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. 

Comment boards are black holes of suck

My reporting days took place in the early days of the news/internet convergence, when papers put some of their news online. We had a part time guy who would come in and post the day’s stories and leave. The site was pretty simple.

I got out just in time.

The comment boards are now an expected feature of the online news experience. When the Forum shut them down for a brief time a few years ago, people went ballistic. They felt their rights to free speech were being taken away, rights that they didn’t have 5 years ago in this form. Rights that aren’t actually tied to any law, but try to tell them that this is just a service the Forum provides and they want you to die slowly with at least three crows working on your eyes.

The comment boards are where reason, community, and argument go to die. Continually. Every story, and every comment.

Every person who comments on these boards has a similar desire – to get someone to change their mind and see the world from his point of view. It’s like having the ability to speak to all the drivers around you while in your car and telling them how they are doing it wrong. At the same time, they are trying to do the same.

I have enjoyed reading the comment sections despite all this – in much the same way one enjoys watching reality television. It’s a verbal party with no accountability. The only reason to post to a comment board that will fulfill your need is if you are posting just to poke fun. Try to bring any logic or reason to the party and you will be going home with no one. I enjoy posting as dead horse, a character I bring out whenever the story topic or argument has been ground into dust, pissed on, and sun bleached – yet still somehow people are still trying to convince others to see things from their point of view.

The Fargo Forum comment section is populated by about two dozen regular posters. Each has been posting for years, but never have I seen any of them change their point of view based on someone else’s comments. Read long enough and each will be guilty of the same logical gymnastics they accuse others of. It can be disheartening to see such public verbal belief masturbation with nary an internet cop in sight. There are moderators for the site, but they’ve rarely laid down the law since the early days of the new area voices system. At a conference once, I heard the presenter talk about how the commenters on her site began to self-police, and after a while, they understood the community of commenters and were civil. I don’t see that happening on the Forum, but I can dream.

I try to remember that it’s always the same 24 people posting, which helps keep the despair over the Fargo/Moorhead area to a minimum. The other 175,000 people here really don’t give that much of a shit about these events. Comment boards are largely for the extremists. You can’t reason with an extremist. You don’t commune with an extremist. And you can’t argue with an extremist. It doesn’t work.

Another comment board area I frequently read is on avclub.com. Their commenters also have their faults – most commonly a sense of self-importance and judgmentalism that comes as part of the hipster douchebag package. But they are also pretty funny if you can look past the cynicism.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about comment boards, and I hoped that this blog would help to organize them. However, I feel rambling today. 

Since I began checking out twitter, I’ve strayed away from my heavier days of trolling the Forum comment boards. I think twitter is the next generation of comment boards. You can follow people as you see fit, don’t have to read crazy people that make you angry and aren't open to new ideas, you can follow the local news reporters, and can get a nice one-liner joke from any of your favorite comedians. Twitter has become the comment board of choice for any news topic of the day – and it never pulls you into a pit of depression over the future of mankind the way that the Forum comment boards can, unless you follow Justin Beiber fans, I suppose.