Page 61 of Cuts like a Knife
The morning meeting was for pitches. Not feature pitches, but pitches for the day. Timely news pitches. We were supposed to call out one-line ideas. If Rian liked them, he would write them on a big white board. After the meeting, he would “assign” the pitches to us to write up for the day.
Usually, if you’d pitched something, you’d be assigned to write it, but that was never the case for me. Rian would always give me stories pitched by other reporters. Or ones he’d come up with himself.
Five stories a day sounds like a lot and it was, but most of the pieces were short. I had to do things like write 250 words on the opening of a new Anthro location that was just announced. Easy. All I had to do for a “story” like that was find the press release and regurgitate the main points from it. If I needed a quote that was better than what appeared in the press release, I’d call or email the media contact from the bottom of the page. That kind of piece took less than an hour.
Then there were bigger news pieces. The first time Rian assigned me one of those, I nearly crapped my pants204.
But it started to happen almost every single day. Rian would assign me these stories that I had no idea how to handle. He’d drop an assignment about the state police on me and say something like “I expect at least three original quotes, Madison.” But like, how was I supposed to get quotes from the state police? I tried calling the media liaison, but they blew me off. I emailed, but got no response.
It was frustrating. And stressful. And Kelsang’s promise — that whole “you’ll be doing just what you’ve been doing on Twitter” thing — fell entirely by the wayside. Rian was my direct supervisor and he never approved any of my pitches for stories on social justice issues. Once, when I mentioned a rally I thought I’d like to attend, and suggested taking a photographer, Rian said, “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard” and for a half-second, I thought I was making progress. Then he assigned the actual story to Adele and my spirits fell.
She made sympathetic eyes at me from the depths of her own beanbag chair across the way. Social justice wasn’t her interest, either, so the assignment was as irritating for her as it was for me.
None of it made any sense.
On the day when Rian dumped the first Gaza strip piece in my lap, I decided I had to do something, and knocked on Kelsang’s door, expecting a sympathetic ear, but while he was friendly and listened to what I had to say, he also brushed me off.
“You’re new to this so I get it. It’s all unfamiliar, but it’s pretty reasonable for reporters to have to pay their dues. Nobody in a newsroom gets to pick and choose their own stories.”
“But … I’m not a reporter,” I remember saying, helplessly. Reporter was my title, but it wasn’t what I’d been promised, you know? “I don’t know what I’m doing. Shouldn’t I be writing about things I have, like, at least a little bit of expertise about?”
Kelsang had smiled, told me not to worry about it, said, “we all learn by doing,” and then dismissed me from his office.
I was practically in tears about having no idea where to start on the Middle East stuff — because this was really important, wasn’t it? — when Adele took pity on me and finally pulled me aside to explain.
Turns out, we weren’t supposed to write all of these news piece from scratch. Not exactly. Flash subscribed to a Wire Service. All I had to do, she said, was grab a story from the wire on the assigned subject, then cut it down to fit the space I’d been assigned. I should only add my byline if I did original reporting or sourced a new quote or something, but she said, and she didn’t recommend it. “There isn’t time,” she explained.
“But we don’t even add our own bylines, anyway” I said.
This was true. Reporters like Adele and I would file our stories via an internal messaging system. Copy editors would write the headlines and decks and ostensibly fix any errors. Although, in my first few months, I noticed that a lot of my pieces were published with spelling mistakes in them, so I’m not sure what the copy editors were even doing. Possibly hazing me205. Nonetheless, Copy Editors were also in charge of adding bylines. And bylines were as space issue as much as a reward. Some pieces weren’t worth a byline. For others, bylines were left off to help pieces fit into allotted space. Most of the short pieces at Flash were published with initials, or no bylines at all, with the exception of the long-form features that appeared in the centre spread once a week206.
“Oh, good point,” Adele had replied. “So don’t worry about it then. Just cut the wire piece down and you’re done.”
It sounded easy enough and suddenly the whole five-stories-a-day thing, as well as Kelsang’s dismissiveness, made a lot more sense. I’d misunderstood the assignment.
It was a huge relief. After all, stories about stuff like the conflict in the Middle East were actually important. It wasn’t like being assigned to review a restaurant or a book, or being told to cover the opening of a new food truck. This was big, serious stuff. And if I had to do it on my own, with no training and no background, I was sure of one thing: I was going to f— it up.
But cutting down was okay. Cutting something down — something written by an actual career reporter from a huge international wire service — was something I could do.
Unfortunately, after talking to Adele, I realized I didn’t even know how to access the wire service. And I was too embarrassed to ask. I ended up Googling the story Rian had asked me to write, finding a piece in another publication with a wire service byline, and cutting that down before submitting.
And it was fine. It all worked out. Nobody said a word.
Googling wasn’t the best method for finding the right stories, however and after a few weeks, Adele caught me at it.
When I confessed my method, she laughed for a solid three minutes, then took pity on me and gave me a five minute tutorial on how to find wire stories on our own internal system.
Slowly (very slowly) I began to make progress. I was learning on the job, like Kelsang told me to. Sure, I still had very little idea of what I was doing.
I was flying by the seat of my pants when it came to everything Flash, but at least I was flying.
Chapter Seventeen
“So if you’re not a machine,” Drew is saying, “then why don’t we do something fun this morning? Something distinctly un … mechanical.”
I’ve finished my breakfast, which was very good207.
“Can’t. Obviously. Have to work.”
