@btindrelunas @aheram Dude, if your mother says she loves you, check it out. #journalizing #wordstoliveby
three stories that needed telling
Two weeks ago, three drivers died on our local roadways in a series of unrelated crashes that spurred a traffic nightmare on the freeway that everyone loved to talk about, we at TDS loved to write about and our online readers loved to click on.
The day after the crashes, it occurred to me that no one at our news organization had made any calls trying to track down the family members of the three people who were killed. So I made the rounds, left messages at questionable numbers with nondescript voicemail greetings and heard, well, nothing — at first.
Gradually, though, I got messages on my own voicemail from those long-shot cold calls, and soon I had successfully pitched the idea of a family-based folo to my editor. Then, the reporting really began. On Thursday, I talked with a woman who lost her stepfather. Friday, it was a man who lost his brother. And Tuesday, four children and a widow... and then I had to sit down and put all of their stories — and all of their loved ones — into words.
The result was the story that appeared on the front page of The Desert Sun this morning, and I actually spent most of the morning upset about how it turned out. An editor's attempt to add more detail to the story ended up introducing a small error, and what had been my first three paragraphs had been expanded quite a bit to become a six-paragraph intro that I didn't quite recognize when I saw it underneath my name in print.
But in my frustration, I lost sight of the fact that the bulk of the story was still pretty much how I had written it, and it was still my reporting that informed the words.
Luckily, the story was so well received throughout the newsroom and, really, throughout the company that I had to take a second look at how I had managed to get insight into three families and tell the three uniquely engaging stories of how they're dealing with loss and who it is they lost.
These were stories that needed to be told, and I'm glad I was entrusted (by editors and families alike) with the responsibility of telling them.
dream on
A friend's criticism of the appearance of The Desert Sun's print product got me thinking about one of the things that I've yet to see from many news organizations on the Web. Since my latest response seemed to include too many words and links for Facebook's liking, I've decided to move the conversation here.
11:59 » In the time it took me to get everything formatted over on this end, the response did start appearing on Facebook. Le sigh.
In case you haven't been following along on Facebook, here's what you missed:
Jayel at 20:06: It looks like someone at the Desert Sun forgot to left justify their columns. This looks pretty horrific. http://twitpic.com/3fh5jr
Brian at 20:25: Actually, columns run ragged right throughout the paper. (Look at Political Insider and Answer Man tomorrow; both usually run on B1 and will be ragged right, distinguishing them from the justified news copy.)
Jayel at 20:39: I meant "typographic column" not "opinion column." And it looks like that some of the straightforward news articles were also ragged-right.
Brian at 23:07: I know you were talking about the columns of text... but still, the typographic columns that make up an opinion column (which is what's pictured) aren't supposed to be justified. We've made mistakes at TDS, but running Rick's column ragged right isn't one of them.
I haven't seen Sunday's paper because I was off Saturday night, but what news stories ran ragged right?
Jayel at 07:16: I ended up doing some research into this practice and frankly, I am horrified. Typographic decisions like whether or not something is to be justified or ragged-right ought to be design decision. That is, do it because it makes sense aesthetically, not because something is an editorial.
If running Rick's column ragged-right was not a mistake, but an intentional act, then that is worse. It looks horrible.
Jayel at 08:41: I am looking at a copy of the NYT right now and they do the same thing... Except they still hyphenate so it is not as jarring.
Jayel at 08:56: On the other hand, NYT times does not have a consistent baseline either.
(He had earlier noticed and pointed out that lines of text in one TDS story don't line up with those in another story on the same page, as they do in the LA Times.)
In any case, here's the response I typed into Facebook that doesn't seem to show up now that I've refreshed the page:
To make design decisions based solely on aesthetics deprives design of its power to inform.
A page designer thinking only about aesthetics would probably make the headline "Students prepare for finals" larger and more prominent than "18 killed in bus crash" because the "fi" pair looks so pretty.
But any newspaper designer -- and, at least subconsciously, any newspaper reader -- knows that a more important story gets a larger headline. Things like headline size and style, play on a page and placement in the paper convey the comparative importance of a story without using words.
So too does text alignment. Seeing an entire story run ragged right sends a signal to the reader that there's something that distinguishes the Answer Man column that appears on B1 from the lead Valley story at the top of the page. The content of a news story and a column are stylistically different, and so too are their respective presentations.
This is an area where the print product still holds a significant advantage over Web sites because few news organizations do much to visually distinguish between news and editorial content online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/health/policy/14health.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/opinion/13mon1.html
And I think it's even more important to harness the informative power of design online since people don't have to flip past news pages to arrive at a column or editorial on the Web. Opinion pieces can be reached just as easily as news stories through a Google search or links sent around through e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.
Sometimes we try to convey what is unwritten in print through tweaks to Web headlines:
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201012040366
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010101202014
But few news organizations lean on their Web designers to have them produce something that just *looks* different based on the type of content. The State Press at ASU is headed in this direction with the way their WordPress setup labels columns:
http://www.statepress.com/2010/12/06/bcs-national-championship-game-rewards-innovation/
http://www.statepress.com/2010/12/08/arrest-made-in-kyleigh-sousa-murder-case/
And with WordPress, at least, it doesn't take much work to make even more dramatic stylistic changes based on how an item is categorized:
http://brian.indrelunas.com/?p=8824
http://brian.indrelunas.com/?p=8879
For years, I've been dreaming that newspapers would start harnessing both the power of their CMSes and the power of design to once and for all make it clear to Web readers exactly what kind of article they've landed on from their friend's link or that Google search. But if design can only be used for aesthetics' sake and not to inform, I guess I'd better keep dreaming.
the triple threat
Yesterday morning, when my editor got into the newsroom and I informed her that there was nothing all that exciting going on in the valley or in the world, she suggested that I maybe take it relatively easy.
After all, I had written a pair of B1 stories this week, along with two A1 stories, the latter of which was our big story on the lifting of California's same-sex marriage ban... next week... maybe.
So my editor said something along the lines of, "We won't give you any major A1 projects to do today."
But my morning project of resurrecting some of the legal analysis that was cut from Friday's Proposition 8 story for the Web eventually turned into an A1-candidate follow-up story.
Then, in the afternoon we got word that one of photographers was able to get some sweet shots of the Perseid meteor shower Thursday night that could definitely go on the front page of Saturday's paper, and I was asked to rehash my earlier meteor story so we had something to go along with the photo.
I also volunteered to put together a weather story for Saturday's paper, which I expected would go somewhere inside the Valley section — i.e., the B section — or maybe on B1 since we seemed to be light on both staff and stories yesterday.
During the editors' afternoon news meeting, though, I overheard the editor who usually picks out stories for the front page (or at least recaps the collectively-decided choices) rattle off a list of my three stories. I knew the first two were A1 candidates, but I figured the weather story would maybe just be teased from the front page to its actual home in Valley. Or, you know, maybe the editor had been asked, "What the hell was Indy doing today?" instead of "What's going on A1?"
After the meeting, I didn't bother to ask anyone about my suspicion that perhaps all of my stories would end up on the front page. I was more concerned with getting all three of the stories done and filed since I had things to do in the post-work afternoon/evening that I was running late for.
Anyway, fast-forward to this morning, when I checked Today's Front Pages on newseum.org and found that, yes, I did write all three of the front-page stories in today's Desert Sun. Awesome.