Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

National Geographic recently asked all 100 U.S. senators to sketch their states from memory and identify at least three important places on their maps.

Some of the pols produced impressive work. Sen. Al Franken has a nicely drawn map of Minnesota with detailed annotations. In fact, Franken is a bit of a cartographic showoff. Check out this video of Franken drawing an entire map of the United States at the Minnesota State Fair.

Of course, if this was a contest it would be unfair. Some senators had much easier assignments. It doesn’t seem like Sen. Michael Enzi would have much trouble drawing the boxlike outline of Wyoming.

And I don’t mean to come across as the mapping police, but some senators not blessed with a state with regular borders appeared to have a little help. I’m suspicious that Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins may have a carefully traced submission.  But perhaps I’m overly cynical. You be the judge: Go to the National Geographic site and click on the states of the senators who participated.

And perhaps that’s the map that is the most interesting aspect of this story. It appears that senators representing only 11 states contributed. I suppose that might be chalked up to busy schedules rather than geographic ignorance.

Still, if I was an environmental reporter, I’d give a quick call to my own senators and ask why they couldn’t have sketched Michigan’s mitten and its Upper Peninsula. Connect the two with the world famous Mackinac Bridge and identify any two of the four lakes - they’re all among the world’s largest - that border it and you’ve completed an assignment that I would hope that most of the state’s schoolchildren could do.

Geography is critical to the environmental reporter. You need to know what makes your region special. You need at least a baseline of understanding of what goes where so that you can write about what’s at stake when the environment changes, if not degrades.

The National Geographic story would be a fun one to do locally. Ask officials to sketch the outlines of their domains – say a county or a city. Have them locate important geographic features and natural resources. Publish the result. Regardless of what they produce, you should be able to write about it. It’s a talker, and you may even challenge your readers to do likewise.

But before you do, maybe you should try it yourself. If you’re covering the environment, you need to know your region’s geography. The “where” of a story is an important yet often neglected part of environmental reporting.

You need to know what’s special about the region you cover. Do you?

By David Poulson

I’m a strong advocate of visual storytelling. Giving readers an understanding of the “where” of a story is an underappreciated but especially critical component of environmental writing. How are people supposed to know what’s at stake unless you paint them a picture?

I tried to hit that lesson in class last week by using for an example Jef Mallett. He once was a graphics artist at a news service where I covered the environment. Nowadays Jef draws the nationally syndicated Frazz comic. Perhaps no one understands visual storytelling better than cartoonists who cram a story into three- or four-panel strips. Jef clearly gets this. His characters address complex issues briefly but with a great mix of humor and insight. It’s one of those rare strips that often teach me something.

Jef also writes, bringing his visual talent into that venue as well.  He’s just written a new book called Trizophrenia. I look forward to its release later this week.

But with this post I want to address a short piece Jef wrote that came out of a tour of military hospitals by cartoonists seeking to cheer up the troops last April. It’s not an environmental story.  But it is a masterful example of establishing place with strong, descriptive writing. Jef reports how one of the patients described how he was wounded. I’ve reprinted it below so that you can appreciate it without interruption. What follows is the same piece with my comments.

Here’s the same piece with my comments in bold:

This Navy Corpsman was third man in, with two Marines clearing an abandoned house when a booby-trapped refrigerator blew up and cut them down. He couldn’t get to his feet, didn’t even have both of them anymore. So he dragged himself to the squad leader and applied a tourniquet to what was left of the sergeant’s leg, then gave him orders: I’m going to save the other guy; I need you to keep yelling “I will not die” at the top of your lungs.

As long as he could hear his leader screaming, he knew he was clear to attend to his other squad member. Same touniquet application, same orders to scream. Ah, here’s the answer. Our curiosity is immediately rewarded. How cool is that? He dragged himself back and forth between the two men several times before he took the time to put a tourniquet on his own leg. He remembers cutting open his squad leader’s pant leg and watching a shin roll away like a fireplace log, neatly sheared off at the knee and ankle. Wow! Nothing like a strong simile to put you there. That’s an approach that can backfire. Writers often overreach with similes. The only way I keep from doing so is to test them aloud on someone else.  I think Jef hit just the right note here. So how did he pull it off?

The corpsman did not use that simile, Jef said. He described the injury with a lot more words and hand gestures. But the image of the rolling shin came to mind immediately. It remained just an image until it came to writing it without the luxury of the corpsman’s time and hand gestures. “I guess I had subconciously already done the refining and editing and I just wrote it down,” he said. “It’s pretty gross, isn’t it?”

He remembers being a little surprised at the trail of blood-mud that described his path between the two men. He remembers, just before passing out as he was being hoisted onto the medevac, being able to see the sun shine clearly between two perfectly cauterized holes through his foot. Had he had a better angle, he could have seen the sun shining through most of his lower leg that way.

Another nice set of descriptions with the wonderfully alliterative “blood-mud” which is something quite different than writing that it was a trail of blood and mud. And Jef effectively uses the corpsman’s recollection of the sun shining through his wounds - something he even extends to describe another wound that the guy couldn’t see himself.

A year later, just about all of it spent in the same room on the same floor at Walter Reed, he was showing a bunch of slackjawed cartoonists the scars on that leg. The other leg was gone, and this one was still touch and go. Somebody called him a hero, but he snorted. He just did his job, that’s all. Give the Navy credit for training him so well, he said. But he did allow that he was up for a Silver Star for valor. Someone else snorted. What does it take to get a gold one, for crying out loud?

Stay dead, he said. He had died, for two minutes, but his timing was good. His heart stopped while surgeons were already inside his torso clearing out shrapnel, so it was an easy reach to massage the heart back to silver-star status.

The previous passages are a nice flash forward. We don’t continue the chronology but hint to the reader of a long recovery that occurred during the period we’ve jumped. I particularly enjoy the answer to the question about what you need to do to get a gold star: “Stay dead, he said.” It is short, powerful and alliterative. The only way I would improve it is to set those four words into their own paragraph to give them even more emphasis.

So what was next? This guy seemed capable of anything except what he wanted, which was to return to the fighting and save more Marines. But he would get his nursing degree and return to that same floor at Walter Reed. Nobody knew the floor better than him. Nobody knew what the patients had been through better than he did. Nobody, but nobody, was going to tell him no.

Putting on my subjective news editor hat, I’d probably edit this last paragraph. It’s got a bit too much of the writer in it for my taste. Others are certain to disagree with me.  And it probably works in the context it was intended, which is more of a column than a news report.

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My point is that description done right is a powerful tool. It is jettisoned too often in the pursuit of brevity. And you certainly can go overboard. The trick is to make the best of what you’ve got without going over the top.

And if you want to enjoy some fine writing from Jef in a lighter vein, buy Trizophrenia.

By David Poulson

I like to preach that journalism equals content plus engagement. I tell students that they can write an incredibly important story, but it isn’t journalism unless people - hopefully lots of people - consume it.

Important but boring is not journalism. Something no one reads but the writer is not journalism. That’s more like a diary entry - perhaps helpful to the writer but certainly not journalism.

Social media and other digital tools have given reporters new ways to escape that fate. Over at Great Lakes Echo we’re experimenting with Facebook quizzes. Recently we launched one that assesses which lake best suits your personality. The concept initially appealed to me as the engagement piece of the equation. My hope was that it would drive interest in and traffic to the site where readers could consume the other more serious content that’s already there.

But can a Facebook quiz be a self-contained unit of journalism - one with engagement and content? I asked a class that question recently. The reply: “Can reading the back of a cereal box be considered journalism?”

Maybe.

We just asked readers to help us create a new quiz: Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other? Judging by private e-mails and the comments on the site we’re succeeding with the engagement piece. But just maybe we’re delivering content as well. Check out this comment on that post:

Spotted knapweed – a loner with a toxic personality – sucks the fun and energy out of life (poor palatability for herbivores and takes up all the water in the area, possibly releases a toxin that kills other plants), likes chaos and disorder (colonizes disturbed locations)

We’ll have fun with that and the other suggestions - there is a great one comparing an ex to the Asian carp poised to invade Lake Michigan:

He’s huge, gross-looking, and he frequently pops up when I least expect him too. I wish there was an electric fence to keep him away…

And we will research more ourselves, perhaps serving as a front door to more information that we link to.

It strikes me that at the same time we will be delivering serious content, perhaps raising just a bit the level of awareness readers have about important environmental issues.

I’m not exactly ready to petition the Pulitzer Committee to expand its categories to include Facebook quizzes. But it strikes me that there is something going on here that journalists should be exploring.