Trimming Good Stories

Sorry for the lag time on posting--I had meetings all day Friday, slept for 16 hours yesterday, and have been in meetings again all day today.

On Friday, we ran a story about four professors in SEAS collectively picking up $1.3 million in grant money. It was one of those stories that we get to write up a lot at Spec because we have so many world-renowned professors, and it's always difficult to choose which ones get stories and which ones don't. Because of the impressive size of these grants and the fact that they went to four professors, instead of one, we decided that this merited a story. We put it up on our list where it was requested by one of our trainees, Sara Maria Hasbun.

Now, most straight news stories that we run are skedded for between 400 and 600 words, closer to 600 if the story has wide-sweeping implications, a lot of facts, or a swath of sources, and closer to 400 if it goes the other way. That didn't used to be the case. As the result of a gradual shift on the part of news editors over the past three years, the average size of stories has been cut by about a third--when I came in my freshman year, I feel like my average story was in the 650-750 range and I never wrote something less than 500.

There are a number of pros and cons about shorter stories. The pros include that articles tend to be tighter and less verbose, have fewer extraneous quotes, and ensure that more peple read all the way to the end. On the flip side, it gives reporters less incentive to interview many sources and can lead to a loss of some context or extra information. For those reasons, our word count guidelines aren't hard and fast rules, but we tend to schedule the word count and hope that people tell us when they need more words.

I don't remember how many words we had originally allotted for Sara's story, but because we do run a lot of these, I can assure you it wasn't outside of the traditional range. Sara, however, went above and beyond in her reporting. On what could have been a simple recap of the basic news (Columbia gets money, professors say they're happy), she turned it into an analysis on the ways in which Columbia is better for incoming professors than MIT and Stanford, including the level of autonomy and resources they are given and they're ability to work across disciplines.

The problem is that this made the story substantially longer. While I can't tell you how many words Sara originally had, I can tell you that it was substantially less than the nearly 900 that I saw at midnight. By then, we had a couple of problems. The first was a space issue: we didn't have a single house ad and had about 350 more words than we could fit. The second, though, was a less obvious but equally important issue: since we do now have basic guidelines regarding how long our stories run, there are necessarily value judgments attached to those. In other words, if we give 900 words to a story, it makes it seem like we're saying it's twice as important as our normal story. As I said, while these are exceptional professors, the fact that they won this award is not in and of itself exceptional and we shouldn't treat in our paper as such. This semester, outside of Implications and Perspectives pages, I believe we have run three stories total more than 900 words. Thirdly, without some surprising or exceptional element, nobody was going to read all the way to the end of the story, no matter how well-reported it was.

We ended up at a compromise. I didn't want to cut the interesting additional research that she had found, but at the same time, we simply couldn't run 900 words on this thing. So I cut two full paragraphs--one of them was a rather lengthy quote recapping something that was essentially already stated--which got me about 100 words. I cut another eighty by tightening up language and snipping sentences here and there.

It's a weird experience cutting things that are good, but in the end, we believe that it made the paper better. I apologized to Sara Maria afterwards and the paper awarded her today with our trainee-of-the-week reporter's notebook. Good job, Sara Maria.