This led to a conversation earlier this week with Meghan, which led to a conversation last night with Ben, which leads now to this question: If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …
WHAT?
What would the “beats” be?
Cue Hank Stuever from the introduction to Off Ramp: “I am unassigned, mostly. I was a child born and raised and now living in a permanent Elsewhere, and because I didn’t have a beat, I gave myself one. It started out as a private list I taped next to my computer, in my newsroom cubicle, for several years: I put ‘false cities’ on my beat, which meant airports, the Best Buy, bland buildings. I put ‘things kept in shoeboxes in spare closets’ on my beat. I claimed ‘teenagers who don’t help out the community’ for my own. Also:
“People Who Are Loathed.
“Spare Freezers Kept in the Garage.
“People Who Move Heavy Things; Rock Bands Who Have Not Yet Figured Out That They’re Not Going to be Famous; Stories Where People Voluntarily Get Out Their Old Yearbooks. Also I wanted exclusive rights to stories about embalming, algebra, bedrooms, breakfast cereal, and pieces of furniture that cost under $500.”
Ben said last night he’d write about people who have monster trucks and the things that happen in “the other 9 (p.m.) to 5 (a.m.).”
My working list, scrawled in the back of this book (pretty good, by the way) to this point includes: People Who Eat Out a Lot at a Table for One. Collision (cars, people, ideas, whatever). Stuff on the Side of the Road. Chance Meetings and Random Catastrophe. Possible Death, imminent Death, the threat of Death. Death.
So.
What else?
What would you write about if all bets were off?
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