Mike Wilson is the AME for newsfeatures here at the SPT. He did a brown bag session Thursday called What I Learned About Writing By Editing. The best thing he talked about: "closing the distance between fact and meaning."
"Too many of our stories are just big bags of facts," he said.
He says we can fix that by focusing on The Big Idea.
What does this story MEAN? To you? To us?
What is it ABOUT?
My take: You might call this a nut graf-PLUS. The BIG IDEA GRAF gives context -- like the traditional, almost always necessary nut graf -- but then it does more.
Some examples Mike gave:
John Barry on a bat mitzvah:
"A Jewish girl had her bat mitzvah on her 13th birthday Saturday a week ago. Her Jewish mother had never had one. Her Cuban Catholic father wanted to invent one. It followed tradition; it broke tradition. A congregation heard the Hebrew words of Moses; it heard a thunderous stripping of gears of a Ferrari 360 Spider. Orbits intersected and cultures collided. This is the way it is today: Collisions, and then new cultures on new orbits."
"That's not in your notebooks, guys," Mike said. "That's in your head."
Emily Nipps on Goths:
"They share a love for songs about bleakness and corrosion and bloody coffins, and they enjoy the enduring friendships and warm memories, the good times that happen when they?re trying to be sad."
Jeff Klinkenberg on a baseball memorabilia hound:
"For a baseball fan with gray hair or no hair or a sagging waistline, following baseball is all about romance and escape. It's a link to childhood, to the time when Mom and Dad were still alive, when the most exciting thing on television was the game-of-the-week broadcast by Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean. When you were immortal."
And, um, me on a fringe Senate candidate:
"And yet there is something universal and archetypal about a man straining for something that's not within his realistic reach, and fighting battles most folks would call impossible, and knowing that. And still going forward."
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