Open letter to a company with strange expectations for applicants

Dear company

You recently emailed me some writing exercises to do in order to obtain an interview with your engineering consulting firm. I accepted the challenge and completed the first two exercises rather quickly. One was standard editing of an article that was riddled with passive voice problems. The other was a standard press release for a ribbon-cutting event at a bridge. The third was to write a more opinion-based piece on the benefits of government agency collaboration. I’m glad you had a phone number there for me to call for more information.

Luckily, I was able to call the number just before the guy went on vacation. In the course of our conversation, we shared pleasantries, common connections to lake country, and a working definition of what collaborations means in this instance. I found it helpful and rather illuminating. I have enough info to write a basic piece about the benefits of agency collaboration.

The guy, an engineer, also shared that there were 200 applicants for this position. I was in the final 20, but not the final five. However, those five did the writing after their interviews and none of them “blew us away.” So you went back to the 20 and emailed the rest to see if there was still interest. The engineer said that your committee felt you could write as well as the previous submissions, and you are looking for some sort of wow factor in these articles.

About a ribbon cutting.

And government collaboration.

Now, lest you think I’m some sort of complainy mccomplainersonpants, esq., I want you to know that I love to write fun, interesting pieces. I love making complicated subjects interesting and exciting to a broad audience. I love speaking to experts on DNA extraction, or people who run the hot dog stand their grandfather started, or engineers who helped plan the interstate highway system. But there are limits to this. Sometimes, a lot of the time, actually, you have the standard, info-laden articles that exist simply to impart information. You spend the time saved on whipping these articles out to focus on the articles that can be improved by feature or narrative techniques.

I’m at a loss here, since part of this ribbon cutting assignment hamstrings the writer by giving them a set of bland facts and saying  “Wow me.” It makes me think you have been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell, or other rude British realty stars.

I am tempted to make things up. An alien landing, perhaps, that city leaders at the ribbon cutting are shocked by despite the prior warnings they had received from a scientist and the local sheriff to “get people off the bridge! These aliens are feeding machines, Mayor, and you’ve just filled the trough.” But no, you had to have your ribbon-cutting event, you fool. And now look who has alien eggs all over his face!

To put this in engineering terms, not all bridges are the Golden Gate. A vast majority are workman thoroughfares not meant to be noticed. They simply get people from one place to another. Likewise with many articles – the info needs to get to those who need to know, and there isn’t much point in gussying it up unless you want to trick people into reading something they honestly don’t care about. Then they grab their pitchforks and awkwardly type angry online comments about that darn media system and all it’s stupid bias blah blah blah, and they hate you with a passion. Why do you want people to hate you so?

So in the end, I’m going to put together some basic articles on a ribbon-cutting event and the vague government collaboration thing. I could put some time into it, but you have written that this should take no more than two hours, and calling up a city engineer and taking up his time from trying to keep Fargo from flooding so I can have a nice feature piece to maybe nab me a job seems like a poor use of taxpayer dollars. It also would require me to spend some time with a that engineer, make him a central character in the article, incorporate agency cooperation facts and savings, all of which takes more than two hours and would definitely stretch your 250 word limit.

I think it would be interesting to write for an engineering firm, but I am concerned about the misconceptions concerning articles and press releases. If you expect every piece to be Golden Gate Bridge, your expectations may need some tweaking, particularly if the writer has little but 100 words of facts to go on.

Anyway, I thought you should know this before proceeding to the articles I wrote, because while they aren’t anything to send in for award season, they do what you want them to do. They get the reader from not knowing something to knowing something without confusing him. A lot of the time, that’s what we writers do, and even that is a challenge.

So enjoy the articles, and for Pete’s sake, stay off that bridge!

Fargo Jones

Why you hate small town newspapers

Every day another critic speaks against the media.  Left this, right that, bias, bias, bias. The forum comment section usually includes one person or another asking why something was covered, as if all their resources should be devoted to one type of story. For the most part, I think the scope of the Forum coverage is very good. They hit a lot of types of stories in a week, and if you don’t like one, there are 30 others that day that might interest you. The point of coverage isn’t to get you to read every single story in the paper, but to read the ones you might be interested in.

On a national scale, The Daily Show has built a reputation on pointing out the faults in mainstream media coverage of stories. And most of the time, the critics are correct. The coverage of our nation’s news does not meet the basic tenets of journalistic integrity, and there certainly is more partisan bias to be found in national media. But is this a top down problem?  Tackling the behemoths of the journalistic problems of Fox, New York Times, Newsweek, etc. is a gargantuan task, and one that hasn’t made any real headway since Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire factored into the decision to cancel the show. From personal experience, as a reporter and minor editor at a daily newspaper with a circulation under 10,000, I wonder if the media problem wouldn’t be better handled from the bottom up.

This article will not be journalistic.  I have few sources other than myself to back anything up and reading through it I know it's pretty jumpy. I will start with a story.  This didn’t happen to me, but was related to me by the photographer of the newspaper I worked at for two years. This happened after I left.

            The photographer had gone on assignment to get a photo of a llama playing with schoolchildren. He took several dozen photos, and eventually ran with his best shot, one of the owner trying to get it back on the trailer to drive away from the school. The owner came in later that day and requested a meeting with the editor. The owner complained that the photo they ran misrepresented llamas since they aren’t ordinarily stubborn. He demanded a correction.

            They ran one.  Of sorts.  They ran another photo of the event the next day, with a caption clearly stating that llamas are not ordinarily stubborn creatures.

            Upon hearing about this event, I wondered if shooting pictures of a house on fire is misrepresenting that house since it isn’t ordinarily on fire.

            I think this anecdote is representative of small town newspapers.  They bend, they fold, they do everything they can to please their readers and small number of advertisers. It’s a different kind of bias – not politically based, but bias in favor of small town values. They don’t have the financial ability to print negative stories on the local hospital or the local school.  They don’t have the resources to do stories on the effects of no health care, or poverty, or pollution levels of the local plants. Why?  Businesses and local government want everybody to think that the town is the perfect place to live. Even a hint of negative story on the local hospital once brought a team of lawyers and a 50 percent slash in their newspaper advertising revenue.

            Why didn’t I do stories on these issues, you ask?  Because of another nice little problem – downsizing. Small papers like the one I worked for have been bought by larger papers, who slash at newsrooms and don’t pay reporters enough to care.  My publisher had a private plane and a tank of a SUV.  I made more money selling shoes on the weekend.  Really.

            Pay matters. During the two years I was there, I saw the newsroom of seven drop to six and go through about 10 staff changes, including an editor and three photographers. If no one is around for longer than one year, context flies out the window. The same features and stories are written every year.

            With three reporters covering the news daily, we were expected to turn in 15 stories a week, and quality wasn’t a concern.  As long as the stories had bylines, all was okay.  I could cover a Republican rally during the governor’s race and only have to type out quotes from Republicans about why Republicans are awesome. I could call the local county health office to get quotes about the dangers of SARS, West Nile Virus, and biological terrorist attack plans.  My editor didn’t want me to take the time to ask if there was really any threat. He wanted a local version of a national trend, no matter how overhyped it was.

            Certainly there were negative stories, but they always involved either arrested criminals, meth labs, or people who didn’t live there. 

            What can we do about this?  Everything.  Every time your local newspaper prints nothing but positive fluff pieces to continue the image that the town is wonderful, write in.  Every time a story with one source is written, write in. Every time the paper focuses on local preparedness for bird flu, ask what’s being done to help the homeless guy in town (which is dickish in many ways, but sometimes valid if the article in question is manufactured fear). I found out as a reporter that the town’s resources for homelessness included a one-way bus ticket to a larger city. I never wrote a story about it.

            One of the few stories I did do right, I think, was about a man waiting for a lung transplant.  He wanted people to know about his disease. He died four months later.  I did a follow up story.  Newspapers often like to write about successful transplants.  Rarely do they write articles about the ones who die waiting.

            I grew up hating my hometown paper. The articles were all written in a folksy manner, like something you might find in a church bulletin. The one writer would end most stories about events with bold encouragement for the community to come out and support this cause, these students, etc. Not as a quote, but as the writer’s opinion. I understand the impulse, it’s easy to fill space if you can throw in your own thoughts and no one seems to mind. So while I am at the same time for and against critics of newspapers, I do appreciate the struggle most journalists face when trying to produce copy to feed the beast.  

            Call me a coward for leaving, but I could feel my soul being drained away by the small town paper I worked for.  I had the journalism beaten out of me for a long time.  Like teachers and politicians, journalists have the misfortune to have a job that everyone thinks they can do better, and they don’t have a problem telling you so. I am a hypocrite in this sense, since I'm bitching about it myself, and I admit that.  I’m amazed at people who can continue to be journalists, especially in the age of instant anonymous criticism that can weigh one down in cynicism. I salute those who still report every day. 

The Most Relaxing Dump in the World

(Note: This is an old performance piece of mine. Entirely too much of this story is true.)

            I can feel it, somewhere near the end, bubbling and churning, anxious to breathe, but not yet. I have a few moments before I’ll have to get out of my chair and start my trek down the long hallway to the restroom. I’m at the office, and my mind begins negotiations with my ass. “Can you wait? Can you make it for a few more moments until today’s deadline? If you can hold it for 10 more minutes, you will be able to make it home, where the toilet paper won’t chafe.” To which my buttocks replied, “You know I’m sensitive. You already went earlier this morning after you got here and two dumps in a row with the one-ply sandpaper they provide … to put it short, I promise blood if you do that to me again.”

            I have no answers. I try to concentrate on the front page. Five minutes to deadline and Terry needs any errors marked. I got it one minute ago. Six minutes to proofread everything on the front page of the newspaper. Why am I doing this?

            “You done yet?”

            Terry needs it now. One minute to proof the front page. He expects me to proof a damn paper when I’ve got a stew brewing in the basement, homemade chili nearly spilling out of the pot. My mind quickly flashes to an image from a television show where insects, worms and scorpions were put through a meat grinder, the black, eviscerated remains dripping from one end into a contestant’s mouth.

            I look at the secondary picture, a llama playing with children. We had another llama picture yesterday, one of the owner trying to get it back on the trailer to drive away from the school. The owner came in later that day and requested a meeting with Terry. Terry came back ten minutes later to ask if I had any more pictures.

            “The owner said the one we ran misrepresented llamas. They aren’t ordinarily stubborn. So we’ll do a correction in tomorrow’s paper.”

            At the time, I didn’t need to take a crap. I had time to do the mental gymnastics. You pansy-assed mutant son of a bitch. Misrepresenting llamas?  You are freaking joking. The frickin llama was stubborn. Is shooting a picture of a house fire misrepresenting houses since they aren’t ordinarily on fire?  Take your fucking llama and cram it up your ass.

            What I said was, “I think I have another usable picture.”

            So now the llama is on the front page again. And I have to seriously shit. Screw going home and screw the blood. I scan the headlines and hand it back to Terry with a word of advice about the main photo. “Perhaps there’s a better headline for the visiting missionary talking to a local school than “Priest reaches out and touches children.’ Just a suggestion.”

            Getting up released some sphincter control, I can feel it poking out, touching cloth. I’m already late for my appointment with nature. I force it back in, quickly promising my ass relief, “I will give you all the Preparation-H you can handle if you just hold on.”

            An old lady comes in before I can sprint off down the fifty-foot trek to the porcelain palace.

            “Who does the obituaries?” She asks me.

            Damn.

“I do.”

            “I’d like to know something,” God, she’s going to drag this out in the same passive-aggressive way everyone in this fucking town does when they find something spelled wrong or disagree with the angle of a particular story.

            “Yes?”

            She has yesterday’s paper under her arm and unfolds it mercilessly slow. I grit my teeth in an effort to smile while I focus all energy on keeping the sphincter shut. She points to the obit. “Can you read this to me?”

            “Doris Anderton, 88, of Harford Lake, died Tuesday…”

            “That’s enough,” she says, smugly triumphant.

            Sweat begins to gather on my eyebrows. My eyes start to water. I imagine asking her if the person was actually alive. But instead…

            “What?”

            “The copy I wrote said she went to meet her heavenly father.”

            “Christ.”

            “Yes, you remember.”

            “Look, it’s standard policy, we change everything to died.” I’m losing control, in more ways than one. “We try to base this paper on fact, and we don’t know if this person went to meet her heavenly father, stress on the heavenly. From what I heard, she was secretly stitching satanic prayers into her doilies.”

            I leave her. Terry can handle it. I have business to attend to. Terry tries to call after me, but I keep going, talking out loud all the way. “Screw you, screw this job that pays less than retail, screw this fucking town where everyone’s a critic, screw everybody.”

            I’m still talking when I get to the bathroom, fling the door open, get in the stall, drop my pants without unbuttoning them and let it all go. The first wave splashes water back on my butt cheeks. My stomach drops an inch. My feet go numb. Goosebumps rise on my arms. I find myself wishing bidets were more common in the states. The last of the solid matter drops. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and take a few deep breaths. I can feel the next wave coming, the liquid wave. It flows out and sounds like a horse pissing into a pond. I begin to get dizzy and the stall becomes dark, but my head hits the metal door and knocks me back to the present before I can fall to the floor. I even feel my heart stop for a few seconds. Visions of wide meadows, long grass stinging me as I run through in the soft autumn breeze, deer lapping up water from a tiny brook before heading off to hump among the aspens. My personal musk rises from below, filling my nostrils with a heavenly scent. The tension in my neck melts away and I have trouble keeping my head from dropping to my chest as a low moan passes through my lips. “God, yes. Jesus. Oh man. Son of a bitch.” Drool runs down my chin.

            I hear the door to the restroom open and Terry’s voice over the top of the stall. I can tell he’s speaking through the neck of his shirt.

            “Holy Mary, it smells like burnt batteries. You in here?”

            “Yes, God yes.” Another solid one hits the deck.

            “I’m going to have to let you go you know, after that.”

            “Yes!”

            That was the last one. I’m done. I sit back and rest my head against the wall while craving a cigarette. My legs quiver as I look at the toilet paper dispenser. “Terry, could you do me a favor and grab a newspaper? It’s softer than this stuff.”