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Joel Achenbach
On News
FEATURE
STORIES
The dirty little secret about journalism is that you have to do
more reporting when you do a feature story, because with a news
story, a lot of times, you can always just quote what the person
said. And you go on. But with a feature story, you have to
actually think about what the person said, and put in this
larger context of what it all means, and sometimes you can take
the way the person said it, or who this person really is and
write about that, and to go an extra mile, I think feature
writing, well done, I think it's clearly reported in greater
depth than your average news story. For one thing, in your
average news story, you have the great benefit of the deadline
being right there. It's much easier to write a story in a day
than to be told, "Now, take your time with this. Spend three
weeks with this." 'Cause then you have to come up with something
that's there that doesn't have the great cop-out of "Well, you
know, I did pretty good considering I had two hours to write
it." So I do think that feature writing, plus at the
Washington Post, I guarantee you, that the reporters on the
national desk, that cover the White House and Congress, have a
relatively low estimation of the reporting that's necessary to
write a Style section story. I mean, I'm sure that they consider
it to be, well, it just looks so easy. But I think that's wrong,
I think it's hard to write a good feature story.
HARD
NEWS AND FEATURES
I've done both kinds of reporting. I've done hard news
reporting, where you have half an hour to pull together a story
about a homicide that happened at 11:30 at night, and you have
you know, 500,000 newspapers that are about to go to press, and
you're phoning in to the city editor, from the hospital, we know
where the body is. I've done that kind of reporting, and I do
think that every reporter should do that kind of reporting.
Should learn how to write and report on deadline, and to get the
story and to, you know, even the basics, writing down people's
names, getting, spelling their names right, figuring out quickly
what is the news here, who are the players? Learning how to park
at a news scene. Okay, you know when you see the police tape?
How do I, pull up your car, quickly jump out and get the story.
These things, you have to learn how to do that in some point in
your career. But when it comes to what's really hard, writing a
feature story, I think is harder. Having done both kinds of
reporting, I think writing a feature story is harder because you
have to, you have to think more, you have to, um, tell a story
that has a narrative arc to it, that takes you someplace, that
has a shape to it. And it's unfortunate that a lot of people in
the business who do only news, think feature reporting is easy,
they think it's meaningless fluff, they think, aw, anyone can do
that. That's fine if they wanna believe that, but I think having
done both kinds, I find the pressure of doing a feature story,
of trying to be entertaining and to be right, 'cause you still
gotta get the names right. And you still have to figure out
who's who. And you often have to work longer on it, I mean, you
have more time, but it's harder to have more time on a story.
And, um, I'm not sure if I'm being clear, I work as a feature
writer, so maybe I'm being self-justifying.
The biggest problem with feature writing is that a lot of
times we do ourselves a disfavor and we write too long, the
stories are just simply too long, and there too, we think we're
writing in a beautiful way, you know, "I write so well," and in
fact, it's not really that good. If people really wanted to read
good writing they should pick up Dostoyevsky or something, I
don't know. And then we bury the significance of the story
sometimes amid this big clutter of words. And that's one of the
nice things about a news story, is that sometimes you cut to the
chase.
FINDING
AND CREATING STORIES
Well, I'm very lucky, in that I get to write about things
that interest me. And, this is, I hope that everyone in
journalism has this opportunity, to do what they want to do. My
basic standard for what I write about is I wanna write things
that I'm interested in, and I'm hoping that other people will be
interested too, as opposed to, doing what my boss tells me to
do. Usually, if my editor comes in and says, "Achenbach, I got a
great story for ya!" it's gonna be a pretty lousy story. I mean,
because, it's, it's not that there's anything wrong with him,
but if it was such a great story, you know, maybe they'd write
it, or someone else would have written it, you know, why's this
story just sittin' around waiting for me to write it? I mean
it's kind of, you have to be suspicious. You know, I mean, no
one else has had this idea? I write about things, I try to
always say, is this something that is fascinating to me? And
then you sort of make the arrogant leap to think, "Well, if I
find it fascinating, maybe other people will too." But my
column, there's always the problem that, I'll do a topic, and
I'll think, "Now does anyone care about this?" And I don't know,
and sometimes people say, "Oh, no one ever cares about that." I
did a column last week. Um, why is it that we just happen to be
alive right now, in this point in history, which seems like a
very interesting time in history. You know, it's a technological
phase in history, and when I was growing up, I saw people land
on the moon, and I thought, "Boy, I'm so lucky," I mean, I
happen to be alive right at the moment, in all of human history
going back thousands of years, I was alive to see the first
people land and walk on the moon. And so I wrote a whole column
about why is it we're alive now? It turns out that
statistically, it makes sense that we're alive now. There's
nothing unusual about it because, the reason so many people are
alive, you know, five billion people, is because of technology.
Which is the reason why people landed on the moon. I mean the
technology makes it possible to feed five billion people. And so
one would expect that a lot of people would be alive during
moments of adventurism in space. For any planet, any
civilization. And a lot of the people who have ever lived are
alive today. I mean, about seven-and-a-half percent of all the
people who've ever lived are alive right at this moment. And
this is going back 200,000 years. So it's no big deal that you
know, it's what you'd expect. So I don't know if anyone else
cares about that, but for me it held the answer to a question
I've had since I was eight years old. Which is why, I'm
thinking, why did I get to be here for this moon landing. And
now I know. It's 'cause statistically, it's what you'd expect.
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