Journalism 101: Inside Baseball
When I was at my second newspaper gig, Dear Newspapers in McLean, Virginia, I was under the tutelage of managing editor R. Cort Kirkwood. Cort, now the editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and I both have strong personalities, and we clashed a fair amount. But I learned a quite a bit at Dear. (Not to mention made a friend in education reporter Todd Behrendt, who later helped me get a job at the Potomac News, where he had landed while I was still freelancing in Egypt.)
One of the things Cort spent a lot of time focusing on was making sure that none of our four-person reporting staff wrote stories that were too “inside baseball.” In other words, not too wrapped up in the nitty-gritty insider details that were of no real interest or relevance to the average reader, like a sports story that discusses arcane personnel issues instead of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the actual game.
Another way he approached this, in a way that’s been more applicable to me throughout my career, was that “every story is someone’s first.” The reader at home doesn’t care if you’re tired of writing the background and the context on some complicated issue over and over again in subsequent stories. For some of them, those follow-up stories will be the first time that they’ve been exposed to the issue, and they need that background, whatever your feelings on it might be at this point. It’s certainly something I’ve had to remind myself of numerous times over the years, especially with complex stories like the progress of the Hesperia casino proposal.
I don’t always succeed on these two related points, but it’s something I try to bear in mind. It worked out well in one illustrative case, when I picked up a Virginia Press Association award in 1998 for play reviews I wrote at the Potomac News. The secret of my success: Cort’s advice. Although I have a reasonably strong background in theater, I wrote for a regular person who just wanted to know whether or not a given play was worth seeing and why.
I wrote the reviews as though I was telling my mom about them. Mom’s a smart cookie, but she also doesn’t really care about blocking or technical intricacies or backstage politics. She, or at least the imaginary version of her I used as my audience while writing, wants to know 1) what the play is about, 2) some examples of what it’s like and 3) whether or not to see it. It would have been very easy to slip into talking about the inside baseball aspect of the plays, but Cort’s advice (OK, his barked orders) came back to me over the years and steered me right.
Remember the readers when you’re writing. That’s your audience, not the editors and not other reporters and not even the newsmakers themselves.
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