8:58 After a half hour of settling in, it strikes me as I stare at the depthless screen of my laptop that I didn't do any of my interviewing right. I didn't even do any of my interviewing the way I would normally do it. I was assigned to write happy, boostery articles about Brooklyn for a happy, boostery publication, and that's what I set out to do. As a result none of my notes or interviews make any organic sense. I have a couple dozen jagged pieces of tin to work with. None of them ring prettily when struck.
9:16 I make a note -- TKTK. I don't quite even know what it means -- I've learned everything I know about journalism on the job -- but I know my editors stick it in the text when they want a fact checked. My concerns are niggling little things which nobody would probably notice if I just let them in, but they have the ability to stop me for hours at a time. Hours. Probably Jayson Blair doesn't agonize like this. Maybe that's what separates the people who get the big stories from the rest of us.
9:27 369 words in the studios article, and I've only mentioned two studios. Is the editor's scheme to set a pay rate for a word count which is impossible to meet, then inflate the number of words in the article, so I get paid less per word? In 500 words you can't possibly write something as grand and overarching as she proposed. As a matter of fact, I bet her assignment was about 500 words.
9:42 Finishing up the "dog-ate-my-homework" letter to my editor. Should I mention that my computer had a peculiar and startling crash earlier tonight, for sympathy points? I have already spent too much time agonizing about whether I've pestered her too much tonight, whether she'll deign to throw me a freelance piece ever again.
9:57 Now I'm glad I skipped dance class. I needed that extra time to dick around before I sat down. It could be 11:57 right now.
10:04 Bury that lede! Bury that lede! Woo! Two paragraphs into the Coney article and I still don't know which metaphor I'm using for it. I think the anecdote about my grandma is out, though.
10:38 Joan Acocella's article on theatrical hip-hop in the New Yorker leaps off the couch and starts humping my leg. Now I'll never get anything written.
11:09 I know I have a good story here someplace. It's about a stingray, a sideshow freak, Jacob, and the Funny Face logo, or maybe something about work. If I publish that here instead of turning it over to my editor, is it stealing?
11:25 Literal eleventh-hour interview from a studio owner in an obscure neighborhood whose name even he doesn't know. Doesn't yield good quotes. Half of my interviews yielded no good quotes.
Posted by Gus at May 28, 2003 01:05 AM | TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry:
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No one knows what TK means. It's one of the great Mysteries of Journalism, like where -30- comes from. (Why not -28- or DKDK?)
Posted by: Lysander at May 28, 2003 1:35 AM
I know TK meant "to come" when I was doing proofreading. Maybe TKTK is the same idea, but with emphasis, "Its coming! No really I promise. I'm on the other line getting facts to back up my wild ass claims".
Posted by: kellan at May 28, 2003 2:08 AM
And now I know why reporters consistently edit what people say to them to produce pithy quotes. Which could be helpful advice for you - if they said something whose content could have been pithy, reword what they said and publish that.
I mean, if you want to be dishonest like that. Me, I'd be all over it.
Posted by: fuz at May 28, 2003 9:15 AM
Truth be told I do edit what people say lightly, if they repeat themselves, use speech patterns which place the subject of what they're saying in one fragment and the verb in another, etc. I figure people would rather I clarify that kind of thing than end up looking stupid or incoherent. Of course, my time at Hampshire was spent deliberately *not* editing what administrators said, for the opposite effect.
One guy I talked to yesterday recommended the use of a minidisc recorder for interviews, saying it made recording what people say a breeze. I actually have one, but I hate recording interviews. It really is much more work than taking notes. I have much more to go through when I'm done, there's more angst over which quote to use, and of course when you've written down the quote there is a record of what was actually said, so there's basis to haggle over whether you represented someone accurately. heh heh.
Remind me to post another comment about my experience editing interviews under an older Hampshire alumn tonight -- right now I gtg do another interview.
Posted by: gus at May 28, 2003 1:14 PM