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.)

Whether you know what it is or not.

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

It was seven or eight minutes to air, and a thick tower of black smoke had just plumed high above the east side of the city. We could see it from a camera, installed in our transmission tower, 600 feet up.

“That’s our new lead,” the producer announced. “Just ad lib something off the top. We’ll roll the breaking news animation, and then take the tower camera live.”

“What’s burning?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“Is the fire department there yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ambulances? Anybody hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has anyone here called the fire department?”

“I don’t know.”

“Police?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I replied, somewhat confused. “What am I supposed to say about it?”

He looked at me and shrugged. “We’ll just have to go with what we know.”

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

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

The ordinary viewer is just so… ordinary.

“You know what your problem is?” My news director was putting the question to me — not in an accusatory or critical tone, but with the demeanor of a doctor telling his patient he has a terminal illness. “You have no style and no class.”

That was actually part of an employee evaluation I was given. (And here’s a bit of free career advice: if, during your first evaluation, you’re given an assessment like that, don’t think things will get better if you just hang around another 17 years.)

When I was recruited for my first TV news job, just five years earlier, I had gone to work in a newsroom full of people from working class families just like mine. Some were liberal and some were conservative, some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish.

But no one was there with the sense that the circumstances of their birth, or the fact that they were on TV, entitled them to some special place in the social order.

But five years later, Ronald Reagan was president, and the Ewings of Dallas were America’s TV family. And the term “working class,” at least in my profession, had become pejorative.

And although it is no longer my profession, the profession’s attitude seems the same.

Before Joe the Plumber

Have you ever heard of “Joe Sixpack?” He’s the ‘typical viewer’ for whom television news managers program their product. He is, by most accounts, an overweight, undershirt-wearing, lowlife who plops down in his ratty, squeaky, vinyl-upholstered easy chair at six pm, rips a Bud out of the plastic six-pack ring, and props his feet up for the news. Every morning, in newsrooms across the nation, executives and producers meet and talk about what Joe Sixpack will want to see on the news that evening.

Want to see a picture of him? Go look in the mirror. Because, unless you’re a doctor, lawyer, stock broker, or someone similarly situated, you are Joe Sixpack.

TV news personalities, in their need to separate those with “style and class” from those without it, have informally divided their public into two groups. The first group consists of the aforementioned doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, plus a few charismatic politicians — and, of course, TV news personalities.

The other group is ‘trailer park trash,’ consisting of everyone else.

But the grim reality for these provincial news celebrities is this: the affluent, fashionable folk with whom they want to associate, and be associated, don’t watch television news.They’re all tuned to the Discovery Channel, or Crossfire. The local TV news constituency is the very mechanics, convenience store clerks, letter carriers, plumbers, insurance salesmen, and the like whom one of my coworkers once dismissed with a single word, or rather, sound effect: “Ew.”

Dual Citizenship?

For the TV news reporter, the quandary is this: how to produce a news product for the mass of citizens who actually watch the newscast, and buy the products advertised — while simultaneously nudging the rich and trendy with a wink and a smile, as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to that. Really, we’re just like you.”

One afternoon at an upscale shopping mall in the city where I lived, two gang members got into some kind of friendly scuffle outside the Swiss Army shop, and one of them accidentally shot the other in the butt with a small handgun.

We didn’t make any bones about it in our live coverage: the story was not that a black teenager had been shot. The story was that a lot of upscale white bystanders, whom our anchor described as being from the city’s ‘select neighborhoods,’ could have been shot.

Years later, we interrupted programming to report on a shooting in a similarly exclusive mall — 250 miles away. One indignant caller demanded to know why we thought anyone in our audience cared what happened in the Dallas Galleria. One news executive shrugged and said, “Everyone I know shops there.”

You Might Be Surprised…

A pipe bomb exploded one evening in a suburban, semi-rural community east of the city. The teenager who had assembled it was seriously hurt. Our reporter on the scene — born and raised in one of those ‘select neighborhoods’ — began her live report by saying, “You know, you might be surprised. There are actually some pretty nice homes out here.”

In fact, though, TV reporters generally aren’t like the affluent upper classes from whom they seek acceptance. They may have been raised in those kinds of homes, but in the competitive, cost-conscious world of modern TV news, they’re paid far less than they would be making if they’d actually become doctors, lawyers, or stock brokers.

So, they try to make up for it by just toadying and name-dropping (“Omigawd! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a Rolex repaired in this city?”), and leveraging their tenuous status as celebrities for the chance to stand on the fringe of sophisticated society. They’d rather be the lapdog of the establishment than the watchdog.

But frankly, the glamour of exclaiming “Just take a look!” in front of a nightly procession of car wrecks, house fires, and drive-by shootings is often lost on people who have spent ten hours performing open heart surgery, or made new case law, or gotten in on the ground floor of an IPO that tripled in value in eight hours.

Life Without Apology

The guy who first tagged me with the ‘no style and no class’ criticism eventually got fired. His boss — chief enforcer of what the company described as the ‘aura of affluence’ — was escorted from the building under armed guard one day, along with most of his family, while auditors pored over the fat leaseback deals and inflated expense reports he’d written for himself at the owner’s expense. That’s how he’d gotten his ‘aura of affluence.’

I’m more than two years out of the business myself, now. I decided to go do something else for a living — something that didn’t require me to start every day by apologizing for having ‘no style and no class.’

I’m not dramatically wealthier than I was, but getting off the ‘best car/best restaurants/best neighborhoods’ merry-go-round left me financially more independent than I ever was as a reporter.

But there’s another kind of independence that’s even more valuable. That’s the freedom to be your own person, choose your own friends, form your own values, and not portray a semifictional character created by a boss, or a consultant, or your coworkers — or even by yourself — to please someone else.

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