Gangrey.com

New Rules

what if?

This led to a conversation earlier this week with Meghan, which led to a conversation last night with Ben, which leads now to this question: If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …

WHAT?

What would the “beats” be?

Cue Hank Stuever from the introduction to Off Ramp: “I am unassigned, mostly. I was a child born and raised and now living in a permanent Elsewhere, and because I didn’t have a beat, I gave myself one. It started out as a private list I taped next to my computer, in my newsroom cubicle, for several years: I put ‘false cities’ on my beat, which meant airports, the Best Buy, bland buildings. I put ‘things kept in shoeboxes in spare closets’ on my beat. I claimed ‘teenagers who don’t help out the community’ for my own. Also:

“People Who Are Loathed.

“Spare Freezers Kept in the Garage.

“People Who Move Heavy Things; Rock Bands Who Have Not Yet Figured Out That They’re Not Going to be Famous; Stories Where People Voluntarily Get Out Their Old Yearbooks. Also I wanted exclusive rights to stories about embalming, algebra, bedrooms, breakfast cereal, and pieces of furniture that cost under $500.”

Ben said last night he’d write about people who have monster trucks and the things that happen in “the other 9 (p.m.) to 5 (a.m.).”

My working list, scrawled in the back of this book (pretty good, by the way) to this point includes: People Who Eat Out a Lot at a Table for One. Collision (cars, people, ideas, whatever). Stuff on the Side of the Road. Chance Meetings and Random Catastrophe. Possible Death, imminent Death, the threat of Death. Death.

So.

What else?

What would you write about if all bets were off?

Comments

Re: New Rules

Desperation. Or, the things people do when they are forced to do something (abandon morals, embrace new ones, kill others, kill themselves, learn things, beg, win, lose, ignore the problem, take risks, become the Wiggles).

Contentment. Or, what people do when they don't have to do anything (change the world, teach a child, clean the neighborhood, kill others, kill themselves, shop, build a dragster, watch TV, write a book, invent something cool, run for city council, annoy the city council, become a clown).

Also, small towns that no one covers, trailer parks that are not for seniors, and people who live in the swamp.

richard

Re: New Rules

Yes, yes, yes. I like these. What else?

Re: New Rules

The other beats at the paper would be these:

Politicians who are helping.
Politicians who are not helping.
The effect government agencies have on poor people.
The effect government agencies have on everyone else.
Local food.
Local bands.
Local stuff to do.
Current violence.
Past violence.
Weird stuff that happened yesterday.
Taxes.

Re: New Rules

awakenings (stories about people having epiphanies in professional life espscially)

weird economics (how many people does crack cocaine feed here? how many jobs does art really create here? how many do hot dog stands create?)

Re: New Rules

Gray areas. Culture clashes. People who live in the spaces between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and fiction.

Re: New Rules

Firsts and lasts of everyday life.

Journeys, of the internal and external variety.

Connections, between people, places and things.

Re: New Rules

"People who live in the spaces between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and fiction."

Damn, that's broad. Don't we all live there?

A few more:
Teenagers.
Old people.
Quiet desperation (read Pete Hamill's The Invisible City and you'll know what I'm talking about).
The places where we spend our free time (be it the mall, the youth sports complex, sports bars, sports arenas, the library, the big-box strip on the edge of town).
And, my favorite, conventions. In its golden age, the Philly Inquirer had a reporter full-time covering all the conventions that came through town. One week, he met and wrote about experts and advances in, say, library science, the next, physical therapy, after that, insurance sales. Sounds fascinating, both to do and to read.

Re: New Rules

"Firsts and lasts of everyday life."

What do you mean, Janine?

Howabout:

People who keep their baby teeth in tiny boxes.

People in their 30s and 40s who work for minimum wage.

People who wear sweatsuits.

Re: New Rules

Great topic.
I think I could spend the rest of my life telling the stories of taxi/tow truck/bus drivers or writing about the world within a world of any dive bar. I'm also a big fan of auto repair shops.

Re: New Rules

Firsts and lasts -- first date, first kiss, first drink, first underage party, first baby, first house, first baby, first communion, first tooth, first lost tooth. last time you spoke with your grandma before she died, last day at a job, last day with a car before selling it, last day of school, last football game, last day in jail, last day in office.

I'm fascinated by moments, especially the ones that define an era or some kind of change in their life.

Re: New Rules

People who play the lotto every week, on the same day, at the same gas station, and really can't afford to part with those few dollars. For that matter, anyone who clings to unreasonable dreams with such conviction.

Old men who take jobs at coffee shops or fast food joints and get trained by a kid 30 years their junior.

Town residents who nothing but sit on their porch and watch the town change.

Night security guards and the stories they could tell.

Re: New Rules

Gaming: including poker, casinos, video games, the lottery, church bingo, sports betting, and day trading.

Porn: everything from internet porn, hotel porn, the cultural, legal, criminal, sexual, and economic implications. The industries that support it.

Re: New Rules

I'd be all over that porn beat, like, whoa.

And car culture: the money, pride, obsession, artwork. We're talking El Dorados, not necessarily the Escalades (yawn).

Re: New Rules

Whether medical science is destroying humanity's chance at evolving into a superior being.

Whether anyone really likes snow.

Whether people who rely solely on the internet for human contact are lonely.

Whether methamphetamine abusers have a chance at recovery.

Human traffickers and their motives.

Re: New Rules

I think of one more as I watch the daily pilgrimage of take-out food make its way to the back of the newsroom to the nite desk: food delivery guys and gals.

Re: New Rules

Dude, the food delivery culture would be an awesome beat. I delivered pizza for 10 years (really) before I found this reporting thing. I've been beaten, chased, robbed, propositioned, crashed into, spat upon, flashed, invited into a hotel room with Fleetwood Mac, chased by the cops, gotten stuck in the mud, stuck in the snow, tipped huge, threatened with a Taser, attacked by dogs, escorted off the property, knocked unconscious and once shook hands with Paul Anka.

Re: New Rules

TYPO!

"A New Celebrity: People Who Earn Less, Have Less, But Live Well."

Re: New Rules

Secrets.

Re: New Rules

From the sports pages:

Physically helpless moments.

Bookies.

Dying games, dying venues.

Sexuality.

Re: New Rules

How about this as a beat: things we accept but shouldn't.

Things like your contractor working on your house will take three times as long as he says he will. Or your mechanic will always find 10 more things wrong with your car -- expensive things -- than you came in to fix.

From the mundane but magnificently personal all the way up to the massive and seemingly intractable. Half of everybody being without health insurance because health care is now impossibly expensive for all but the comfortable. Or every government program you think is working isn't.

Re: New Rules

I don't want to sound whiney and all, but if only it were that easy. I've been asking -- some might say begging -- for over a year, yet here I sit still, covering a beat I do not like and am frankly not that good at. From your description of your beat, I believe the SPT may, in fact, be different than the rest.

Re: New Rules

On another note, this comes out of a conversation with Keith, these beats that we write about, are they actually for our readers or for ourselves. I wonder if our readers are as interested in the mundane and small stories as much as we are. Or is it perhaps a little too esoteric? Is it just an opportunity for us to spread our writer wings?

Re: New Rules

Second story cops man. Take the most interesting crime daily or brief. Give people more.

Quickie biographer. Take the two or three most interesting paid obits in a week. Give people more.

Re: New Rules

To respond to the question that came from the conversation evidently had by Raja and Keith: These "beats," done well, done right, ABSOLUTELY would serve readers. Let's see: loneliness, collision, contentment, desperation, sex, debt, gambling, dreams, secrets, porn, prostitution, alcohol, death -- MUNDANE and SMALL? ESOTERIC? More like huge and human and real. Put it this way: If all of us here on Gangrey quit our jobs tomorrow, started a Web site and wrote for it stories about only these things, folks would read the shit out of that site, no?

Re: New Rules

Also, federal court cases no one cares about. In just two hours at the courthouse this morning covering an identity theft sentencing, I saw and then moved past these cases: minor FEMA fraud by a fat man with gout, a Guatemalan man with a third-grade education who got busted forging fake green cards in Forest, Miss., a 40-ish lifelong drug abuser who counterfeited cash and gave his parents tearful hugs in the hallway on the way back to jail, and a former violent criminal who got a judge to reduce his potential sentence by nearly half because current thugs are threatening the lives of his wife and child.

Re: New Rules

Of course.

Re: New Rules

Here's s'more beat ideas:

• Red: News and local ephemera that has to do with that color.


• Last Month, Last Year: What matters now about what happened around here 13 months ago?


• Oooops: Who out there is making the 'best' mistakes, and how do they do it?


• PGs and QBs: Point guards and quarterbacks in the news.


• Five Years: News and ephemera about five-year-olds.


• Running on Empty: "Running out of gas"-related news and stuff

Re: New Rules

People who stay in their car in the parking lot while their spouse goes to church.

Re: New Rules

A spirituality beat, but I don't necessarily mean religious practice.

I'm thinking about profiles that dig deep enough to show how some people connect to the world in a meaningful way through a sport, a hobby, a passion... as artisans, runners, writers, bowlers, grafitti artists... you name it.

Re: New Rules

"People who stay in their car in the parking lot while their spouse goes to church."

On to something there, Tim.

Howabout: Guilt.

Re: New Rules

Like Kruse's idea about the inflated blotter beat, also death beat, that's my dream job after the one I have now. You could expand to do dogs and guinea pigs, too. And make the stories HONEST, no perfect people allowed.

Re: New Rules

Live from Princeton, W.Va.: People who are regulars at the Applebee's in a place where the Applebee's is in fact the neighborhood grill and bar.

Re: New Rules

Didn't Abbie Vansickle do that story about Citrus County?

Re: New Rules

From Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture printed in the latest New Yorker: "What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears -- the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults ... "

Re: New Rules

Kids who show up to the dance or other school-sponsored event only to stand alone.

Receptionists or local leaders' or officials' right-hand men and women.

Re: New Rules

I need to think of a beat topic for my reporting class that i have to write news stories and feature stories for. The audience is a college campus. Any ideas?

Re: New Rules

Intake. The stuff students put into their bodies, from cucumbers to Milwaukee's Best to NoDoz to Silicone to World Geography.

Clusters. The natural and unnatural ways in which students segregate.

None

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