comm207fall06

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Read them over, because you'll also be asked to choose a story over the Thanksgiving holday, post it to the blog, link it and comment on it. Reading my posts will show you how to do yours.

Yesterday I confessed I used to write an "inside baseball" political gossip column. Today I went looking for a sports story to post to the blog. Instead, I found a political gossip column that reads kind of like a sports page column.

That figures.

When I covered politics, I was advised to cover the politicians like they belonged on the sports pages. (Sometimes, believe me, they did.) Good advice, as it turned out. Not all games are like Bobby Thompson's home run, and not all political events are like the "stolen election" of 2000. Most of the time, you're writing up prep league scores or meetings of the county board of zoning appeals. So what do you do to make your story stand out? Especially if you're writing a feature? You focus on the people, you tell what it's like to be there.

That's what I like about this routine political color story in today's New York Times. It's by Carl Hulse of the Times' Washington bureau, and it's about the upcoming change from Republican to Democratic control in the U.S. House and Senate. A real prep league yawner of a story, but watch how Hulse uses quotes and description to set the scene:

Some Republicans were quick to remind Democratic colleagues that they had not been all bad. “Bill, be nice to me,” Representative Peter T. King of New York, the departing chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, shouted to Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, a member of the panel. “I was always nice to you.”

The power shift was evident in ways large and small. For years, reporters have crowded the Republican end of the speaker’s lobby off the House floor, buttonholing majority lawmakers who ran the place, and virtually ignoring the opposite end, where somewhat irrelevant Democrats came and went with little notice. As soon as lawmakers returned Monday, the news tide flowed to the Democratic end as journalists swarmed for insights about the party’s infighting for majority leader.

“Wow,” said one longtime Congressional doorkeeper. “I thought that wouldn’t have happened until at least January.” That is when Democrats officially take power.

Notice also that the doorkeeper was savvy enough not to give his name to Hulse. Or Hulse was savvy enough to not even ask it. Or both were savvy.

What draws readers into a story, whether it's about high school sports or backroom politics, is people. Good writers write about people, and good editors look for good writing about people.

Here's how Hulse writes about two GOP senators who contested the same leadership post -- the party whip, who helps round up votes for the minority leader -- and how the winner was gracious in victory. Since he'd been writing about Democrats, Hulse begins the passage with a transition:

But Democrats were not the only winners. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who lost his Republican leadership job in 2002 after a racially charged remark and has been plotting his return ever since, won the No. 2 spot in the minority. He will serve as whip under the new Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Usually willing to share his opinions freely, Mr. Lott was uncharacteristically quiet after defeating Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee by one vote for the job.

Mr. Lott seemed determined not to take the limelight away from Mr. McConnell on the day of the elections even though it was obvious that Mr. Lott’s return would grab the headlines, given that Mr. McConnell was unopposed.

As the week wore on, however, it became harder for Mr. Lott to restrain himself. “I can still count votes,” beamed Mr. Lott, whose skill in that department is legendary.

Hulse not only writes about politics as if he were writing about sports. He writes about politicians talking about politics as if it were sports:

Oddly enough, the closed-door nominations of Mr. Lott and Mr. Alexander, two Southerners, featured dueling hockey analogies.

In urging a vote for Mr. Alexander, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia compared the Tennessee senator’s political radar to that of Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great who knew where the puck was going to be before it got there.

Not to be outdone, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who told his colleagues he knew a thing or two about hockey, compared Mr. Lott to Bobby Orr, who he said knew where the puck was going before it went.

That, apparently, was enough to put Mr. Lott’s election on ice.

And he knocks the puck into the goal with a real groaner of a pun. What's not to like about this routine inside political baseball story?