The Boy Who Wouldn't Die... Amazing piece in SI about Rae Carruth's son

that's an excellent use of the word sidebar. most people who never have worked in newspapers have no clue what the word means or to use it in context. nice that you can use it in passing.

 

Very good assessment.

 

As I read the story I could not help but think of the strange contradiction of Carruth in jail for attempted murder of an unborn child, while at the same time doctors day in and day out legally perform late term abortions to the count of 18,000 a year. It's a fine line that doctors walk.

 

I didn't like the lede either, but I didn't have a hard time reading past it.

Some of Pierce's ledes are so bad, I just stop reading. Writers get to a certain level and editors stop touching their stuff and the only people who suffer are the readers.

 

This is what I do, too. One story I'm working on right now, there was some pretty detailed local coverage. Since I wanted to make the narrative work without bogging it down with credit for those shops, though, I called everyone the original reporter had talked to and re-confirmed every detail. The cool part was, that yielded new information that made the story even stronger. So there's value in it beyond making the story your own. Stories evolve in source's minds over time—often, the more times they tell a story, the more they remember with each telling.

 

That's really interesting that you do that. And also that there's value added to that process in the possibility of new info.

 

Minor part of story but I had to wonder why Lake did not offer to buy Chancellor Lee and Saundra lunch when they met him at TGI Friday. He wrote that Saundra ordered a glass of water with lemon wedges to make Chancellor free lemonade. She was also able to get free chips by using her TGIF affinity card all because she had watch her budget.

If I had not read about Lake buying Pops beer and lunch for that story it might not have seemed as odd.

Maybe when Lake gets registered he can clear it up for us.

 

Just read this yesterday.

I agree with what's been said here about the lede -- made me scratch my head -- but the rest of the story was awesome.

And I'm going to go ahead and raise my hand and say I didn't know any of this beyond the fact that Rae Carruth tried to have his pregnant girlfriend killed a long time ago. I didn't remember if she did die, if the baby died, if he'd been convicted. Its a busy world out there and a lot of stuff gets missed or just plain forgotten. (To be honest, when all this happened I had my own 5-month old daughter, so I may not have been catching ESPN every night.)

Point is, if you can tell a story very well to a very wide audience, as this does, there will be tons of people who find it new and worth reading.

 

I just read this story this AM, and while of course the facts in it are astonishing, I didn't care for the writing. I am old-school enough to believe that the better the story, the more the writer should get the hell out of its way.

 

Makes you wonder if Lake now feels some pressure to write a "Thomas Lake" style piece every time out.

Admittedly talking out of my ass, but it makes you wonder when a writer who writes with a style like Lake can knock it out of the park every time out. I think same thing happens to Gary Smith. To me in this type of writing it seems like less is more in terms of annual volume of stories. Otherwise you put the writer at risk of being a caricature of themselves.

I think a bit of that happened to Selena Roberts when she was assigned SI back page weekly column.

 

Chop the first five or so paragraphs and the last two or three paragraphs off, and I thought he did just that.

 

So in other words he made a very poor first impression.
Enough to put the piece down.
Doesn't matter how much you tone it down if you fuck it all up in the first 5-10 grafs.