[Industrialblog,
January 24, 2006]
Covering the Meeting
I read Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man over the weekend. It was interesting, but something bugged me about it. It seemed to have a wrong focus. It took me until this morning to figure out the problem: Norah covered the meeting. Let me explain.
Back when I was a cub reporter on the Bridgeton Evening News, my first beat was covering local government meetings. I used to come back with these stories about what happened at the meeting. My boss used to say, "We don't want you writing the stories this way; the goal is not to write stories about meetings, it's to go to meetings to get stories."
Norah spent a lot of her narrative talking about what she did: her dressing up, the revelation to people, that sort of thing. But she had promised insight ... not enough. She covered the meeting, not the story. FWIW.
Back when I was a cub reporter on the Bridgeton Evening News, my first beat was covering local government meetings. I used to come back with these stories about what happened at the meeting. My boss used to say, "We don't want you writing the stories this way; the goal is not to write stories about meetings, it's to go to meetings to get stories."
Norah spent a lot of her narrative talking about what she did: her dressing up, the revelation to people, that sort of thing. But she had promised insight ... not enough. She covered the meeting, not the story. FWIW.