Digging around the Review\u2019s archives last week for stories to submit to the California Newspaper and Publishers Association contest, I found quite a few pieces that would have been promising had I gone a step further.\u00a0 You know the step that requires you to make that extra call? Find that last perspective? Add the graph that gives it wider context?<\/p>\n
Often the wider context seems painfully obvious at the time. Sometimes it feels like I\u2019m connecting the dots for readers who presumably know the basics of what\u2019s going on outside Half Moon Bay. Paging through the archives, it was obvious that a few months, or even a year, can dim the timeliness of such stories. So my thought is to plug in those extra graphs in the top third of the story, even though writing them feels like hand holding. Maybe some of my hesitation is because it\u2019s sometimes awkward to weave such \u201cwider-context\u201d blurbs into the fabric of an otherwise local story.<\/p>\n
Some weeks, writing nine or 10 is an overwhelming task. Truth be told, for the five or so stories that beg for those \u201cextra steps,\u201d it\u2019s just a matter of calling up an expert at Stanford, or googling around for a national news story that articulates the wider trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Digging around the Review\u2019s archives last week for stories to submit to the California Newspaper and Publishers Association contest, I found quite a few pieces that would have been promising had I gone a step further.\u00a0 You know the step … Continue reading