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Writing / Editing
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Writing / Editing
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Msnbc.com Uses Slide Show for In-Depth Narrative Story
Like most investigative reporters, the culmination of Bill Dedman's reporting is generally an article or a package of articles. As he worked on his latest project, he collected images and documents that helped tell the story of a wealthy, elderly heiress who owns several expansive homes but doesn't appear to live in them.
When he was ready to write, he decided that, rather than craft a 2,500-word story, he'd rely on the images he had shown to his family and coworkers, accompanied by captions. The slide show would be an experiment, a way to see if in-depth reporting could be presented in a way that would reach far more people.
Judging by the response, it may have been. Dedman told me that he's received 500 e-mails from readers about the story, entitled, "The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery." That's more than he's received for any story he's done in 30 years.
Dedman and I corresponded by e-mail and discussed how he decided to do a slide show, what he gained and lost with this story form, and whether this can work for other stories. Here's an edited version of our exchange.
Steve Myers: What is this story about?
Bill Dedman: It's a historical mystery with connections from the Civil War era to today. Why are the mansions of one of America's richest women sitting vacant?
The mansions are owned by the reclusive Huguette Clark, now 103, whose father, copper miner William Andrews Clark, was one of the richest men in the country and also a U.S. senator from Montana who had to leave the Senate in disgrace -- then was re-elected.
People in Montana were surprised to learn that his daughter was still alive. But where is she? And what will become of her fortune?
How did you get interested in this story?
Dedman: I got into the story last summer, when I saw the Connecticut house for sale. Tiring of looking at real estate listings for houses I couldn't afford, I looked at houses I really couldn't afford.
The mansion in New Canaan is on the market for $24 million. In the assessor's records online, I saw the owner's name, Huguette Clark, but didn't recognize it. I read in the zoning minutes online that her attorney said it had not been lived in for 50 years. Then I saw an online discussion in Santa Barbara about her empty mansion there. And her father's political history was interesting. So I was hooked.
If you write about what you're interested in, others will be interested, too.
How long did this take?
Dedman: I started last summer, but I did other stories, went to Haiti, etc., in the meantime. It was probably two months of work, counting reading all the Clark books I could find, tracking down a few distant relatives, waiting for public records to be dragged out of archives, hanging out with the doormen.
In your reporting, were you guided by your research, which led you to seek photos to illustrate it, or were you guided by the images you found?
Dedman: All along I was collecting all the photos I could. I had planned to do a normal story format, with as many photos as we could use.
The photos also help with interviews; if you show up at an interview with a notebook, you are in a subservient position, begging for information. If instead you show up with printouts of photos to show, then the person you're interviewing is learning something, is eager to see them all, and it helps the conversation along. It's the same trick as making the graphic for a story as you do the reporting, so you can take the graphic to the interview, and let the sources draw on your draft copy, correct it, add what they know.
Where did you find the images?
The New York Times Caption from MSNBC.com slideshow: "Tracing the lives of William Andrews Clark and his Huguette, we are left with mysteries. What does she remember of 'Papa'? Is she well cared for? What will she leave to the world? 'It's hard to find out what the real story was,' said nephew [Ian] Devine. 'No one is alive -- except for Huguette.' " |
Dedman: Some were free: The New York Times generously shared two old photos; the Library of Congress; the Realtor for the Connecticut home; the Corcoran Gallery of Art had old photos, photos of the art, and a color photo of the salon that it still has on display from Clark's mansion. The grand-nephew, in Austria, let me use a couple of old family photos from his book, which unfortunately is published only in French. Old newspaper clippings came from the Google News Archive, a New York Times subscription and ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which many public libraries have access to. Pictometry gave us one aerial of Santa Barbara, similar to what you can see on Bing. And I took photos at Woodlawn Cemetery and her apartment building.
The only photo I just grabbed off the Web was the Renoir; that image was the best I could get. Sotheby's, which sold the painting, would not hand over a better image, but this one is good enough.
Paid images: New-York (yes, there's a hyphen) and Montana and Las Vegas historical societies and archives. Maybe $100 apiece. We paid a Santa Barbara photographer for a better copy of an aerial he had already shot -- $150. Altogether, perhaps $1,000 or $1,200.
Documents included a marriage license, divorce record, wills and probate files, cemetery lot cards, passenger ship's registries, passport application, zoning records, assessor records, and census forms from 1880 through 1930.
How did you decide to do a slide show?
Dedman: I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.
I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don't we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first -- would that crimp the writing? -- but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.
We've done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.
The photo editors threw the photos into our standard slide show template, which was built in-house years ago. You just drag the photos into a folder and it makes a slide show, which you can edit by moving the photos around and writing captions.
One problem: I didn't like the font, which was way too small for reading a long narrative. Our standard caption text is smaller than our standard story text, too small to read that many words comfortably. The solution was to put the text in the headline field of our slide show template, so it came out larger. A workaround.
Once you decided that this could work as a slide show, how did you construct the narrative?
Dedman: The order of the photos was determined by what I had found would draw the listener/reader/user into the story: first just a shot to establish the two main characters (father and daughter), then the empty mansions, and from them on it was chronological. Readers sent e-mails saying they thought "Oh no!" when they saw that it was 47 slides, but then after the first four, they couldn't stop.
Chronology is the easiest way to tell a story, and easiest on the reader. It's just like telling a bank robbery or other story. You might tell the main points or the most interesting part first -- "Four people were taken hostage ..." -- but soon you have to start at the beginning: "It all began just after closing time ..." In this slide show, that transition comes on slide 5, "Where did such wealth come from?" which takes us back to 1863, the beginning of the story of William Andrews Clark.
What did you gain by presenting this as a slide show? What did you lose?
Dedman: First, it's a pain to write in 50-word chunks. I had to go over and over that text, to tighten, far more than I would have if it had been a "story." That's a gain.
An enterprise story on the site, presented in a normal story page, might get a million page views. The page views for this slide show, so far, are 78 million.In writing a story, you can throw in a phrase or sentence when you need to clarify something; no room for that here. If you don't -- or can't -- throw in that extra phrase or sentence, the narrative moves much more quickly. So something gained and lost.
You lose attribution. Except for attributing the quotes, I removed all the "how do you know this" material. That all went into the "notes and sources" page, along with the tidbits that couldn't fit on the slide show.
You lose complexity. For example, we quote Mark Twain, who had a grand time going on for pages about how bad Sen. Clark was. "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs." Well, the story is more complicated. As I point out on the notes page, Twain's benefactor, the man who rescued Twain from bankruptcy, was Henry Huttleston Rogers, who was a business competitor of Clark's. It's possible that Twain's wallet was talking.
You also lose paragraph marks. I could have put them in, but that adds more lines, and I was worried that the text would run over, breaking the whole experience for readers in some browsers. So I chose in the end to keep the captions to one paragraph. That makes it harder to maintain clarity.
The story is more readable in the print version, for that reason. That print version is also the life raft for people who have trouble seeing the slide show in their browser.
How would someone know if this approach would work for his story? Are there certain types of stories that would be appropriate?
I'm not a fan of slide shows that are created just to generate page views. If you have 10 reasons the Red Sox are going to be better this year, just tell me the 10 reasons; don't make me click through 10 slides to find out. The readers know they're being manipulated.
But if you have a tale that you're finding is much easier to tell to your friends and family and colleagues if you show them the photos, then you should probably tell it that way to the reader, too.
Are the captions really 2,500 words? Didn't seem like it.
Dedman: Thanks! It's 2,788 words, not counting photo credits.
The idea that we have to write shorter for the Web is hooey. If we write about something that people care about, they keep reading.
Of course, on a normal story that jumps to two or more pages, far fewer people read the second page than the first. It drops off significantly. We might have 600,000 people read the first page of a story, and only 60,000 read the second page; most of those 60,000 readers will then stick with us for several more pages.
But so what if fewer people read page 2? The ones who want more are getting the full story, and we're getting more page views, and more time on the site, which are the main measures that advertisers are interested in.
What is the rationale to write shorter on the Web? There's no savings in time. You have to research a story thoroughly either way, and as Mark Twain and others have pointed out, it takes longer to write short than it does to write long.
How has traffic been? Is there any way to compare that to traffic for a similar 2,500-word story?
Dedman: The page views so far are 78 million. There are 47 slides, so that's the equivalent of more than 1.6 million people reading every slide. Not that it works that way, of course; some people dipped in and out. In all, 2.2 million unique users (computers) went to the slide show.
A typical slide show, such as snow photos from a big storm, or the Week in Pictures, might get 3 million page views. "An evening at the Oscars" might do 6 or 8 million.
The 78 million isn't a record. Our Haiti earthquake slide show got 99 million page views in a week. But it's more than the death of Michael Jackson (56 million page views on the slide show and 7.4 million on the first story about his death).
An enterprise story on the site, presented in a normal story page, might get a million page views. It all depends how long it's on the cover of msnbc.com, and whether our half-sister company MSN picks it up. Some stories go over that number. For comparison, the story on Todd Palin's e-mails was about 1.5 million. The series on abusive interrogations at Guantanamo got 3 million. A story on Hillary Clinton's hidden thesis at Wellesley reached 3.2 million.
If this same slide show had been told as a story, and had gotten the same display on our cover, I'm guessing it would have had 1.5 to 2 million page views. But the time spent by readers would have been far less. The average time spent by readers on this slide show was more than 13 minutes.
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Selling Your Gold Jewelry Probably Won't Make You Rich
The Boston Globe wanted to know how much those people who advertise "cash for gold" really pay for stuff that people want to sell.
The Globe bought some earrings that an appraiser said contained about $14.65 in gold.
But when the newspaper tried to sell the jewelry, buyers were offering a few bucks.
In some cases, the gold buyers only pay 11 to 29 percent of the value of the jewelry.
ABC News also recently took a look at gold jewelry parties that are springing up around the country. The party includes an appraiser who buys and pays on the spot.
"People should not trade sentimental pieces or pieces that are valuable, said [Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments and "Good Morning America's" personal finance contributor]. Buyers at gold parties are not interested in the artistic or decorative value of the item but only the gold it contains. "An expert at Weiss Research Inc., estimated that people should be able to get 70 percent of the value of their gold at a reputable gold-party service. Purchasers have to pay middlemen and other overhead costs, Hobson said. "She urged sellers to walk away from any offer that's significantly less than that. "She noted, however, that prices vary widely from appraiser to appraiser. Whether sellers dispose of their gold at a party, to a jeweler or through some other service, they should be sure to get multiple quotes, she said." The Canadian Broadcasting Co. found something similar: "CBC-TV's investigation unit went undercover to three gold buyers in Winnipeg to see how much they would pay for a gold necklace and four rings that had been appraised at more than $1,000. The offers varied from $275 to $600 for the batch."
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Online Communities Bolster Extreme Couponing
It might seem odd, but thousands of Americans are obsessed with couponing. They use discount offers to load their homes with cases of drinks, Jell-O and such because it's free or cheap.
The Wall Street Journal reported that some couponers just can't resist a great deal:
"These discount devotees have formed vast online communities that collectively unearth and swap digital, mobile-phone and paper coupons. The cleverest shoppers combine dozens of coupons and go from store to store buying items in quantity, getting stuff free of charge. File Not Found
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'" 'If you can get 100 packs of toilet paper for free, you're going to,' says Erin Libranda, 38. When the resident of Katy, Texas, has amassed enough coupons to buy many months' supply of eggs, she puts tiny cracks in them, adds lemon juice and freezes them.' "Jill Lansky, 34, of Kalamazoo, Mich., likes to amuse friends by opening a cupboard to reveal 150 bottles of Powerade she bought for 25 cents each, thanks to coupons she collected on CouponForum.com. "Jody Wilson, 33, got turned onto the couponing Web site AFullCup.com last March. Since then, she's posted nearly 9,500 messages to the site's forum. 'I became extremely addicted,' says the credit analyst from Battle Creek, Mich. 'There's deal after deal after deal.' "Couponers trade deal information and coupons themselves through cellphones, Twitter, Facebook, and message boards on Web sites like Slickdeals.net and TheKrazyCouponLady.com, motivated as much by competitiveness as by frugality. "Some sites, which tend to make their money from online ads, organize contests to see which member can spend the least cash in a month on essentials. Some couponers brag online about stockpiling free groceries, then selling them at yard sales." The Boston Globe also tapped into the coupon craze, telling the story of one particularly aggressive couponer who is so well-known to stores that they open a special register just for her: "At one of her favorite local chains, she used a combination of coupons, sales, and cats to drop her total from $118 to $9 (and change). Her best effort, she boasted, was when her methods zeroed out her initial $400 total, and, because of several rebates and promotions, she actually got paid $60. "Not everyone is as dedicated -- or quite so strategic. But overall, strung-out shoppers are getting more tactical with their scissors. "Price-conscious purchasers redeemed 3.2 billion coupons in 2009, a 23 percent increase over 2008, according to the Deerfield, Ill.-based NCH Marketing Services Inc. That's the highest year-over-year growth rate ever recorded, according to Charles Brown, NCH's vice president of marketing. "There's a remarkably voracious coupon culture. Hundreds of websites and discussion boards advise about doubling, buzz with rumors of unadvertised store promotions, and dissect the practice of two-for-ones. "There are even coupon parties, which are akin to sewing circles -- only attendees gather with scissors and piles of circulars."
"The study -- called 'The New Consumer Behavior Paradigm: Permanent or Fleeting?' -- looks at how consumer spending has changed in the last two years. As the nation shifts into recovery mode (February's unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent, per Department of Labor stats), retailers and packaged goods makers can expect the emergence of a more cost- and value-focused consumer. This consumer is also less likely to be driven by 'rampant, deal-seeking,' the study found.
"When the economy first hit rock bottom, cash-strapped consumers jumped into a frantic, bargain-seeking mode, said Lisa Feigen Dugal, PricewaterhouseCoopers' U.S. retail and consumer practice advisory leader. Now, that intense focus on meeting budgets and saving any additional cash 'will give way to more deliberate and purposeful' spending, Feigen Dugal said."
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CoPress Co-Founder Explains Why Student Startup Shut Down
CoPress touted itself as a "safety net" for college publications, enabling news organizations to safely experiment with their Web sites. The startup moved college news sites off proprietary publishing systems like College Publisher, provided hosting and offered WordPress training and around-the-clock support in case anything went wrong.
But after working with about 40 student publications since February 2009, CoPress announced that it was shutting down for financial reasons.
CoPress, which was started by college journalists, encouraged students to innovate online, and innovate they did. That safety net, however, became more of a security blanket, inundating CoPress' small tech support staff with unending requests.
Under CoPress' hosting arrangements, student news organizations could receive unlimited, 24/7 support for a monthly fee. CoPress Co-Founder and Executive Director Daniel Bachhuber said the company couldn't keep up, let alone make enough money to adequately pay its support staff.
"We were letting publications submit as many support tickets as they needed," Bachhuber said in a phone interview last week. "We gave them full access to the server, and it was open-source so they could tweak and mess with the software all day long."
Bachhuber said he spent hours a day trying to answer news organizations' questions while interning at Publish2. He dropped out of school in fall 2008, partly to dedicate more time to CoPress, and said he doesn't plan to go back. Three other CoPress employees, who were full-time students, helped him handle tech support questions.
Because CoPress' clients were using WordPress, which is free and open-source, they'll continue to have full control of their sites. Rather than pay CoPress, they'll simply pay the third-party company that hosts their sites. Most of the sites are moving toward third-party hosting services, such as WebFaction and Slicehost, which offer 24/7 support. The main change is that clients can no longer rely on CoPress' around-the-clock support to help them resolve technical issues related to WordPress.
Bachhuber said the lack of support could actually be good in that it may force student news organizations to do something that may have been easy to avoid when CoPress was just an e-mail or a phone call away: build in-house expertise and seek answers themselves.
"There's so much you can learn on the Internet if a) you have the motivation and b) you know how to look and ask the right questions and participate responsibly," Bachhuber said, noting that he'd like to see all student news organizations have developers on staff. "There's a little bit of hand-holding that can be done, but what it requires most importantly is initiative."
Some of the colleges and universities that were using CoPress' services, such as Fairfield University's student newspaper, The Mirror, have created positions to help troubleshoot technical issues internally.
Joseph Cefoli, who was hired this school year as The Mirror's online projects manager, worked with CoPress to help the paper transition from College Publisher to WordPress.
"As I finish up my senior year and we transition to the new staff, I'm creating documentation and training a new project manager who will be able to work with WordPress and the newspaper staff," Cefoli said in an e-mail.
Moving forward, CoPress' clients will be able to refer to a list of WordPress consultants who can help student news organizations with extended projects and technical support. Bachhuber has also created a Google group where students can solicit feedback from each other and share ideas about innovation in college media. Additionally, CoPress plans to release its database conversion script at the end of the month to make it easier for news organizations to get various archives into WordPress.
Bachhuber said that having run a challenging business, he's learned a lot about what it takes to make an operation viable.
"On the money side of things, you really need to know your market, have a good sense of what your business is going to be, and make sure you're charging appropriately," Bachhuber said. "We had to change our prices twice, which indicates that we didn't really start out knowing what we were doing."
Hoping to make its efforts more financially sound, CoPress began offering an hourly rate of $50 to $70 for tech support last September but found that student news organizations couldn't afford it and therefore stopped asking questions. The company realized that the monthly fee was more attractive to customers and experimented with other ways of managing the high volume of support requests. Bachhuber, for instance, planned to create a distributed support tool, but didn't make much progress on it due to limited time, money and staffing.
"Distributed support is an interesting and unexplored idea," Bachhuber said. "Basically, we'd build a tool where, instead of all the support requests coming to us, some support requests would come to us and others would go to other Webmasters at student publications."
Andrew Spittle, CoPress' hosting director and a member of its tech support team, said that as much as he liked offering support to other student journalists, it wouldn't have made sense financially to continue doing so after graduating from college this spring.
"When we projected out where we'd be in May, it was going to be nearly impossible to scale to a point where we could afford to pay three to four staff members," Spittle said by phone. Working for a few dollars an hour is "not bad for a group of people who are in school and have the motivation and the time to commit 30 to 40 hours to it, but for people looking for a full-time job salary, it just doesn't scale."
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New Study Finds One in Six Americans Has Herpes
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study yesterday saying that herpes now infects about one in six American adults ages 14-49.
The study found that the disease affects 21 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men and that blacks are three times more likely than whites to be infected. An estimated 48 percent of black women carry the disease.
BusinessWeek summarized the study, saying:
"The survey, conducted from 2005 through 2008, found the infection rate didn't change significantly from a previous report from 1999 to 2004.
"There's no cure for herpes, which has two forms. Herpes simplex virus type 1 typically causes blisters near the mouth known as cold sores or fever blisters. Type 2 creates blisters near the genitals. Most infected people don't know they have the virus and spread it to partners through sexual contact even when theyre not experiencing symptoms, according to the CDC. " 'This study serves as a stark reminder that herpes remains a common and serious health threat,' said Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for STD Prevention. 'We are particularly concerned about persistent high rates of herpes among African-Americans, which is likely contributing to disproportionate rates of HIV in the black community.' "
Here are some additional resources from the CDC:
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Set the Bar High Before Showing Killer Whale Attack Video
You can learn from the tight spot that Orlando news media outlets have found themselves in.
Newsrooms might soon be able to to get their hands on SeaWorld security camera video of a killer whale attack that killed a trainer a couple of weeks ago. SeaWorld turned the video over to investigators, and when the investigation is over, the video could become public. The victim's family wants a judge to block the release. My colleague Kelly McBride has written about why it's important to fight for access to the video.
Florida has a strong open records law, so it is not beyond imagination that the video could go public. But even if that happens, I think newsrooms should set the bar high before releasing it.
Reasons to run the video might include these unlikely scenarios:- The video shows some discrepancy between what SeaWorld says and what actually took place.
- The video shows a systemic breakdown that compromised public safety.
- The video reveals a coverup or a great truth that the public needs to know, and the video is the only real way of showing that truth.
These are not reasons to run the video:
- We spent a lot of money on lawyers to get it.
- Other media have the video and plan to run it.
- It is "out there," so why not?
- We will run it on the Web, because "anything goes" in cyberspace.
- "It's interesting and people are free not to watch it."
Consider these other factors:- How will you explain using or not using the video to the public? To the family? To the newsroom?
- What rules or guidelines does your newsroom have about using graphic or disturbing images?
- How will you warn the public about what they will see? Online, you might consider a warning slide that the user would have to click through to get to the video.
- Are you showing everything a viewer would need to see to understand the situation? What came before and after the clip?
- Even if you find the video newsworthy, how do you limit its use in headlines, teases, promos and file video that could air on future newscasts?
- Is the video clear and conclusive?
- What are the short-term and long-term consequences to SeaWorld? To the family? To the station?
I would also remind myself that this video is from a private security camera, not a government one. It is different from watching dashboard cams from police cars. The public has a stronger need to see what the government is up to on our behalf.
Also, remember that nobody has been accused of a crime.
The victim's family does not seem to be searching for answers or seeking justice. If the family were turning to the media to press for answers, it might be a very different issue, one of "holding the powerful accountable and giving voice to the voiceless."
I am in favor of journalists pressing to see the video. I just hope they have the good sense and good taste to leave it alone if the video does not prove to be more than simply shocking.
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How Humor Can Help Make Your Writing More Powerful
In my book "Writing Tools" I make the argument that a writer should know "when to back off and when to show off." The more serious the topic, I argued, the more the writer should soft-pedal the language. The less serious the topic, the more the writer can twist and shout.
Then, one day, I confronted a writing task that demanded I turn my own advice upside down. I wanted, more than anything, to write a funny essay about colon cancer. This impulse was inspired by my pastor, Rev. Robert Gibbons, who underwent emergency surgery after a colonoscopy, the most reliable test now available to detect the polyps that can turn deadly.
When the good padre returned to his parish after treatment, I rushed up to him with a hug and this declaration: "Congratulations, Father, you are now one of the few people in America who knows how to use a semi-colon." To my relief, he laughed.
Now it was my turn to have a colonoscopy, so I wrote about the experience:
"My butt could save your life.
"Not my butt, per se, but what's in my butt.
"What's in my butt at the moment is a tube with a camera and light on the end. It is snaking its way up my colon, which photographically looks like the Lincoln Tunnel, searching for a little cave-dwelling bioterrorist I've named Osama bin Polyp.
"I am not awake, but on Cloud 18, and learn all this later.
"The camera finds bin Polyp and projects his image onto a video monitor. He looks like a tiny white bump, the size of a yogurt-covered raisin, but in real life he is much smaller, maybe three or four times the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Snip.
"It will take a few days for the lab results: Will it be benign? Precancerous? Malignant?
"What then?
"But first, a few more words about the junk in my trunk -- and yours ."
I've read this passage aloud to groups large and small, and it always evokes laughter, some uproarious, but some nervous.
The nervous laughter is understandable. One woman I've known for years told me that she would rather die of cancer than submit to a test "down there." I pray that the squeamishness expressed in that euphemism not prove fatal.
In a mission statement for my story, I described my desire to write a story unlike any other composed on this topic, containing graphically humorous elements rare in a newspaper. That is, I wanted to defuse the fear, ignorance and anxiety that pervade public understanding of this procedure so that vulnerable readers might overcome their inhibitions and get tested.
"Why didn't you write: 'My butt could save your ass'?" asked one curious critic.
I knew why. I wanted those six words (each a one-syllable word) to foreshadow the tone of the story. This would be a humorous story about a deadly serious topic, so I wanted to join two words not usually juxtaposed: "butt" and "life."
Let's X-Ray the sentence and consider the practical language decisions that shape its meaning:
My butt could save your life.
Notice how each word carries special weight:
"My" : The possessive form of the first person singular signals that this is an intimate account from the get-go.
"butt": A funny noun, down and dirty, but not filthy. Slang that reflects informality.
"could": A helping verb that informs readers that this life-saving statement is conditional, dependent upon their choices and actions.
"save": A strong, transitive verb in the active voice. The meaning transfers directly from subject to object.
"your": The second person "your" parallels "my" and turns the sentence into a conversation, a transaction with the reader.
"life": The most important noun, the direct object, comes at the end -- raising the stakes and moving the sentence from comedy to potential tragedy.
Humor depends upon the strategic use of language, such tools as the hyperbolic metaphor (comparing the picture of my colon to the Lincoln Tunnel); comic personification (comparing my polyp to a notorious terrorist); the use of allusions and rhymes from popular culture (such as the "junk in my trunk"); even a single word of onomatopoeia (the intentional fragment "Snip.")
What follows, of course, is a series of quite serious questions, a cliffhanger that keeps the reader in the story, I hope, eager to find out the results of my test. This pattern defines the structure of the entire essay: Anytime the piece gets too serious, a bit of humor relieves the tension. Anytime it threatens to become silly, a shadow appears overhead. To be honest, I learned this technique from none other than Willy Shakespeare, often condemned in the 18th century for mixing comic and tragic elements in his most enduring plays.
It worked, I am happy to say. Two weeks after my story appeared, a woman arrived at the clinic where I was tested. She told the nurse that she had read the story and that it had inspired her to get tested. She was 50-years-old, with no family history of cancer, but the test discovered malignant polyps, early enough in their development, I pray, to make effective treatment possible.
So not only can my butt save your life -- but so can the glamour, the alluring power of grammar.
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Wary Employers Hiring More Temporary Workers
"This upswing may foretell good news for the overall job market. Many economists view temp hiring as a leading indicator of where the rest of hiring is going. Why? As you can see in the chart above, temp workers (the purple line) are among the first to be laid off when employers need to cut corners, and are among the first to be hired when business picks up again.
"In other words, temp workers provide a sort of cushion for employers uncertain of whether they should commit to permanently expanding or shrinking their staff. The increase in temp work provides hope that employers may soon feel ready to take the plunge and increase their payrolls for good."
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Great Real Estate Deals Likely to End This Spring
Now may be the best time to buy a new house, partly because of falling prices and low interest rates. The great real estate deals aren't likely to last, though.
The Christian Science Monitor explained:
1. "Interest rates are likely to rise. By March 31, the Federal Reserve is set to end its special program to buy up to $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Unless ample replacement buying turns up -- or the Fed extends its MBS supports -- mortgage rates will rise to attract private investors, many experts predict. 'We're factoring that' issue 'into our rate forecast,' says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of single family research at the Mortgage Bankers Association. By year's end, the rate on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages should reach about 6.1 percent, according to the MBA. That's up from an average 5.01 percent for the week ended Feb. 4, according to Freddie Mac data. 2. "Federal home buyer tax credits will end. Late last year, Washington extended the stimulus program that provides up to $8,000 in tax credits to qualified first-time home buyers. And it expanded that program to provide up to $6,500 in tax credits for current home-owners buying a new principal residence. ... 3. "Home prices will start to turn up. The timing is a little iffy here. Nationally, many experts say, the plunge in home prices should end by midyear -- or even earlier."
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Memphis TV Station Finds Hundreds of Rape Kits Untested for DNA
Memphis TV station WREG found that more than a thousand rape kits -- evidence of sexual assault used to help identify an attacker -- went untested for DNA from 2007-2009.
The city of Memphis collected the kits, and in thousands of cases decided for various reasons not to send them to be tested. They included instances in which a "victim decides not to press charges, date rapes, domestic sexual assaults, and many times when the victim does not know the attacker."
When the kits are not tested, victims don't have much hope for justice, and police don't have the evidence they need to link one attack to another through DNA databases.
In one year, only 6 percent of the rape kits handled by the city were tested; in another, 9 percent were.
After the TV station reported the story, the city shipped 600 kits to the state crime lab for testing. The city went on to change its official policy: Now it will send all rape kits for testing.
I asked reporter Keli Rabon to tell us more about how she found and reported the story. Below is our edited e-mail exchange.
Al Tompkins: How did you hear about this story?
Keli Rabon: In November, we saw a CBS News investigation about rape kit testing from other parts of the country, and wanted to see what the situation was in Memphis.
How did you find the victims whose rape kits were not tested?
Rabon: We went through hundreds of police reports and looked at the information available on each case. In most all of the cases, the victim's name was listed but the phone numbers were often disconnected. Utilizing public records and online searches, I tracked down phone numbers for dozens of victims. Most victims were hesitant to talk on camera about their story and what may or may not have happened to their kit. But they all remembered the painful and embarrassing process they had to go through, as evidence was collected within hours of their attack.
Why on earth would police not send these kits away for testing? Is it money?
Rabon: That's a great question. We don't know why they don't test. Police say they test what they think is needed.
Police can send the kit to be processed (to see if sperm can be detected on the sample) but the DA's office must sign off on the DNA testing. We're told that, typically, the DA will not sign off on DNA testing unless police have developed a suspect. So in cases where the suspect was "Unknown," it's unlikely that the kit would be DNA-tested if police were unable to find a suspect. In cases of boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife sexual assault, police say it's unlikely that those kits would be tested because the question is about consensuality, not "did a sexual act occur?"
But if the kit is never tested, the suspect's DNA is not loaded into the national database [CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, established and funded by the FBI], thus reducing the chance of solving other crimes in other jurisdictions.
In Tennessee, the initial processing and DNA testing of rape kits is FREE to local law enforcement. It is already factored into the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's state budget, though that may be changing in July due to budget cuts.
What changed after your reporting?
Rabon: Two days after our stories aired, the city of Memphis announced changes to its rape kit testing policy. They have gathered 600 backlogged rape kits that have never been analyzed, and are in the process of sending them to TBI for testing. Now, all rape kits will be sent for testing.
Is it fair to say this story would play out in other cities?
Rabon: Yes. It is definitely worth the time and effort of looking into. There may not be a problem like there was in Memphis, but you don't know until [you] start digging. One thing we found when we talked to advocates is that they have been waiting on a story like this to be told for a long time, but they didn't know who was going to tell the story.
What advice do you have for other reporters to help them get started?
Rabon: - Gathering incident reports is crucial to finding a victim. Know where victims go to get their rape kits administered.
- Talk to victim advocates and see if they're aware of the problem. Be careful here -- many advocate groups work closely with the police and DA's office, so politics can come into play.
- Verify the numbers and don't just take what they give you the first time. Check with the police department, the DA's office, and the agency/lab that does the testing. In our case, it was a state agency (TBI), but that may vary in other places.
- Remember, all rapes don't have a rape kit. Ask for "rape kit numbers" not just "rapes." Understand that "rape kits" can also be administered in cases of other sexual assaults, not just rape.
- Understand the difference between the rape kit being 'analyzed' or 'processed,' and the rape kit being 'DNA Tested.' This will help in asking the right questions early on.
- We purchased our own rape kit on the Internet. It helped to add a visual element to a difficult story to tell in pictures. Being able to look at the kit and the contents inside helped us understand how invasive the procedure is for these men and women, and how delicate we needed to be in our storytelling.
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