Andrew Wolfe of the Nashua Telegraph goes wild on a car crash (thanks, Matt):
Dude, you are SO grounded!
Taking your mom’s ’95 Maxima after she went to bed, that was brazen.
It’s cool you could pick up your four friends, but, dude, you couldn’t find anyone old enough to drive?
A 13-year-old kid wracks up your mom’s ride on a PSNH pole, and you all bail. . . . What were you thinking?
Read the whole thing. Thoughts?
Since I sent it, I'll chime in. I've been this guy before. It's a nothing story. Another cop brief, another inside filler. You get desperate to write something -- anything -- different. Anything to keep from having to write another goddamned inverted pyramid cop story (I have numbering in the high hundreds of these littering my career). So you try something new, and it feels good to do it.
That said, this fails on so many levels. First, the kids it's aimed at, if they even read it, are going to think you're a tool for using dude in the lede, among othere look-at-me-I'm-hip-and-happening sins.
Second, parents and other old people (read: actual readers) are going to get all huffy about how you took something potentially serious -- underage drivers stealing a car and wrecking it -- and laughed it off. So you've pissed off a wide swath of readers, and for what?
But the worst offense? It's too long. The joke stopped being funny about a half dozen sentences in. Did we really need the blow by blow on which addresses had trees or mailboxes run into? Really?
OK. Totally dug it. Don't care about the logical reasons it shouldn't have worked. Don't care who you pissed off. Don't even care if the idiot kids laugh at you. This story was fun and I read the whole thing. It made me smile. Newspaper stories don't usually do that. So props to you. Dude.
Let's separate the issues, first:
Well written? The effort to seem cool, hip, and 13 is just embarrassing. Lame. It takes a novelist's ear to pull it off. Journalists should be allowed to write dialect only when quoting from native speakers.
Encourages juvenile assholery? Juveniles need no encouragement and nothing we write will discourage them. But, please, let's not scold each other every time we write about low crimes and misdemeanors with something less than Puritanical sobriety. That's even lamer than writing in dialect.
I think it worked. It's not something you read often in the paper, and for good reason. Yes, could these kids have gotten hurt but ultimately what it was about was a bunch of kids on a minor joyride so I think it's still safe to handle it lightly.
And with the casual language and slang the writer used, you occasionally get the sense you're on the ride with these kids. Like it or not, I think everyone who began the story probably finished it, and in the end that's something to be proud of.
There are many many MANY ways to get the reader to the end without doing THAT.
Bill,
"Assholery."
Wonderful word. Thanks.
I thought the story was funny. Sure, there are problems with the tone ("brazen" and "wise" sound wrong to me), but I read the whole piece and enjoyed it. I think the tone of some of the criticism here is what stifles creativity in newsrooms.
It didn't work, but I don't knock the dude for trying.
The main reason: This was written in the voice of an early 90's 13-year-old with some newspapery words and convention thrown in. While that may have been a semi-accurate portrayal of 13 year olds back several years ago, kids don't talk like that now. You might be surprised to hang out in a middle school hallway for a few hours. Yipes.
That said, you took a risk. Just because this one wasn't a homerun, don't be afraid to take the next one. I am so bored with newspapers -- and I LOVE newspapers -- that I desperately search every morning in my hometown paper for something to be excited about. I rarely succeed.
There's a paradox at play here, I think.
It can be expressed in the form of a ranking system, 1 being the best and 4 being the worst.
1. A creative, risky approach to newswriting that's executed with brilliant precision.
2. A traditional approach to newswriting that's executed with moderate flair and a modicum of grace.
3. A traditional approach to newswriting that's executed with workmanlike competency.
4. A creative, risky approach to newswriting that's executed with anything but brilliant precision.
This, of course, is a radical oversimplification. But I hope you see the point. Creativity in newswriting is like Longfellow's girl with the curl:
When she was good she was very, very good
But when she was bad she was horrid.
(This is not meant to represent my feelings about the above story.)
Now. What does this mean for us?
It means reporters should keep trying fresh approaches. Hone them in non-published writing. Bounce them off colleagues to see if they work. Then, carefully, mix them into your journalism.
the thing is I think the valetine story worked really well, so its worth it to be creative but sometimes you have to be careful not to cross that very thin line
Readers responded to the explanation the paper put up. I liked this one:
I asked my 17-year-old daughter what she thought of the article when it was printed, and she thought that, had she been the culprit, she would have been mortified and humiliated to see her actions printed in this way, not encouraged to do it again, and certainly not an egg-on to her peers to try the same thing.
Nice, Cris.