The Hard Work of Getting the News

            We went to see the movie “Spotlight” last week, and like nearly everyone else thought it was terrific. Viewing it from the perspective of a former newspaperman, I couldn’t help but think about it in the context of today’s news business.

            The film tells the story of a team of four reporters from the Boston Globe who, in 2001-02, uncovered the widespread pattern of pedophilia by priests in the Boston diocese and the systematic degree to which the Catholic Church covered it up. It took a year of attacking the story from multiple angles before the paper finally had it nailed down and ready to print.

            A little more than a decade later, things have changed. Four reporters no longer constitute a special investigative team. In too many cases, four reporters is the whole newsroom, and that obviously has a limiting effect on any news operation’s ability to investigate a large, complex story.

When It Takes More Than a Tweet

            This has been a while coming, but I could see it on the horizon when I left the business more than 20 years ago. I vividly remember a conversation I had toward the end with a corporate executive whose office was far, far away from the town our newspaper served. Arguing against budget cuts, I made the point that when a reporter is cut from the news staff, that amounts to two to three hundred stories a year that don’t get covered.

            “That’s the old way of thinking,” the executive replied, strongly implying that there was something wrong with me for not being able to figure out how to generate professionally written news stories without any people to research and write them.

            What “Spotlight” depicts so well is the phenomenal amount of hard work and ingenuity that goes into running a story to earth. It takes an understanding of the wide range of ways of getting information (from interviews to poring over documents until your eyes glaze over) that non-professionals simply don’t have. Sure, anybody can tweet a photo or a putative factoid, but a complex story that someone doesn’t want told? That’s another matter.

Making Sense out of Chaos

            Seeing the movie shortly after the terror attacks in Paris brought home another point. It takes both professionalism and time to make sense out of a huge breaking story like the Paris attacks. But we have become a society that wants to wait for nothing, hence a much more partially (and dangerously) informed society.

            Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist, noted that the internet, and Twitter in particular, in the wake of a big, messy story like the terror attacks, is a maelstrom of knee-jerk opinion and misinformation (slightly paraphrased).

            The great CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow once said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.” Instant communication has made that situation even worse, and I have to wonder how many people will remember things about Paris years from now that simply aren’t true, but that came out in the immediate aftermath without proper vetting.

            I agree with Manjoo. If you really want to be informed about a story like Paris, turn off the TV, don’t look at the internet, and wait a day until the facts have been sorted out and the worst misinformation has receded into the background.

            As if anyone will do that.

Easing Into Friendship

            Funny how the mind works. Sunday was perhaps our last day of Indian Summer, and Linda and I went down to the Esplanade in Capitola to get a latte from Mr. Toots Coffeehouse and drink it on one of the benches looking out over Capitola Beach and the Monterey Bay.

            Because other people had similar ideas, Linda took off to stake out a bench as soon as her beverage was up, and while mine was still being prepared. I paid for both the drinks and left, walking down the Esplanade toward the bench area. Because it was crowded; because I didn’t know where she was; and because I’d forgotten to get a lid for my cup of coffee, I took it slowly.

            That was probably why I noticed the menu at Zelda’s, one of the restaurants facing the beach. I didn’t really read it, but it was broken down by meal, and for some reason, when I saw breakfast, I thought of my friend John.

The Business Power Breakfast

            John and I had met in 1994 in connection with a political campaign his wife and I were working on, but we really got to know each other in 1996-97 when we were both working on a contentious land-use project in Santa Cruz. That was when a mutual respect for each other’s professional abilities evolved into a friendship that has lasted to this day.

            One of the ways in which that happened was over a series of meals, coffees, and drinks after work, where we got together to talk about the project and the conversation branched out to other topics.

            Breakfast at Zelda’s was part of that ongoing experience, but I can’t say for sure how many times it happened. Not many; two or three at most, and maybe only once. Nor do I recall anything of great import being spoken or decided. It was merely one of many instances where we got together — one link in the chain, as it were.

            And it may be that the only reason it stands out is that I don’t recall ever eating breakfast at Zelda’s alone or with anyone else. Lunch, yes, but the only breakfast memory is associated with John.

Evolution, Not Drama

            One of the hardest things to do in fiction or drama is to show the development of a friendship. It’s often done by depicting a dramatic event that brings two people together and establishes an instant bond of trust. And to be sure, there are a number of friendships that develop in that fashion.

            More often that not, however, it’s a longer, subtler process. It’s an accumulation of shared experiences that develop a common bond of trust and affection. For every friendship made in the Hollywood way, there are dozens that were forged over breakfasts at Zelda’s and other such gatherings that gave two people a chance to talk and connect and get to feel comfortable with each other.

            True friendship takes time to develop, and, because of that, can weather the test of time. And it’s based on a personal connection, forged by extended periods of time spent together, getting to know each other. There’s no substitute for face-to-face experience, and it’s safe to say there will never be an app for that.

The Slump

            November got off to a good start in terms of book sales. The first two days of the month were well above average, and I had high hopes that things would continue in that fashion the rest of the way.

            But, as they say in the financial services industry, past performance is no guarantee of future results. On the third day of the month, sales dropped to below average, and on the fourth day, I sold no books at all.

            A day without sales is not unheard of. I’m in the early stages of self-publishing my mystery novels, and while I haven’t been at it long, I’ve been doing it long enough to know that sales are random and fluctuate wildly. The day with no sales simply offset one of the two good days at the beginning, and there was nothing to worry about.

            Until, that is, the day of bupkis was followed by another (not unusual), then another (more unusual), then another (quite unusual).

The Skunk on the Couch

            Athletes are familiar with slumps. Sports fans can readily call to mind a ball player who suddenly couldn’t hit or a basketball hotshot who suddenly couldn’t make a wide-open shot. It’s in the nature of the game. The athletes, however, can at least practice more, work on their technique, and try to pull themselves out of it.

            My book sales, however, are entirely outside my control. People buy when they do for all sorts of reasons, and with no apparent pattern. My wife thinks it’s all random; I think there’s an algorithm somewhere and I just haven’t found it. But no matter what the reason, I can’t control it.

            I tried to influence the sales with tweets and other social media. No luck. I had an ad running on television. El Zippo.  After days of being skunked, I began to think of the skunk as a personal entity. In my mind, the sales chart was a once-pristine retail outlet purveying my books, now transformed by a skunk on the couch, scaring the customers away.

Beer and Potato Chips

            As sale-less day followed sale-less day, and my morale began to droop like a mustache in a Georgia summer, I found myself elaborating on the skunk fantasy. I pictured Skunk lying back on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, watching daytime soaps while swilling beer and eating countless sacks of potato chips. Then I began to envision him inviting his no-account relations over and trashing the room altogether.

            Even my wife was saying I needed to sell a book and get this thing over with.

            It was getting so bad I asked someone I know to buy a book, just to see if my sales were being properly recorded by Amazon. The sale showed up promptly and told me that Amazon wasn’t the problem.

            The slump lasted eight wretched, nerve-wracking days, and then, like a heat wave broken by a rainstorm, it was over. On the ninth day, I returned home after my Rotary Club meeting, went to my sales report, and found that in the time I’d been gone, I’d sold two and a half times the normal daily volume of books. Just like that!

            This slump was at the far edge of the bell-shaped curve (if not off it altogether), and I’ll probably have no idea why it happened. That’s all right; I don’t have to know. I just don’t want to go through it again any time soon.

Getting It the First Time

            There are plenty of generalizations about the writing process, and some of them are even true. Today I’d like to talk about one that’s often presented as being absolutely true, even though it’s only mostly true.

            It’s been expressed in various ways, but the thrust of it is, “The first draft of a book is always terrible.”

            Substitute “usually” or “often” for “always” in that sentence, and I wouldn’t argue too much. From almost everything I’ve written and heard, I’ve concluded that most authors, particularly fiction authors, discover their book in the process of writing it. When the first draft is completed, they’re left with something that ended up being a lot different than what they started out to do.

            Get me rewrite!

            There are, however, and always have been authors who know what they want to do and pretty much nail it on the first try. In such cases there’s always some cleanup and tightening to be done, but it’s hardly a major overhaul.

The Speedy Genre Writer

            I’ve read — though so long ago I’ve forgotten where — that Dickens and Shakespeare wrote quickly, channeling the muse before she escaped. When Dickens, at the urging of Bulwer-Lytton, rewrote the end of Great Expectations, he was simply adjusting what he already had, not reimagining it anew.

            A certain number of genre writers, working within an established format, are able to figure out the book beforehand and come up with a first draft that works, with a few changes. I have recent evidence of this. Over the weekend I read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mystery The Second Confession, written in 1949. And I do mean all written in 1949.

            According to a note at the end of my edition, Stout began writing the book (some 240 pages long) on March 16, 1949 and completed it April 23. It was then submitted to the publisher and after typesetting, final editing and legal review, it was published September 6.

            That’s five and a half months from first keystroke to book off the presses. And he did it with typewriters. And 65 years later, it’s better written than many current best-sellers.

Doing the Thinking First

            It takes me a year to get one of my mystery novels written, but it isn’t the writing and revisions that take up most of the time. A lot of that time involves prep work and outlining. I’m one of those writers who needs to know where the story is going and how it’s getting there before I actually start writing it.

            Since I’m not writing mystery novels for a living, and since I have a day job, and since I have a life outside writing, my books get written when I can get to them, which is often in fits and starts. Some weeks I can work on the book nearly every day. At other times, it goes a week or two (in one instance a month or two) without any attention.

            But because I’ve imagined the book in considerable detail before writing it, what finally gets into print (or e-book) is essentially an amended and improved version of the first draft. I’m not saying that’s the way any other author ought to do it, but it works for me and it’s worked for other writers who have been deemed good. I won’t tell you how to write your book if you promise not to tell me that my first draft can’t possibly be any good.

Why They Call It Gambling

            It’s a sign of my age, no doubt, but there are certain new developments I just don’t get. Like Fantasy Football.

            It’s all the rage now, and very much in the news, what with a couple of large firms being looked at more closely by the government. But I look at it and ask two questions: Who has the time? And, How can you win?

            It turns out those questions weren’t so bad. A recent story in the Times said that in order to succeed in any consistent way in Fantasy Football, a person has to devote huge amounts of time to studying the game and developing algorithms for figuring out which players will do well within the gaming system (as opposed to doing well in real football, like winning games).

Most people who play spend a lot of time on it, but their understanding is so limited that they might as well be picking lottery numbers by using their aunts’ and uncles’ birthdays.

If you’re a business, you have to love customers like that.

The Old Way Wasn’t Easy

Before Fantasy Football came along, people who wanted to bet on the sport usually bet on the outcome of a game, with a point spread factored in to give the underdog a fair chance.

Betting on games in that fashion was never easy. People extremely knowledgeable about the game rarely did much better than 50-55 percent over any period of time, which is essentially breaking even. No matter how much you know and how shrewd your insights about a game might be, an injured quarterback or a couple of freak turnovers can upend everything.

Even so, I like to give it a try once a year. My friend John and I go up to South Lake Tahoe in late October or early November to catch the fall color and make some football investments. The fall color is pretty much a sure thing; the football investments — not so much.

Don’t Kick a Field Goal!

By this time of year, the pro football teams are settling out, and a shrewd observer can get a pretty good sense of which teams are good and which ones aren’t. (Shrewd observation #1: A team with a 1-6 record isn’t very good.) Three weeks beforehand, I started compiling statistical information about teams and tracking their records game by game in order to make informed bets. Well, as informed as it gets, anyway.

One of my picks, for instance, was New Orleans minus 3.5 points over the New York Giants. The game was in New Orleans and ended up being an epic. With seconds left, it was tied 49-49 and the Giants were punting. New Orleans got a good return to just past midfield, but the Giants grabbed a face mask, adding a 15-yard penalty and putting New Orleans in position to kick a long field goal on the last play of the game.

The field goal would win the game for New Orleans but lose the bet for me, since I had them winning by four points or more. Sure enough, the New Orleans kicker booted it right between the goalposts to win the game, but I lost my bet by a stinking half-point.

This is why it’s called gambling.

Advertising the Book

            F.W. Woolworth is reputed to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.” I just signed an advertising contract and can hardly wait to find out which half it gets me into.

            A bit of backstory is in order here. For my first two mystery novels, I produced video trailers to promote them. I thought they were pretty good, but when they went up on YouTube, even with extensive flogging on my part, hardly anyone was looking at them. The videos were essentially an unrecovered expense.

            My third novel, Not Death, But Love, came out at the end of May, and though I retained Chip Scheuer, my video guy, to do one for that book, I held off on getting it shot. The way I was looking at the whole thing was evolving, largely as the result of an article I read in Vanity Fair earlier this year.

Going Directly to the Reader

            It was a profile of the best-selling mystery author James Patterson, and one of the things it mentioned was that when he first started writing mysteries, he advertised his books on local television. Having been an ad man himself, Patterson knew the value of promotion, and his ads were simple, but, apparently, quite effective.

            That got me thinking that perhaps my next video trailer should be 30 seconds long so that it could be used as an ad on TV. Cable advertising is pretty reasonable these days, and I figured I could do a trial run somewhere at an affordable cost. If it gets results, I could try to build on it. If not, well, I tried.

            Rigo Torkos, who edited my previous videos, put me in touch with a cable TV consultant, and after considerable back and forth, I decided the idea of running the video on television in a closed market, just to see what happens, was feasible. Last week, I signed a contract to do a two-week test run in Monterey County in November.

The Target Audience

            Because the book centers on a retired English teacher who starts out to write her family’s history and gets dangerously close to a long-buried secret, I felt the book would be appreciated by female readers, who, after all, are the majority of readers — especially fiction. So the consultant and I targeted cable channels that deliver a high number of women viewers between the ages of 35-64.

            The video features my wife, Linda, as the retired English teacher, with a simple voice-over and atmospheric lighting. The cover of the book is prominently featured, as is the address of the website for the mystery series and the fact that the book is available on Amazon. Short of putting a link on the TV screen, I tried to make it as easy as possible for people who see the ad and are intrigued to buy the book.

            And so the story begins. It has been represented to me that enough people will see this TV spot in the two weeks it runs that if one percent of them buy the book, I’ll see a bump in sales, regardless of normal monthly variation. Regardless, I’ll have an answer. I eagerly await it.

The Mother of All Traffic Jams

            Something there is that doesn’t love a traffic jam. And because of that near-universal feeling, we have become virtual prisoners in our house most weekday mornings.

            The way from our home to the outside world leads through the village of Aptos, California. We drive three-tenths of a mile down our road to Trout Gulch Road, then three-tenths of a mile down Trout Gulch to its intersection with Soquel Drive. Soquel is one of the main arterial roads in the county. Trout Gulch ends there, but a left turn takes us toward the state highway leading to Watsonville; a right turn takes us to the highway leading to Santa Cruz — those being the two major urban centers.

            Most mornings, the 0.6 miles to Soquel Drive would be a 2-4 minute drive for us, but in the past month and a half it’s turned into a nightmare. One day last week, it took 19 minutes to get the last three-tenths of a mile. Yesterday, it took 12.

Blame the Students

            The local community college, Cabrillo, is about two miles down Soquel Drive from us, in the direction of Santa Cruz. Many of the students come from Watsonville. For those who drive, the fastest way is to take the state highway exit on the Santa Cruz side of Aptos Village, turn left, and go the last mile to Cabrillo.

            Because the state highway is heavily congested during rush hour, there are always some people who try to beat the congestion by getting off the highway at the exit on the Watsonville side of Aptos Village and taking Soquel Drive three miles to the community college. Bad idea.

            Driving that arterial adds three-quarters of a mile to the trip, and the additional length is broken up by five traffic lights and one stop sign (Soquel and Trout Gulch). Even with light traffic, it would usually be faster to stay on the highway and drive a shorter distance and go through only two traffic lights to get to the same place.

            And with all the people getting off the freeway early, traffic is anything but light. In fact, Soquel Drive has become two miles of gridlock. That, in turn, backs up Trout Gulch Road and creates a situation where there are 50-100 cars queued up on each flank of a T intersection at a four-way stop sign.

Something Has Changed

            In years past, we would have the sort of traffic jam I’ve described for maybe the first three weeks of the community college school year. By then, most people figured out that there was no point in taking the arterial, and traffic returned to normal, with queues of 7-8 cars each way during rush hour at the Soquel-Trout Gulch intersection.

            We’re now in the ninth week of the school year, and the gridlock has shown no signs of abating. What’s different? The only thing I can think of — and a recent news story lent credence to the idea — is that the severe drop in gasoline prices has led more people, and in particular the college students, to drive alone, rather than carpooling or taking the bus.

            If that’s indeed the case, and if the situation doesn’t let up soon, I might find myself in the position of rooting for higher gas prices. I never thought that would happen, but the morning traffic jam is beginning to turn me into the oil companies’ best friend.