COMM 337: Quotes and description

Moved from my blog The Mackerel Wrapper for students in COMM 150 and 207.

When you can't be on the scene of a story, you have to get the who's, where's and what's through interviews. You'll never get as much detail as you would if you were there, but you can get enough to convey a sense of what it was like.

This CNN account of the shootings at Virginia Tech in April, posted to the web that day, fills in a lot of the gaps by quoting eyewitnesses. For example the lede:

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) -- A gunman who killed at least 30 people in one of two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech was dressed "almost like a Boy Scout," said a student who survived by pretending to lie dead on a classroom floor.

"He just stepped within five feet of the door and just started firing," said Erin Sheehan, who was in one of the Norris Hall classrooms where the second shooting incident took place.

Sheehan described the gunman -- who later shot and killed himself, according to police -- as a young man wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt and black ammunition vest.

"He seemed very thorough about it -- getting almost everyone down -- I pretended to be dead," she said. (Watch student describe surviving by playing dead )

"He was very silent," said Sheehan, one of only four students in her 25-student German class who were not shot.

The gunman left but returned in about 30 seconds. "I guess he heard us still talking," said Sheehan.

"We forced ourselves against the door so he couldn't come in again, because the door would not lock."

The man tried three more times to force his way in and then began firing through the door, she said.

The story is a "sidebar," i.e. a story that runs off to the side of the main story and elaborates on it, so it doesn't have a nut graf. Instead, it quotes other witnesses all the way through to give us an overall picture of the scene. Note how this one has a little less information than than the first:

Student Tiffany Otey was taking a test inside Norris Hall when the shooting began. She and about 20 other people took refuge behind a locked door in a teacher's office.

Police officers with bulletproof vests and machine guns were in the area.(Watch a student's recording of police responding to loud bangs )

"They were telling us to put our hands above our head and if we didn't cooperate and put our hands above our heads they would shoot," Otey said. "I guess they were afraid, like us -- like the shooter was going to be among one of us." (Watch students react to shooting )

The quoted details get fewer and fewer as we get deeper and deeper into the story. In this sense it's a classic inverted pyramid, with the most interesting stuff on top trailing off to filler on the bottom. The last graf, for example:

Before Monday, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States occurred in 1991, when George Hennard drove a pickup truck into a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria and fatally shot 23 people, before shooting and killing himself.

Please note: I left in the links to audio and video links in the CNN story, since they're such a good example of cross-platform convergence.

COMM 337: Interview assignment

Final draft due Monday, Sept. 24. Interview a classmate (we'll make time at the end of class today) about a time he or she was really surprised by the way something turned out and learned something important from the surprise. This is not a particularly easy assignment: I want you to recreate the event through quotes and descriptive writing, using details you get from the interview. So you're not only interviewing for who-what-when-and-where, you're also drawing your classmate out and getting them to remember the details. What was the weather? What was the setting? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Who was there? What did they say? The trick to this assignment is to get the person you're interviewing to describe things, to take down what they say and quote it back.

The story: A 750- to 1,000 word narrative focusing on what your classmate learned from the surprise. I'd give it a soft lede, sort of a narrative: (1) a little story for an attention-getter; (2) the lesson learned in the nut graf; (3) the body of the story, which will be mostly narrative and description.

I think you'll do best if you approach this story in stages: (1) Do the initial interviewing today. (2) Write up as much of it as you can before class Friday, and make a list of "holes in the story," questions you didn't think of at first but need to explain things now. (3) Ask any follow-up questions on Friday. (4) Do the final draft over the weekend, and turn it the finished product Monday.

I post examples of news-feature stories that do this to the blog. In the meantime, you will get some ideas by reading the Boston Globe story by Richard Knox, and Don Murray's analysis of it, on pages 140-45 in the textbook.

COMM 207, 337: Student press furor

Cross-posted to my journalism blogs.

Content advisory. The subject matter of this controversy is offensive to many readers.

A student newspaper in New Britain, Conn., is in the news for a joke about locking a "14-year-old Latino girl" in a closet and urinating on her. The editors say they're within their First Amendment rights to publish it -- and the consensus is they're probably quite correct about that -- but the incident raises questions about professional standards and student journalism.

The cartoon appeared in last week's edition of The Recorder, student paper at Central Connecticut State University. It is difficult to describe, but The Hartford Courant made a creditable effort when it broke the story last week:

The comic strip printed in Wednesday's edition features a triangle-shaped figure talking on the phone with a square figure. When the triangle tells the square that his urine smells funny whenever he eats a certain cereal, the square asks if his urine tastes funny, too.

"I dunno," the triangle replies. "I'd have to ask that 14 year old Latino girl tied up in the closet."

In one of the panels, a chain can be seen over a closet door, and a voice from behind says "I'm hungry" in Spanish.

Underneath the comic, a message from the paper's editors says, "The Recorder does not support the kidnapping of (and subsequent urinating on) children of any age or ethnicity."

This is strike two for the student paper, the Courant noted. Last school year it published what was intended to be a satire praising rape as a "magical experience" for "ugly women."

Central Connecticut State president Jack Miller has come under fire for not cracking down on the paper, but he says he has to balance interests at a public, tax supported university. "While I recognize that the Recorder's right to publish is secured by the First Amendment and a broad range of judicial court decisions, I must say that I am offended by the decisions of the editorial staff, and Mark Rowan in particular. ... "I share the concerns of my Latin American colleagues and students and others for the hurt inflicted by the editor's decision to run this offensive cartoon."

I have to sympathize on both counts. The First Amendment does protect offensive speech, but I also think the paper was highly unprofessional.

• The Hartford Courant, arguably Connecticut's most influential daily, summed up its attitude today in an editorial headlined "Recorder Hits The Gong Again." The Courant said controversy can be a good thing if it's in a good cause, but neither the rape column nor the earlier cartoon remotely qualify. "Both used questionable, insensitive and crude humor to demean women. They also appear calculated to generate controversy for its own sake. As such, they're a morally empty exercise; the literary equivalent of sticking one's tongue on a street sign in winter and reading aloud from the First Amendment."
  
  
• The Michigan Daily, a independent student newspaper in Ann Arbor, Mich. Opinion page blogger Gary Garca also noted The Record's past lapses and adds, "The cartoon is not only degrading and humorless, it has no point. Offensive speech just for the sake of being offensive is unproductive and hardly the point of the First Amendment. While some of the responses have been a little dramatic, including that from the university’s president who wants to cut off advertising (which would essentially shut down the paper), this type of material shouldn’t be accepted."

One last point. Latin American women don't call themselves Latinos. They're Latinas. So the cartoon is not only tasteless and demeaning. It's ignorant.

COMM 337 - Wednesday's assignment

Here it is in writing: Take one of the observations or potential story ideas that you or one of your classmates posted to their blog, and speculate about how you would go about writing a story on it. What angle would you take? Who would you talk to? What would you ask them? Read the part about interviews in Don Murray's chapter on "Reporting for Surprise." Toward the end, he interviews a reporter on how to do interviews. How, specifically, could you use that reporter's tips in conducting your interviews? What problems might you anticipate in interviewing somebody on your subject? What would you do to prepare for the interviews? Post a paragraph or two in answer to these questions to your blog before class Wednesday.

Here's a link to our directory of class blogs. It has links to most of them.

By the way, I'm glad to see more people posting to the blogs today. I'd been getting a little worried about several of you. There's still plenty of time for everybody to get caught up, even though some of you have quite a bit of catching up to do. But we've been in school almost a month now, and the semester isn't going to last forever. If you're not one of the three or four people who have been keeping up with assignments, it's time to start getting caught up!

COMM 337: Surprise, 'people-watching' and story ideas

Since I was assigning you guys to do a list of 25 story ideas like Don Murray's list of observations in a supermarket (Writing to Deadline 16-17), I decided I'd better do the same. In addition to jotting down quirky little things I noticed that might be developed into a story, I also started free associating right off the bat ... as I saw things that reminded me of stories I've read before, that I might be able to spin off in a new direction. So I stuffed a napkin in my shirt pocket, kept it there all weekend and scribbled down ideas as they came to me. The resulting list:

1. Sacred Harp "singing" at Christian County Historical Society. Why there?
   
2. How do Midwesterners get interested in Sacred Harp singing? It's a Southern tradition of old-time gospel singing, very old-fashioned and folk music-ish.
   
3. What is a Sacred Harp singing like? I've seen stories based on interviews at individual singings in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press. (A lot of writers keep what they call a "swipe file," clips of stories they might be able to do themselves someday.)
   
4. Does anybody sing for fun anymore? Why? Why not?
   
5. Portapotty next to 1820s log building on CCHS grounds.
   
6. How do you get a portapotty? Why? What are the regulations? Where do you rent one?
   
7. Is "portapotty" a trade name?
   
8. Volunteers setting up chairs, brewing coffee, helping in kitchen, etc. What does it take to put together a statewide singing convention?
   
9. Married couple from Sheffield in England. They're Sacred Harp afficionados ... on a two- or three-week vacation in the U.S., going on from Illinois to singing conventions in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
   
10. Southerners dressed up, e.g. wearing dresses, shirt and tie, starched white shirt, Midwesterners in T-shirts and Birkenstocks
    
11. Variety of down-home and major metro yuppie food at potluck -- ham and beans, barbecued chicken, church basement-ish casseroles, hummus bi tahini, vegan casseroles
    
12. Singer playing kaen (a wind instrument from Thailand made of one- to three-foot lengths of reed pipe). She is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Chicago.
    
13. Combines out. What kind of a crop year for corn and beans has it been?
    
14. Sign at Rochester city limits honoring high school science fair winner in addition to athletes
    
15. Business sign in Rochester for orthodontist, "Where Braces are Fun." How can that be!
    
16. Mural showing Abraham Lincoln and Martin van Buren painted on old grain elevator
    
17. Fiberglass cow from "Cows on Parade" outside restaurant on North Grand Avenue
    ___th anniversary of Cows on Parade promotion in Chicago (I did a Google search, and Cows on Parade was in 1999)
    
18. Chicago cows at State Fair in 1999
    
19. Traces of Chicago at the State Fair ... the "et'nic village" features Chicago restaurants and it seems like stage shows of traditional dance, etc., from half the ethnic churches in Cook County. Jamaican roots band called Waterhouse ... front man is an ethnomusicologist.
    
20. "Original Red Coach Inn horseshoe"
    
21. Horseshoes as Springfield "delicacy" (??) ... does anybody still eat these things? Who? Why?
    
22. Origin myths -- north end taverns vs. Leland Hotel
    
23. North end tavern food
    
24. The north end -- is any of it still distinctive in an increasingly homogenized, Wonder Bread culture?
    
25. I just did a keyword search on "Wonder Bread," and discovered a Wikipedia entry saying the U.S. manufacurer is having financial problems. Since Wikipedia is not always reliable, I am going to keep my eye on the Wonder Bread story for a while. If it stands up (i.e. isn't corrected by an irate PR person for the manufacturer in the next few days), I could use the product's apparent loss of market share and financial stablity to peg several trend stories on whole-grain, organic breads, changing taste in foods, etc. Wonder Bread has been a bland, white, middle-class icon for my generation.
    
26. Waggin Tails shelter -- an "evergreen" that gets profiled every few years in SJ-R, Illinois Times. It's a no-kill shelter with a lot of volunteers -- what do they do? why do they do it? what do they get out of it?
    
27. African American father and daughter in "kitten room"
    
28. Little girl and kitten -- do we choose our pets, or do they choose us?
    
29. Why a separate room for kittens?
    
30. How many cats are there in the sheleter? I count at least 30. What are the logistics of having 30-40 cats in the same building?

Some of these would make excellent stories. Others would go "pffft!" and vanish as soon as I tried to ask somebody the first question. Most of them, probably all of them, look pretty lame when you see them in a list like this. But if you start looking up background and interviewing people, any one of them could turn into a really interesting story. They're all about people, and dreaming up story ideas is nothing but old-fashioned "people-watching" focused on a specific objective.

One rule I try to make for myself when I'm brainstorming. There's no such thing as a bad idea. I don't want to censor myself. Like everybody else, I've got a little creep who sits on my shoulder and tells me, "Lame, lame. Nobody's going to want to read that." If I listen to him I'll never get anywhere, so I'm open to lame ideas. My own and other people's as well. Which leads me to my second rule. There's no such thing as an idea that's so good it can't be improved on. Especially when I'm brainstorming in a group, the best ideas often take shape when somebody says something kind of half-baked and somebody else takes it, changes it just a little bit and it turns into something absolutely brilliant.

As we look at each other's lists in class today, remember Rule No. 2. Read them over, choose an idea or two that seem especially do-able and suggest how you might go about turning them into a story -- who you might interview, what you'd ask them, how you might modify it a little bit and so on ... Post your suggestions as comments to each other's lists.

COMM 337: Surprise! Surprise!

Post to your blogs --

How does Donald Murray define "surprise?" You'll want to skim through Chapter 3, "EXPLORE: Report for Surprise," before answering this. He doesn't really define it, but he has several brief quotes you might want to include in your blog post.

How can you adapt Murray's concept to your own writing? In other words, how can you report for surprise? Hint: I think it has something to do with always being ready to be surprised.

Here's an example of how I might go about blogging it ...

So I'm sitting in a little family restaurant on 9th Street, throwing cholesterol bombs into my stomach (No. 3 on the menu, scrambled, corned beef hash, wheat toast) and wondering how I'm going to explain what Don Murray means when he says, "The constant awareness of the working journalist is not a mystery. It is something that can be learned and practiced" (35). And in the booth in front of me, I'm aware of a couple of guys with one of those tourist-y maps of Route 66 spread on across the table between them. The kind with little pictures of the Cozy Dog Drive-In and all the other tourist spots along old U.S. 66 between Chicago and St. Louis. Back in the day, it ran down 9th Street. They're in their mid- to late 30s, I'd say, and one of them is wearing a tan knit shirt with "RSPCA" embroidered on the sleeve.

With that, I start to get interested.

The only RSPCA I know of is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in England.

So I listen a little more carefully, and darned if one of the guys with the Highway 66 map doesn't have a British accent.

Do I have a story? I don't know yet. But I know how to find out. All I'd have to do is introduce myself, comment on the map and start a conversation. If my hunch is correct and they're Brits who are following old U.S. 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, I could do a five-minute interview on the spot. I already know the old highway attracts occasional pilgrims from Europe, and I can get on the Internet later to fill in the background.

Anyway, that's what I think Murray means by surprise. If my hunches pan out, I've got a story. Just by keeping my eyes open, and being ready to be surprised.

But even though it's my assignment, it's your blog. So take this assignment, turn it around and adapt it to your own style, your own voice. Surprise me.

COMM 337: Reporting ... ABC, BBC, NHK poll

The subtitle. title of this course was supposed to be "beyond newswriting." See! There it is on our syllabus. But we keep coming back to the basics -- reporting, in other words -- because you never get beyond reporting.

In the news today, along with the political news about U.S. involvement in Iraq, is a poll by ABC News, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) and the Japanese broadcaster NHK that finds "deepening dissatisfaction with conditions in Iraq, lower ratings for the national government and growing rejection of the U.S. role there."

At least in the U.S., it's what we call a sidebar story, one that kind of stands off to the side of the main news about Gen. David Petraeus' long-awaited report on the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq.

This time the sidebar has a sidebar of its own, a story on how the poll was done. I think it's a masterpiece of reporting.

Read it, and we'll discuss it in class.

A couple of things to think about: (1) How does this kind of reporting give a different view from that of the Iraqi priests who spoke at Springfield-Benedictine? How is it the same? (2) Should American media join with the Brits and Japanese to do a poll that some observers would say undercuts U.S. foreign policy in Iraq? Why? Why not? What are the principles to be balanced here?

COMM 337: Weekend blog assignment

Something to keep you busy and happy over the weekend ... also (and primarily) a review of your reading assignments in our textbook.

Re-read Chapters 1 and 2 of "Writing to Deadline" by Don Murray. Post to your blog a paragraph or two in answer to each of these questions:

1. Murray identifies and passes on several tips or processes that have helped him as a writer, starting with his habit of "writing" away from his desk (i.e. figuring out how to organize what he writes, word choices, etc.), on pages 16-17. Analyze your own writing processes as a communications student and therefore an apprentice professional writer, and compare them to Murray's. What tips can you pass on to other professional writing students?

2. What specific ideas in Murray's discussion of his writing practice and his interviews with staff writers for The Boston Globe can help you with your own writing? What specific ideas or anecdotes in their stories can help you develop your own sense of professionalism?

Read the chapters over the weekend, post a draft to your blog by class Monday and have a final draft of your post completed and edited by Wednesday.

COMM 207, 337: Newspapers, news and the internet

Cross-posted to my masscomm. blogs. -- pe

Here's one from a guy you should get familiar with, media critic Jack Shafer of the electronic magazine Slate.com. This column on how newspapers serve up a steady diet of leftovers from their internet editions is especially timely for students in Communications 207 (editing for publication) because it updates the chapter on news editing and copy flow we read for Thursday, but it's important for all of us.

What does the future hold for newspapers? That's anybody's guess, but you'll be able to guess better after you read Shafer.

And it will affect all of us, even those of you who have no intention of going into the newspaper business (or like me who have no intention of going back to newspapering). The news business still sets a lot of the standards for the communications industry. So it's worth knowing.

Besides, questions like this -- what does the future hold for newspapers? -- have a way of popping up on midterm and final exam essay tests.

Read it, and be ready to discuss in class.

COMM 337: Newswriting review -- the lede

I've decided we have two groups of people in Communications 337 who could use a quick-and-dirty review of COMM 209 (basic newswriting), at least the part on how to write a lede and "hang" a story from it.

First, the two types of people:

Students who haven't had COMM 209 yet and haven't studied how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid is the basic building block.

Students who've had COMM 209 and have forgotten how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid -- of course -- is still the basic building block.

Actually, now that I think of it, there's a third category:

Students who've had COMM 209, who remember the inverted pyramid and still could benefit from a review. And it goes without saying the inverted pyramid -- I'll bet you can see this coming by now -- is still the basic building block.

I think that covers all of us. So here goes.

For my money, the best, clearest explanation for beginners is by Lawrence Surtees of the Toronto Globe and Mail on the "SSN Newsroom" website for Canadian journalism students. Read it carefully, several times, too, and you'll understand how to organize a news story. You'll also start developing a feel for when to use a hard lede, when to use a soft lede and how to craft a lede that introduces the key elements of the rest of the story. Surtees also has an excellent tip sheet on "How to Write a Great News Story" that goes into this business of hard and soft news stories in a little more detail. I've assigned it once already, but it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

Here's something I learned from my first city editor, the late Dick Smyser of The Oak Ridger, a daily in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Dick told us to think of four or five keywords that had to be in the story. "Four die in flash flood," or "City council raises taxes." Those words would be in the lede.

Here's another link. A journalism student named David Cohn has an explanation of why some of us spell it "lede" in his blog DigiDave. It's basically so you don't get "lead" (the leading part of the story) it confused with "lead" (the metal). Cohn also has an example of what "Little Red Riding Hood" would look like with a hard news lede:

"A 10-year-old girl and her bed-ridden grandmother escaped death yesterday after a woodsman hacked open a cross-dressing wolf that swallowed them whole."

Try it. Choose a fairy tale or well-known story, and write a hard-news lede for it. Post it as a comment to this blog.

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. -- "30" and career advice

Cross-posted to all my blogs.

Found while surfing The San Francisco Chronicle's website SFGate, a "30 piece" by outdoors writer Paul McHugh with a bit of advice for any young people considering making journalism a career." He sums it up in three words:

Go for it!

The column, which ran in the print edition Thursday, was McHugh's last. He's retiring after 22 years on the outdoors beat.

"I'm about to fold my tent and take a hike," said McHugh. "And yes, I do mean that literally."

Like many journalists, McHugh said he's proudest of the stories that exposed abuses and helped correct them:

One great part of a newspaper job is that it awards permission to ask questions and seek answers. I've focused on trying to wield that power well, particularly while facing folks who didn't seem inclined to answer. This job hasn't been only about fun; I've striven to address real resource and public-access issues.

On a few occasions, I've been able to perform investigative work that's at the heart of our journalistic mission. I broke up a cabal of the heedless and malfeasant, helping Asilomar become a well-managed funding source for our state parks department. I ushered an abusive administrator out the door of the California State Parks Foundation, and helped that organization to revive. Fighting for the public felt fabulous. If any of you young folks out there should feel tempted to join the right honorable crusade of journalism, here's my best advice: Go for it! You are needed. Especially if you have the insight and multimedia skills to help journalism re-invent itself for this new century.

McHugh says, "Humanity's age of exploration, of adventure and of existential challenge is far from over," even though the present isn't very inspiring. Again, his advice sums up in three words: Go for it! He adds:

History's overarching lesson, as far as I can tell, is that a time of ease ought to be used in steady preparation for times of hardship or calamity ahead - which will come to us in their turn, as surely as sunrise. If periods of ease are used only to grow soft and indolent, then after calamity returns, you'll have to shoulder more blame than you might want.

Something worth thinking about.

But what's a "30 piece?"
Back in the days when newspapers received their news over the telegraph, the custom grew up of keying in "30" at the end of a transmission. So "30" came to stand for the end of the story, and a "30 piece" came to stand for a writer's last bylined column. Nobody ever types "30" at the end of a story anymore (except occasionally an overeager public relations intern ending their first press release), but it's a bit of nostalgia that still lingers. Like this:

-- 30 --

COMM 337: "Anatomy of a High School Dropout"

Don Murray, author of our textbook, is the subject of an odd story titled "Anatomy of a High School Dropout" in an online education magazine. (Odd for our purposes, at least, because it's written by an educator rather than a journalist.) It's by Jeanne Jacoby Smith, a specialist in rhetoric and composition pedagogy who decided "the very things that gave Murray grief in school were those that won him the Pulitzer Prize."

I was always interested in the story, because I like Murray and because I never saw a whole lot of point in school either, at least not till grad school (but that's another story and not a very interesting one). But I never looked in the Jacoby Smith piece for anything that might help my own writing until today. Then I needed to find something -- and find it quick -- for an in-class writing assignment when a half dozen students showed up without their textbooks. Smith's story was all I could think of, so I asked them to write about what they found in it that could help them with their writing as J-students.

Which means I had to go back and re-read the story for writing tips, anecdotes about Murray and other things that might help me as a writer, too. I was surprised how much I found.

For one thing, Murray bombed out in school because he'd get too interested in a project, and he'd let all the rest of the busywork slide. I used to do that, too, and it's one of the reasons I always hated school until I could do research of things that interested me in grad school. But the same habits that hurt Murray (and me) in school are the ones you need as a professional writer.

Jacoby Smith explains:

Murray hungered for in-depth immersion in a subject of his own choosing. What mattered were topics he cared passionately about. He was motivated for a career in writing, for meaningful work that would point him in that direction, but he was not motivated for high school, which did not expedite his cause. When topics of interest captured Murray's attention, days would pass until he surfaced again. He reflects on the situation, "I was a compulsive reader held back by my ... teachers since I read more, far more, than was required. I knew I could learn what I needed to learn." His sense of efficacy, the knowledge that he could do what he determined to do, is characteristic of resilient children.

Whatever Murray decided to do he did with passion. If he failed, he did so abysmally. If he passed, he excelled beyond expectations. His Latin teacher informed him that he was her best translator in class, but in grammar he failed. Today, Murray laughs, "I simply didn't care enough about past participle, intransitive ... verbs."

Wow! That's what I was like all the way through school. I didn't much care for grammar, either. Still don't.

But the way Murray threw himself into research is exactly what pays off in journalism. In a lot of workplace settings, as a matter of fact. Jacoby Smith says Murray is an example of a "resiliant child," a type of student she's trying to reach. I don't know about that, but he was a good enough journalist to get a job with Time right out of school and win a Pulitzer Prize.

The other part I liked has to do with Murray's emphasis on surprise. One reason he was a good writer (a good teacher, too, I think) is because he was always open to being surprised. In fact, he insisted on it. Jacoby Smith says Murray:

... passed most courses, but barely. In his words, "I couldn't make sense of the work if there was no mystery involved."

What is "mystery" for Murray?

Anything that involves surprise. To this day he writes about his craft as putting pen to paper "to write what I do not expect. I invite, encourage, cultivate, welcome, and follow surprise." Though he spent his life as a reporter, writer, and writing coach, he confesses to teaching that which cannot be taught. A writer, he says, hears the voice in his head creating, unraveling, revising, envisioning the writing as it comes. Writing has become an obsession to reveal that which he does not know -- a form of ultimate reality, his daily revelation. He authors faith at the point of a pen and talks about the "voice within, the voice of the text." He claims he can pick out a newsroom's best reporters by watching them silently (prayerfully?) voice the stories as they flow onto the page.

I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes here. You can check them in the original. To me, the main thing here is surprise. It's key to the way I'm trying to teach this whole course in advanced journalistic writing.

In fact, that's what happened when I assigned the Jacoby Smith article in class. I wasn't expecting to, and it was a pleasant surprise. But I guess that's the point.

COMM 337: Your first blogs, a note on grades

Time to close the books on the assignment I gave you last week, which was to create a blog and post your answers to the question about Donald Murray's last columns to the blog. I think we're off to a halfway decent start, although I do kinda think it might have been a better start if more of you had bothered to do the @#$%! assignment. Some overall observations after reading your responses.

What I like about your blogs.

When I assigned you to read stuff by and about an 82-year-old man, I wasn't sure whether his stuff was going to bridge the generation gap. And I'm never sure how much my students are going to like the same things I do. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. It's always a gamble.

This time I thought the gamble paid off.

Something I didn't expect: Most of you commented on Murray's way of life, the way he dealt with personal matters or the way his writing reflected his way of living. His writing tips are good, but I think what he really has to offer is in the attitudes he brings to the craft. And it sounds like you're picking up on that. Good! It's a surprise, but I like surprises (well, most surprises). And I encourage all of you to look for surprises, to delight in surprises as we go along. We'll deal more with surprise as we go along.

Some of your reactions that I liked:

"While reading all of Donald Murray's articles, I got the sense that he thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing," said Christina Ostermeier. "He brought his love of life and writing out in every word he wrote. Although at times I felt a hint of sadness in his writing when mentioning his wife, who passed away before him, I think he still just loved the fact that he got the chance to mention her in his articles."

Christina went on to say that's something in Murray's writing we can all model in our own, writing about the things and the people we know and enjoying it to the hilt. I agree 100 percent.

Other comments that I liked: Ben Harley said:

... What I truly learned from him, and I think I should try to integrate into my own life, I found in his obituary.

"My parents and teachers got together and decided I was stupid," he wrote last year. "My response was to develop a private mantra: 'I'm stupid but I can come in early and stay late.' Surprise. It worked. Good work habits will beat talent every time."

I try to use this idea at work too. This is just a great mantra. Hopefully I have talent, but in case I don't I can still succeed as a writer.

Agreed. Didn't somebody once say success is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?

Michele Bearss said there was advice in Murray's columns she could use, but "I would only use it on a personal level." She added:

Within the columns that we were assigned to read it sounded almost like Murray's preparation to leave this world. Almost as if it was his last advice to his readers. Throughout his 82 years of life, Murray wrote a lot of articles and toward the end of his life they were focused mostly on the advice he would want to give to his young readers before he past. In the article titled, "Adventures Close to Home" Murray writes, "Do I stay at home or go out? Each invitation has its own challenge, peculiar to our combination of ailments, discomforts, indignities. The easy way is to stay home watching soap operas as my father did in his last years. But I want to live the life I have been unexpectedly given as fully as possible."

Amen. Good advice for all of us. I like the quote, too, and what he said about life being unexpected. Kind of like surprises.

If you want want to see a model for what a good blog item for class can look like, visit Robert Schwartz' blog. I'll just quote the whole thing:

The one thing I found interesting about Donald Murray's obituary was this quote:

"Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it," he wrote. "The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."

Even at age 82, he was never sure he'd be able to complete his next assignment. Not because of any physical ailment, but because of the uncertainty that comes with the blank page -- something that all writers share at some point or another, if not all the time. It's interesting to know that even someone of his age and experience would continue to face that problem up to his death.

That blank sheet of paper may turn into a blank computer screen with changing tecnhology, but it never goes away.

What I didn't like.

I would have been happier if more people had done the assignment. This is a writing course, and I don't know any way to learn how to write without doing some writing. If you don't write, you can't learn to write. It's not rocket science, is it?

A word or two about grades.

It would be a violation of federal law for me to post grades to the internet, but I am allowed to make some general observations. One is that you have to do the assignment to get a passing grade. If you don't do an assignment, you get a zero. If you do half the assignment (if you create the assigned blog but don't bother to post anything to it, for example), you get a grade of 50 percent. If you consult our syllabus for COMM 337, you will see the following notice in the section on means of evaluation: "The instructor's grading scale is as follows: A = 100-90. B = 89-80. C = 79-70. D = 69-60. E = 59-0." Do the math.

COMM 337: Wed. in-class exercise

I developed an instinct for story, the dramatic interaction between people that moved forward with cause and effect. -- Donald Murray

In Chapter 1 of "Writing to Deadline," Don Murray tells how he developed "an instinct for story," something he says every newswriter ought to have. Typically, he tells how he developed the story-telling instinct by telling a story ... the story of how he learned to tell a story. Wow. Kinda post-modern, isn't it? But he also lists several journalistic principles he learned -- things like accuracy, using verbs and nouns, "discovery," writing tight.

Read Washington Post staff writer Teresa Wiltz' Aug. 29 story "Still Singing Those Post-Katrina Blues" and analyze it in terms of Murray's principles. How does she practice the craft? By reading between the lines, what can you tell about the way she reported the story? How does it stack up in terms of accuracy, conciseness, order, clarity, voice and especially "discovery" and "voice?" What do you think Murray means by the terms? You probably won't be able to tell how Wiltz wrote earlier drafts of the story (I can't)! But you can analyze the voice that comes from working with the story and "adapt[ing] to the writing task and the music of the voice" (9). Look at her word choices, the rhythm of the words, the way she picks up a little bit of the New Orleans way of speaking. How can you use some of her techniques in your own writing?

Post your answers as comments to this blogpost.

COMM 337 - links to your blogs / FINAL LIST

Here's a roster of weblogs in COMM 337 so far, as complete as I can make it. If I don't have your address posted yet, please email it to me. If you want to change yours, correct me, please don't hesitate to let me know. Make a note of the *permalink for this post, because you'll be using it to keep track of class discussion, etc.

• Quinn Allen untitled (qa-vs-qsa)
  
  
• Michele Bearss untitled (writing4weenies)
  
  
• Jeremy Cook COMM 337 Advance Journalism
  
  
• Eric Craddock eric
  
  
• Shalon Davis untitled (shalonspot)
  
  
• Jeremy Dixon Jeremy D's Blog
  
  
• Whitney Drobnack untitled (com337mwf1200)
  
  
• Terah Ellison COM 337 Journal
  
  
• Jeff Hall Journalism
  
  
• Ben Harley untitled (vicious_apathy)
  
  
• Deanna Jones untitled (Ms. Jones)
  
  
• Zach Kirchner Advanced Journalism 337
  
  
• Mitch Ladd The Best Blog Names Are Taken
  
  
• Meghan McCarthy meghanmccarthy
  
  
• Gina Moscardelli Blogger Gina
  
  
• Christina Ostermeier untitled (5568blog)
  
  
• Robert Schwartz Advanced Journalism Writing
  
  
• Marqueta Stewart queta-marqueta
  
  

As the rest of you (the ones with a blank after your names) get your blogs created, please let me know the addresses so we can complete the class roster. This is an ongoing assignment that will not go away. If you haven't gotten around to posting your answer to the first question on the Donald Murray obit and columns in The Boston Globe, that one won't go away either!

_______________________
* A permalink is a permanent link for a blog post. Explains the techterms.com website, they allow us to bookmark a blog post so we can come back to it later, even after "the posting is outdated and no longer present on the home page."

COMM 337: Quotes, color in New Orleans story / READ!

Cross-posted from my HUM 223 blog ...

A by-lined story in The Washington Post this morning. Very complex. Very well written. Notice the way staff reporter Teresa Wiltz starts with a soft lede ... a word picture of jazzman John Boutte singing and counting money that leads her into the main point of the story, a nut graf that very simply says, "Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk."

Notice especially how she blends description -- which journalists like to call "color" -- and quotes with background. As you read it, can you imagine her sitting in cars taking notes, going to a night club in the 9th Ward, soaking up color and getting people's words down? As you read it, look for the way she reported the story, in other words.

Will the New Orleans music scene ever get back to what it was before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005? Probably not, says an article in this morning's Washington Post. Read it (and read it now because The Post doesn't archive stories on its website forever). The spirit of the music will live on, but an awful lot has been lost. This story suggests how much.

Here's the the main point of the story, by staff writer Teresa Wiltz:

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

By industry insiders' estimates, a third of the city's musicians [...] have found a way back home for good. Another third, like Lumar LeBlanc of the brass band Soul Rebels, are doing what he calls "the double Zip code thing," parachuting into town for gigs and then heading back to temporary homes in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The final third, like blind bluesman Henry Butler, stuck in Denver, have yet to make it back.

Among the double Zip-coders is Ivan Neville, singer, songwriter, keyboardist, son of Aaron. His mom's house was washed away. She passed in January. His dad settled near Nashville. Neville relocated to Austin, jetting in and out of New Orleans a couple times a month. As for making a permanent move back home?

"I don't see it," Neville, 48, says between sets at the Maple Leaf in the city's Uptown section. "Not in the near future. The spirit of New Orleans is alive. But it will never be the same again."

Wiltz notes that high schools lost their musical instruments, and 40 percent of their students. "With the loss of schools comes the loss of teaching jobs, work that musicians counted on to pay the rent between gigs," she adds. "With the loss of students comes the loss of a future generation of musicians."

I'm cross-posting this story to my advanced journalism blog, too, because it's so well written. See how Wiltz conveys the spirit of a little club in the 9th Ward, the part of the city hit hardest by the 2005 flooding:

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased. It is that which New Orleanians so desperately want to preserve: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window. A steady stream of sports is playing on the TV, but no one pays much attention.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins's gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" -- traditional jazz. The crowd is more boomer than youthful, with seasoned souls sporting tees that read "We Survived Hurricane Katrina" and "New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home." A grizzled gent leans over a newcomer, slyly uttering the post-Katrina pickup line du jour: "I really want to show you the Ninth Ward."

As the sun sets, a man comes in peddling homemade tamales; another hawks cellphone covers and disposable cameras. Tattooed white kids arrive, while a contingent of Creole matrons stands in the center of the room, arms folded, looking just a little bit aloof. Until they start to dance as one, getting down and dirty with the beat.

A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong, filling the tiny club with a sense of goose-bump-raising communion.

I cry Hey mama

In the morning time

Yi-Yi-Yi

"Only in New Orleans," Ruffins chants, laughing and laughing. "Only in New Orleans."

Wiltz doesn't explain how she happened to hear the "pickup line du jour." Maybe she doesn't have to.

When it comes to American music, New Orleans is the cradle. It's the Garden of Eden. It's where it all began. Wiltz' story conveys that, and in a few words -- a well chosen quote -- she conveys how much was lost in Hurrican Katrina.

This is the city that spawned Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Sidney Bechet, Randy Newman and Master P -- not to mention a long line of famous musical families: the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Toussaints.

Folks like to brag that New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, a sentiment that has little to do with geography. It's a sensibility, evident in the food, the culture, in the French and Spanish surnames, in the old folks who cling to Creole, an Africanized French patois.

New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. All this informs the music here, marinating it in nostalgia and a sense of defiant joy. New Orleanians are peculiarly tied to place, ever cognizant of history.

Drive by Congo Square, and without fail, a local will remind you that it was here that the slaves played their music on Sundays, drumming away their worries, and where a slave could earn enough extra money to buy freedom. Where the Creole orchestras played in brass band concerts -- many of whose members were the black sons of rich white fathers who sent them to Europe to be educated.

"In New York, you learn jazz, you learn the blues," Paul Sanchez says. "In New Orleans, you're born into it. Baby comes out the womb chasing the rhythm."

He's waxing lyrical as he tools around the Lower Ninth Ward, cruising in his green minivan.

"I tell you, this place is magic," Sanchez says. "I say this with sadness in my voice."

In another interview, with more well chosen quotes from a 21-year-old "jazz-funk-rock-pop" musician named Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, she conveys what remains, how fragile it is and how important it is for the future. As you almost have to do in New Orleans these days, she approaches the future through the past:

When Katrina hit, Andrews was a 19-year-old wunderkind on break from touring with Lenny Kravitz. He fled with his family to Dallas, 10 crammed in his Volvo, wondering and worrying if other family members made it out, too.

He didn't stay away for long. New Orleans grounds him. Specifically, it is Faubourg Treme that feeds him -- reputed to be America's oldest black neighborhood, which nurtured the musical talents of the Rebirth Brass Band, 19th-century Creole classical composer Edmund Dede, Kermit Ruffins and Louis Prima. The neighborhood that nurtured Andrews.

Here, high-water marks along the wooden shotgun houses and shuttered nightclubs give mute testimony to the flood. Few residents returned, but today, under a highway overpass, against a backdrop of murals of long-gone jazz greats, a group of men gathers as it does every day, sitting on metal folding chairs, trying to reclaim a little bit of community. Most of them don't live here any longer.

"These," Andrews says, pointing at the men as he pulls up alongside them in his oversize SUV, "are the last that's left. This is the soul of the neighborhood."

He rolls down the window. "Hey, Dad. Do you need anything? You hungry?" His father, James, smiles at him, shakes his head.

This is where Trombone Shorty comes to touch base, to get his "laugh on," to run errands for his elders. To remind himself not to get a big head. To remind himself of the importance of reaching back, to pull along other musicians who aren't as fortunate as he.

"New Orleans made me who I am," Andrews says. "I can't leave it.

"I need New Orleans. And New Orleans needs me."

COMM 337: Ground rules/Fri. assignment

On Friday we will cover a talk by two Catholic priests who have experience in Iraq. As it now stands, it will be in the Presidents Room (L15) at noon and it will replace the Friday writing assignment I mentioned previously. Any updates I will post to this blog.

We have been asked to abide by certain ground rules regarding identification of the speakers or the agency sponsoring the talk: (1) we don't identify the speakers by name in what we write; and (2) we don't identify the sponsoring agency in anything we write. No pictures and no sound recordings, either. You wouldn't think about this at first, but both can be used to identify people. So we don't use either.

Normally journalists are very reluctant to quote anonymous sources. But where there's good reason, it is not an uncommon practice. Given what is happening in Iraq, failure to abide by ground rules could literally get somebody killed. So we will be attending the talk "on background" and following Associated Press ground rules on the use of anonymous sources.

COM 337: Read and post to blog

Do this assignment after you open your blog and post the address to the COMM 337: Class blog addresses" comments field. Due Friday so I can read them and evaluate them over the weekend.

Donald Murray, author of our textbook "Writing to Deadline" and columnist for The Boston Globe," died at the end of last year. He was 82.

Here's what I want you to do:

1. Read Murray's obituary in The Globe and the last few columns he wrote, which are still available on the newspaper's website. (Talk about a guy who kept going right up to the end. He turned in his last column on a Friday, he died Saturday and the column appeared in Tuesday's paper.) Pay special attention to his last column, headlined "Friends' caring, sharing shows the way," and the column headed "Finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank sheet" that ran Dec. 26.

2. Write an answer to the following question(s) and post to your blog. (Especially if you're not used to blogging yet, I would recommend drafting your answers in Microsoft Word and copy-and-pasting them to the blog. If you post links, see this important *warning at the bottom of the page. If you're not posting links yet, it'll just confuse you. That's why I'm putting it at the bottom like an old-fashioned footnote.) Here's the question:

Donald Murray was 82 years old when he did. Is there anything in his last few columns that you can learn from in your own career as a professional writer?

No right answers here, although I do want you to think about these columns and see if there's anything in them you can use in your own writing. You all have different goals, and different ways of writing, so you'll get different things out of the columns and/or the obituary ... something he says about writing and the craft of writing, the way he handled his career, the way he writes, his style, word choices, etc., whatever. It's up to you, but I think he'll have something to say to all of us as writers.

An example: If I were doing this exercise, I might post a blog on the way he kept churning out columns in old age when life was obviously getting difficult for him and he had a good excuse to just sit back and not put in the effort, but clearly it was important to him to keep meeting deadlines. His daughter said something about how he lived through his writing. But I also like what he said about people might think he's stupid (although I seriously doubt anybody really did), but he could work harder. And it blows me away his last column was thanking his friends for being there for him. Did he know it was going to be his last?

No wrong answers, either. Although "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" might come close to being one.

* Warning footnote on hypertext links. Here's something I found out the hard way: If you type out hypertext -- that stuff that goes "a href equal-sign quote" you used to link to your blogs -- in Microsoft Word, Bill @#$&ing Gates will put "curly quotes" in automatically, and Blogger won't know what to do with them. I just put x's in the draft and type in the hypertext later in Blogger.

COM 337: Class blog addresses

As soon as you've opened your blog, you need to let the rest of us know your address. So I've set up a handy-dandy place you can do that. It's this post. Here are the steps:

1. Go down to the end of this post where it says "posted by Pete # 3:20 PM 0 comments" (except the number of comments will change as you follow the rest of the instructions), and click on where it says "___ comments." That will open up the comment field.

2. In the comment field, write a message telling us what you're naming your blog and creating a link to it (which is why the number of comments will change, but you've figured that out already so I don't need to tell you, right)?

Here's how you do a link. You'll have to use the angle brackets, the keys that look like "less than" and "greater than" from math class that you'll find as the shift of the comma and the period on your keyboard. Stuff that's enclosed in angle brackets is called an HTML "tag." (And HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. But I'll bet you already knew that, too.)

3. Start your link by entering <a href=" Then copy your blog's address (or URL) from the "Address" field on your browser and paste it in right after the quote mark. Follow it with another "> so it looks something like this <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com"> all run together with no spaces.

4. Next you need some text that you highlight so it'll take readers to your blog when they click on it. That's called hypertext. If you're doing this for the first time, it's easiest to say something like: Click here for the link. And highlight the word "here." It'll look like this: Click <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com">here</a> for link.

5. Make sure you put your address in the message. Just type it in normally without any of the angle brackets.

You may get all of this right the first time. You may not. (Don't feel bad if you don't! Just keep trying.) Pretty quickly, you'll get used to it. And it's an important thing to know because you'll be doing a lot of linking on your blogs as you get under way.

Once you've made the link, save the comment to this blogpost and make a note of the headline, the date, the permalink address of this post or whatever. We'll be coming back to it.

So the next time you're sitting at a bar and you notice somebody next to you staring into their beer and muttering "angle bracket a space href equals quote URL quote angle bracket," you'll understand why. Buy 'em a round. They may need it.

COMM 337 assignment: Starting your blogs

You'll notice on your syllabus for Communications 337 I'm requiring you to create a blog and do a lot of your work in the form of posts to that blog. I think you will enjoy this part of the class once you get used to it.

A couple of places to look to begin with:

1. There's a good brief (500 words) definition of blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's writing a book on blogging and also has an academic research blog on blogging called jill/txt. Some of her discussion is way over my head, but she's one of the best people I've read on the theory behind the phenomenon.

2. To see what a major metro newspaper does with blogs, go to The Chicago Tribune's homepage and look for the "Latest from our blogs" box. Today's is in the middle of the page, a little to the left and directly below the chicagotribune.com nameplate. It'll probably be in more or less the same place tomorrow (Monday) when you see it. Read several of the blogs, and they'll give you a good idea of some of the possibilities.

We'll look at several other blogs in class, and you'll link to several in one of your first posts. So start looking for blogs that you can model yours after. See what interests you and what doesn't. One thing you can do is express your personality (although maybe not in the same way(s) as MySpace) in a blog. So look around and see what appeals to you and what techniques you can use in your own blog.

By the end of the week, you should be ready to start your blog. I suggest Blogger. It's relentlessly user-friendly. But you may have another host that you like better. If so,

One warning, though: Blogging is a form of publication. One of my old bosses, an elected state official, used to say: "Never put anything in writing you wouldn't want to see leaked to The [Chicago] Trib or The Sun-Times." Good advice! Never put anything on your blog you wouldn't want to see printed out and clipped to your resume before a job interview. But you can -- and should -- express yourself more informally in a blog than you do in a college paper. In evaluating your blogs, I'll be guided by the applicable standards in the Writing Assessment Rubric linked to my faculty page.