bryan curtis

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring Cleveland, graffiti, & Moneyball

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson says arbitration process keeps bad cops on police force (2/27/15, Cleveland Plain Dealer): As the city of Cleveland continues to face massive local and national scrutiny for the actions of its police force, its largest newspaper showed a great way this week of elevating the discussion with informative coverage.

The staff took what could have been a simple daily news story — the mayor holding a press conference and speaking out against the arbitration process on disciplined officers — and turned it into something deeper. In addition to the straightforward recap of the mayor’s comments, the newspaper focused on five specific arbitration cases and broke them down in a meaningful way.

News outlets are constantly looking for these kinds of “see for yourself” applications to major stories. The Plain Dealer included on its web site both summaries and the actual documents from the selected arbitration cases. This is empowering information for anyone who chooses to use it.

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3 GREAT STORIES: Starring India, SNL, & Soldierstone

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Fulfilling a promise, Jewish center in India reopens after terror attack (8/26/14, New York Times): Here is an example of what the New York Times often does so well.

Writer Gardiner Harris tells the story of a Jewish center in India that had been “attacked and gutted during a 2008 killing rampage by Pakistani gunmen”. A week ago, the center re-opened, with a group of Hasidic men from Brooklyn having flown to Mumbai to help dedicate it.

The facts of the story are interesting on their own. But Harris elevates them by surrounding them with context, a summary of Jewish history in India, and personal perspectives. Sometimes, as journalists, we complete a story and wonder if we have covered everything worth mentioning in our tiny allotted window.

This is a complete story, and Harris — with his editors, for giving him the space — deserves credit for a job thoroughly done. (more…)

3 GREAT STORIES: The all-Grantland edition

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

The web site Grantland.com covers a lot of ground … with various degrees of success.

An off-shoot of ESPN’s web site, helmed by its most popular writer, Bill Simmons, the Grantland site is a hub for creative writing on sports and entertainment. At its best, it features some of the sports world’s most perceptive and insightful writers (particularly Zach Lowe, who runs circles around most basketball analysts) and does as good a job as anyone in joyfully tackling the frivolity of show business. At its worst, it often seems hypocritical, transparently searching for the type of clickbait (promoting “‘hot takes’ … dunks, GIFs and more” in its sports coverage) it elsewhere claims to disavow (regularly parodying those same knee-jerk hot sports takes).

But Grantland’s contributors do one thing particularly well: analyze themselves.

Many of the site’s columns involve turning the lens inward, performing the classic storytelling trick of exposing the process of journalism. The writers often insert themselves into stories and discuss their thought process about the very story they are covering. Again, sometimes this comes off as stale and self-promoting. But often it provides a great window into how the media works — especially in the highly-scrutinized worlds of sports and entertainment.

This past week showed three examples of Grantland at its best:

At least one real, authentic moment of humanity with Cameron Diaz (7/23/14, Grantland): Take this story, in which writer Alex Pappademas covers the site’s “Rom-Com Week” — yes, a week devoted to romantic comedies in the movies — by chatting with one of the genre’s more notable actresses, Cameron Diaz.

The problem for Pappademas? His interview with Diaz is a bit of an awkward mess, patrolled by PR folks and unable to produce the kind of honest insight he had desired.

So he focuses his article on just that: the awkwardness.

He sets the tone by sprinkling his first few paragraphs with sentences that read like mental note-jotting, treating himself almost like a detective going to interview a key witness. Throughout the description of his allotted time with Diaz, he documents numerous moments of ridiculousness, exposing more about the process than about Diaz.

It’s an enjoyable — and informative — ride. (more…)