by ken winston caine
I have more than 10,000 published articles.
Easy to do if you work for newspapers for many years, as I did.
You rack up clips fast when you start on a good, scrappy, high-circulation twice-weekly. Like Lowell Blankfort's and Reb Rebele's Star-News group of papers that covered San Diego's South Bay of the 1970s like a coat of paint. Our territory ran from the southern edge of the San Diego city limits to the Mexican border--and sometimes darted far across both lines. And we truly competed with the three big dailies (now only one) and the other 30-some media outlets in town. Did serious investigative reporting. Crusaded. Captured best-of awards in our circulation category year after year in the big journalism contests.
Lowell's oft-stated philosophy was that a good newspaper should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." We did that. Smartly and often.
20-plus articles a week
Work for an aggressive journal like that and you easily write 20 or more pieces a week.
You are expected to write several especially meaty, enterprise pieces and features each issue. Your beat is not not a beat. It is a combination of many beats. Business, Urban Planning, Transit, Religion was mine for awhile, for instance. And you're expected to stay competitively atop them all.
You attend every meeting--some into the wee hours. And for those meetings you miss due to conflicts with others, you arrange to call up key players and get the lowdown. You write up and play up every heated controversy and every significant discussion and decision. Even the maybes people are talking about behind the scenes. You write them up. You call people on every side of it and you stay with it. Week after week if it's important or stirs interest. You know every politician and every politician's press person on a first-name basis and talk to most sometime during the week. They like the ink, even when they're busy denying that they said what they said if it's bringing heat.
Write fast
And you process the half-dozen assignments dumped on your desk throughout the day. A quick followup. Four obits. Check the police reports. A meeting announcement. Calls to return. Story tips to check.
You translate every building permit issued into make-sense English in a weekly column listing them all. Same with every property sold, listing the people involved, the valuation, the address. And every small claims court judgment. All public records in California.
In all, you write somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 words a week.
Do you write 20 articles a week, or 20 articles a day? Wayne Lee, editor and publisher of the scrappy little Simi Valley daily during my time there, used to tell us that he had to write 30 stories a day when he was a reporter. And he'd count them out for us. He'd count each obit. Each traffic accident report. Each meeting notice. Each rewritten press release. Each crime report. Using Wayne's formula, we all wrote 30 articles a day. And it somehow made us feel better knowing that.
Start your career with a good newspaper--like the Star-News was in the '70s--and survive it for a year or longer and you learn a lot.
Learn to spell
You learn to write fast. And learn to get it right. Because tough-as-nails and doubly sharp Editor Johnnie Lou Rosas raised vulgar terror, shaking her finger and fuming, audible and visible to the 70 or so employees in every department in the entire building when she thought something was a bit amiss. Or wasn't spirited or soulful enough. Or if you didn't spell well, as I didn't when I first started.
"See this?" she'd ask at about 110 decibels, waving the company-issued pocket edition of Webster's New-World Dictionary that she'd snatched off my desk--waving it menacingly well above my head. (Johnnie Lou was about 9-feet tall in those days.)
SLAM. She pounded it onto the desk.
"USE IT!"
Her theory was that misspelling is nothing more than "%# @!!*% laziness."
"You know when you are misspelling a word," she'd preach to the metal rafters. "You know if you don't know how to spell a word. You're not some %%@&* fool. LOOK IT UP. Don't be so %# @!!*% lazy! You think I should have to follow you around cleaning up after you?"
You learn to spell.
Johnnie Lou taught me a lot
Not hard to raise Johnnie Lou's wrath and belittlement. Miss the point of the story. Or, heaven forbid, get it wrong and have to rewrite or run a correction. A few of those and you're outta there.
Still amazes me how much less work you do on a big daily. Maybe a story a day. Maybe two some days. And at least every other week, a big enterprise piece for the weekend editions. But the same rules apply.
Get the story. Dig deep. Get it right. Get it fast. Write it well. And get onto the next one. And be prepared to toss your entire schedule in a second if real news breaks loose. Or if the competition comes up with a better angle. And expect to be called on the carpet and publicly humiliated if you get it wrong. And fired if that happens too often or in too big of a way. So you don't let it happen. And face the music when it does.
Writing health books and magazine features is not that much different.
The main things that are different are the depth of the research and the development time. The research goes much deeper because you have much more space to develop your themes. And because the timeframe is longer, generally more people get involved and sometimes more reworking and rewriting is called for. A bit more polish and shine is applied. But the research and writing need to go just as fast. No one says, "Hey, we've got months, so take your time."
You're still expected to get it right. Get it fast. And do it well. And be working just as hard on a new section tomorrow.
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