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.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
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1 comment:
Loved the comparison to Cletis and the clean weld. Both thumbs up on this one.
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