Unique Angle Key to Annual Holiday Stories

Many reporters view writing holiday stories as they do paying rent or credit card bills. It's something that has to be done, and several times annually.

Like paying bills, crafting holiday stories is simple to do. Making them fresh and interesting, with original angles, is not.

Leading up to holidays, such as the Fourth of July celebration on Monday, some reporters have found unique angles to the holiday story they inevitably will have to write. They arrived at them in a variety of ways.

Melissa Monroe and her colleagues on the business news department of The Express-News in San Antonio discuss story ideas at weekly budget meetings. Vicky Eckenrode, a business reporter with Morris News Service, followed a tourism bill through a state legislature. New York Times auto industry writer Danny Hakim dug into a press release about drinking and driving fatalities.

"There's a [business] angle for every holiday-related story," Monroe says. "Every year, it's the same holiday, same old thing…'How can I make this one different?' I always ask myself that every time I do one of these stories."

That's where seemingly mundane affairs such as budget meetings can help. During one last summer, Monroe asked co-workers whom she should talk to for a first-person account of the business of local fireworks sales.

Monroe, who covers retail, tourism and advertising, then decided to focus her story on a family that has been selling fireworks in the San Antonio area since the 1920s. She contacted them, researched the economics of fireworks sales and spent a few hours watching the family conduct its business, Alamo Fireworks.

"Being creative and asking other co-workers is the biggest thing for me," Monroe says. "It's the way you lead off [that makes the difference]. But the rest of the story's going to have the same information."

Eckenrode agrees. She employed a similar strategy in crafting a story pegged for Memorial Day weekend for Morris, an Atlanta-based news service that serves Morris Communications papers, such as dailies in Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.

Eckenrode, who writes several economic development pieces, was intrigued by a bill passed by the state legislature that called for Georgia to launch a new tourism campaign.

She researched the plan, interviewed state tourism and business officials and visited a campground outside of Atlanta to add tourists' points of view. She then wrote a short feature exploring the new tourism plan and gauging the likelihood of its success.

Eckenrode approached that piece as she has other holiday stories for Morris and The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle -- such as a piece about July 4 being the second-most popular holiday for beer consumption and one in which she followed a Christmas shopper through huge early-morning lines.

"There are certain stories that you expect to do and the paper expects you to have in there every year," Eckenrode says. "They can be formulaic…So we have tried to look for sidebars that can be kind of fun."

Sometimes reporters don't have to be so aggressive to find new angles to holiday stories.

Hakim, Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, had a good idea dropped in his lap when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a new advertising campaign to curb drunken driving in the summer of 2003.

The administration reported that drunken driving incidents had caused nearly 18,000 deaths in 2002, the most since 1992. So it was launching a campaign targeting young men to halt that trend.

Hakim pitched the story as a Times feature on the advertising industry to run July 3. The piece was much different than a typically peppy Fourth of July story (abstract available here).

The perils of drinking and driving on the Fourth is a story "that's worth telling again and again," Hakim says. "That's when it's the worst."

It's important to write about such serious issues around holidays, Hakim says, to provide readers with balanced coverage.

It also helps to make the paper's holiday coverage fresh.

The advertising campaign "was something unusual that regulators were doing," Hakim says. "I think that helped."

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism