Turn Weakness into Strength by Imitating Soap Operas
If you’ve stuck with me this far, I’ve got one easy, positive step that you can take to see if Mitchell’s really onto something. This is one of the interesting ways that the Light and other small papers have turned their big weakness into a strength.
The weakness is their resources (and again, this is an entry point for all you groovy new media types putting out a product with spit and baling twine) and space limitations make it so that they cannot take the time to produce a big story about a breaking event without having to dump their daily coverage. Big papers can just throw a couple more reporters (the New York Times famously called it “flooding the zone,” while the Los Angeles Times more cynically referring to “unleashing the flying monkeys”) – but if a small paper misses on something like this, it can drag it under.
The solution is to tell the story in slices (much as I have done with this epic – yeah, this story was itself something of an experiment. How very meta, eh?). Back when the Light and the Los Angeles Times were both covering the Synanon story, their different approaches came into sharp contrast.
“They would send a couple reporters out into the field, and they would do research for several months, come back and give you a blockbuster story, a main bar that skipped over six pages and three sidebars and all the rest,” Mitchell said. “You’re asking a lot of your readers to go through all that volume of stuff.
“Because we can only cover a little of the story each week, we keep the story in front of our readers week after week. Because of space limitations, we’re also forced to do that.
“So in the long run, this is why issues in weekly communities don’t quickly come and go the way they do in so many big-city papers.
“I think weekly papers, by keeping issues in front of the public week after week, actually have more effect than the dailies, because too many stories in the dailies are good for today’s news cycle and then they’re gone. No matter how significant they were.
“Whereas our news cycles can stretch for years sometimes.”
I realize that this kind of consistency and follow-through are difficult to sustain, especially when you’re a reporter working for a corporate-owned paper/station/site that is whipping you like a cur to churn out copy. But it’s still easier to beg, borrow or steal a little time to work on a story that you’re going to tell a slice at a time, rather than getting a couple months to work on a project.
An added benefit is if the story you’re working on doesn’t get any traction, you can end it without having wasted all that much time.
But if you stumble onto something that sparks some real reader reaction (see the earlier anecdote about the park rangers), then your project starts to become a thing. I’ve seen and covered lots of news stories turned into things (i.e., stories that take on lives their own, apart from your coverage). Where people start talking about your coverage and you keep covering it because everybody’s talking about it.
Even if you don’t manage to catch lightning in a jar the first time around, Mitchell points out that there have been many instances where they’ve started out looking into one story and wound up going in a completely unexpected direction.
“I think there are times when we started out on a story and there was an obvious bad guy but he might not have been the big bad guy,” Mitchell said. “Researching a news story should be done with the same approach as empirical science.
“You set out to prove or disprove that hypothesis, and that gives you the starting point. There’s been many times that we started out, this was our working hypothesis and discovered, no, when we really got into the story, it was something else altogether.
“But at least that gave us a way of asking questions. And then we keep hammering at it.”
It’s the same persistence, born out of some innate faith, stubbornness (critics say cussedness and stupidity) that has kept Mitchell going during the hard times. So now please allow me use this video clip (a little bit of comic relief to reward you for slogging through all this heavy soul-searching and philosophizing) to illustrate.
I had pointed out to Mitchell that the pathway up to his cozy hillside house was getting hard to navigate because the weeds were getting to be shoulder-high. In short order, he was wielding a heavy-duty weed whacker like a man possessed.
May I be forever barred from the ranks of the New Journalism ripper-offers if I don’t use this metaphor, because it occurred to me that his approach to this task epitomized his approach to life. He started with the grass growing over and around the railroad ties that serve as steps. Then he moved on to the grass on either side that was starting to curl over and onto the path. Then he frowned, gathered himself, and marched up onto the steep hillside below his house to start clearing the brush that had sprung up, encouraged by California’s record winter rainfall.
Once he sets himself a task, David Mitchell pursues it all the way to the end, no matter where it leads him, or how much bigger the job grows along the way. He does this with single-minded determination and tenacity, employing on the way techniques that some might call eccentric (not many people use hula-hoop hip movements to get the weed whacker to mow at head level).
But even as Mitchell waded through a sea of head-high brush, sweating on a hot and humid day, obviously far exceeding his original mission … I noticed that he was very carefully mowing around the small, vulnerable patches of wildflowers
The Soap Opera Effect – It may seem like journalistic jujitsu, but Mitchell says that weeklies turn their great weakness into strength.
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Zen weedwhacking – Mitchell’s approach to life is evident in the way that he mows his lawn.
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