The Weekly Screed (#821)

It’s all about the weld
by David Benjamin

“What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.”
                                                                         — Joseph Pulitzer

MADISON, Wis. — For one sweltering summer in Orlando, I was a cub steelworker. The fabrication plant where I worked had only recently integrated. The tension among the Southern whites on the crew and the new hires, black and Puerto Rican, was still as thick as the July humidity. I felt this palpably because I was the long-haired punk lumped in among the minorities. My acceptance came, grudgingly, when it turned out that I had a strange knack for hooking stacks of bar joists — 800 pounds per load — onto the overhead crane and zinging them the length of the factory without slipping their chains, crashing and — possibly — killing a few of my co-workers. Whenever there were joists to move, the call went out: “Get the hippie.”

Addison Steel — a literary reference that escaped everyone but me — put together the structural metal for small buildings. We fitted, welded and painted the erector sets that became new Burger Kings, KFCs, gas stations, mini-malls and the beginnings of Disney World. There, as in any steel plant, it was all about the weld — that blinding molten bead and a clean, clear line drawn between two stubbornly disparate and dangerous slabs of high-carbon steel. If the weld was sublime, it resembled putty along a window rim, its edges crisp and arrow-straight, its surface smooth, ripple-free and tucked tenaciously into the crease.

There’s beauty in a great weld — like a swimmer’s bicep or the curve of a woman’s hip. The best welder in the shop — everyone knew it — was a grizzled artist in grubby overalls with a sunny disposition and a fondness for the bottle. His name was Cletis. Every now and then, another welder would sidle up beside Cletis, drop his eyeshield and watch for a while, just to see the steadiness of that alcoholic hand and the purity of Clete’s art when it was still red-hot and fresh. Even his slag looked as smooth as a baby’s ass.

I did steel for a summer, but print has been my life. Over the years, besides writing, I’ve produced, edited, specified, headlined, cutlined, curned, trimmed, typeset, laid out, pasted up — and shot, developed and printed photos for — five different newspapers and at least a dozen magazines. In my jobs, a waxer, an X-Acto knife and a phototypositor have been, from time to time, every bit as necessary as a ballpoint, a notebook and a keyboard. But, mostly, I wrote. I once estimated my editorial output at somewhere between four and five million words.

Most of them accurate.

All this trenchwork renders me slightly touchy when a dilettante — Limbaugh or Drudge, Bannon, Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders — starts casting facile aspersions at rank-and-file reporters. The current slander is that the vast majority of professional journalists are venal hacks who foment “fake news” to serve a seditious partisan agenda.
When I hear these flacks whine, I think about welding. I recall Cletis, who might have been a white Klansman or a Marxist. I didn’t know. He didn’t talk much. The steel might be intended for a new McDonald’s or for the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center. None of this mattered. The steel had no agenda and Cletis didn’t care where it might go and who, in the end, it might shelter. It was all about the weld.

In the news business, likewise, it’s all about the copy.

You start with the news. A reporter has to sense what news is. He has to recognize — suddenly — its significance, and how news is different from dog-bites-man. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein spotted the beginnings of the Watergate scandal, they didn’t think, oh boy, here’s our chance to nail Nixon. They said, instead, something like, “Oh my God, what a story!… if it’s true.” In a recent documentary, Bernstein talked about a day, very early in a story that took more than a year to unfold, when he was standing over the coffee machine at the Post. Suddenly, the depth and reach of this story hit him. He said to Woodward, “Jesus Christ! This president is gonna be impeached.”

Bernstein had not done all the research he needed to do to pin down the story, he hadn’t yet met most of his sources, he had barely written his first fifty ’graphs. But he knew this was news — as did Woodward — and he knew what it meant.

Not everyone can do this. News is more instinct than expertise, more feel than training. There are plenty of so-called journalists who wouldn’t recognize a story if it stood naked in front of them waving sparklers. There are many who have the story sitting in their lap, blowing in their ear, but can’t craft that all-important first sentence that tells the entire tale — who, what, where, when — in fifty trenchant words or less.

The most celebrated lead I ever wrote ended up being taught in a journalism class at Oklahoma State University. To this day, I have no idea whether the professor intended it as a positive model or as an example of How Not to Write a Lead.

It read: “The School Committee Tuesday night cut the balls out of the school budget — footballs, baseballs, basketballs and tennis balls.”

The point I hope the professor made is that I, the reporter, didn’t care what happened to the school budget. Of course, I knew the School Committee was doing the wrong thing. But I left that out, because it was obvious. If a story is news, and you write it right, the facts do their work. They don’t need help.

Beyond the all-important lead, my job was to place the most important information at the top, to fill the middle ‘graphs with background and detail, and to end the story, ideally, with my second best quote. (The best quote was already there, close to the top.)

What the propagandists in politics, right or left, have never understood about newspeople is that all we want is the story — good or bad, happy or sad.

The story is the steel. It’s the potter’s clay. It’s the surgeon’s spleen, heart, kidney, broken leg. It’s the coldblooded hunter’s hotblooded quarry.

The story might be politics, but to the reporter, it’s not political. The journalist’s allegiance is to the facts, to evidence, to the words uttered — and recorded painstakingly — by his or her sources, and to the trail where the story leads, to the Next Story. Choosing sides would muddy the trail. It would spook the quarry.

A good story has an integrity that fills the reporter with purpose. It has a life of its own outside the reporter’s feelings, emotions, beliefs and loyalties. It’s actual and it’s a little bit sacred. It’s a clean weld.

If you’ve never crafted — or appreciated — a story that explains, educates, holds together and hearkens to a truth that exceeds your own capacity for honesty, you’re in a piss-poor position to challenge its authenticity.