Talking about the Inauguration

Brian Lehrer show is online. You can listen to me blather about New Yorkers and Inauguration travel here. Click on "Inauguration Prep."

Things I didn't say that I wish I had:

--That I was a NYU grad student!
--That there are still plenty of bus and plane tickets available, though morning Amtrak trains are starting to sell out
--That I had known where to send New Yorkers coordinating travel to D.C.

My First Radio "Appearance"

My blog on New Yorkers and the Inauguration caught the eye of a producer at the Brian Lehrer show. It's an "under-reported story" and my blog is one of the few things out there on it. (Thanks be to my Writing and Reporting professor who forced the class to keep blogs to track their reporting on their final pieces). I shall be on the radio (WNYC-- 93.9 FM and AM 820) at 11:25 on Wednesday talking about New Yorkers and Inauguration enthusiasm waning. Stay tuned.

Would you call this a radio appearance, or a voice-pearance?

Finals... Busy... No time...

Last week of the semester. So busy. Working on this project for my Writing and Reporting Class: New Yorkers and Inauguration 2009. I have to maintain a blog to accompany a feature story I am writing.

The stress of this week and last force me to ask the question, Why am I paying NYU to do this to me?

Attempting to Master the Art of the Profile

Last year around this time, I was assigned one of my most challenging stories for The Washington Examiner: profiling a Virginia woman on her 100th birthday. I drove out to her house on a rainy morning the day before Thanksgiving, and spent two hours talking to her.

(My job was not made easier by the presence of the Examiner photographer who snapped away while she talked, making her visibly uncomfortable.)

When I got back to the office, I had pages and pages of notes about "Cornie" McGrath's life, and faced the difficult task of assembling them into a coherent narrative that didn't just go along the lines of she was born, she did this, she did that, she moved to Virginia, now she's 100.

With this in mind, I've been focusing on profile-writing in the first semester of journalism school. I have two in the works now, and recently finished one that I was able to use as a school assignment and a posting on Above The Law: Legal Profile: Nick 'Ultimate Fighting Lawyer' Thompson.

There seem to be a few tricks to writing profiles:

• Research. Get background material to inform the questions you ask. Has the person been interviewed before? Has he written articles/books? Does she have a blog?
  
• Extract an anecdote to provide color or insight into a person's character or story, and leading the piece with that.
• Triangulation. It's tempting to write the profile based on one interview with the subject, and your impressions of the person. But it's best if you track down friends, colleagues, and other "experts" to lend insight and quotes to the piece.
• Multiple interviews with your subject. Talk to him or her, then talk to others, then talk to him or her again. Try writing along the way to figure out what you've forgotten to ask about.
• The phone just ain't as good. Interview your subject in person. If you can, follow your subject around for a few hours, or a day, to get a sense of how he or she interacts with others and how he or she behaves when not in "interview mode."
• Creative narrative arc. Don't get stuck in a biographical/encyclopedic retelling of someone's life story, following the easy chronological path. (Write down everything, but figure out which details can be dropped. Most of the time, we probably don't need to know which high school he or she went to.)

Well, this was a form of procrastinating before tackling my current profile piece. Time to put the nose back to the grindstone.

Marathon Writing

Life feels like a marathon these days. Grad school is not the laid back, sleeping-in, leisurely reading, lots of down time, cafe-spending experience that one would expect. But journalism school is rewarding, especially when the reporting brings me into contact with people like Bob and Susan Hammond.

One of my class assignments was to profile someone from my hometown running the New York City Marathon. I went through the list of entrants and chose to contact Bob Hammond due to his affiliation with the Natural Living Club. I thought that could provide a good news hook. I interviewed him twice by phone in the month before the marathon, and then met him and his wife in New York the weekend of the marathon.

I accompanied them to the Expo, had lunch with them at a vegan restaurant, and stood with Susan at mile 23 to cheer Bob on as he ran past about three hours into the race. The Hammonds were wonderful, inspiring people, and it was a joy to meet them. My profile piece ran in The Pelican Press this week.

Twenty years ago, newly minted dentist Robert Hammond was an avowed junk food lover, indulging frequently in "Twinkies, double dogs and Ring Dings." On the car radio one day he heard health guru Gary Null talking about holistic living and healthy eating.

Read the full article.

I had tried to pitch the piece to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but they totally snubbed me, not responding to phone calls or e-mails. Grrr.

Running changed his diet and brought him love [The Pelican Press]

Elections and Meltdowns

I am a bit late "filing" this blog post. I spent election day morning on the Staten Island ferry gathering quotes for this article, Political Families Go Head to Head in Staten Island, and spent a good portion of the evening at the Department of Journalism editing reporting done by undergrads on How Gen Y Voted. The reporting behind the political families story included coffee with Bob Straniere's spokeman, conversations with twenty Staten Islanders over a month period, a Congressional candidate's debate, four ferry rides, online research and phone conversations with political experts in New York and even Missouri. And now it's over.

Every time an article is "put to bed," written and published, it's like a little funeral. You hope that all of the reporting led to something informative, worthwhile, and maybe even thoughtful. Yet, at the same time, you know its life is likely to be incredibly short-lived. Just another small contribution to a vast sea of news and information being poured out into the Web. Sigh.

At this point, November 4 is a distant memory. Now all the talk is of January 20, and plans for the inauguration. There's definitely a part of me wishing I were still living in D.C. to witness history being made there this January. But in New York, at least I get to witness the financial meltdown firsthand. Woo hoo...

I spent this past weekend in Ohio. Friends and relatives talked about disappearing jobs and fear of the coming recession. Cities like New York and D.C. haven't truly been hit by the economic downturn yet. They chug along, mostly unscathed. Though the Wall Street Journal screams terrible economic news at me each morning, I feel the weight of the downturn most when I talk to family and friends in Cleveland, in Sarasota, and in Charlotte.

We can only hope that the new roster of political office holders does a better job with the economy than the last bunch.

Getting to chat with two of the best New York Times writers ever

My press ethics class with David Margolick meets every Wednesday night at 5:30 p.m. I never know exactly what to expect, as the class tends to easily spin off onto free-wheeling ethical tangents. Such is the nature of ethics, I suppose-- slippery.

One of the best things about the class is Prof. Margolick's ability to put us in touch with some of the greatest journalists around. We talked to the Arkansas reporters who covered the Little Rock Nine and school desegregation. We talked to New Journalist Joe McGinniss who found himself under attack in Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and The Murderer, a seminal text on the parasitic relationship between journalists and their subjects.

This week, we had the incredible opportunity to talk with Gay Talese and John McCandlish Phillips, considered to be two of the best journalists ever to work at the New York Times. Talese is known for his books on the mafia, Americans' sex lives, and the building of Staten Island's Verrazano-Narrows bridge, as well as his magazine articles on Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Floyd Patterson, and Joe Louis. "Frank Sinatra Had A Cold," written for Esquire Magazine, is considered to be a perfect piece of magazine work.

John McCandlish Phillips is not a well-known name; he wrote for the New York Times for 21 years starting in the early 1950s. Among writers, he's considered to be one of the most talented to have graced the craft. Towering over us all at six feet, five inches, he was skeletally thin. His voice choked with age. He was there to talk to us about an article he wrote in 1965 where he revealed a Ku Klux Klan leader's Jewish background. The subject of the story killed himself the day the story ran on the New York Times' front page. In answer to our questions, Phillips said he was "not a deep thinker." He did stories as they were assigned to him and that was that.

Gay Talese has an incredibly powerful personality. Dressed to the hilt in a three piece suit, his presence seemed to fill the room from the moment he entered. He led the discussion off on all kinds of tangents, though he returned again and again to his disgust with the New York Times' present Washington bureau. He was emphatic about the need to eliminate anonymous sources from stories.

Talese named the three worst stories of the last few years: 1. The Los Alamos spy story; 2. the anthrax story; and 3. the Duke lacrosse scandal. "The Hester Primming of those boys was disgraceful."

An interesting point raised by Talese was the need for class differentiation between journalists and their sources. He said it was different for him and Phillips in the 50s and 60s. Talese went to the University of Alabama, while Phillips never went to college. They were on the outside looking in, and had a distance from their assumedly more elite and powerful sources. Journalists nowadays though often come from the same places and top schools as those in power. Talese objects to reporters' social lives being so intermingled with those of their sources. I definitely saw a lot of this in Washington.

In a really beautiful moment, Phillips read a story to us from City Notebook, a collection of 60 of his articles. All but one was published in The New York Times. This is the one he read to us. It recounts the artistry of a Ringling Brothers clown, Otto Griebling. Phillips tried for years to write about Griebling for the Times, but they would never approve it. In 1972, one editor finally agreed to run an article on the clown, but when Phillips called the circus, he discovered Griebling was in the hospital. The circus promised him access to Griebling as soon as he recovered, but Griebling died. Phillips' greatest regret is that the clown was never recognized for his artistry in the pages of The New York Times.