An anecdote on anecdotal leads
By William M. Hartnett on Apr 9, 2007 in newspapers
>Readers’ Plea: Get to the Point (Wash Post)
(Via Romenesko)
Washington Post reader John Schappi on the scourge of anecdotal leads:
“I’ve dubbed these stories ‘Look, Ma! I’m writing!’ because they seem designed to show off the author’s storytelling capabilities rather than his/her reporting skills.”
Yup. Which reminds me of a great story in The Atlantic a year or two ago, The Greatest Stories Never Told. Specifically, this passage, a parody written in the 1980s by a New York Times reporter:
DALLAS, Nov. 22 — Elvira Brown’s aging face seems almost to be a map of the parched, weatherbeaten Texas countryside that has been her home for 83 years. Through the eyes that squint in the harsh sunlight, she has seen Dallas grow from a tiny cowtown into a midland capital. The street outside of her tiny house used to be nothing more than a dust trail in summer and a mudhole in winter.
Years ago, she would sit on this porch and watch cattle drives pass. Today, a procession of quite a different sort passed along the now-paved course. It was a motorcade. It flew by at top speed on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Top speed, because, it seems, the President of the United States was inside. And he was dead.
Hilariously over the top. But … Don’t you get the awful feeling that there are newsrooms, big, bafflingly well-regarded newsrooms, where you might actually come THIS CLOSE to getting something like that published?
