48 Tips in 48 Hours

... w/ Dan Barry.

"When I got to the [Journal Inquirer] I rode around ... and imagined that 20,000 people around me were keeping secrets from me." When Dan got to The New York Times, that number jumped to eight million. And then, most recently, when he started writing "This Land," it jumped to two or three hundred million.

22 Drop the attitude. We drop into a certain lingo. "We build up a callous that separates us from the story."

This makes Dan think about Hurricane Katrina. When he went, he thought to himself: "I've done disaster, let's go. ... But I quickly shed that attitude."

"When I did that, everything became fresh again. Even if something looked like a cliche, it was the truth and I wrote it down. ... I opened myself up to it. ... And once you do that, there's kind of a liberation, at least there was one for me."

"I felt like I was owning the material in some way. Out of a hundred details, I maybe only used five in the story. But I knew, if I needed a better one, I could get it in my notebook."

23 Write a killer lead. "I think people read newspapers, for reasons not to read the story. ... So our challenge is to grab them through the paper and say -- 'Read this.' ... I work extremely hard on my leads. That's my shot." He thinks about top spin, driving the reader from paragraph to paragraph to a surprise that the end.

"What would grab my mother if I told this to her. You need to who, what, where, when, why. But there are creative ways to do that. Maybe you put the who, what, when in the first paragrph and the where and why in the second."

24 Read the newspaper, especially the little stories. "I love metro briefs. These are extraordinary stories that happen in New York that we're too busy to give any more than 60 to a hundred words. ... A man rescues someone off Coney Island. I want to know what that's like. I've never rescued anyone."

"I look for stories about the human condition, the small stories that say something about who we are and where we are."

Coming soon >>> Yes, Chip, history. Andy Borowitz on fake news. Dinner (since I still haven't eaten today).