. It is a joyful tribute to the fact that each reporter has to be in control of his story because circumstances change so often. When talented people work together, they eventually wind up throwing out all policies except Rule Number 1.

Rule Number 1 makes it clear that if any rules or policies have to exist, they can be broken–crushed whenever the news requires it. Rule Number 1 symbolizes the kind of thinking that keeps newspapers vibrant, living entities. It stands flatly against the breed of publishers and editors who use words like “product” to describe what they put out.

Employ that rule while you read this book. Some of its ideas will work for you. Others may fall flat. Building a conceptual framework of your own process is an asset only if it comes from your soul. Your kind of mental filters may feel completely different from mine. You may visualize their operation as doggie doors or windows, through which your stories are processed in the forms of poodles or flies. Does it help? Then do it.

For the most uninhibited approach to improving the efficiency of your reporter’s mind, remember this: There’s no consensus about what’s going on “up there.” Psychologists, neurologists, physiologists–their fields are still separated by generations of rivalry and disparate terminology.The model does not have to be scientifically proven, but it does have to be built. In the following chapter we begin to lay the foundation.

Hey, Bob! Where’s the chapter on newsthinking your way through the Web?

It was tempting to add that–with one exception: There is no universal model, and there never will be. As with all other writing processes, you’ll build your own, personalized one. Shorter sentences? More audacious style? Aimed at a less-patient reader? The pressure of 24-7 updating? If somebody wants to give you his one-size-fits-all formula, nod pleasantly and incorporate only the filters that work for you. That’s how you’ll newsthink your way through the Web.

Yours truly,
The Department of Trial & Error.

The Secret to Making Your Facts Fall into Place

I hated it.

A reporter would break his neck for hours or days, come up with first-class information and then write a second-class story. A piece that missed the point or was far too wordy or just didn’t live up to its potential. He or she would romp into the city room, gleefully bellowing the juicy details, sit down at the typewriter, and an hour or two later I’d be reading the copy, shaking my head and asking myself, “What was all the fuss about?”

Of all the frustrations I encountered as a rookie city editor a quarter century ago, that kind of disappointment was the worst.

“You didn’t think!” I’d complain. But the reporter could just as easily have shot back, “What the hell do you mean, exactly?”

I hope this book is the answer. I hope it teaches you how to think when you write a news story.

This book is devoted to improving the prewriting process–the thought process all reporters go through before they hit the first computer keystroke. It is an intense examination of those moments in which you make your facts fall into place. This is newsthinking, where the genius of great writers–their creativity, their imagination, their willingness to take risks–unfolds.

Much of it is subconscious, but most of it is also structured. The reporter or book author or magazine essayist you admire may appear to be an artist who launches his impulses from a deep, mysterious font, but in fact he is producing his mastery in a laboratory. With the sophistication of a scientist, he has built and refined a complex set of thought strategies, a system in which nothing is left to chance, where each sentence and paragraph is automatically and rigorously tested.

He knows that writing is not merely an aesthetic ballet in which words dance onto paper. Writing is thinking.

All good writers understand this, but they also know that the process is an intensely personal one built on layer after layer of habits so deeply ingrained and complex that they defy simple description. How can any writer tell you, in five or ten minutes, how he thinks a story through? As a result, many reporters–especially the successful ones–adopt the pose of artist rather than mechanic, and it’s hard to blame them. After all, we merely admire proficient mechanics; we marvel at artists.

The goal of this book is the same in 2001 as it was when it was first published 20 years ago: to cut through that facade by revealing to you the thought processes and mental attitudes a highly skilled reporter uses to sort though thousands of facts and organize them into literate, perceptive and creative copy. Whether your goal is to write newspaper stories or novels or biographies or publicity releases for a community organization, you will profit by building that same sort of system for yourself.

Newsthinking, the inner game of newswriting, is a marvelous performance, a testament to the human brain’s capacity–and yet it is almost never analyzed. It is one of those achievements regarded as “natural” by those reporters who write well and as “magic” by those who can’t.

Whom should we believe? Both sides sound logical: Newswriting is natural, a blend of hundreds of mental and physical steps ordered and monitored. by the brain. And it’s magic–at least, when you’re working at the peak of your game and the words are flowing and the creative impulses are coming out of nowhere and the story writes itself, it seems like magic, right?

Forget it. If you want to keep thinking like that, you’re settling for less. You’re squandering your talent. You’re taking the easy way out.

Because writing, while one of the most complex mental and social acts a human can perform, is nevertheless a definable skill like any other. You improve it by making more efficient use of your inherited attributes. The people who best succeed at increasing their efficiency are those who concentrate the hardest on doing so.

Sadly, among most reporters and editors there is little emphasis on either concentration or improvement of writing…and it shows. The quality of writing in the average newspaper remains woeful. It discourages potential readers from delving more deeply into the news and it discourages people with first-rate minds from devoting themselves to news work. They bum out or grow disenchanted too quickly.

To avoid getting caught in that quagmire, you have to begin looking at the world of newswriting in a different way. You have to stop concentrating on merely the results of good writing–the examples they show you in most books. You have to begin thinking about the causes–the thought strategies that created those polished samples.

To do that, you need a massive injection of vision and imagination. Because the only way to improve your prewriting process–your ability to organize information and make the right choices–is to look inside yourself, to look hard at what you’re doing. There is no physical evidence here, no scrapbook of story clippings; instead, you must visualize the stages of mental preparation you now go through, and then begin bolstering them. You must build them into a more thorough, more efficient information-processing system.

Even the least skilled reporter works according to some kind of subconscious mental formula, some crude, unspoken plan by which he decides how to conduct an interview, what questions to ask, when to take notes, how to use his memory, test his creativity, write his leads. The trouble is, this unskilled reporter has no idea that his mental processes are shallow because he seldom talks to another reporter about the inner game. He rarely compares, so he rarely learns.

But we will.

We will show you, for one thing, that the mental development of any story–news, feature, obituary, whatever–follows a general chain of thought. Some of the steps in this cycle of information processing may seem obvious to you, but what’s more important is the unity among them. The steps–we have nine elemental ones–are an obstacle course that no one ever runs perfectly or without variation. What’s so enticing about writing is finding out how close to perfection you can come. As you study the steps, you’ll realize that you–and most other working newsmen and women–are far, far away from your optimum level.

By the time you finish this book, you should be building your skills with goals far higher than those of the average journalist. You should never again have to worry about competing against another reporter, because there will be a new, more challenging target to take aim at: your own potential.

This book is not a miracle cure. It assumes you have or will acquire sound news instincts and a passion for newswriting. Without them, you may build an elaborate, polished mental system but you’ll still crank out nothing but well-structured oatmeal. You may turn out to be just what the “happy news” television consultants want, but you won’t be a good reporter.

This book wouldn’t be needed if so many newspapers–and so many of their reporters–weren’t so willing to settle for so little. Pick up any newspaper and examples abound. There’s the feature story that was blown because the writer didn’t use his heart. The news story with the real news in the ninth paragraph because the writer didn’t have the guts to depart from the chronology and define the essence of what he observed. The half-hearted analysis of a local water district audit, so thickly littered with uninterpreted financial details that only an accountant–not the average reader who deals with the district only when he pays his bill–could understand it. Spread the blame all you want to. (The way they don’t teach writing in high school any more…the way newspaper staffs are kept too thin…there are a dozen more excuses if you’d like to fill them in here.) But the spotlight inevitably falls on the reporter. He wrote those stories; he blew them. He had the control. He had the power. He had the facts. And he had the keyboard. What went wrong was inside his head, and if we want to improve the quality of newswriting, we have to start there.

Subsequent chapters cover your reporting “stance,” leads, sequencing, knowing the reader, the perspective paragraphs, your inner voice, creativity, self-editing and coping with pressure. An appendix offers more than 80 pages of excerpts from “Nuts & Bolts,” the L.A. Times’ newsletter on writing, linked to specific chapters of “Newsthinking.”

“Newsthinking” was first published in 1981 by Writers Digest Books and purchased by about 10,000 writers. After its first printing sold out, Bob Baker began distributing the book himself in the mid-1990s. In 2000, the book was acquired by Allyn & Bacon, an international textbook company, which published it on June 4, 2001.

The new version of “Newsthinking” contains a detailed appendix consisting of excerpts from “Nuts & Bolts,” the Los Angeles Times newsletter on writing that Bob created in 1998.

“Newsthinking” was originally written for college journalism students and journalists in their first five years of work. But it has developed a following among a broader range of journalists and other writers, who applaud its sophisticated yet plain-spoken approach to the biggest unspoken problem journalists have: “Now that I’ve collected all this stuff, what the hell do I do with it?”

Julia Scott makes the transition and shares her tips

Julia Scott is a reporter turned blogger who adapted her print skills for the web. She currently writes a savvy-spending blog called BargainBabe.com. I asked her to describe the transition. Read on:

Print journalists may have a hard time transitioning to blogging if they are not willing to let go of some of the basic tenets of traditional newspaper writing. While there are many similarities between the two forms, the difference are striking. Let’s start with what works in both forms:

–Classic, good storytelling

–Solid reporting, great quotes, salient details

–Concise writing

Writing for print vs. blogging

Now let’s talk about the differences:

–Bloggers write more frequently. While there are exceptions, successful blogs generally have multiple posts everyday or each weekday. Some Sports bloggers regularly post a dozen-plus times a day.

–Blog posts are typically shorter. Think 2-8 paragraphs for most posts. The goal is to provide nuggets of information as soon as you get them. Forget about crafting one long story that has complete information. Break up big topics into separate posts so readers can go directly to the information that interests them.

–The structure is simpler. Worry less about a beginning, middle and end than with providing a polished tidbit.

–The style is even more informal and conversational. Remember what your editor said about writing a story like you were telling it to your grandmother? Bloggers write as if they are talking to their bff. –Slang is not uncommon, and the writing often reflects the blogger’s internal dialog in their head.

–Bloggers use first person. Readers want to connect with bloggers and enjoy hearing your opinion, how a particular post relates to your life, and other personal details. Some of my most popular posts are personal stories that have little or nothing to do with my blog topic.

–Bloggers share opinions. Telling readers what you think of an issue can create great discussion via comments, which keeps readers coming back. Be open to dissent and respectful disagreements.

–Bloggers encourage interaction. Readers love to share their two cents and great bloggers embrace this. Feedback via comments, polls, live blogging sessions, Google map mashups, videos, and more can generate tips, create loyalty, and increase the time readers spend on your blog.

Those are the basic similarities and differences. To get a better idea of what makes a good blog post, I encourage you to check out: http://www.bargainbabe.com/