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Embarassingly bad work… and what it’s taught me

So, I probably shouldn’t perpetuate links to stories from my past that are less than stellar, but oh well. I will do so for the sake of showing those just starting out that everybody starts somewhere. And for myself, to remind me how far I actually have come.

Someone hit this blog by searching for “Meranda Watling” on Google. (I am still always curious about why random people search for me, but it’s one of those things I’ve come to accept.)

I’ve mentioned before what comes up on this search, but it’s been awhile since I Googled myself, so I clicked on the link in my counter to see if anything new or cool popped up. No such luck.

After the expected top hits — MerandaWrites, my LinkedIn profile, my ClaimID — comes the Stater stuff. Mainly, a list of my articles (though, not all of them as we switched hosts and systems half-way through my sophomore year and never moved the archives).

Now, let me start by saying, seven months into my first real job I have grown a lot, but I still have much, much, much more growing to do as a person and a reporter. I realize that, and anyone at this level of the game who doesn’t think they have much to learn is delusional.

I think, actually, that’s what makes reading my old Stater stories so humbling.

Even as I wince at my blunders in these, some of my first stories ever, the practical experience I now have keeps my brain thinking, “If I did this story today, I would …” And I think that’s great. It’s a sign I’m learning. I wonder what I’ll think three years from now of the way I covered the budgets this fall, my first time covering them, or next fall how I’ll feel about the round of first day of school stories I just did as I search desperately for more new angles.

Some of these stories are pretty horrible. Allow me to introduce the lead/first-five-graphs (the holy grail of whether a story flies or flops at the J&C) of one of the articles I wrote during RPA about the fire chief being a finalist for another job:

Kent Fire Chief Jim Williams has been named one of 10 finalists for the fire chief position in Delaware.

Delaware, located in Central Ohio north of Columbus, is among the fastest growing communities not only in Ohio, but in the nation. According to the U.S. Census, Delaware County was listed as the 12th-fastest growing county in the country between April 2000 and July 2005.

In the 2000 U.S. Census, the city of Delaware’s population increased 24.7 percent. In the same period, Kent’s population declined 3.3 percent.

The growing nature of the area is exactly what attracted Williams to apply for the position, he said.

“It’s an opportunity in a growing community,” Williams said. “The department’s a little larger than ours … but it’s a pretty similar department.”

The fact that it was in Ohio also impacted his decision to apply because he said he’d like to stay in the pension system here.

I mean what?! It reads like a Wikipedia entry. I don’t get into the context — that the chief’s been in the job a decade and at the department for another 17 years beyond that — or anything else until I’ve already lost my readers to boredom and confusion (Delaware? They only have on chief for the whole state? huh? Oh, it’s a city in Ohio. Now I get you.) from which they never recover.

To be sure, not all of those stories were horrible. Although this one about a bridge being closed (as far as I know this bridge is STILL closed a year and a half later) and the impact it’s had on the area citizens could stand to be cut, I do like the lead:

Jim Wyle was excited recently when he saw railroad workers on the tracks near the Middlebury Road bridge. Thinking they were there to work on the bridge, he started a conversation.

But the workers were only working on the tracks. In fact, they complained to Wyle, who has lived near the bridge for 15 years, that they had to go all the way around because the bridge was closed.

Wyle’s response?

“How would you like to live here and do that every day?” he asked.

Nearly 80 Kent residents met yesterday afternoon at the Kent American Legion to discuss the problems and delays with the Middlebury bridge and the possible legal action they could take.

The Middlebury bridge, which links the residents to Cuyahoga Falls, Akron and the other side of the city, has been closed because of safety concerns since March 2003, said Gene Roberts, service director for the city of Kent.

OK, so I cheated, that was six graphs. But they weren’t as long and it flowed much smoother. The anecdote really got to the point of the story.

Ironically, I wrote both those stories within a week of each other. I guess that shows, it was hit or miss. In a lot of ways, it still is.

Even now, I have days where I really like the stories I write or interviews that go particularly well. Then, I have others where I feel that nothing I do is any good and I should just scrap it and start over or give up. Sometimes, I even feel that way about different stories running in the same issue. But ah las, I can’t do that.

The beauty of newspaper reporting is that every day you are essentially handed a blank canvas. It’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to paint and fill it that day. And sometimes, when you’re done, you are really happy with the outcome. And other times, when you’re done, you can’t wait for the next day to end so you can forget all about that canvas and start again fresh.

Not everything I produce is going to be great. Although it kills me, I have come to accept that sometimes I’ll miss the mark. Those are the days I hustle to leave before my story’s edited and when I hesitate to open the daily readme memo from our editors to see just how far off I was and whether they noticed.

But you know what? Those are the stories that teach me the most. They’re the ones I come back to as I grow and say, “OK, knowing what I know now, how would I approach this differently?” Then, the next time sometime like that comes along, I know better and my work is better. Give me a few years to get a few “could have been better” stories out of the way. I’ll be a more humble and effective reporter for it.

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