Ouch, and then some

This week was painful.

It started well enough, I had wrapped up all those interviews and readings about school district finance. I had an article that I felt explained the situation and was written clearly.

Of course, I had been talking to people in the thick of this finance stuff, and taking classes on the side where "marginal benefit of social cost" was one of the clearer phrases used.

Liz edited the story on Tuesday and blessed it, I went to St. Louis that afternoon to see a nationally known economist talk about school policy, was inspired, blah blah blah...
...and was told Wednesday that the article I had taken for finished was un-understandable, should incorporate story-telling and had to be totally rewritten.

Which violated the first and most important of my goals for this semester: to explain this financial situation so that anyone could understand it.

Crash. boom.

Back to the drawing board. I moved things around, added embellishments, tried a really bad rainy-day/typhoon metaphor, threw in a paragraph addressing you, the reader, and tried to make it more conversational.

The result was a longer piece, unsimplified, but prettier to sit through, if you had to.

And I found myself sitting in Liz's office yesterday afternoon, unable to go anywhere new with what felt at this point like scraps.

Throughout this process, Liz asked several people how to "tell" a technical story. Here's what I heard, many of which we tried:
1. Relate it to something the reader can understand.
2. Find a common thread to the questions you ask, and frame your story around that constant theme.
3. Tell the story the numbers tell, without relying on the numbers.
4. Begin with "Once upon a time..." and tell the story in the language of a children's book.
5. Use concrete examples, like rent, that would give the reader perspective.
6. Translate jargon into language.
7. Lead with the news.

So. These were swimming around upstairs while I was staring at the three apparently unusable versions, and I felt like I was being asked to reach deep and find a way to tell this story clearly, with sparkling language and suddenly become the writer I've always wanted to be.

And I'm not there. And I knew that I wouldn't get there with the story that ran today, and I felt that it was futile to wait until I got there, because what the article was about was something that's happening and will soon stop happening, and people need to understand the basics of it as soon as possible, without having to wait for my magnum opus.

This is what makes the Missourian hard. Not only do we have to be reporters, we are expected to learn and grow. Articles get pushed back because they could be better.

There was some fuming on my part. It ran along the lines of: "how can you tell a finance story without numbers? I could be writing about school events, but no, I'm here, caring about this which apparently no one else cares about enough to wade through some of these numbers with me." Grumble, grumble, grumble.

...

At which point Liz found me in the newsroom and said, "Tom just told me something. He said if you had written this like a blog entry, you wouldn't be having this much trouble. What's making you write this differently?"

That was one of "those" moments for me.

The Answer:
At the Missourian, we are always taught to lead with the news. Get it up top, get it condensed, bang the reader over the head with that rock, and then when he regains consciousness, smile and say, "but I can explain it."

With a blog post, I feel like there's trust between the reader and writer. The writer trusts the reader to finish reading the post.

In writing an article, there's this mania to hook the reader. And that's necessary, but trying to find that 2-sentence hook while translating the technical felt impossible yesterday.

So, we began with the context. And that felt like stepping out onto nothing. But when blogging, it's the most natural thing in the world. Because there, I get to assume a reader's trust. He trusts me to find things out, care about them, and speak to him, as one human being to another.

That assumption lets me in turn trust him. I get to trust him to follow my links if he needs more information, and I get to trust him to remember what I said and build from there the next time I write.

The end product was equal parts blog post, article, frustration, translation, and dare I say it, growth.

We ran it by Scott, he blessed it, asked for a few details, and it wound up in today's paper.

And of course, there is already a post on the SchoolHouseTalk blog about the issue. And, yes, before you ask, it was easy to write.