10.4.2000
Cut the fat; It'll read better

Related story: Looking for trouble: Truck squad gets down and dirty to keep R.I. highways safe

   I'm not as well trained as a cook, but I've heard about the important process of reduction.
   You mix up a batch of something much too soupy, and then simmer for hours until most of the liquid is gone. But many of the ingredients and flavors remain, so the result is tastier and less sloppy than when you began.
   The truck-safety story, like most of the longer stories I've worked on, went something like that. The first draft was nauseatingly overlong. Through rewriting, as Sunday editor Tim Murphy turned up the heat, I boiled it down into a somewhat more presentable form.
   If the Chef can be indulged a little longer with this junk-journalism metaphor, I should also report that dinner was served late.
   The story originally was ordered for the daily Providence Journal menu as a timely fast-facts service to readers worried about the nightmarish trucks that appear in their rearview mirrors, in light of two recent and horrific truck accidents.
   But things went awry in the kitchen.
   The Chef fussed that there weren't enough nutritious Facts & Figures, high in useful calories and low in brain-clogging fat, and that the wholesalers (various federal and state agencies) were slow in delivering.
   It also was decided to take a field trip to round up some native-grown ingredients to spice things up with local flavor. So Journal photographer Jimmy Molloy, who knows more about police procedures than most police officers, and I spent a very fruitful day with those energetic troopers at the R.I. State Police ``truck squad,'' the Ginsu knife-wielders of highway safety.
   Back in the Journal dining room, understandably impatient editors were drumming their fingers on the city desks - realizing to their horror that the menu had changed from luncheon to Sunday-dinner proportions.
   The Chef plodded along, tossing things into the expensive, high-tech Dell computer crock pot, still fretting over the undersupply of actual facts, arguing on the phone with the government-data wholesalers to speed up their Facts & Figures.
   Finally, editor Murphy, speaking for the other diners, declared that the story would be served up on a day certain, at a time certain. And it was, sort of. It was delivered as a Sunday centerpiece, presented much more palatably than it deserved by the Journal's design genius, Cecilia Prestamo.
   We don't know how many readers devoured this, but presumably they wolfed it down in much shorter order than it had taken to prepare and many of them left behind vast amounts of unconsumed Facts & Figures.
   Crews cleaned up the unread portions later that Sunday -- although some people may have put it aside with the vain hope that they would nibble on it later in the week.
   Finally, the remains were hauled to the Central Landfill, in Johnston, R.I. presumably in huge, dangerous-looking trucks that we hope were as wholesome and generally safe as the menu had promised.