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A journalist outline
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Posted by satis
Jul 22, 2018 at 12:31 AM
Interesting interview with WaPo’s Avi Selk over at Nieman. He’s got a manually-intensive outlining workflow he uses to pump out articles:
> “Even for 300-word stories, I have just gotten in the habit of outlining. I do everything on a laptop, but I will have scrap paper next to me, where I jot down bullet-point level outlines. Sometimes it just says ‘nut graf, then chronology.’ I find that very helpful. I also do outlining simultaneous to the reporting and researching. If it’s an aggregated story, I copy/paste the information into a text file. At that point I jot down a little outline for how I think the story will go, and then do a little more reporting and see if that changes the outline at all.”
> “On my computer, I take every quote or note or aggregated fact and put it all into a single text file that follows the outline. I start every story with this gigantic text file of facts pasted from aggregation or raw notes from my phone interviews. It’s thousands of words long. Then I start winnowing that down into a story with my own prose. I have every single note laid out according to the outline, and sometimes I duplicate that file and start deleting chunks out so it gets smaller and smaller. When it gets to a manageable size, I open up a new file and start writing it in my own voice. I write in a new file as to avoid accidentally copy/pasting someone else’s language in and calling it my own. I write really simply for the first pass. Subject-verb -object. I don’t worry about making it fancy. If that’s all I have time to do, sometimes that’s the way it publishes. I find once it’s all down there in simple prose, I give it another read or two. To what extent I want to have a certain tone or style, that starts coming through on those second passes.”
> “... I didn’t have a process before I came to the Post, and sort of figured it out because it keeps me sane and efficient. It just evolved. When I started writing, like everyone else, I started doing it with no plan at all. I could spend half a day staring at three paragraphs.”
Posted by tightbeam
Jul 22, 2018 at 11:40 AM
What a great article, with valuable insights from a working journalist. Thanks for posting the link!
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 22, 2018 at 12:45 PM
Very interesting indeed. Reminds me of how I used to write essays at university. Similar purpose, similar principle.
Posted by Hugh
Jul 22, 2018 at 08:35 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
Very interesting indeed. Reminds me of how I used to write essays at
>university. Similar purpose, similar principle.
I hope you never had a three-hour deadline to meet, though, Bill!
Reading Avi’s article, I found the only new routine for me was “aggregation”. I never had to do that, although I can see how the growing economic pressures on traditional news outlets could lead to such practices. “Following up” other outlets’ stories, yes - though that meant that as a reporter you only wrote a follow-up if you could contact the original sources, check the reliability of what had been previously written, and develop the story further.
But, yes, in my case always outlined. Reading longer pieces in newspapers now I think I can almost always tell when one has not been outlined before writing. Similarly with TV documentaries: I can almost always tell when the piece has not been filmed according to at least a “treatment”. It won’t have a clean through-line, and key turning-points in the “story” will, if anything, be purely filmic, not based on logic.
Posted by Amontillado
Jul 23, 2018 at 02:09 AM
Aggregating without attribution is a low practice. I assume it’s commonplace, but it’s still a low practice.
His comments on outlining sound valid, though.
There are those who claim not to outline. The “pantser” community, and let me be quick to distance myself from the term. It’s not a word I like to use.
I submit that the zeroth draft of anything needs work. For some, draft zero is a month’s work, 25,000 words long. For others, draft zero covers the same ground with a 1000 word bullet list, or a hierarchical outline, or something along those lines.
The only question for me is do I want to work for weeks to create my draft zero, or do I want to work an afternoon?
Well, there’s another reason to outline. If you don’t outline, you don’t need nifty dedicated outlining tools. But that’s heresy. We need nifty dedicated outlining tools. That’s a given, therefore we must outline.