Dan Wetzel on McCoy and Gilbert last night

Couple things here...
1. We're talking about a scenery piece from a national championship game. While accuracy is always of the utmost importance, the purpose of Wetzel even writing a piece was to add color to his organization's coverage of the game. That's it.

2. Gary Smith has made a living on adding scenery, but to vilify him for the Tillman piece is ridiculous. When even the official documentation of an event is wrong, there's not much a reporter can do until enough people are willing to corroborate that the official documentation is wrong. That didn't happen until well after Smith's piece, and after reading Krakauer's book on Tillman, it could have been delayed even longer if not for the sheer public outrage that they had been misled by the government/military.

3. Personally, I never got the impression Wetzel was there. Common sense says he's not going to be in the locker room until after the game, if even then. Good writers listen to multiple perspectives and recreate the scene from there. That's what Wetzel did and he did a tremendous job.

 

It's simply wrong to reconstruct events based on unreliable testimony, however elegantly you do it. And if any organization has proved itself to be an untrustworthy reporter of its own activities, it's the U.S. Army.

Wetzel's mistake was small potatoes. Two simple words of sourcing, transparency, honesty, and accountability -- "said he" -- would have satisfied this nitpicker. Any reporter who wants you to think he's somewhere he couldn't have been erodes his credibility, a la Albom.
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As for "villifying" Smith for "scenery," no, I didn't do that. I said he should have said out loud who his sources were; that way the reader could decide how much of the "scenery" to trust.

 

Erodes his credibility? Hardly.

There's a time to be a journalist and there's a time to be a writer, and we're so paranoid anymore about being right or being first that so many of us have forgotten about the tenants of writing a good story. For pure hard news writers, getting the facts down and relaying the proper information is the primary goal. But the meter pegs back the other way for scenery and feature pieces. Yes, you need to be accurate, but you need to be able to take your readers into the story as well.

It falls back on the old adage: Show, don't tell.

The information is just as accurate with Wetzel relaying the information the way he did as it would be as doing the way you suggested.

 

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Who says the information is "accurate"? It's (I'm guessing) McCoy's version of "accurate." I'm not arguing it's wrong; he'd have no reason to mislead Wetzel, and Dan would have no reason to distrust him. Still, it doesn't hurt the thing in any way to do the subtle attribution of "said he." On further review, in fact, it might have worked well had Wetzel shown us McCoy's anguish at the moment he recounted being unable to throw it seven feet. That anguish would be more real and more honest, for having been witnessed by Wetzel, than any reconstruction of an unseen moment. Actually, each moment would have complemented the other.

Easy for me to say from my ivory tower. I apologize to Dan for allowing this to get out of hand, to become a nit-picking second-guesser's deconstruction of his work when I only wanted to add two little words. He is a fabulous columnist who, in this case, was doing his damndest, and succeeding yet again, to be creative under deadline pressure in a frenetic setting. He does it as well as anybody in the business.

 

If Wetzel quotes McCoy telling him about throwing to his dad or if Wetzel uses what McCoy tells him to reconstruct the scene, it's the same information. It's just presented differently.

 

So glad I'm no longer this cynical.

 

Not a matter of cynicism. A point of craft.

 

I'm ok with the way it's sourced, but I very much appreciate jaredk standing up for the craft, and trying to apply standards to it. Not every writer is a good or as ethical at Wetzel, and therefore I think he raises an interesting discussion point. The line is not always sharply drawn as to what is ok in terms of narrative and what is not. This are the kind of discussions we should be having on the journalism board, so if your immediate response is "Hey jaredk, you're a cynical dick" then you're adding very little to a very important debate.


What upsets me still, to this day, about the first Gary Smith Tillman story is not sourcing. Because if you go back and read it (and I'll excerpt part of it below) Smith does try to couch it by saying That's what the military says and That's what a Taliban source says. People seem to think he presented narrative like it was fact -- in a typical Gary Smith way -- that later turned out to be false. Well, not exactly. He did source it, which is unusual for him. Which is why the real problem is tone -- the entire story was far too fresh to give it the typical "Gary Smith" treatment. Frankly, an editor should have shown better judgement with the way the entire piece was presented. Some stories are cannot be subjected to narrative five days after they happen. The attribution actually give's Smith cover in the piece, but the entire thing is told in a way that suggests much too much intimacy to be legit.

Now, I will say too that Jones' national magazine winning story about the solider coming home from Iraq -- he didn't witness a single scene in that story. It's all reconstructed from over 100 interviews, then fact-checked and re-checked. But it took nearly a year to write, edit, fact-check and run. Are we ok with the sourcing in that piece? I think so. Yet Chris didn't witness those scenes. So again, it's not a definitive line.

Anyway, here is the section of Smith's Tillman story I was referencing.

 

I'm a big fan of Wetzel. I thought this column was just OK. A tad too schmaltzy in parts. Without citing specific passages, I thought he overwrote a bit where he didn't need to, plus the fact Colt has indeedy been hurt in the past, which hurt teams chances as someone above mentioned.

But yes, some great reporting in there, especially about the locker room stuff with dad.

 

jaredk, very simply, I'm with the "presentation was just fine" side on this.

I don't know that sprinkling a few "he saids" through this is going to do much ethically, or whatever word you'd use. Nobody is going to think Wetzel was standing on the sideline, and most will either A) understand he was given the information by others or B) not care.

If you disallow this, you disallow some of the best narrative journalism of the past 50 years. If it's a technique you don't agree with, I guess we'll simply have to agree to disagree. This is as simple as:

"Down in the huddle, Joe Montana looked around and said ..."

Do you really want that to say, "Down in the huddle, Joe Montana says he looked around and said ..."?

I certainly don't.

If the accounts are accurate, they don't need "he said." If they aren't, "he said" isn't going to help.

I think that IS standing up for the craft. Not knocking you ... again, we simply disagree.

 

Those extra words add little or nothing to the story, and honestly they're not necessary. Wetzel did a fine job, and it's a great piece.

 

There's a difference, I think, between this and one that we chewed over last year: the Esquire story about the college shooter in Illinois, where the lead said what the killer was thinking and doing in his last night alive, which was pure supposition from the writer. That's a little shady. This was using great reporting and just presenting it in a different - better - way.