media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Be Clear

(Feb. 7, 2008)  One day my not-quite-three-year-old daughter looked up at her father with big brown eyes, tugged at his shirt and said: “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

That’s how I feel sometimes when I read newspapers, and not just the Times-Standard or Eureka Reporter. I often want to tug at the shirt of the San Francisco Chronicle or New York Times and ask the reporters: What are you talking about? Newspapers exist to inform their readers. But often they leave us more confused than before we picked up the page. A newspaper’s survival depends on relevancy to readers, but you can’t have relevancy without clarity, which is the ability to explain something without confusing the hell out of your reader.

When readers see big headlines and front page placement, they understand that a story is important. But when they read the story and don’t understand it, they end up feeling ignorant or stupid. And I would bet that’s not the reaction the reporters and editors hoped to get. Newspapers are more prone to this than radio. With radio, when listeners don’t understand what they hear, the topic changes so fast they forget what it was they didn’t understand. In print, when readers are interested but confused, they reread. So the newspaper confuses them over and over.

Mastering clarity takes time. It means giving the reader just enough but not too much information. It means pacing out information in chunks so that the reader can digest it. It often means sacrificing elegant wording for clunky copy. Imagine yourself trying to tell a great story, but you tell it to someone who keeps interrupting your story with questions that seem basic. Telling the story takes more time than you anticipated. The tale turns tedious.

It means spending more time on topics that are real for many people, but not very sexy from a storytelling perspective. There you are trying to tell a great story about something that happened at work the other day and the listener seems fixated on how you got your job in the first place, even though that’s irrelevant to the story you want to tell.

Within stories, reporters tend to skim over and bury the information they don’t find interesting to spend more space and time on what they consider more interesting. But folks who work on newspapers need to understand that readers have different rating systems for measuring the importance of different issues than do the reporters and editors. Readers get confused when newspaper stories seem to overrate issues they don’t think are important or when they underrate issues the readers think are critical. And if readers think that an issue that a reporter skimmed over is important, they will want to tug at the reporter’s sleeve and say: “Hold on now, what was that you said back there?”

Let’s look at two recent stories in the Times-Standard about confusing issues: Schwarzenegger’s proposed state budget and Proposition 93, which was on the Feb. 5 ballot.

A three-person team of Jessie Faulkner, Karen Wilkinson and Thaddeus Greenson put together the Jan. 11 state budget story. But first consider the challenge of reporting the California budget to local readers. It is so immense and contains so many pieces reporters must summarize an awful lot and then piece out parts relevant to different readers without boring the math-challenged. And they must do all that in about 1000 words.

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