Breaking a Few Rules Sure Feels Good.
Posted: Monday, December 08, 2008
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
We have a special report on Mondays in our paper.
It is called the Personality of the Week.
What we do is showcase someone in the community that does a great deal of public service but receives little if any praise. It is always a fun task for either myself or a staff writer and the area readers really like the idea of our telling a favorite person's story to the world.
It was well written as always and very clean but it was also far too long.
A good story should be in the 600-800 word count and this was twice that.
The writer and I went back and forth about where to cut back and I advised that all the elderly person's early stories were good but didn't fit the point of the story being about what the person does for the community.
I explained the rule of a two-minute read and how readers drift when things are too long. I explained the features were about community involvement and not really biographies. I explained several other rules about writing that I have been told and followed for years to explain why I was pushing for the reduction in word count.
Finally a much smaller version was done.
But then the writer explained that the section removed had several of the personality's favorite stories and that the person didn't have a lot of time left. In fact 2009 will be his last year with us.
This put my thinking on hold.
Here was someone still actively involved in his community that surely had other things he could be doing right now but instead he was still volunteering to help out the small town he lives in almost every day.
I had sent the truncated version to the publisher for a look before posting but now I included the original longer version as well.
I explained the situation and asked her to mull it over.
In my mind, allowing the larger version with the gentleman's favorite stories to be included was a way to say thank you for all his years of helping his town. I thought how pleased he would be to see his favorite stories out to the world. I thought we owed him that for a lifetime of selfless effort to his community. I didn't hear back from the publisher that evening and I knew the correct thing to do was to run the shortened version of the story.
The next morning, I saw the story had been forwarded to posting and I just had to see which version was going out this morning.
I smiled broadly when I saw the original version made it to press.
And so I sit here knowing that we have failed to follow several of the good rules of journalism today.
We didn't stay on point. We were too wordy and we even posted the man's picture as our top picture of the day over a stunning daylight picture of an abandoned building that had collapsed over the weekend.
Yep, a lot of rules were broken. But I can't stop smiling. I hope he has a great day.
This Article has been viewed 1,854 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.