Using humor to humanize

Diane Cardwell of The New York Times wrote a commercial real estate story that offers another look at people benefiting during the recession: artists getting free or cheap space as landlords seek to avoid empty spaces. The story says:

These “pop-up galleries,” as they are known in Britain, where the phenomenon is already well established, are increasingly taking hold in New York as development advocates and landlords struggle to keep up appearances where commerce and construction have stalled.

The demand among landlords is so high that Chashama, a group that has been working for almost 15 years to find vacant real estate for visual and performing artists, no longer has to go looking. Its founder, Anita Durst, said she gets calls every day from landlords asking her to find art projects for them. Some even offer to cover basic expenses like electricity.

The story offers a variety of voices, which makes it more interesting. For example, Diane provides an exchange between two barbers who work near one of the art exhibits:

His co-worker, James Tucker, said it was, “different, cultural-wise,” saying that he liked some of the artwork on display but that he found Mr. Chang’s road-kill project “really creepy.”

Junior added, laughing, “He should do a Halloween thing with that.”


Today’s Tip: Don’t be afraid to add humor and voices from non-stakeholders to your stories.

As the Barlett and Steele Award winners noted recently, stories need people. Quotes like the ones noted above bring life – and humor – to stories.

Finding Real People -- How Barlett & Steele Award Winners Did It

Gary Cohn and Darrell Preston wrote a piece for Bloomberg Markets magazine investigating the fees that AARP collects on members’ insurance policies. The article won the silver award and $2,000 in the Reynolds Center’s third annual Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism this week.

The story leads with Arthur Laupus’ story:

Laupus stumbled onto something that many members of the world’s largest seniors’ organization don’t know: The group, formerly called American Association of Retired Persons, collects hundreds of millions of dollars annually from insurers who pay for AARP’s endorsement of their policies.

The insurance companies build the cost of these so-called royalties and fees, which amounted to $497.6 million in 2007, into the premiums they charge AARP members, according to AARP’s consolidated financial statement for that year.

Darrell says he got the tip about the AARP fees while reporting on another insurance industry story. He and Gary teamed up, did some comparison-shopping and then realized the hard part: finding people, Darrell says.

While at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Gary learned from Don Barlett and Jim Steele -- for whom the award is named -- that you need to bring the impact of investigative stories home with human examples.

“It’s important to have all of the good details,” Gary says. “Also, it’s really important to have real people in stories. That’s what takes a lot of extra time.”

Today’s Tip: Use LexisNexis, a searchable database that many media outlets pay to access, to find sources in the “Letters to the Editor” section of publications.

Darrell and Gary searched LexisNexis for letters from people complaining about AARP. Many of the authors were listed in online phone directories.

Darrell says they also talked with brokers who knew of clients who’d comparison-shopped for insurance. They found Laupus through a source and learned that he had kept voluminous records, Gary says.

“He was the perfect case study because of the interviews and the detailed paper trail.”

For a tip from The Miami Herald reporters who won the top gold award in the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism, please click here. For more information on Barlett and Steele, as well as advice from last year's winners, please click here.

Bringing data to life

Rico Gagliano of American Public Media’s “Marketplace Money” used a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland to create a segment questioning how two seemingly similar areas could have such dramatically different foreclosure rates.

North Collinwood's rate in 2007? Almost 21 percent. Braddock's? 5 percent. Both places should have been equally hit by foreclosures, but the Ohio community got hit harder.

Today’s Tip: Use additional sources to bring data from agencies such as the Federal Reserve alive.

Rico adds the human element by driving us around a neighborhood with him to see what the data means. He also focused the segment by citing only the foreclosure rates, although the Federal Reserve report offers lots of numbers.

Also of note, the same show aired a segment illustrating the ripple effect of reduced spending by Cleveland consumers. Dan Bobkoff shows how the loss of the father's job affected one family’s spending at individual businesses. The lesson: follow the money.

The best views aren't just from the penthouse

Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace offered a segment, carried on many public radio stations, about the financial crisis that, as one listener commented, “brought the issues to a more understandable, personal level.”

Today’s Tip: Add a micro dimension to make macroeconomic stories more useful for your audience.

For this Lehman Bros. anniversary piece, Kai focused on people at both ends of the financial spectrum: Millicent “Mama” Hill, whose Los Angeles home was foreclosed upon after she took out a subprime loan she couldn’t repay, and John Chrin, a former Wall Street executive turned college instructor. Then, to provide context, he added in experts on the financial crisis, the psychology of financial decision-making and the financial trust index.

“Excellent, excellent piece,” wrote listener Zaid Hassan of Austin, Texas. “Spellbinding to be reminded that, in the end, it really is just a piece of paper,” Hassan said, referring to the central thesis of the report: Without trust in the financial system, a dollar is really just a piece of paper.

Let people speak

John Blackstone of CBS’ “Sunday Morning” provides a closer look at California’s financial troubles from the mouths of the people experiencing it -- and with an eye to the past.

To set up the theme of California’s bust, the story juxtaposes images:

There was a time when the rest of the country looked west to California and saw a place of sunny beaches and postcard vistas . . . the thriving economy of Silicon Valley . . . and Hollywood, the world's capital of entertainment.
But lately the view west is of foreclosure signs and financial crises . . . and headlines about a state forced to pay its bills with IOUs.
In this economy, even Hollywood's dream factories can't deliver a happy ending.

Then, the segment offers a wide variety of voices, including the owner of a failed business that once did well by supplying props to movie makers and the founder of a going-out-of-business clothing store that opened in 1952.

Today’s Tip: Step back, and let your sources’ voices be heard. Humanize the facts with tales of real people.

People identify with other people, and letting your sources speak is the best way to connect with your audience.