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Cleaning the Eazel


By J.D. Hildebrand
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July 1, 2001 —  (Page 1 of 2)
What journalists do, I have come to understand-even journalists who occupy tenuous bottom-rung positions on fortnightly industry trade publications like the one you hold (that is to say, even such wretches as yours truly)-is simply this: They turn facts into stories.

The world is full of facts. Events happen. Speeches are made, products launched, elections held, automobiles crashed, stock prices revised, hemline lengths altered, baseball games won and lost. Facts are omnipresent. Facts are cheap. I suppose before there were journalists, people just wandered about in the world, observed events and took them for the news. It must have been a difficult life in the days before there were reporters to tell people which facts merited attention and what to think about them.

Journalists do not merely convey facts to readers, but select for conveyance certain facts. And they structure those facts into tales that make it clear what the facts mean and why they are important. Facts by themselves mean little or nothing. It is within the context of a story-a narrative-that facts become significant, relevant and memorable.

Sometimes the facts are incidental. It is often the case that a journalist-not yours truly, of course, but a scribbler of the lower orders-mentally composes a rantlet or minor observation that would be just the thing to fit the day's quota of verbiage. And yet... in the news business, one cannot simply offer observations and opinions. Especially when one is employed as a mere reporter or columnist, and not as an editor with ex officio access to the opinion pages. One must find an excuse: a current event that illustrates a trend or highlights a problem.

Such an event is known in the trade as a news "hook" or "peg." The idea is that the event is a little bit of news upon which the reporter can hang the story.

For example, a Microsoft announcement regarding planned language extensions for Visual C++ could serve as the news peg for a "thought piece" (that is, a navel-gazing essay containing little more than the author's opinion) about language standardization. The announcement that a certain trade show has been canceled might serve as the news hook for a trend story about the conference industry's vulnerability to competition from online information sources.



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