The Biz Blog

Here is the story about a story that started life as a local video and made its way in the course of a  month to a front-page feature in The Wall Street Journal.

 

No huge deal but a little paradigm of the artful use of video to develop a story with legs that might never have seen the light of day in print alone.

 

Events unfolded in this sequence:

 

In mid-April, Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers engaged in a shouting match with Ken Cockrel, climaxing with her twice calling the bald and bulky City Council president, "Shrek."   The incident received video and print coverage in both Detroit newspapers (and wasn't the first such dust-up, characterized by what Conyers has called "passion" but most would say is an explosive temper).

 

Two weeks later, the Detroit News, with enthusiastic buy-in from Conyers' press representative, convened and taped a discssion in council chambers with a group of middle school children. The Shrek incident was on the agenda. Discussion warmed, and one of the students, 13-year-old eighth-grader Keiara Bell gave Conyers a courteous but firm dressing down, repeating several times, "You're an adult."

 

In the weeks following, the clip, hosted by multimedia reporter Charlie LeDuff with eyebrow rolling in the style of E!'s "The Soup," got a good run in cyber-space. It turned up on YouTube, on NPR (in both video and audio formats) and on political sites the Daily Kos and Wonkette (where I first saw it).

 

On May 27, the Journal reported on the Bell-Conyers confrontation and its sequel under the headline, "Detroit Poltician Gets Lesson in Civility From 13-Year-Old." The story by Katherine Rosman, in the bottom-page slot for what used to be known as column-three readers, is well-written and well-reported with such nuggets as that Keiara's proud mom "sells candy in Detroit neighborhoods from the trunk of an old gray Cadilac." The piece acknowledges the Detroit News but minmizes the cyber virus in favor of a peg on Keiara's local celebrity. (We cannot link to the piece since even recent WSJ stories go behind a paid wall). 

 

Pam Shermeyer, online editor at the News, agreed in a phone conversation with my sense that the "video made the story." The set-up was LeDuff's idea, she said, and part of the charm is that Conyers (a former teacher) and her advisors were looking for a positive spin engaging cute school children, and "that sort of backfired."

 

The inner-city fundamental school, as Rosman's story makes clear, had its own motives, looking to showcase that its students are serious and versed in local affairs. The element of staging doesn't get in the way of the video. But explaining how all this came to happen -- along with the lesser immediacy of just quoting the exchange -- might have sunk a print-only treatment (the News only ran the video version).

 

My takeaway is that skillfully-conceived video can indeed break a story -- in this case a comedy of manners with lively protagonists and a satisfying kick. There have probably been many such stories  that I haven't noticed. And plenty more to come.