Related story: Overwhelmed

By GERALD M. CARBONE and DAVID HERZOG
Journal Staff Writers

Dean Starkman, a former colleague at The Providence Journal, once said that the worst thing he ever did to the Journal was to win a Pulitzer Prize by writing an investigative piece in a narrative fashion. After Dean and the newspaper's Investigate Team won success with that piece, there was a tendency to write every investigative/explanatory story as a narrative. And the fact is, the narrative form is rarely right for an investigative-type piece.

We wrestled with writing our investigation of probation as a straight narrative, and we found that it just wouldn't work. Certainly the piece has narrative elements embedded within it -- scenes with setting, characters, and dialogue -- but the story was too complex to begin by just dropping readers into a scene. We know because we tried to do that.

Gerald M. Carbone, nicknamed ``Ged'', began writing the story after his first interview with a probation counselor in Warwick, RI. In a morning spent in the Kent County office, he saw a counselor deal with the case of a convicted child molester who owns a baseball-card shop, a convicted swindler working in real estate, a man who raped a teenager installing gym equipment in high schools, and a man on parole for running a chop-shop delivering autos.

Ged wrote that scene, and then spent a day with counselors in Providence. This reporting also resulted in a scene with a setting (a drab place where carpets are bound by duct tape and wallpaper curls off the walls), characters (a hooker, a roofer), and dialogue (``To be honest with you, it's not that I haven't been doing what I've been doing; it's just that I haven't gotten caught.'').

Ged wrote those scenes as he got them, which was good, because then we had them in the bag. But neither scene would work as a lead; each was too narrow a slice of the problem pie. So rather than begin with a scene, we began with a simple, declarative sentence: the system is broken.

The lead paragraph basically came from an e-mail that David Herzog sent Ged, which Ged then cannibalized as a lead. We could authoritatively state that things were broken because we had done so much reporting that we knew this was verifiably true. In fact, this was a strange story to report, because the bureaucrats were dying to tell us how awful their system was; this was somewhat disorienting, as usually they defend it.

Before we even explained what probation was, we showed why it was important: because 1 in 33 Rhode Islanders is currently in the probation system. Then we finished our lead ``scene'' by explaining what probation was, how the problems came to be, and what the problems were.

After that, we tacked on Ged's scenes from Providence and Warwick to show what we had said.

The reporting and writing was pretty far along when David found a man who had been arrested 30 times while out on probation; this case, too, demonstrated the problems we had mentioned, so David wrote a scene of that man in court to buttress our statement that the system is broken. David initially felt that this scene should end the story, but Assistant Metro Editor Elliot Krieger said it made sense to stick this scene on the heels of the other two true scenes to maintain the rhythm. Elliot was flexible about this; Ged agreed with him, and David didn't object.

We worked well as a team; Ged and David rarely sat together at the keyboard, but both writers felt free to add or subtract, then discuss material with the other. Elliot pushed for a narrative lead at the initial stages, but was willing to listen when the writers said it would not work. Elliot was calm throughout the process, which was good, as this piece needed time to mature.

While laying out the pages, Page designer Cecilia Prestamo noticed that some of our best information was going to run after the jump; she suggested to Sunday Editor Tim Murphy that we move that information a few graphs higher in the story.

Tim, Ged, and David considered the suggestion and found that it could be done with a little tinkering; so we did it. The relationship between writer and page designer can be volatile. For instance, had Cecilia suggested we begin the story with a word that begins with G because the letter would make a pretty rubric, Ged would have freaked out; on the other hand, there's nothing worse than discovering that the key sentence in your lead scene missed making page 1 by a single sentence. When that happens, you wish the page designer had said something so that you could've squeezed the text a bit through editing or tweaking the leading (the white space between sentences). In this case, Cecilia's comments were valid and good and welcome.

After David's courtroom scene, we dropped out of the narrative mode to finish. We explained that The Providence Journal's G. Wayne Miller exposed these problems 15 years ago, and that the only thing that has changed is that the system has gotten worse. We also told people how the Corrections Department intends to fix the problem, which is good, useful information for people to know. Tobias Wolff says: ``Information is the death of story.'' But sometimes, in an explanatory piece, you've got to sacrifice story for information; in this piece, we tried to balance the two.