Reporting from the Field

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Just got back from a twenty-day assignment and finding myself back to doing basic news reporting, yeah, the hard news stuff. Digging out facts, double-checking data, “accuracy, accuracy, accuracy”, and writing the story fast so it could be carried to tomorrow’s news.

I had forgotten how tedious the work could be as it was more than a decade ago since I was in the field. Particularly when upon writing the story, you realize the questions that should have been asked, the facts that should have been verified, and how that basic background info should have been available, pronto, because deadline is just an hour away.

And then the burst of gunfire – suddenly you realize that the derring-do you once were as a twenty-year-old has departed. Gone somewhere. But the same sense of mixed emotions is still there: the excitement of being there as a story unfolds and the rush of awareness that one stands there at that moment as a reporter, an eyewitness to history; and the unmistakable sense of danger.

Along the way, when one gets a little older, too much action breaks the bone literally. That is what I like about doing features as one is simply allowed a “distillation period”, which could run from a day to even a month depending on the story of course, and where more heart can get into the piece; a collage of the senses here, some rhythm there, and when one gets it right as with others whose writing styles are magical, the article becomes a piece of symphony that transcends time, months or even years after it is written.

Yes, magic and craft. Two elements newsrooms should add on to the 5Ws and 1H in their stories, according to a writing coach in an article I once surfed. But how to write the story with the M and the C? That is a question one needs to seek out on one’s own time, and as for me, until then, I have enough reasons to assuage the self and forestall writing that story until the magic and the craft drives away that other malady, the WB (“Writers Block”).

Honestly, I better begin writing now or else . . .the story simply becomes irrelevant.

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