It’s a reporter’s worst nightmare

You finally just run out of cliches.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

“News writing is English with its shirt sleeves rolled up.”

I don’t know who said that originally, but it was in my high school journalism textbook, and it stuck with me.

The best news writing, I was always told, was simple, direct, and unadorned. Think of Hemingway, or Ernie Pyle’s war dispatches.

The first news director I ever worked for had two exercises he insisted reporters practice. One was to look at notes, then turn them face down, and write from memory. That encouraged conversational writing. The other was to look at every word in a sentence, especially adjectives and adverbs, and try saying the sentence aloud without them. If the meaning remained the same, the word was unecessary. That encouraged concise, accurate writing.

The Modifiers Strike Back

But three or four news directors later, the trend had begun to go in the opposite direction. I worked for a guy who used what I called the ‘grease gun’ approach: he’d pick up his mental ‘grease gun’ of adjectives and adverbs — most of them ridiculously hyperbolic — and start injecting them into sentences. Accidents became ‘tragic.’ Increases became ‘alarming.’ Developments became ‘shocking.’

The trite writing I had worked so hard to avoid was now not only desirable, it was mandatory.

The purpose of newswriting was no longer to inform, nor even to entertain; it was to scare the bejeezus out of the viewers. Then, we could hold ourselves up as the only thing standing between them and their families, and the certain, violent chaos we were warning them lurked right outside the door.

Cold Comfort?

I still hear from people about the story I did, on assignment, about the fatal risks homeless people faced sleeping out in the autumn chill, on a night when the temperature was in the low fifties.

“But there is something else on the street tonight,” I wrote — or at least something very near to that. “Its name is death, and it waits in every alley, in every open doorway, in every vacant warehouse.”

Although it was crap — certainly no one was going to die of exposure in that kind of weather — I like to think it was a loftier level of crap. I had created an ominous, scary scenario without using a single overblown adjective. I had stuck to the plain, direct writing style of Hemingway and Pyle.

Ernie, not Gomer

Eventually, though, as I began to work with ever-younger producers and editors — people who assumed Pyle was that ‘gawwwwlll-leeeeeeeeee’ guy from Mayberry — even that kind of writing wasn’t enough. They suspected that what I was writing might simply be the truth — that I was taking the easy way out and just reporting what was actually happening.

They needed to see some ‘shockings’, and ‘devastatings’, and ‘terrifyings’ from me — sort of proof of good faith effort on my part that I was sincerely trying to sensationalize the news.

Dressed Down for not Dressing Up

The weekend news team of which I was a part was once scolded by our consultant for not ‘winning the lead’ of a six pm newscast. We had failed, the consultant said, because our chief competitor (who regularly inflated even the most trivial of stories to Hindenberg-esque proportions) had started its newscast with the line, “It’s a mother’s worst nightmare!”

I don’t remember what the ‘worst nightmare’ was — for the consultant’s purposes, it didn’t matter — but I remember that I went back into our own computer script archive, and discovered that we had diligently employed the ‘worst nightmare’ cliche ourselves about fifteen times in the previous twelve months.

We’d had a ‘mother’s worst nightmare,’ a ‘police officer’s worst nightmare’, a ‘firefighter’s worst nightmare’ — hell, we’d even had a ‘state budget official’s worst nightmare,’ whatever that was.

But we hadn’t ‘lost the lead’ because our story was weak. We had failed because we hadn’t used a cliche.

News writing used to be English with its shirt sleeves rolled up.

Now, it’s English dressed up in a Hallowe’en costume.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)