Beats, ledes and budgets

Today, the perfect lede fell in my lap. I'm working on a story about the B5 bill that passed the Missouri senate last week. It will require all diesel sold to be a blend of 5 percent biodiesel to 95 percent regular diesel. But what was great about this lede was that the tip was buried in my notebook from an earlier interview: Columbia buses run on a biodiesel blend. So I called public works and, guess what,all diesel vehicles owned by the city run on B5 and they've been using biodiesel for six years. For a state story, I thought it was a great way to make it local. Anyone who's hitched a ride on a city bus or had garbage truck pick up their waste has had an experience with biodiesel. I've looked at some of the work other papers have done, and none of those stories have an angle like I do.

But I think a lot my angle comes from the fact that I've been reading, writing and breathing corn, soybeans and biofuel all semester. I've heard the arguments, the talking points, and am finding ways to show those instead of tell them. Not only do I know who to talk to, they know me. This is the first time in my career when I've felt like I'm working a beat. When I call Adam at the Missouri Soybean Association or Tommy at the Missouri branch of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, all I have to say is "Hi Adam/Tommy, it's Katie," and they know who I am, who I work for and what I'm most likely working on. Both have been incredibly helpful with my energy bill story and a few of the daily stories along the way. If I wasn't approaching this semester like a beat, the biodiesel story would be a different beast and most likely would be a surface level story. I'm hoping my hard work shows.

On another note, I've been thinking about the budget meetings a lot lately, and it all started with a conversation about building thick skin. I was explaining to my non-J-School friend that in budget meetings we talk about the stories in the paper and get critiqued by our editors and our peers. If something wasn't done well, you'd hear about it. Or if it was thorough or had strong writing that would be pointed out too. If you weren't there, no one could defend your story. People could be harsh, but damn if I didn't learn something after a budget meeting, at least last year. Something in them has changed. Yes, we have a lot of fancy-dancy toys, but that's not it. It's the conversation. Rarely do we get into a real critique of story, we talk about how cool the multimedia is or how things were posted online in a way that was advantageous to the reader. Yes, these do deserve to be talked about, but so does the proper use of parallel structure in a sentence. A crummy lede deserves to be pointed out, vetted and reworked as a group. The people who report for the Missourian are mostly newspaper and magazine majors who want to learn how to write. We learn from practice, yes, but when you learn from critique, you learn from what you didn't do well and it sticks with you. It points out skills that need work or new approaches to topics. It thickens the skin. I think part of the reason why Reuben has a hard time getting people to talk in budget is because 1) they are afraid of criticizing a peer, 2) they don't want to get criticized themselves, 3) they don't really have thoughts about the multimedia because they're more interested in the stories and 4) they haven't been trained to read like a writer, in fact they aren't seeing the point in reading the paper at all. I remember budgets being like a test, the editors could always tell who did their homework. Now I feel like budgets are an afterthought, and I'm concerned the 4450 reporters are missing out on one of the best things you can leave this school with: a thick skin.