The Power of Words. Arial SABAR: Working the night beat means 'event' stories

5/13/98
Arial SABAR: Working the night beat means 'event' stories

       When you work the night beat, you get intimately acquainted with a species of journalism I'll call "the event story.'' Everyone's had to do them. You get into work and your editor tells you to go out and write a story on a party, celebration, festival, fair, parade, school talent show. You know the routine.
       In some ways, I dread these assignments. The thought that always crosses my mind is, What on Earth am I going to find here that readers will care about?
       The fallback approach in a lot of these stories is this: Cull cutesy quotes from revellers and string them together in a random sequence whose chief effect, however unintended, is readers who stop at the jump. These are the stories in which we read about so many sugar-loaded 2-year-olds staring in awe as a clown tortures a long balloon into the likeness of a rabbit.
       Working the night beat has given me opportunities to experiment with writing event stories, simply because a lot of the events I'm talking about take place at night. One that stands out was the Joe Garrahy Flannel Shirt Reception.
       The reception was a $100-a-head cocktail party at the State House, a fundraiser for the Rhode Island Historical Society. It took place on the 20th anniversary of the Blizzard of '78, and the guest of honor was former Governor J. Joseph Garrahy, whose flannel shirt has become a blizzard icon.
       My editor told me a day in advance that I'd be covering the party, and this helped. It gave me time to come up with a "bigger idea'' to guide my reporting and cement together the details I would find at the party. When I use this approach in event stories, I find I stay much more focussed when I sit down to write.
       The big idea, or question, I came up with for this story was: Why was a 20-year-old blizzard that killed 21 people and stranded hundreds of children in school overnight a cause for celebration? This query was at the back of my mind as I interviewed martini-sipping guests about how they weathered the blizzard and why they were toasting it two decades later.
       The answers I got became the backbone of the bottom two-thirds of my story: It wasn't the destruction people were celebrating, it was the goodness the blizzard brought out in people. It was the English professor with a house on Benefit Street who let two stranded UPS workers live with him until the blizzard passed.
       This larger idea anchored the story, but wasn't enough to convey the light and sound of a high-class soire. That's where the top of the story came in. A flannel-shirt reception is a pretty whacky idea on the face of it, and I didn't fight it. I chose a simple lede that set a tone of whimsy for the rest of the piece:
       "J. Joseph Garrahy looked fetching in his red, white and green plaid flannel.''
       Because I used the top of the story to paint the scene at the party, the transition to the second part came easier than it might have: "In some respects, Joe Garrahy's Flannel Shirt Reception had the air of a dinner party in which guests reenact the last meal on the Titanic. The dandily attired guests plucked skewered tenderloin hors d'oeuvres from passed trays and gabbed beneath gilt-framed portraits of George Washington and Oliver Hazard Perry, seemingly oblivious to the newsreels of snowbound Armageddon that flickered across a TV screen behind them.''
       I think that sometimes in event stories we are tempted to include every little detail we have in our notebooks because we think that's what is meant by "color.'' I know I've done this. But without a bigger idea to make sense of those details, the color dims and readers lose their bearings, and their interest.
       Granted, a Flannel Shirt Reception hosted by a charismatic former governor is a little more unusual than, say, a Fourth of July parade. Still, I think this story worked because it had a single unifying theme, a guiding principle. I included only those details that did work, the ones that advanced "the bigger idea.'' I left out everything else.

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