A story unfolds

Our advanced reporting class went to a field trip to the Orlando Sentinel yesterday where we got to sit through a budget meeting in which editors, writers, page/web designers and photographers pitched their ideas about upcoming stories. After the meeting, a few of the Sentinel staff stayed to talk to us. As I was listening to Editor-in-Chief Charlotte Hall talk about the future of journalism, she mentioned that the inverted pyramid way of writing news is fading from newspapers and is more suited for the web, and journalists should start thinking about writing in an anecdotal way to capture readers.

I started thinking about all the stories I’ve read that really grabbed my attention and the one story that popped up in my head was from the St. Petersburg Times, titled,"Mary and Jim to the End." First of all, I first read this story in my news reporting class at Florida Community College. I remember we were discussing feature writing and my professor mentioned the St. Petersburg Times as a perfect example of anecdotal writing. My professor described the St. Petersburg Times as a “writer’s newspaper” because of the narrative and descriptive way they write some of their stories.

Mary and Jim to the End is an article about Jim Morrison from the Doors and Mary Werbelow, a woman he fell in love with before he became famous. The article is fairly long highlighting the years of Jim and Mary’s relationship from 1962-2005. But this doesn’t drag the readers throughout all those years, instead the St. Petersburg Times breaks down the years into segments and keeping only the significant parts of their relationship. It explores the first time Jim and Mary meets and carries the readers until the aftermath of Jim’s death. When I was reading this article in class, I had a hard time listening to my professor’s lecture that day because I couldn’t take my eyes off the story. Reading the story was like having a movie play inside my head, I could see the beach where Mary saw Jim the first time and I could feel the emotion coming from Mary when she had to make the decision to break up with Jim.

St. Petersburg Times writes:

He was drinking hard and taking psychedelic drugs. The darkness she says she had seen from the start was overtaking him, and she didn't want to watch him explore his self-destructive bent. She felt he had swallowed her identity. Whatever he liked, she liked.

"I had to go out and see what parts of that were me. I just knew I had to be away from him. I needed to be by myself, to find my own identity."

This type of writing really takes people in-depth into someone’s thoughts and feelings making the reader feel part of the actual story. Another reason why I loved this article because it introduces quotes perfectly into the article without making it sound awkward or surprising the reader. It flows well enough that each sentence in the story transitions smoothly to the next.

If this is the future of journalism, then I don’t mind. More importantly, I want to be this type of writer. To engage readers to a story by taking them on a journey from the beginning to the end is a more meaningful way of giving insight into someone’s mind.