Bravo to the LAT for the time & $ spent on one helluva story...

Lighten the fuck up mofo.



And as for the 2 parts, I tried to link the first part but for some reason my browser was balking at it.

 

Here's part 1.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ana5-2009apr05,0,2159234,full.story

My youngest daughter, who's 8, has this disease, neurofibromatosis type 1. Her tumors are growing inside, not visibly, and are being treated by chemotherapy. No matter how NF manifests itself, it's a tough road to walk.

Little-known fact about NF: It's more common than muscular dystrophy and as common as cystic fibrosis, two diseases that most people have heard way more about.

A great piece of storytelling, indeed. Strength to Ana as her journey continues.

 

Hey, the spelled "helluva" wrong.

 

It must also be noted, of course, that with continuing staff and editor cuts, these kinds of stories will be fewer and farther between, obviously.

 

It would be interesting to see, publicly, the page-view, video-view, audio-listens and gallery-visit numbers, as well as the numbers for times emailed or printed out, for this story and others like it.

My hope would be that the such numbers, over time, if a paper would do such types of stories with consistency, would show that there is some truth to the idea that quality work -- as much of it as possible -- is what might bring the responsiveness, interest, and, it follows, readers and advertisers that newspapers seek.

 

I can hope -- but I'm not hopeful.

My prediction is that this is going to go down differently -- if success is achieved.

Government and business watchdog pieces (not just projects, but breaking news), pervasive local reporting and all sorts of analysis and commentary and entertainment would be, to me, the things that end up paying the bills as more advertising hopefully moves to the Web (and mobile, etc.)

If it gets to where I hope it could, there'd be enough money being made on that kind of thing to pay for this kind of thing.

If that makes sense.

This story "paying for itself"? I don't know that that will happen. Then you start talking about pay models again: Would people pay to read a story like this. And we know where that conversation is currently going.

 

Also, I did find it interesting that, in printing excerpts from Ana's emails to the reporter, words like "I" and "I'm" were not capitalized, even when they were at the beginning of a sentence. And also, grammar wasn't always correct.

I understand about context, editing with a light touch, and the idea of treating the emailed quotes as quotes. But, in this instance, I'm not sure it was necessary, or added to the story, or the writing, to leave things written incorrectly (although I know such things are not necessarily considered a big deal in the language of email).

I was always taught that we shouldn't gratuitously make people look stupid when it's not necessary, or doesn't add insight, perspective or context to the situation, just as you wouldn't automatically mention a person's race without a reason, or if the fact did not add context to the story.

 

I'm in that school. I don't think this made her look dumb at all. It's the way many people write in e-mails. I didn't have a problem with it.

 

It makes sense, SF, and I understand what you're saying.

I guess I just meant what I was saying in terms of the quality.

These types of stories -- of the same depth, exhaustive work, research, reporting and good-quality writing -- could, potentially be done on government watchdog pieces and pervasive local reporting, too. In fact, they have been done, frequently, by the L.A. Times, and, at times, many smaller papers.

Take, say, the top APSE award-winning stories, in the investigative division, maybe, even, and get the papers' numbers in the statistical categories I mentioned, or whatever other ones of measured value there may be, and again, I'd be interested to know the results.

And if they might indicate something -- a point that newspapers and journalists need, perhaps, to be reminded of -- that could be important and pertinent.

I just wonder, and am curious, that's all, because we don't enough of this kind of work anymore. But maybe, just maybe, such things are where our emphasis should be. Especially now.

 

I guess one of the thing that strikes me about this story is that I can't imagine starting a story like this now and realistically expecting it to see print in four years. I also don't expect to see a story like this translate to the Web very well, because a story like this really needs to get splashed big on a section cover to indicate both its scope and the work that went into it. There is an immediacy in a story like this that won't translate to a national magazine. I've seen papers do stuff following a class of kindergartners through to their graduation day, passed down from generation of reporters to generation of reporters, "Now and Then" - type stuff where a veteran reporter would follow up on a widely-talked about feature from a decade back. I just don't see this happening much in the future for multitude of reasons.

 

She's just lucky she didn't use the word "helluva."

 

I dunno, Dan. Big and splashy on a section cover, with a couple of inside pages, is one way to do it.

Two parts on the web, with multimedia and photo galleries and all that kind of thing is another now.