All this Hallman talk seems to stem at least partly from the assumption that the kind of reporting "the Tom Hallmans" do is somehow different than any other kind of reporting. It gets at the question of are you more a writer or more a reporter, which, of course, as we on Gangrey all should know, is the dumbest, most misguided question in the whole darn industry. You can't be the one without the other. Just can't.
Jeff Leen, the AME for investigations at the Washington Post, was here at the SPT today to do one of the cool weekly let's-get-better shop talk sessions we call brown bags, and most of the stuff he talked about wasn't really about doing "investigative journalism." It was about doing journalism. Get paper (documents), work people (sources), write early and often, live in the trees but don't lose sight of the forest ...
Some of us have a makeup more suited to chasing paper, and some of us are better than others at getting folks to tell us stuff they didn't think they would, and some of us love crunching numbers with computers, and that's great -- we need all of that -- but get right down to it and it's all the same shit.
Report, report, report.
Then AND ONLY THEN can you ..
Take me somewhere I've never been. Show me something I didn't know.
Tell me a story that's fun, important, unexpected and most of all readable.
Reported fact. Every sentence. Finkel preaches that, and he's not the only one, and with good reason: Stick to that rule -- every sentence, every sentence, every sentence -- and you eliminate a lot of the risk associated with assuming we can know the exact thoughts had at exact times by the folks we're writing about.
It's also a built-in cliché alert.
Without the every sentence rule, you start getting resolves being tested, men being broken, astounding genius, false starts, dead ends, creatures of habit, pasty skin, grim pasts, brilliant futures, bouncing beams of headlights, ideas bouncing off of people, people going where no one had gone before, problems cropping up, subcultures being tapped into and hitting bottom. Those are all images from the Hallman story in question. Just sayin'.
The stories that work are the stories that grab the reader by the collar and drag him to the end. The reader might see writing -- or, better yet, not see anything and just read. But the best writers are the ones who read a damn good story and see all the impeccable reporting on which it stands.
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