We’ve all read about them. The determined teacher. The courageous firefighter.
If only life were that simple, says Louise Kiernan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
But things are complicated. The world isn’t black and white. You have to embrace the gray, Kiernan says.
“Question anything that seems simple,” she says.
Kiernan led a session Saturday on making sense of the complex. One way
she’s done that in her own reporting is by using public documents.
Whether it’s a long-term feature or
an investigative piece, documents will help you tell the story, she
says.
In 1999, a piece of glass fell from a downtown building in Chicago. It smashed on the head of a woman and killed her.
Kiernan chased the story. Through her reporting, she found that the
building’s company had known of the cracking window and hadn’t repaired
it.
“The person I was writing about was dead,” she said. “The people I
needed to talk to wouldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t have written the
story without the documents.”
Kiernan says all reporters should know how to do at least this much:
- look up courthouse records
- write a Freedom of Information request
Send a Freedom of Information request to everyone involved in the story, she says. The Chicago
police gave her documents with blacked-out names. The city building
department gave her the same records, untouched.
See the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press for more information on these skills.
When you get to the story-writing stage, keep the complex simple with these eight tips:
In a story about a man learning to read, Kiernan wrote: “He says the
word as if he is surprised he has grabbed it, a fly banging and buzzing
in his fist, sure to escape if he loosens his grip.”
through your characters’ experiences. Relate the conceptual to the
concrete.
3.) Keep numbers simple. Connect them to your characters.
In her article about the falling glass, Kiernan said the piece that fell was about the size of a
cafeteria tray. Using visual comparisons lets readers see what you mean.
Details should reveal something about the character. They shouldn’t be random.
They don’t have to be human — like in Kiernan’s story about nearly 6,000 people stuck in a Chicago airport: “On the radar screens, the thunderstorms slide across the country in
silence, creeping toward O’Hare. But, on the ground, they stampede like
a posse of drunken cowboys, slamming up to the airport in a swirl of
gusts…”
7.) Hone every sentence to its simplest, strongest elements.
This takes reporting. Sentences get sloppy when you’re writing around something you don’t completely understand.
