Indian in England » journalism

Dec matches Ant?

Chindu Sreedharan — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:54:31 +0000

THERE is a word that anyone who has ever worked as a sub-editor is particularly wary of: public.

So very easy to miss out the ‘l’ in it, and, boy, are you in trouble. ‘Gordon Brown addresses pubic meeting’. How nice.

Looks like there is another we better start paying more attention to. ‘Finally’. Substitute an ‘a’ for the ‘f’ and ‘i’, and you get something quite, um, different.

Admittedly, that is a rather thick feat for any sub under normal circumstances, and quite unheard of till now, but someone did manage that at the Daily Express last week. Result, this headline:

‘Can Dec anally match Ant?’

Here’s the how and why of that story on MediaMonkey. Yep, definitely one for the scrapbook.

Don’t sputter. Just say

Chindu Sreedharan — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:36:11 +0000

THERE is this four-letter word in English that many of us are severely allergic to — and no, this one doesn’t start with ‘F’.

‘Said’ is the word in question. The one we brush aside when we attribute direct speech.It is too simple for us, too common. Where is plain plebian Said when compared to alleged, argued, articulated, averred, claimed, disclosed, declared, held, offered, opined, stated, and pronounced? And the ‘action-packed’ laughed, grimaced, cried, sputtered, spat, and spewed?

“Said,” a reporter claimed, “is okay when you are attributing for the first time. But you can’t keep saying ‘said, said’ all the time. The copy will become repetitive and monotonous.”

“Said,” disclosed another, “is too bland. It doesn’t say anything.”

Precisely. Said is neutral. And that is its beauty.

A long time ago I remember reading a clipping my editor-in-chief — an elephantine gentleman with an elephantine memory for the published word — passed around. It, well, said Said is a writer’s best friend, and when a reporter uses anything other than Said, he is poking his nose in, colouring the quote.

This is not always acceptable, certainly not in newswriting — objectivity and all the rest, you know. More than that, if it is a passable quote, the words should convey whether the speaker is disclosing/alleging/stating/laughing/sputtering, whatever.

At times we also end up conveying the wrong meaning when we opt for frilly attributory words. Take, for instance, the quotes above.

‘…a writer claimed’ goes the first, conveying our disbelief at what the writer has to say. We are thus telling the reader, hey, mate, this is what he says, but it ain’t true.

The ‘disclosed’ in the second attribution, for its part, implies a revelation to the reporter. And since it is a revelation, it must be true, is the impression.

An editor at the Wall Street Journal had an effective way to handle such writers. Whenever he spotted funny stuff, he would call the writer in question to his desk. “Laugh me this sentence,” he would say. Or “Sputter me this sentence.”

Now that doesn’t mean you don’t communicate the speaker laughed when he said his say. Go ahead. Try attributing it differently, though: “…he said, laughing”.

The reasoning Said should be used ‘sparingly’ to avoid repetition doesn’t wash either. Because, Said is one of those invisible words. So non-intrusive, so low-key that we skim across it. Here’s a bit of Hemingway — I think we can take him for an authority on good writing — to illustrate my point:

‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘Good-night,’ he said. ‘I cannot take you to your hotel?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘It was the only thing to do,’ he said. ‘The operation proved–’
‘I do not want to talk about it,’ I said.

Five exchanges. Four Saids. Now let’s try some fancy attribution and see where that takes us:

‘No,’ I seethed. ‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘Good-night,’ he wished me. ‘I cannot take you to your hotel?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘It was the only thing to do,’ he justified. ‘The operation proved–’
‘I do not want to talk about it,’ I spat out.

What do you say?

Now please don’t tell me Said works only for dialogue, in fiction. It works perfectly fine for captured conversation in non-fiction as well. Here’s Michael Herr, one of the best war correspondents ever, exposing the psyche of a bunch of scared American youngsters in Vietnam trapped in a war they want no part of. From Khesanh, a piece he wrote for the Esquire in 1968:

Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first. ‘That ain’ no outgoin’,’ he said.
‘That ain’t outgoing,’ Mayhew said.
‘Now what I jus’ say?’ Day Tripper yelled, and we reached the trench as a shell landed … A lot of them were coming in, some mortars too, but we didn’t count them.
‘Sure was some nice mornin’,’ Day Tripper said. ‘Oh man, why they can’ jus’ leave us alone one time?’
‘Cause they ain’t gettin’ paid to leave us alone,’ Mayhew said, laughing. ‘Slides, they do it cause they know how it fucks you all up.’

Stats? Let’s dip into the work of two Pulitzer-winning journalists.

Michael Vitez, in the first chapter of his series Seeking a Good Death (1997, Explanatory Journalism), quotes some 1,200 words of speech, across 46 exchanges. He uses 2 ‘tells’, 3 ‘askeds’, 1 ‘agreed’, 1 ‘insisted’, 1 ‘flinched’, 1 ‘concluded’, ’1 whispered’, 1 ‘continued’ — and 36 Saids.

In his 3,828-word piece titled Final Salute (2006, Feature Writing), Jim Sheeler uses 27 complete direct quotations (about 700 words of it) to tell the story of a Marine major who helps the families of colleagues killed in Iraq to cope with grief. All 27 times he uses Said.

I think that says it all.

Dog bites news

Chindu Sreedharan — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 01:58:42 +0000

MAN bites dog. It is news.

How about dog bites cat?

Is big news, I just learnt by way of Daily Echo, the leading – and only – newspaper in my little town in south England.

Hogging its front page today was a remarkable piece of journalism. Crux of story: three dogs kill a cat.

Or rather, Dogs savage cat to death. The strapline read: ‘It could be a child next time’ [sic] says mum.

In the last 12 months a child was killed, another two severely mauled by dogs in England, so this is newsworthy. But a Page 1 splash?

I better save a copy of this edition.

PS: I am not a fussy man, so I won’t pick on the missing comma in the strapline, nor the passive photograph, nor its caption that features a man identified simply as ‘Barry Richardson’ (he doesn’t figure anywhere in the story). Hell, I won’t even pick on the fact the strapline parrots the same direct quote as the intro – nor that one of the quotes has been doctored.

PPS: Not entirely in passing, here is some all-round biting for you: Man bites dog (and policeman)

Sex, Church & Siebert

Chindu Sreedharan — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:46:47 +0000

BESIDES Messrs Frederick Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, there’s another group responsible for the popularity of the Social Responsibility Theory, did you know?

Of Canadian vintage, let me tell you. By the names of Baron, Pelletier, Verreault, Beaudoin, and Gallant.

Like many people out there I had largely associated SRT with ‘Siebert’s’ classic Four Theories of the Press (1956, University of Illinois Press). As a matter of fact, it was the 1942-formed Hutchins Commission that came up with it, though it was Peterson’s chapter in Four Theories that gave it a new respectability and, indeed, its undying fame. With Libertarian, Authoritarian, and Marxist ‘theories’, SRT wrote in a new – and possibly the most debated – chapter in media-society relation.

Now it turns out Jessy Baron, Rick Pelletier, Remy Verreault, Mike Beaudoin, and Claude Gallant have added their names to SRT. They belong to the Quebecer rock band Government Fury Kills, and the name of their first album is – yes, that’s correct – Social Responsibility Theory.

All this I came to know from the excellent Wikipedia. A search for Social Responsibility Theory threw up just one ‘stub’. On GFK. Nothing on Siebert et al. I tried a direct search, with their names. No, so far as Wikipedia is concerned they do not exist (except for Schramm, who gets a brief mention unconnected to the Four Theories). This allows me to put forward a credible theory of my own: SRT belongs to GFK in today’s world.

Which is a shame really. Because the original trio helped shape the thoughts of a few generations of bright-eyed journalists, forcing many to dig deeper into the philosophical issues surrounding their profession, filling many with a righteous desire to serve the ‘society’ (something most journalists eagerly – and blindly, may I suggest – spout as a core responsibility even today), it is a pity they don’t get a mention with Jo Public.

Not that I am a fan of SRT, mind. I am only happy to hop on to the bandwagon of its critics. Forget everything else, including the criticism SRT is not one step above Libertarianism but just one step away from Authoritarianism, applying SRT to an intractable conflict is the worst you could do: it feeds nationalistic and ‘patriotiotic’ sentiments, which in turn feed the conflict itself.

But this post is not to critique SRT, but to trade trivia on it. So here’re a few things you might not have known, complete courtesy The Four Theories of the Press Four and a Half Decades Later: in retrospective, in Journalism Studies, volume 3, number 1, 2002, p 133-136…

Did you know Four Theories still remains, with six-figure sales, the all-time non-fiction best-seller for its publishers?

Because Siebert is the first author, we get the impression he was the initiator. Actually, it was Wilbur Schramm. Does he not remind you of a certain prodigy who makes his entrance on a broomstick at the Qudditch World Cup in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? Anyway, Schramm ran into Peterson at the water-cooler of Greg Hall, University of Illinois. They talked a bit, and decided to ask Siebert to come aboard, and that was that.

We owe a lot to the Church for the Four Theories. But for a grant from the National Council of Churches, the book may not have come into being. When Schramm stopped to talk to Peterson, he had some money left over from an NCC grant, which went on to finance the Four Theories. Amen.

The book was literally cobbled together from the authors’ earlier projects. Siebert “cribbed together his two chapters from his recently-finished Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776”, Schramm’s sketch of “Soviet communist theory came from his work on psychological warfare in Korea”, and “Peterson’s chapter on Social Responsibility came from his teaching and engagement with the Hutchins Commission”. Schramm and Peterson walked to Siebert’s office after their water-cooler discussion and there and then divided up the chapters. They never met till the book was drafted.

Schramm’s work in Korea, we are told, was “for a branch of the federal government”. Now allow me to leap to a conclusion, but which is the most likely branch of the US government interested in psychological warfare in foreign nations? Are we in the CIA’s debt too – as we are in the Church’s – for the Four Theories, I wonder.

Since we are trading trivia, here’s one final tidbit: Wikipedia tells us one of proponents of Social Responsibility Theory had sex with a 13-year-old girl – here I am talking about the latter bunch, of course. It was the bassist, it was in a bathroom, and it was in Alberta.

Shh, did you hear that? I think it was Siebert sitting up in his grave.

Hook me, I am available

Chindu Sreedharan — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:11:06 +0000

AMAZING what happens when you throw a crusty old subject at a bunch of young minds and ask them to write. I did that a few times in the last two years and came away pleased.

The subject was always the same. Childishly simple, the kind you would expect to write an essay on in school: your hobby. Difference was, you needed to produce a feature article, a piece of creative non-fiction, informative and interesting, capable of carrying the reader through to the last word.

Result? Some very pleasant surprises (also some quite, um, unconventional use of punctuation and grammar, but more on that in another post), to prove, yet again, that there’s nothing called a boring topic. It’s how you tackle it that makes it boring — or not.

Naturally, how you begin is crucial. So here’s a sample of beginnings I found interesting…

Helen Smale’s hobby is not reading, nor dancing, nor singing. It’s mentoring school kids. She begins thus:

I have just helped someone change his life. How? I went back to school.

Crisp. Dramatic. Now I want to know why, and how. She’s got me all right.

Mike Goodeve wrote about driving tests — to be precise, how he routinely fails driving tests. That’s not really what you would call a hobby, but, hey, he got away with it. This is his reworked lead:

I have a hobby, a rather unusual one: I fail driving tests routinely.

I don’t know how long I will be able to carry on with it. But at the moment, I am giving it all I have got….

Point is, you can pull off darn near anything as a hobby (I remember a piece in Esquire magazine in which the writer decided to bargain for everything he bought, including hotdogs, then wrote this absolutely riveting piece on his haggling experience), provided you peg it up.

Leonie Wilson did something similar:

I have this hobby I love to talk about. In fact, I’ve made talking about it a hobby in itself. This is why I jumped at the opportunity when a stranger contacted me and asked me to talk to her about my experience last summer.

Enough suspense in there to get us reading. More about how she keeps us hooked, and what her hobby is, in the next post. Now for another interesting beginning, clever pegging, from Sophie Pascal, who didn’t think she had a hobby –- till she looked the word up…

This made me wonder what a hobby is. So I looked it up. The Oxford Dictionary describes a hobby as ‘a leisure time activity pursued for pleasure’.

In that case maybe I have a hobby. It’s not your average sporting hobby, but a highly developed fondness for cats. In my leisure time I enjoy cats and collect cat-related objects for pleasure … this must technically mean my immense love for cats is a hobby.

And now for another, from Katrin Kerber. Katrin’s hobby is video games, quite conventional compared to the ones we have discussed till now. She gets us with a saucy summary sentence:

In the last couple of days I slept with at least four guys, married a girl, stopped a restaurant from going bankrupt, helped a musician get into the charts, and became vice-president of a big company.

Gemma Gilbert works along the same lines. Here’s how she teases us in (lightly edited):

We’ve all done it, many of us more than once. Some of us do it in the bedroom. Some in front of mirrors. Some like to do it in clubs, with their mates watching.

Curious to know what she’s been up to? I was.

What makes these work? They grab my attention, one way or other, through surprise, shock, sheer sauce. You can also get me with information, description, action, conversation… anything really. Fact is, I am available. Up to you, how you hook me.