Arial Sabar: Assume nothing, and let everyone read it
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8.19.98
Arial Sabar: Assume nothing, and let everyone read it |
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About two years ago, a smoke detector went off in the luggage hold of a United Express plane, and the pilot declared an emergency. I was working late that night and was assigned the story. It turned out to be pretty minor. The smoke detector had sounded by accident. The airplane landed safely at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick R.I. There was no fire. But this story -- all four inches of it -- is what first piqued my interest in how commuter airlines are marketed. When I called United for comment, they told me that United Express, their commuter service, was run by an entirely different company. Something called Atlantic Coast Airlines. I was a bit perplexed. The plane was painted with United's colors and name. Why would another company be flying it? I didn't much think about it again until one day last February when City Editor Andy Burkhardt dropped a few clips on my desk about a lawsuit in North Carolina. The suit stemmed from the crash of an American Eagle flight in 1994 that killed a Warwick grandmother and 14 others. A jury ruled that American Airlines was partly liable for the crash because its marketing led passengers to believe that American Airlines and American Eagle were one and the same -- even though ``American Eagle'' was actually flown by a Nashville company called Flagship Airlines. American Airlines denied responsibility. Here was a shining opportunity to delve into a subject that had made me curious two years before. This time, however, there was a lawsuit, a jury verdict, a victim from Rhode Island, a family member (her son) who was mad as heck at American Airlines, and the potential for tie-ins to a national issue. I didn't want this to be a story about one upset person who had lost a mom. The case of Pauline Josefson, while poignant, was an example of something much bigger. I wanted to tell the bigger story. If I couldn't generalize from her experience, I didn't think the story was worth telling. My reporting took me from chats with passengers waiting for flights at T.F. Green to public documents on the Web, government reports, and interviews with travel agents, consumer advocates, plaintiffs' lawyers, airline officials, federal officials, and the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. I was working the night beat, so my progress was slow. If I did two or three interviews a week, I was doing well. Within a couple of months, the file drawer beside my desk was a mess of reports and computer printous. I struggled a lot over how to write the story. I took drafts home with me and mulled over them. The subject of "code sharing" was complicated. And it was one that most people -- including me before I started writing about it -- didn't know the first thing about. I could take nothing for granted. I had to assume the readers knew zilch. The story would have to begin from what little a lay person could identify with and then build block by block from that. My lead, I think, accomplishes the former. To keep readers interested as I moved into the experts and the reports and the more arcane twists and turns, I returned now and again to Pauline Josefson's story. The human drama -- which plays on readers' desire to know what happens next -- would keep eyes from glazing over. It would remind readers that the story was not just some abstract argument about marketing. This was my hope, anyway. Perhaps the biggest writing lesson I learned from this piece is how helpful it can be to show drafts of a complicated story to anyone you can lasso. Be prepared to swallow your pride and be willing to listen. A journalist friend at another paper looked at an early lead and said, "This doesn't move me. Make it more personal." Another friend, a doctor, got about two thirds through the story and put it down. "I feel the story has ended," she said. "You're giving me no reason to read on." Another person, a sports reporter here, advised me to avoid a 50-cent word when a five-cent one would do. The editors saved me from other disgraces. Working on this kind of story, it's easy to get blinded by the minutiae -- there's just so much of it. You're at risk of forgetting what first excited you about the story, and you need some perspective. So if there's a moral in all this, it's let other people read your stuff. Show it to a non-journalist. Show it to anyone whose judgment you respect but who knows nothing about the subject. They're who you're writing for. |
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