It was 25 years ago, but the challenges then had the look and feel of 2003. Newspapers were losing readers. Editors were scrambling for ideas. Writers were wrestling with the timeless question of whether it was possible to do hard-hitting, relevant stories without sacrificing the lyrical touch.
So it was that Eugene Patterson, then the editor of the St. Petersburg Times, charged Roy Peter Clark with the task of creating a book that would celebrate great writing and inspire journalists to push beyond dryly informing, giving readers a reason to stay around until the end of the story.
The result was "Best Newspaper Writing," which celebrates its silver anniversary this year with the publication of its 25th edition.
Clark, now Poynter's vice president and senior scholar, set the template for what would follow by describing the "BNW"'s mission this way: "This book should help dispel persistent myths about newspaper writing in America: that there is no room in newspapers for good writing; that reporting and writing are mutually exclusive skills; that deadlines make good writing impossible; that governmental or international news is, by definition, unreadable; that good writing can only be found in powerful papers with enormous resources."
Year after year, through the words and, in recent years, the pictures of excellent journalists from across the country, "BNW" has put the myths to rout.
No room in newspapers for good writing. Deadlines make good writing impossible.
Richard Ben Cramer found room in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on deadline, to bring riveting prose to the enduring story of conflict in the Middle East. His were the first stories to win the deadline-writing prize in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' contest, and were published in the first edition of the book: "Best Newspaper Writing 1979."
CAIRO – Slowly, with pain, Orani Mahmaud Daker climbed the stairs to the second floor schoolroom where he was supposed to vote.
He propped himself with a stout wooden cane that was in his right hand. His grandson, Rashid, helped on the left. His breath came in short whooshes from brown cheeks, which were not so much wrinkled as folded where the absence of teeth let the skin go lax.
Once Orani Daker was a tall, graceful man. But 32 years of delivering water in Cairo, a liter at a time from a heavy leather gourd that pressed cold and damp against his back for 10 hours a day, had stiffened and bent him and used him up before his time.
International news is, by definition, unreadable.
Actually, it was hard to
stop reading Blaine Harden's stories in "BNW 1988." Then an Africa correspondent with the
Washington Post, Harden's stories about tradition and change delivered a fresh, three-dimensional vision of a poorly-covered continent. In one story, he wrote about the conflict in Kenya between yesterday and tomorrow.
NAIROBI, Kenya – The late S.M. Otieno was a thoroughly modern African. He was a tall, silver-haired, honey-voiced criminal lawyer who drove a Mercedes, lived in a big house in a horsy Nairobi suburb, and sent his children abroad to college. He was a dominating, theatrical presence in a courtroom, adept at flustering prosecution witnesses. He made his reputation defending accused bank robbers.
But his death in December began a family, tribal, and legal feud that has made Otieno, whose body has been in cold storage in the city morgue ever since, the most talked-about man in this country. His corpse has forced Kenya's legal system and millions of Kenyans to re-examine their nation to see just how modern it has become.
Good writing can only be found in powerful papers with enormous resources.
Unless the Medford Mail Tribune, circulation 30,000 in 1989, qualifies as "powerful and enormous," Terrie Claflin in "BNW 1990" seriously undermined the notion that size trumps all. Her series about a child born to a crack-addicted mother won the non-deadline prize that year. She gave it this chilling start:
She is, in many ways, a china doll. Skin like snow, eyes like sky, a tiny body rigid and cool to the touch. Her cheeks are rosy, her face expressionless, unchanging. The world swirls in color and motion around her, yet she does not perceive it. For like a china doll, within her tiny head, behind those ice-blue eyes, Rachel has no brain.
Reporting and writing are mutually exclusive skills.
Amy Ellis Nutt might have something to say about that. She is a feature writer for the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., and there's no question that her stories in "BNW 2003," which captured ASNE's non-deadline writing award this year, are the height of excellent reporting. How else could a reporter hope to help readers understand the scientific pursuit of answers to some of life's biggest questions? (How big is the universe?)
Yet, with all the reporting demanded of Nutt's series "The Seekers," she writes in ways that unpack complex truths, laying the stories out in smooth, comfortable, and inviting prose. Here, she tackles the question: Where in the mind does the sense of self reside?
In 1637 the mind was front and center when Descartes announced, "I think, therefore, I am." Having proven his own existence, the French philosopher then asked himself the mother of all follow-up questions: "What is this 'I' that I know?"
Nearly four centuries after Descartes essentially threw in the philosophical towel, Todd Feinberg, a neurologist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, and Julian Keenan, an experimental psychologist at Montclair State University, believe they are close to mapping the place in the brain where the sense of self is formed.
So much for the myths. Then, as now, good writing is within the grasp of those who seek it. In "Best Newspaper Writing," writers share their best tips, their insights and techniques, their secret fears and, most importantly, their winning work. Their work is the annual evidence that there's plenty of room in newspapers for good writing.
Keith Woods is Reporting, Writing & Editing Group Leader at The Poynter Institute and editor of "Best Newspaper Writing."
Patterson1
BNW
