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“unshackle the hardworking majority”

There’s an obvious and reasonable objection to my push for reporters to stay out of the newsroom and phone their sources while strolling around town: Some reporters might make the calls from bed or from a barstool. This is both literally true and functionally false. Cheaters will game any system, but honest people can’t thrive while handcuffed.

I like Daniel Pink on this subject. Here he is in Drive, which I finished a few days ago:

… a web of rules that assumes good faith—as most autonomy-centered policies do—can actually encourage good behavior.

So perhaps it’s time to switch the focus of some of our workplace policies and use them to unshackle the hardworking majority rather than inhibit the less noble minority. If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn’t to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.

I don’t pretend that Pink’s words settle the issue, but my hunch is that he’s right.

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Later, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, I had an editor named Paul Ingrassia, whose pet hate was to catch someone in his newsroom looking up something online. He would creep up to the terminal and bark: “The story’s not on Nexus. It’s on the street. Get out there!”


So, for whatever it is worth, I’m passing on this advice to the next generation of short story writers, those jeunesse dorée who will come to the form at what might be the most perfect time in its history—a golden age to rival and perhaps surpass the era of the popular weeklies.

- from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011

1) It’s Nexis; not Nexus.

2) Sometimes the story is on Nexis.

3) George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” is just sitting there waiting for some newsroom troubadour to create ”All My Ex’s Search on Nexis.”

4) Now that smartphones exist, I hope newsrooms are emptier than they were when I left my newspaper job in 2003. It always felt like such a wasted opportunity to have reporters start the day at their desks, making the phone calls that might scare up something newsy enough to justify leaving the building. If I ran a paper, I’d urge reporters to make those calls while walking around town — walking a beat, essentially, since familiarity makes it possible to detect change. Because change is news.

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It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of the bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of.

- John Updike in the 10/22/1960 New Yorker*, witnessing Ted Williams’ final at-bat

A bit further on, Updike writes something that Aaron Carroll’s post about endings surely primed me to notice:

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent in the smoke of Williams’ miracle.

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* Updike’s piece is behind the magazine’s paywall. I put the link up for subscribers, who have access. My Kindle subscription doesn’t give me access. Click here and scroll down for a longer excerpt that would have denied me the pleasure of typing out Updike’s words. I read the piece in a library copy of The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting From The New Yorker. You can buy an ebook version here and support my great neighborhood bookstore, which doesn’t know I’m doing this and certainly isn’t paying me to put up the link.

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UPDATE (1:52 p.m.): Everything I read today seems determined to dance with Aaron’s post, which hinges on a Stephen King ending. This is from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:

In horror fiction, the monster often threatens a comeback in a coda at the end: not truly defeated at all but only waiting for the sequel. Descartes did not want sequels. He thought he had covered up the abyss forever, but he had not; his reassuring ending fell to pieces almost at once.

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My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. If I were a journalist walking into the room, I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait of the New York writer’s apartment with its standard tasteful objects (cat included) and general air of unrelenting Culture.

- Janet Malcolm interviewed in The Paris Review

It’s only because I respect the guy who recommended this interview that I kept reading after that last sentence with its “I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait …” claptrap. I never say “claptrap.” But I want to swear. A lot. Enough to make everyone uncomfortable. So I’m going with “claptrap.”

There’s a story I’ve told myself about why I get mad when journalists act as caricaturists, foregoing the joy in the unexpected that makes reporting so fun to do and gobbling up details that confirm lazy preconceived ideas. The story I’ve told myself is simple: I tried so damn hard not to caricature the people I wrote about, and I was right to try so hard, and every reporter should try as hard as I did to do subjects the miniscule favor of paying close enough attention to discover who they actually are. Preachy, I realize.

I only mention the simple story I’ve told myself because I got email today that made me question the story. The email was about the first journalist I ever saw on the job. I must have been 12 or 13 when a newspaper reporter came to our house to interview my mom about efforts to end Prohibition in our Illinois town — in the mid-1980s, which is another story.

I remember meeting the reporter on our driveway. He glanced into our garage, saw a newish Saab and a 10-year-old Volvo, and declared, “Ah! Physicist cars!”

Now my dad is a physicist, and maybe Saabs and Volvos somehow constitute “physicist cars.” But I remember feeling instantly sick, suddenly sure — at 12 or 13 or whatever age of just wanting to fit in that I was way back then — that this reporter only wanted to see details that would show my family’s otherness.

I don’t even know if “physicist cars” made it into the newspaper, so it’s astonishing to realize how much the experience marked me.

Getting back to where this started with the Janet Malcolm interview, I’m glad I didn’t stop reading it. I especially like what Malcolm had to say about her husband’s editing:

He hated it when people went on and on. Much of his work as an editor was devoted to the elimination of superfluous words—often of superfluous paragraphs—sometimes even of superfluous pages . . .

Manuscripts have been preserved with Gardner’s markings on them, and on first sight it looks as if someone had taken an axe to a helpless piece of writing. But on closer scrutiny, you see the tact with which each intervention was made. Gardner always said that an editor’s first obligation was to the reader, but he had a remarkable feeling for every writer’s form of expression, so that his changes on behalf of the reader always read as if the writer rather than some crass interloper were making them.

After quoting this, I went back, cut a couple hundred words, and decided against starting off on a harsh, tedious tangent about the more recent conduct of the “Physicist cars!” reporter.

“

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship.

- from Amy Harmon’s “Navigating Love and Autism” on the front page of Monday’s NYT

Michael Lewis names an Icelandic architectural style and falls ill with journalistic outrage fatigue

I’ve delighted in Michael Lewis’ journalism ever since encountering his blunt, funny, observant book about the roadkill candidates of the 1996 presidential election. If he’s written a mediocre book before or since, I haven’t found it. Today, I started Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. There’s so much I’d like to quote, but I’ll limit myself to three passages.

1) “… on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.”

2) “To remain in the euro zone, they were meant, in theory, to maintain budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP; in practice, all they had to do was cook the books to show they were hitting the targets. Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness. … The machine that enabled Greece to borrow and spend at will was analogous to the machine created to launder the credit of the American subprime borrower—and the role of the investment banker in the machine was the same. The investment bankers also taught the Greek government officials how to securitize future receipts from the national lottery, highway tolls, airport landing fees, and even funds granted to the country by the European Union. Any future stream of income that could be identified was sold for cash.”

3) “The extent of the cheating—the amount of energy that went into it—was breathtaking. In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former MP. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a book. The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting.”

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For background on why I value Lewis’ financial journalism, see this post of mine from back in March.

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This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of “color” I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a “story” than a true noche obscura.

- Joan Didion in 1983’s Salvador, describing a sickened epiphany from her reporting trip during El Salvador’s civil war.

“Terror,” as she wrote earlier in the book, “is the given of the place.” She elaborated:

A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight desconocidos, unknown men. The same morning’s paper: the unidentified body of a young man, strangled, found on the shoulder of a road. Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyed by bayonets, one face carved to represent a cross.

That, then, is the context of her realization that shtick won’t do, that she needs to override the autopilot of her own trademark journalism, that there’s no value to the notes she’s just jotted juxtaposing the “guard who did the weapons check on everyone who entered the supermarket” and “the young matrons in tight Sergio Valente jeans, trailing maids and babies behind them and buying towels, big beach towels printed with maps of Manhattan that featured Bloomingdale’s.”

So here’s the seemingly insurmountable contradiction of being a reporter:

* Because deadlines loom, because readers don’t want the Sunday paper delivered on Tuesday, autopilot is crucial to journalism.

* The most potent, honest, revelatory journalism overrides autopilot. Even good autopilot. Even great autopilot. Even Didion-level autopilot.

Never be shy about throwing open the windows and waking the neighbors with your cheering when a reporter manages to be fast, accurate, deep, insightful, compelling, and nimbly adaptive. It’s a feat.

“

Time has vindicated the Lipsytean approach, for today, if you’re a sportswriter and not a skeptic, you’re complicit in your own delusion.

Lipsyte follows a few simple rules. When you cover athletes, you don’t “god ‘em up.” When you write about sports (not “sportswrite”), you don’t “pipe” something even a half-step removed from the truth. And you always keep tabs on who holds power and how it’s wielded.

Read his wise and wide-ranging memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, a highlight of this year’s crop of sports books, and you’ll understand why: Lipsyte — “Lippo the Hippo” — was bullied as a kid. This year of all years, haunted by the image of some hapless child in a shower room in Happy Valley, the bullied deserve their spokesman and the powerful deserve to be called to account.

Sports Illustrated’s Alex Wolff, making his case for veteran sportswriter Robert Lipsyte as Sportsman of the Year.

(via Dave Zirin, who seconded the Lipsyte nomination on Twitter)

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Is it any wonder the most imitated writer of the twentieth century rose sometime after seven o’clock that morning, slipped a red dressing robe over blue pajamas, put on slippers, moved past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping, padded down the red-carpeted stairs, crossed the length of the living room to the kitchen, retrieved the key to the locked storeroom where the weapons were (inexplicably, Mary Hemingway had left the ring of keys on the windowsill above the sink), went down to the basement, took shells from the ammo box, closed and relocked the door, came back upstairs, walked ten steps to the front-entry foyer (one sees him in this grainy mind-movie moving very fast but also methodically, teeth clenched and bared in that sickly smile he often exhibited toward the end of his life), opened the foyer door, stepped inside, placed the butt of the gun on the linoleum tile, tore open the breech, slammed in the cartridges, snapped it shut, bent over, as you might bend over a water fountain, rested his forehead against the blue steel, and blew away his entire cranial vault with the double-barreled, 12-gauge Boss shotgun with which he’d once shot pigeons?

- the insupportably specific passage from Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson that made me decide to put the book aside and read something else for now.

Look, even though the book is biography rather than fiction, I’ll grant Hendrickson the clenched teeth he hallucinates in his “grainy mind-movie.” But there’s just no reason to write a scene that has Hemingway getting the gun before the ammunition. Except for the obvious fact that the gunshot came last, we can’t know the order of what happened that morning. Hendrickson is free to cope with that uncertainty by inventing an order. I wish he hadn’t. I’m reminded of another bit from the William Langewiesche interview I quoted a couple of days ago:

Writing is a private conversation with the writer and each individual reader. It is a very intimate communication, which relies on trust. So it is crucial to establish that trust by never tricking the reader, never playing cute, never cajoling, showing off, or wasting the reader’s time.

Fair or not, Hendrickson lost me. I tried to go on. I did go on. But I can’t get past wondering where the truth ends and the truthiness begins. My loss maybe.

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He said that the mark of the great pilots he has known is that they admitted in advance to their capacity for error, and they addressed their mistakes vigorously after making them. He said, “Vous savez, monsieur: L’erreur est humaine.” Actually, the Latin original goes, Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum. To err is human, but to persist is diabolical. Maybe it should be posted in polling stations. Certainly it should be posted in cockpits. The captain was having a hard time with it that night. He never admitted that he had screwed up. He never even admitted that he and the copilot together had screwed up. Instead he said that they had gotten screwed up, as if it had been done to them by outside forces—presumably some mysterious equipment failure. The distinction may seem like a semantic quibble, but it fits into larger patterns at play that night and helps to explain the ongoing and maddening descent.

- from Fly By Wire, a characteristically lucid, gripping book by pilot, author, and Vanity Fair international correspondent William Langewiesche.

The book sent me back to The New New Journalism, which includes an interview with Langewiesche. This bit about his approach to interviewing is not at all innovative, but it captures a good, solid truth that’s easy to forget:

The secret is: let the guy talk. You never know where they’re going, and it gets really interesting when you let people run on. Every once in a while they say something that makes me want to stop them—”Wait! Tell me more about that!”—but I resist the impulse, because I might lose the jewels that are about to fall from their lips. Instead, I make a mental note to go back to the topic later.

On getting ready to do reporting:

I sometimes spend days and days, just looking around. I try not to jump to conclusions. I’m aware of my limitations. That’s the “rubbing my eyes” stage, the “I can’t see. I can’t see.” I talk to a lot of people. I ask questions, and listen. I get around as much as possible on foot. I walk very fast. I walk through the bad as well as the good parts of town. I walk with such purpose that the natives often ask me for directions. Then I gradually begin to see.

Finally, here’s his method of outlining, because I never outlined, and I’m fascinated by people whose outlines manage to blossom into a vibrant narrative:

I start writing on sheets of standard 8 1/2 by 11 paper, and when I run out of space on a sheet I staple another one to it and keep going. They grow into strange shapes. Sometimes they grow vertically. When I’m done I tack the whole thing up on the wall.

If that’s not enough Langewiesche, I interviewed him in 2008. The resulting post — “Don’t Tell William Langewiesche to ‘Have a Safe Flight’ (and Other Ways to Avoid Self-Destruction in the War on Terror)” — is here. Starting with the fact that he consented to be interviewed by a random blogger, he couldn’t have been more gracious.

Stephen Fry linked to a post called “The Mail and Hugh Grant: flagrant intimidation.” It includes: One of the most vivid insights into the culture of the old News of the World was a conversation from 2002 that happily was recorded for posterity. “That is what we do,” a news editor told a reporter, “we go out and destroy other people’s lives.” The Mail plays the same game, and its technique in this case is wilful distortion. Take three facts and from those facts derive a dozen assumptions, all of which fit your agenda. From those assumptions weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived, and then pile the outrage on top. Never mind that the same three facts could provide the foundation of five entirely different narratives, leading to entirely different perspectives on those involved. The Mail piece, which I made myself read before posting this, does indeed seem to “weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived.” I despise these next bits so much that I actually sort of love them: “Pity his poor daughter, if she ever reads the lurid accounts of her father’s arrest for procuring a sex act in a car on Sunset Boulevard from a prostitute … Let’s hope she doesn’t discover too soon the truth about her father …” Yes, let’s hope. I’m trying to remember whether insincerity is measured in milliliters or micrograms. Really, though, it’s this section that makes the Mail writer’s motives plain: This week’s news that (Grant) secretly fathered a child certainly puts into telling perspective his efforts to silence the Press by demanding privacy laws. As Grant swanned round the party conferences – shaking hands with Labour leader Ed Miliband – his lover was preparing, alone, to give birth. Would those star-stuck politicians have fawned over the actor so much as he whined about the press if they had known this? But then the longer I work as a journalist, the more I become convinced that it is people with rackety private lives who most complain about their privacy being invaded by the press. It’s so much fun when the logic from that last paragraph goes to the family picnic and meets up with its cousins “If you’re innocent, why would you need a lawyer here while we question you?” and “Only a terrorist would oppose compulsory rectal searches at airport security.” Finally, in the spirit of me Googling stuff like “rectal search” so you don’t have to, this 2004 ruling by Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals proved to be an interesting read: … we are mystified as to how the fact that appellant had two drug arrests two years prior to the arrest in the instant case together with the fact that he is driving the truck of a drug user with the record silent as to whether the appellant even knew the drug user, somehow leads one to articulable suspicion that appellant had contraband on his person at the time of his arrest on January 22, 2002.   The question is not was there articulable suspicion to search, but rather, was there articulable suspicion to strip search.   Where is the reasonable suspicion that drugs or other contraband are concealed in the particular place they decide to search?   There simply is none. … We too are troubled by the fact that, any time an individual has a prior drug history, that history alone may be used to justify a strip search of the individual upon subsequent arrests for minor offenses.   What if the arrests had occurred not two years ago but five years ago instead?   Or ten years ago?   Should a distinction be made between a prior drug arrest and a prior drug conviction? Click for high-res photo

Stephen Fry linked to a post called “The Mail and Hugh Grant: flagrant intimidation.” It includes:

One of the most vivid insights into the culture of the old News of the World was a conversation from 2002 that happily was recorded for posterity. “That is what we do,” a news editor told a reporter, “we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”

The Mail plays the same game, and its technique in this case is wilful distortion. Take three facts and from those facts derive a dozen assumptions, all of which fit your agenda. From those assumptions weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived, and then pile the outrage on top. Never mind that the same three facts could provide the foundation of five entirely different narratives, leading to entirely different perspectives on those involved.

The Mail piece, which I made myself read before posting this, does indeed seem to “weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived.” I despise these next bits so much that I actually sort of love them: “Pity his poor daughter, if she ever reads the lurid accounts of her father’s arrest for procuring a sex act in a car on Sunset Boulevard from a prostitute … Let’s hope she doesn’t discover too soon the truth about her father …”

Yes, let’s hope. I’m trying to remember whether insincerity is measured in milliliters or micrograms.

Really, though, it’s this section that makes the Mail writer’s motives plain:

This week’s news that (Grant) secretly fathered a child certainly puts into telling perspective his efforts to silence the Press by demanding privacy laws.

As Grant swanned round the party conferences – shaking hands with Labour leader Ed Miliband – his lover was preparing, alone, to give birth. Would those star-stuck politicians have fawned over the actor so much as he whined about the press if they had known this?

But then the longer I work as a journalist, the more I become convinced that it is people with rackety private lives who most complain about their privacy being invaded by the press.

It’s so much fun when the logic from that last paragraph goes to the family picnic and meets up with its cousins “If you’re innocent, why would you need a lawyer here while we question you?” and “Only a terrorist would oppose compulsory rectal searches at airport security.”

Finally, in the spirit of me Googling stuff like “rectal search” so you don’t have to, this 2004 ruling by Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals proved to be an interesting read:

… we are mystified as to how the fact that appellant had two drug arrests two years prior to the arrest in the instant case together with the fact that he is driving the truck of a drug user with the record silent as to whether the appellant even knew the drug user, somehow leads one to articulable suspicion that appellant had contraband on his person at the time of his arrest on January 22, 2002.   The question is not was there articulable suspicion to search, but rather, was there articulable suspicion to strip search.   Where is the reasonable suspicion that drugs or other contraband are concealed in the particular place they decide to search?   There simply is none.

… We too are troubled by the fact that, any time an individual has a prior drug history, that history alone may be used to justify a strip search of the individual upon subsequent arrests for minor offenses.   What if the arrests had occurred not two years ago but five years ago instead?   Or ten years ago?   Should a distinction be made between a prior drug arrest and a prior drug conviction?

journalism and the art of the astute follow-up question

From Mark Kurlansky’s 1968:

Gene Roberts was removed from his beloved civil rights beat at The New York Times in the beginning of 1968 and reassigned to Saigon. … In Washington he got a round of briefings from the U.S. government. At the CIA briefing he asked if a recent battle had been a victory. The CIA official said, “There are six good reasons to consider this a victory.” He went through the six reasons. Roberts then asked, “Is there any reason to consider it a defeat?”

“There are eight good reasons to consider it a defeat,” the official replied, and he listed them.