I always liked this clip because it showed the importance of quality over quantity in some cases. That and it was essentially the moment Ford launched what I consider to be the greatest car ever made: The Mustang.
The Filak Furlough Tour hit Texas recently, as I got an opportunity through the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association to address students and advisers across the Lone Star State. The whole thing started with a basic request:
“One thing I see my students struggling with — and no doubt other campuses are the same — is staying on the surface. I’m seeing a dearth of deep dives, investigative and data-driven journalism, watchdog journalism, in-depth features. What we do have in abundance are truckloads of fluffy editorials.”
So, what’s the best way to get into all of this? Well for starters, here is Rule #1 to start you off in the right direction: You aren’t writing for yourself. You’re writing for an audience.
One of the main reasons people end up doing “fluffy editorials” is because they want to write things they care about. OK, that’s fine, but ask yourself this question: Does anyone else care about that thing?
I once had a student tell me that he planned to write an editorial for our student newspaper about how the U.S. should annex Puerto Rico. I remember asking him, “OK, but why should the readers of the Advance-Titan on the UWO campus care about this?” He stiffened up and said in a rather haughty voice, “EVERYONE should care about this!”
Um… OK… But a) do they? B) why should they? and c) what’s the point of it for a student newspaper on a regional campus in the middle of Wisconsin?
He didn’t get it, but my point was this: Writing about things you care about without thinking about your audience and what matters to the people out there is like deciding to become a chef at very nice restaurant because you like to eat. A chef is cooking for OTHER PEOPLE, so that’s where the joy and purpose lives. I wouldn’t want to go somewhere, order a steak and lobster dinner, only to have my server return with a plate of weird green stuff, explaining, “The chef feels strongly that people should be eating more organically braised kale, so enjoy!”
In terms of writing surface stuff, the reason why we end up doing it is because it’s easy and we’ve been trained to grind out pieces. There’s nothing wrong with learning how to bang out speech or meeting stories if you can find things that matter to your audience (see rule 1 above). However, as much as journalism is about quantity, it’s also about quality. You can’t just spend your whole life doing nothing but menial stories or you’ll want to throw yourself in front of a bus at some point in life.
Besides, quality endures while quantity fades.
Here’s what I mean. Every year, students come to campus and set up their apartments. They go to Walmart or Ikea and find a $50 tagboard piece of crap kitchen table and build it for the year. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of thing for students on a budget, especially if you’re sharing a house with people who view vodka as a food group and throw more parties in the place than a birthday clown on meth.
However, it’s never going to retain value or have lasting power. Throughout the year, I see broken ones of these tossed on the side of the road in front of apartment row on campus. A leg gave out, a side fell off, the top broke. At the end of the semester, none of those things is still around.
Contrast that with the table my great grandmother bought the year my grandmother was born. It lived in her house for decades and it was where all the meals of the family were eaten, the bills paid, the problems discussed. When holidays came, they tossed a couple leaves in there to make it big enough to accommodate everyone who could attend.
After she died, her son took the table with him and used it at his art studio. It withstood easels being banged on it, paint being dripped on it, brushes drying out on it and more.
When he died, my mom had to clean out his apartment. We saw the table there, just beat to hell and my mom said, “It’s a shame. That was where we used to have all of our best family gatherings and now it’s just done…” I told her, no way. I was taking it with me. I took it home, stripped off all the crap on the top, sanded out the imperfections and re-stained the whole thing. I then coated it all in a rockhard top coat. Today, 103 years after my great grandmother bought it, that table is beautiful and it’s in my dining room at my house.
The point is, you can’t just rely on throw-away crap if you plan to have any kind of value in this field. Sure, that table of my grandmother’s probably cost more than your $50 Ikea wonder, but it’s worth more, it carries on and it retains value. That’s where you want to be in this field at least some of the time.
So, how do you get there you might ask? Well, here are three things I think might help you find those stories and stick with them:
OPEN YOUR BRAIN: Freelance writer Jenna Glatz is fond of noting that coming up with a story idea is about learning to think that everything you experience could become a story. “Once your brain has opened up to this kind of idea generating, you’ll be amazed by how much more perceptive you’ll become in general,” Glatzer writes in Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer. “Conversations you overhear will trigger ideas for new articles. An event you witness in a parking lot will trigger another. Moments before drifting off to sleep, you’ll think of your most compelling idea ever.”
I spend a lot of time driving to work each day along wide open roads and I do my best to open my brain. I try to notice what’s on the billboards along the highway or what vehicles are more prevalent around me. I listen to local radio to see what’s in the news and what’s on the ads. I also think about whatever the people in front of me at Kwik Trip are yammering about while buying their donuts and vape.
One of the first exercises I have my reporting and feature writing kids do is to leave their phones, their headphones and every other device in the classroom and then just go wander around for an hour with an open mind and open eyes/ears. When they come back to class, they have suddenly noticed all sorts of things they never knew were there before.
LEARN TO WONDER: Little kids are great for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their sense of wonder.
A 4-year-old’s favorite question is “Why?” Kids want to know how stuff works, why it happens and the answers to all sorts of other important questions.
At some point, we stop incessantly asking “Why?” because we fear of looking stupid or because we stop caring about how things work. We stop engaging with the world around us and we no longer enjoy the wonderment we once experienced as little kids.
That’s a shame, because wondering more will lead to some incredible stories. Pair some of the 5Ws and 1H with the phrase “I wonder” and you’ll get some pretty interesting story ideas. Here are a few that rattled through my brain just this week:
- I wonder why I can’t get a Diet Coke out of one of our vending machines. On our campus there is only one place I can actually buy a Diet Coke: A convenience store. Every place else, all I can get is a Diet Pepsi, which to me tastes like I’m licking a piece of chemically treated sheet metal. Why? Because our campus has a vending contract with the Pepsi Mafia, so I’m stuck. That said, I wondered why we got stuck with Pepsi. How does your university decide who gets the vending contract on your campus, how long is the contract and what kind of cash does the U get for exclusivity? Who has the say in where that money goes?
- I wonder what the hardest scholarship to get on my campus is: What is the least-often claimed scholarship on your campus and what makes it a difficult one to achieve? (A scholarship for professional banjo players of Bohemian descent? A scholarship that requires perfect attendance since kindergarten?) Every year, we give out tons of scholarships, but there are those that go unclaimed every year because nobody applies or nobody is qualified for them. What is the longest untouched scholarship for your school and what other weird ones are out there?
- I wonder if that law really exists. There are tons of urban legends out there about laws and rules at various schools and institutions. The one that makes the rounds from time to time is that certain housing set ups on campus are illegal if more than X number of women live together, as it technically qualifies as a brothel. It’s been debunked time and time again, but it still shows up.
- I wonder what other people are wondering about: The Freedom of Information Act and state open records make certain documents to the public. If you are at a public university, you can get all sorts of information, including people’s salaries, departmental budgets and contracts the U signs with outside agencies.
One thing that most people don’t think to request? A list of the open records requests that people have made over a given period of time. (I had a student do this once. When I asked him why he did it, he said, “I just want to know what other people want to know.” Good point.)
GIVE A DAMN: The best bit of advice anyone ever gave me about writing a bigger piece was that I needed to make sure I cared about what I was doing. Charles Davis, now the dean of journalism at the University of Georgia, was one of my professors for my doctorate at Mizzou when he told me this. He explained that completing a dissertation, a giant monstrosity of research that no one would ever read, was only possible if you made sure you cared about what you were doing and you wanted to find the answers to the problem you were tackling.
“It’s like a marriage,” he said. “It’ll be with you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death or degree do you part.”
I think about that a lot when I’m writing a longer blog post, a book or anything else that is more than a brief but courteous email to a student explaining that, no, I’m not changing your grade after I filed it with the university. It’s not my fault you missed so much class that we almost held a candle light vigil for you.
Case in point: I read this fantastic story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently by a reporter named Mary Spicuzza. In 1978 in Milwaukee, her cousin Augie was killed by a car bomb, something her family never spoke of for decades. Over the past year, she dug into the history of her family, her cousin’s various transgressions in life and how a powerful mob boss in Milwaukee likely ordered the bombing that took Augie’s life. In reading this piece, you can sense the amount of work that went into it and how much deep digging it took. Why did she do it? She NEEDED to find the answer and thought her audience would want to know as well, given how famous this incident was all those years ago. In short, she gave a damn.
When I think back on the stories I wrote that I liked the most, they were the ones where I gave a damn. I cared about breaking a story about how the KKK was distributing pamphlets on newspaper racks in grocery stores. I gave a damn about being right when it came to whether a local dog track was going to close down, costing hundreds of jobs and thousands of dollars to the local economy. I really felt it was important to do a six-part series for the blog on mass shootings, so much so, I wore a bulletproof vest everywhere I went for six days.
Even with the books I write, I think less about what I want to tell you, and more about what you really want and need to know and how best I can help you and your teachers get that stuff.
If you care, you’ll get into it and you’ll be like a dog with a Frisbee: You won’t let go until you’re satisfied.
And that can do a lot for you and your audience.