Anytime soon, we should start to see the annual river of Christmas news cliches.
Look for the lede "Christmas came early for (insert name of lucky person/family/agency) when...(insert name of benevolent or lucky act).
Or "Tis the season for (Christmas thieves to prey on shoppers/for car thefts at the mall/or name your favorite Christmas malady).
And finally, there will be a story or two how a Good Samaritan became a "Santa" to some poor unfortunate family or individual.
Also, sometime this week, some person or family will be saved from some tragic, or less than tragic event and the story lede will include something like this:
The Smith family will have something to really be thankful for when they sit down to their Thanksgiving table Thursday.....
Seasonal news cliches are the worse and they make an appearance every year starting about now. I'd love you to share those that you find or add your own favorite seasonal cliches here.
We've all done them, although after a few years of doing them you realize they are not only tired, but really bad writing.
Perhaps my favorite revenge on an editor came back in the 1980s when I was given my third straight Thanksgiving Day story to write. One year I interviewed a Native American family about how they celebrated Thanksgiving (a really bad assignment from an editor). Another year I did something about what some prominent leaders were thankful for (presumably their undeserved re-elections). But finally when I was told at the last minute to come up with my third straight Thanksgiving Day story I got my revenge.
Another reporter had failed to produce a Thanksgiving Day story and the editor turned to me on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and told me to come up with something for Thanksgiving Day. So I found a local turkey farmer and talked to him about turkeys and then wrote a first person story from the point of view of the turkey.
I handed the story in just before I left about 4 p.m. Wednesday and the editor thought it was the worse thing she had ever seen. It may have been one of the worst stories I ever wrote, but I avoided any further such assignments when Thanksgiving rolled around the next year. Bad, or not, the story ran on Page 1 the next day. There was a paper to fill, after all.
Our only consolation in writing those trite stories was the realization that most people only picked up the Thanksgiving Day newspaper for the pile of sales advertisements and that few would actually read the trite little stories we wrote for those days.
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9 comments:
i'd love to read that turkey perspective story! those are the kinds of things i'd love to see more in the holiday editions rather than the tired old stuff.
I have to tell you Krystal, it was pretty awful, deliberately so. It was probably the only time in my career I tried to write a bad story (sometimes I did it without trying) just because I was frustrated about the assignment.
Part of the story involved the prevailing stereotype that turkeys were stupid. I had lines like:
"How stupid can I be, I'm the only animal that comes dressd."
and
"If I'm so stupid, how come the President invites one of my relatives to the White House every year?"
There were plenty of bad jokes like that one in the story.
Jim,
You nailed it! Thanks for the good laugh
I, too, remember those awful Thaksgiving assignments given by editors deperate to fill the paper and prove the the world we could write nice stories. They were almost as bad as getting stuck doing "the parade story." (And resisitng the temptation to put the weather in the lede!)
A couple other cliches to look forward to: Friday is, of course, the "official start of the holiday shopping season" - (when I was a night desk editor at a daily, I once had a newbie reporter in utter panic when, just for fun, I challenged him and ask that he validate that claim.)
Or the obiligatory Friday is the "busiest shopping day of the year" -- which it isn't. It's usually the Saturday before Christmas.
Any way to post that turkey story???
I will have to admit that my clip files are in complete disarray and many of my early clips are missing. If someone works at the Oakland Press they might be able to find it if they still have a decent morgue system.
And you are sooo right about the so-called "Black Friday" nonsense. It is not the biggest shopping day of the year and as I recall not even in the top five. As you correctly mention the weekend before Christmas and the days following Christmas are almost always higher in shopping volume that the day after Thanksgiving.
But hey, some editors don't let facts get in the way of a cliche story.
Oh, and just wait until I write about the great Y2K "end of the world as we know it" hysteria.
That was perhaps the pinnacle of editorial stupidity and hype.
I have always found newspapers to be useless. Black Friday is just the Friday after Thanksgiving. I don't shop for very long.
Back in my copy editor days, our desk chief issued a moratorium on "Tis the season" headlines. We got to run one once a year, and once somebody used it, we could use it no more. I got around that edict once for a kicker on a story about autumnal allergies. My headline started, "Tis the sneezin." Still one of my favorites.
Once upon a time there were good editors, they hired good reporters who knew a good story when they found it.
Then came the editors who decided that "news" should be planned. Usually editors who were lousy reporters if they were reporters at all. Heaven forbid the readers not have something "special" to read on those "special" holidays that rolled around annually.
That's when story idea meetings became important. Places to plan how to fill the "news" paper.
Those new editors hated fussbudget old journalists who talked about writing about the news instead of planning stuff. Those were the reporters around long enough to say "No we did that last year" or the year before or the year before that.
Eventually reporters were assigned stories. The editors came up with ideas or they would tell the reporter to come up with a "Big A$$ Sunday Story." God help you if any real news happened...."We can't change the front page now, it's already laid out."
That's how you get those Sunday stories about someone fighting a dreaded disease or how many subdivisions have empty lots or better yet, a good Samaritan story with perfect art (shot in advance, of course).
Tis the sneezin' is pretty good, I'll have to admit.
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