The Mechanic & the Muse

Just looking for a quote, Minister Goebbels

From Ian Buruma's review of "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Frank Rich, in Sunday's New York Times:

"A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally underused. The problem is that there are not always two sides to a story. Someone reporting on the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 would not have added “balance” by quoting Joseph Goebbels."

Let's hope not. But the same twisted logic was on display two decades ago when I was reporting a series on tobacco injury litigation. One of the lawyers leading the fight against the tobacco companies complained about the habitual response of journalists reporting the health effects of tobacco; invariably they called industry spokesmen for their side. If you reported a heroin bust, he asked, would you call up the Mob for comment?

The mechanics of good prose: In praise of copyediting

Serendipity is one of the most enjoyable by-products of reporting,writing and reading and writing.

Over the weekend, I picked up a hardcover version of "Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and how a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry" by Scott Huler. Lined up on a bargain shelf, it sold for just $5.98.

With Ernesto unable to decide whether it's a tropical storm or a hurricane as it bears down on Florida, my choice might have seemed timely. Actually, my purchase reflected an ongoing interest in the natural world, and its place in good writing. Also, I just like trying to learn about elemental forces that have always fascinated man—specifically the wind and clouds.

It's a fascinating account of his exploration of wind and the British naval officer who created a simple way of observing and measuring its strength--a contribution  that meteorologists rely on to this day. You can also hear about it in this interview on National Public Radio. 

(The impact of wind on a house, according to the Beaufort scale; click image to enlarge.)

But who would have guessed I'd come upon an unexpected writing treasure as I began reading Huler's  book.

A single paragraph on page five, it's Huler's homage to his days as a copy editor. The discovery pleased me for two reasons: over the years, copy editors have saved my butt more times than I'd like to admit, and secondly, as you'll see, it reinforces one of this blog's twin identities.  Huler writes:

"For many years I was a copy editor. That’s good honest work and underappreciated, but above all it’s a great place to learn how writing works. From character—is this the right punctuation mark? is this word spelled correctly?—to clause, from sentence to paragraph, from passage to complete manuscript, a copy editor tinkers with prose like a jeweler with a watch. It’s great experience, and great training for a writer. Learning to copyedit before becoming a writer is like being a mechanic before learning to drive a race car. The understanding of the secret processes behind the magic can only help, especially when the handling gets rough."

My plan is to someday produce a book about the art and craft of writing, one that will in all likelihood bears the same title as this blog. I guarantee that Scott Huler's observation about the way copyediting puts a writer under the hood will have a place in it.

(Image of Beaufort scale illustrated from United States Search and Rescue Task Force)

Coming soon: The marriage of narrative and climatology.

 

"Mary Ellen's will:" Combining the Power of Investigative Narrative and Transparency

The Hollywood high-concept pitch might go like this: "Sunset Boulevard," the film classic about an aging starlet's tragic twilight, meets "Dallas," the prime time soap opera about the financial and family intrigues of the Ewing clan.

But a new, four-part Dallas Morning News series,  Mary Ellen's will: The Battle for 4949 Swiss, is journalism, a powerful example of investigative narrative that combines civic clarity and literary grace.

The series focuses on a contemporary social ill-- widespread financial exploitation of the elderly, whose loneliness and infirmities make them easy prey for strangers who swoop into their lives, shower them with attention, alienate them from family and friends, and make off with as much of their wealth as they can get away with.

Investigative reporter Lee Hancock, and the project's editor, Mark Miller, have created a gripping narrative that draws attention to such crimes by setting it against a dramatic and quintessential Texas landscape.

"The Battle for 4949 Swiss" exposes a public problem by focusing on the private tragedy of Mary Ellen Bendtsen, 88, and the fight over the decaying Dallas mansion that was her treasure.  It accomplishes this feat by transforming dogged reporting into a story brought alive by vivid characters, the unrelenting accretion of status details in a society where everything seems Super-sized, and dramatic scenes that  unfold before our eyes.

(A disclaimer: I have led writing and editing workshops for Morning News staffers for several years. In this case, Miller asked me to participate in an early brainstorming session. I also read early drafts, providing "movies of my reading," a running commentary of one reader's reaction. My enthusiasm, however, derives from having watched the series develop in complexity, as Hancock and Miller demonstrated the power of indefatigable revision, and, having now seen most of the completed version; the series' final installment appears tomorrow. A takeout Sunday explores systematic flaws that make the elderly so vulnerable to con artists.)

The paper's website provides an impressive menu of companion multimedia, including photo scrapbooks, character vignettes, and videos, including a poignant hospital scene where a frail Mrs. Bendsten signs over power of attorney to two men who, relatives and investigators believe, were intent on claiming her decaying mansion.

At a time when public distrust of the media overshadows good journalism, "Mary Ellen's will" also takes enormous pains to buttress its narrative, mirroring similar efforts to provide thorough and credible levels of sourcing transparency.

In addition to a source box, footnotes stud the narrative, pointing to documents and other records; some trigger pop-up boxes with links to news articles reaching back six decades. It's yet another example of the innovative ways that news organizations's online capabilities can provide as much information and documentation that a reader could want.

Like any good story, "Mary Ellen's will" is full of twists and turns.

But its greatest strength, and public service, reflects Hancock's relentless reporting and gifted prose, and the entire project team's attention to accuracy and detail.

Their contributions make it difficult to view the "Battle for 4949 Swiss" without thinking of our own aging relatives, and wondering whether vultures circle overhead.   

The best search engines of all

The Internet is a library that is open 24 hours a day, needs no library card and features no “Shhh” signs. But the wise writer knows it’s not the only research source.

As a young reporter, I was fortunate to have a reference librarian in my family: my older brother, Jeff.

For the first several years of my career, when I worked at small newspapers that didn’t employ librarians, a call to Jeff was one of my first reporting steps. He introduced me to the Encyclopedia of Associations, brainstormed ideas, and searched card catalogues for books that added depth to my reporting.

In the years to come, other research professionals became invaluable collaborators on stories. (Unable to afford a house on a librarian's salary, Jeff eventually got a job on Wall Street. "I'm doing the same thing," I recall him telling me when he started the job. "They just pay a lot more for the information.") 

These days, I rely on David Shedden, Director of the Eugene Patterson Library at Poynter, and his always helpful staff: Kathy Holmes, Maria Jaimes and Jean Wood.

A librarian can save you time, help you avoid research cul de sacs and, before you can say Dewey Decimal, locate the fact that will help make your stories accurate. In our Googling era, an informed, curious, and patient mind remains the best search engine.

An exciting new feature on emdashes, the blog that takes us between the lines of The New Yorker, has resurfaced the memory of those desperate phone calls to Jeff at the Greenwich Public Library when I was scrambling to get up-to-speed on a topic I knew nothing absolutely about and had to write about it in a few hours. I admit journalism's not rocket surgery; it's harder.

Emily Gordon, emdashes' creator, has just delivered on her promise of a monthly column written by the magazine's senior library staff. In a promising debut, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey tackle A.J. Liebling's start at the magazine; the status of typewriters in the New Yorker's digs; and an illuminating revelation about the fact-checking of cartoons.

And best of all, you can, through emdashes, submit questions to the pair. Let's see, how many rejections did it take before the magazine published a short story by Bobbi Ann Mason?

 

Image source: Northport-East Northport (NY) Public Library 

Doubting sources

"Of course, it's not uncommon for writers and their sources to disagree over how facts should be interpreted, especially in such emotionally fraught circumstances. In the course of reporting a long article or book, writers will talk to many sources and try to gain their confidence. In doing so, they may cast their research in the most favorable light or leave out the full scope of their project. When the project comes out, sources may feel they've been betrayed."

Motoko Rich of The New York Times buried that nut graf in a piece about a key source repudiating the central premise in a new book by Sebastian Junger, the best-selling author of "A Perfect Storm."

But it's worth the wait as Rich explores yet another book controversy in this season of de-Oprahed favorites. What is truth to the author and to a source? "In the course of researching the book, Mr. Junger discovered that the truth — or what he could learn of it — was much more elusive, and the book is a sort of journalistic meditation on doubt."

Beyond journalistic doubt, there's also the issue of getting things right. The story about "A Death in Belmont" points out that Junger has a history of accuracy problems.

Rich's observation is dead-on, and echoes New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm's excoriating lead from her book, "The Journalist and the Murderer." 

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Taking on what she saw as author Joe McGinnis' betrayal of Jeffrey McDonald, a Green Beret doctor convicted of killing his family, Malcolm tarred journalists; although hyperbolic, and unfairly damming every reporter who ever conducted an interview, her tarring should make all of us look deep inside to ask, "Is she right about me?"

Rich's story is far less stinging. Even so, it resurfaces an important ethical challenge, especially for journalists who prefer painting news in black and white, all the while ignoring the grays that in most journalism dominates the spectrum of light that is reality.

"Correction Appended"

 

I made a mistake. And it got into print.

And now the question is, do I 'fess up?

If I'm writing for a newspaper and someone rats me out to the editors, and they decide it's significant enough, a tiny paragraph will appear in the corrections page, often located on page two. If nobody makes a peep, I could just let it slide.

Readers may remember the story that appeared in a previous edition and mentally replace my incorrect information with the right stuff. But there's a chance they won't have read the story and so furnishing a correction doesn't do them a whole lot of good.

On the web it's a different story. Permanence is one of the Web's chief characteristics, says James Glen Stovall in "Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium," Pearson, 2004. Even so, he acknowledges, not every site, page or story will remain online forever. In the mid 1990s when the World Wide Web first emerged for public use, I noticed that I'd come across a site that interested me. But the next day, or month, I'd go back and it was gone. That happens less and less now.

When I make a mistake in an online story, it's there a long time, always a few clicks away, long after one in my my daily paper has gone onto its next usability stage: toilet lining for cats and birds; ignition device for wood fires, and denizen of recycling facility.

Back to my first question: do I confess my mistake?

Regardless of the medium, I'm a hardliner on the subject of corrections, despite how bad they may make me feel. As a reader, when I see "correction appended," I scroll to the bottom immediately. If it's a minor glitch, I feel reassured. If it's a substantial error that calls into question the validity of an entire story, I may read, but my antennae are up.

Confession time: In a column last week, I described Franz Kafka as a tormented German writer. Within a few  hours, three people pointed out that Kafka wrote in German bu, as  these readers pointed out, Kafka was born in Prague, making him a Czech writer who wrote in German.

I went back to the Web and found that I had relied on a biography that described Kafka as "German in language and culture." Then I looked at other biographies. They were right.

At first, I tried to wiggle free. Kafka wrote in German, I reasoned, so he was a German writer. But then it occurred to me that I wrote in English, but there's no way I'd refer to myself as an English writer; I'm American.

Correction time had arrived. I fixed the offending sentence in my online column, one of the gifts the Web has given writers. That way everybody who reads it from now on will be spared my mistake.

Generally, Poynter Online, where my column appears, appends the error at the bottom.And that's where it lies.

But what about the thousands of readers who subscribe to email delivery of my column? How do they find out? Do we email them a correction? One correspondent was a Swedish journalism professor who wrote, "By the way - Kafka was Czech, not German... It's one of the details we Europeans pay attention to. :)"

It's one I should have paid greater attention as well. Online or not, accuracy counts.

For penance, I'll become a regular reader of "Regret the Error -- Mistakes Happen," a site that describes itself as "reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media."

Its creator, Craig Silverman, explains why in this Q&A, which includes two of his funniest errors. Tip: don't drink beverages when you get to these, unless you like expelling it through your notes.

He still doesn't get it. Do they?

The killer quote from James Frey's note about "A Million Little Pieces" to his readers:

"This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments. It is a subjective truth, altered by the mind of a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Ultimately, it’s a story, and one that I could not have written without having lived the life I’ve lived."

He still doesn't get the difference between memoir/autobiography/creative nonfiction and fiction.

Not so for Doubleday and Anchor Books, Frey’s publishers, which declares in its note to readers, "It is not the policy or stance ofthis company that it doesn't matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them."

Actually, doesn't that last line leave them some wiggle room? What does "the facts as the author knows them" mean?

The publisher is foregoing revenue -- no small sacrifice given Frey's #6 standing on Amazon.com -- by "not currently reprinting or fulfilling orders" until the jacket carries the line "With new notes from the publisher and from the author."

But then Frey could have suffered the fate of novelist and short story writer David Leavitt, who published ''While England Sleeps," a 1993 novel about a young, gay British writer and the Spanish Civil War. The poet Stephen Spender accused Leavitt of plagiarizing Spender's memoir ''World Within World''; Leavitt countered that you can't plagiarize the events of a person's life, although he didn't deny that he used Spender's life in print "as a springboard."

The London Telegraph picks up the story from there. "Spender sued. Penguin settled out of court. An entire print run was pulped." A new, revised edition replaced the first, tainted one.

The ironic part of what became "a legal cause celebre" is that from the start, Leavitt said he wanted to include an author's note, paying tribute to his book's debt to Spender, but a lawyer for Penguin, his publisher, nixed the idea.

(Turning lemon into lemonades, Leavitt later wrote ''The Term Paper Artist,'' "a novella featuring a writer named David Leavitt who has been accused of plagiarism by a famous British poet.")

An author's note might not have saved Leavitt from the ire of Spender who was outraged by the book's homosexual love scenes.

But I'd count it as one more buttress for the value of coming clean about the provenance of books. As someone who sometimes writes in a genre that could be labelled "memoir" and works hard to document what I write, attribute its source, and signal the reader when I'm moving from memory to imagination, I find the entire Frey affair dispiriting and expect it to remain so for a long while.

I won't be surprised if Frey uses the material of his recent days, although I can't imagine that mere words could oustrip the sight of Oprah's cold fury.

Read the full note, all 912 words, and see what you think. I know there are still people who know what he did, and don't care. As for me, I'm left cold, not by the litany of his lies, oh, sorry, I mean embellishments, but by his justification for them.

"I believe, and I understand others strongly disagree, that memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection... It is a subjective truth."

In a sense, he's right, since subjective truths "exist only within the experiencer's mind."

There's no denying that writing must make a journey from the writer's mind to the page or screen. Unfortunately, James Frey, his editor, agent and publisher apparently lost sight of the difference between fact and fiction along the way. I think they ended up betraying all of us who care about the difference.

But I guess that's just a subjective truth.

Her 15 percent's worth

Finally, we hear from James Frey's agent. In an exclusive interview with Publishers Weekly, Kassie Evashevski reveals she's dropped faux-memoirist Frey as a client. She also wonders now if what we need is a "nonfiction memoir," and adds:

"One can fact-check facts, but how do you fact-check memory and perception? I'm less clear on whether or not I think publishers have a responsibility to carefully check nonfiction works of a journalistic nature.Ultimately, I feel an author should be responsible for his or her own work, but I leave that to the legal minds."

The whole experience "will definitely make me more cautious," Frey's agent said. "But, at the end of the day, I guess I hope I'll still be able to take people at their word--even while I'm checking out their stories."

Editors taking writers at their word is where the newspaper and magazine industries got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and a host of serial plagiarists and fabricators. Now it's dumped "A million little pieces" of distrust on the book publishing industry.

During the 2003 Blair brouhaha, I took this stand on the question of trust:

"Journalism, even the creative kind, is built on lots of things, but trust wouldn’t top my list. Good journalism is built on passionate inquiry, indefatigable pursuit of evidence, healthy skepticism, obsession for accuracy, and a near-pathological fear of error—a determination to get things right no matter what it takes.

"Jayson Blair was wrong. As was Stephen Glass. Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle too.

"But so were editors who trusted them. If anything good can come from this, it won’t be pretty, but it will be good for journalism.

"It's an editor's job to vet stories. To role-play the reader. To have the dirty mind and see the double-entendres the writer is blind to—or perhaps thinks would be cute to get past the desk."

"It’s not an editor’s job to trust a reporter."

Or in light of James Frey's self-admitted liteary deceptions, here's a mashup of my thoughts in 2003 and today's reflections on his agent's remarks:

It’s an editor’s job (or for that matter, maybe an agent's too, at least if neither wants to end up staring into the business end of a smoking gun or a steely-eyed Oprah) to challenge, to probe, to prosecute a story, to be the ally, not of his or her colleague, (or client) but ultimately the advocate for readers who deserve to get what they think they're paying for.