Narrative can work surprisingly well on a breaking news story. Although it’s usually thought of as an approach reserved for takeouts and special projects, it can energize and deepen a newspaper’s daily coverage of an event important to its readers—particularly if that event is being covered heavily on TV and the web. Contrary to common wisdom, the sky does not fall if you don’t always put the “news” at the very top. On the day of the verdict, we did not report the verdict until the 112th paragraph of the story. Only a couple of readers complained.
When three reporters are writing a story together, it helps to have an outline that lays out a coherent plan for how it will all come together before deadline. Tom French was our master outliner. Every day during the lunch break we began talking about our best scenes so far, and Tom would start to come up with an outline and figure out who would write what. At day’s end, he updated it. Tom made simple outlines—usually one section from inside the courtroom, one section from outside, then back inside, etc.—seem varied and intricate. But they were logical and the story flowed.
Details are everything. When we were trying to describe the holding cell where Valessa Robinson sat for hours waiting on a verdict, we made sure we could describe that setting for our readers, down to the chill of the room’s temperature, the rank smell of the toilet, the graffiti scrawled on the walls. Try to show instead of tell: the jail grub of turkey sausage and oatmeal shoved through the feed slot of Valessa’s cell, the barrette in her new demure curls, the potential juror who saw all the reporters and said, “Oh, dear’’—all the stuff we too often leave out of our daily stories.
Know when to ask questions and when to shut up. The lawyers involved in the case knew our notebooks were always open, but sometimes it was best to just sit back while a scene played out. The best example: When the jury went out, Anne Hull headed up to the state attorney’s office. Vicki Robinson’s parents were there, too, and then in walked Vicki’s other daughter, Valessa’s big sister. The grandparents had seen little of their other granddaughter since the murder of their daughter. Anne just watched and then later simply described what had happened. It was one of our best scenes.
Take advantage of editions to revise. We had a first-edition deadline for copy to be at the front-page desk by 9:30. Each night, we had to race to meet that deadline, but then for the next two hours we revised and polished for the midnight copy deadline of the main city edition. We made substantial changes between editions; one night we threw away the first 80 lines of the first-edition story and wrote a new top.
Copy editors are your saviors even more so when you are writing thousands of words on a daily deadline. We had two copy editors, Beth Navage and Ron Brackett, reading behind us every night, and they saved us time after time. Also, having the copy editors and page designers closely involved allowed us to push deadline at times. They were on board to make the story as good as possible and kept finding us an extra 10 minutes or so when we really needed it. The page designer, Amy Hollyfield, was a genius at finding solutions when stories came up short or long.
If you’re not going to give away the news in your lead, don’t give it away in the headline or front-page photo cutline either.
Doing a story this way takes resources beyond reporters and editors. We had two photographers, Jamie Francis and Tony Lopez, whose work instantly built the atmosphere for each day; a terrific researcher, John Martin; and an editorial assistant, Michael Canning, who taped each day’s testimony and then would transcribe passages so we could check the accuracy of our notes.
Working 16 hours a day, dinner is not necessary. Sleep is.
Neville Green, managing editor of the Tampa edition of the St. Petersburg Times, oversaw the trial coverage.
