ASNE - What the best writers learn, what they can teach us

Gellman: No excuses

Before he went overseas as Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post, Barton Gellman covered the Pentagon. Where others saw only a hostile gulf between the military and the media, Gellman perceived common ground. "We are both in the no-excuses profession. When you get a mission in the military or you get a story for a newspaper, nobody in the world wants to hear all the good reasons why you couldn't do it. ... You just have to do it."

On the night Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, that lesson enabled Gellman to beat a remorseless deadline and in a few hours seize control of a fast-breaking, highly emotional story. For his graceful work under pressure, Gellman won the Jesse Laventhol Award for deadline reporting.

As colleague Glenn Frankel said, Gellman followed the first lesson of the deadline writer: "Keep it simple. And that's what he did." Straightforward, chronological, get it done. The result:

A right-wing Jewish extremist shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tonight as he departed a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 in Tel Aviv, throwing Israel's government and the Middle East peace process into turmoil.
The lone gunman met Rabin, 73, as he walked to his car in the Kings of Israel Square in front of Tel Aviv's city hall. The prime minister had just stepped off a massive sound stage where he had linked hands with fellow ministers to sing "The Song of Peace." Identified by police as Yigal Amir, a 27-year-old law student, the assassin fired three shots into Rabin's back at close range.

Merzer: Signals to the reader

"You cannot produce a good newspaper story without vivid, excellent, aggressive reporting," says Martin Merzer of the Miami Herald. He recalls a favorite bit of advice from Gene Miller, two-time Pulitzer winner and Herald writing coach: "If you're having trouble writing a story, you probably need to do more reporting."

For their gripping deadline account of the hostage-taking of a school bus filled with disabled children, Merzer, Gail Epstein, Frances Robles, and more than a dozen of their Herald colleagues won the Jesse Laventhol Award for team deadline reporting.

Merzer, who wrote the story, credited the reporters, columnists, interns, and others who hit the streets the morning of the hijacking with feeding him the details that enabled the Herald to compete the next day with a story given saturation broadcast coverage. Details are paramount. "You're not going to put an editor's note saying, 'Read this because we know more than you do.' But it's a signal that we do." It opens this way:

A waiter fond of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson attends morning prayers at his church, steps across the street and hijacks a school bus. Owing $15,639.39 in back taxes, wielding what he says is a bomb, Catalino Sang shields himself with disabled children.
Follow my orders, he says, or I will kill the kids. "No problem, I will," says driver Alicia Chapman, crafty and calm. "But please, don't hurt the children."
The saga of Dade County school bus number CX-17, bound for Blue Lakes Elementary, begins.

Bragg: Getting personal

Rick Bragg, national correspondent covering the South for the New York Times, lives by a rule that editors have preached for decades: "Show, don't tell."

But the lesson that underscores his writing is another editor's never-forgotten comment: "You don't have to be ashamed to make stories personal."

"He didn't mean that my feelings necessarily had to show," Bragg says, "but that it was all right to make them seem as though the reader were kind of wading through. To give the images and the details and to care about 'em one way or the other."

His storytelling skills earned him the Distinguished Writing Award for non-deadline writing, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. They are obvious in this passage from his story about aging inmates in an Alabama prison:

All Jesse Hatcher's life, the devil in him would come swimming out every time a drink of whiskey trickled in.
"It was 1979 down in Pike County," he said, looking down some dusty road in his memory for the life he took. "Me and this boy was drinking. He thought I had some money, but I didn't have none. We took to fighting, and I killed him. Quinn. His name was Quinn. Killed him with a .32. I was bad to drink back then. I never drank another drop." ...
He's 76 now and limps on a cane because of a broken leg that never healed right. He works all day in the flower garden, where he has raked the dirt so smooth you can roll marbles on it.
"My favorites are the saucer sunflowers," he said, "because they're so beautiful." ...
"They could take the fences down and I wouldn't run," he said. "This is the right place for me."

King: Hard work

"You have to gather your concentration at some point," Peter King says, "and that is one of the hardest parts ... Jim Hayes, who was a college professor of mine in California, referred to it as 'buckling a seat belt,' which basically meant, 'OK, the fun is over now;' it's time to write. I have to remind myself of that every time."

The difficult, "terrifying process" may be painful for King, but it pays off for his readers. Witness this passage from a column about downsizing called "One More Styrofoam Parachute":

His supervisors went first, strapped to traditional golden parachutes. The new bosses promptly changed all locks. "Just for your security," he was assured. And then everyone in the department was summoned for an individual "chat" with an executive freshly arrived from New York. This one wore a gray suit, smiled wide with fine white teeth, and talked excitedly about how much fun it would be, bringing the department "into the 1990s."
Right away, our boy knew he was sunk. "Once he started talking about bringing us into the '90s, I quit listening and started to study his teeth. He lost all human form. All I could see was a big barracuda smiling at me. He had jaggedy, razor teeth, and they were worn down - like he'd been using them a lot. And his eyes were in a feeding mood. I said to myself, 'Start swimming for shore.' "

Henninger: Stand-up on the editorial page

When Daniel Henninger sits down to write or edit editorials for the Wall Street Journal, he often remembers a comment by comedian Joan Rivers: "I always figure when I go out on stage ... I've got about five minutes. And if I don't have that audience with me in five minutes, I might as well leave because they're never going to stay with me."

Newspaper readers are just as tough. "They'll turn the page at a drop," so timing is everything, Henninger says.

His work won him the Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing. Here he goes for the funny bone with "The Nationalized Pastime," an editorial about the baseball strike:

Today the President calls the oligopolists of baseball into his office and "sets a deadline" for the two sides to settle their strike. That deadline passes - strike one! Then the President sets another deadline, and it passes - strike two! But Bill Clinton's not about to strike out completely with a third deadline, so he tells Congress to go in and bat for him.
It figures. We'll bet Bill Clinton managed to never actually strike out in a childhood baseball game. Oops, gettin' late; gotta get home for dinner; too dark; looks like rain; got something in my eye; I think that plane's gonna crash!

Albom: Chipping away at the marble

Besides consistently writing award-winning columns, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press is also a gifted musician and songwriter. "I live by the credo of a musician, Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpet player, who said, 'It took me my whole life to learn what not to play.' That's been the hardest thing, but I'm learning it slowly."

What Albom tries to leave in his stories are physical descriptions, personality tics, and other details that create flesh-and-blood characters instead of stick-figure sources. His powerful stories, focusing on the lives of ordinary athletes on and off the playing field, won the Distinguished Writing Award for sports writing:

The first gun in his life was a gift from a relative, a rifle that had been snapped in half. "Let the kid have it," his step-grandfather said. So Dewon Jones took it and fixed the trigger and the barrel, and soon he had a weapon instead of a toy. One day, he was playing with his best friend James. Dewon put the gun in his pocket and danced liked a cowboy. The gun went off.
"I'm shot!" he yelled. "I'm shot!"
At the hospital, doctors used tweezers to remove the bullet. Dewon and James made up a lie to police. They said they were on the porch when someone drove past and fired four random shots, and one hit Dewon's leg. The police wrote this down. It was not so unlikely, not where these kids live. No one was arrested. No one was charged. Dewon Jones went home the next day, wearing the unofficial tattoo of his city: a bullet hole.
He was 10 years old.

In his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, "News Values: Ideas for an Information Age," Jack Fuller, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and novelist, says that "people come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence - the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don't just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom."

As long as readers can continue to find stories that make sense, have order and knowledge - and yes, wisdom - a blend that's in abundance in the work and work habits of these winners, the newspaper's chances for survival don't seem so bleak.

Scanlan is director of writing programs at The Poynter Institute. This article is adapted from the introduction to "Best Newspaper Writing 1996."

"Best Newspaper Writing 1996" will be available from The Poynter Institute. To order, send $12.95 to 801 Third St. S., St. Petersburg, FL. 33701. Discounts are available; call 813/821-9494, Ext. 235.