The routine assignment is a challenge and an opportunity

A colleague was seeking help for a reporter who "is frustrated with the assignments she's been getting lately." A Labor Day assignment was particularly annoying.

I asked some colleagues for their advice, which follows mine (hey, this is my column). I also pass along four key pieces of advice:

The best defense against lame assignments is to come up with great story ideas. In the 33 years I spent as an editor and a reporter, one of the most consistent truths I recall from newsrooms is that editors don't make many lame assignments to reporters who are working on great stories.

Few reporters can achieve that status where they get no assignments from editors and only have to work on their own story ideas. You probably don't want to get there anyway; some of the editors' assignments are pretty good.

The quality of assignments you receive from editors has a direct relationship to the quality of stories they know you're working on. Let's say we could rate stories on a scale of 1 to 10. If your editor knows you're working on an 8 story, she's not going to assign you a 5 story. She wants to get that 8 story into the paper. But if you're working on a 4 or don't have any of your own ideas to work on, you're a perfect target for that 5 assignment. Now, maybe your paper shouldn't be publishing 5 stories, as a couple of my colleague suggest below. But the fact is, most papers publish some 5's. You need a Labor Day story. So your defense is to always be working on an 8 or 9. Even a 10. Let someone else get that 5 assignment.

The handout for my workshop "Every Good Story Starts with a Good Idea" has some tips for generating story ideas.

Ask your readers for help. We can start crowdsourcing story ideas. Put a notice on the web site before Labor Day asking your readers for their ideas. OK, you'll get some people plugging their community's festival or parade (more on parades shortly). But you may get some great suggestions, too.

Editors want better stories than they assign. Let me start this point with a note to editors: When you have to assign stories, don't tell the reporter how to do the story. Even if the reporter doesn't have an idea for an approach to take. Make the reporter figure out how to do the story.

Reporters write better stories when they take authorship of the story. My grandmother was a successful novelist. She once turned down a publisher's suggestion for a story line, saying that she could no more write someone else's story than she could birth someone else's baby. Reporters don't have Grandma's luxury of turning down assignments. But they share her need for authorship. Give them authorship of your assignments by asking them how they will do the story rather than telling them.

Now for the reporter: When your editor gives you an assignment and lays out the story path for you, he is setting the bar, not taking over the story. Take authorship of your story. If you come up with a better approach and turn in a better story, no good editor will complain. The lame story assignment is not a sentence, but a challenge to turn in a great story that exceeds expectations, which brings me to the final point:

Routine assignments can be opportunities. That simple assignment of a boring Labor Day story (or any holiday story) can be your opportunity to showcase your abilities as a special writer. Any writer can deliver a great story from a great assignment. When you deliver a great story from a mundane assignment, that sets to apart as someone special to editors, colleagues and readers. And when you deliver a routine story, whatever the assignment, that tells editors, colleagues and readers that you are a routine writer.

Tom Hallman spells out the challenge and the opportunity of routine stories well in the August Quill column, "Take a risk with everyday assignments." And the story he used as an example was about a parade, which might be the assignment most likely to inspire reporter griping. (Thanks to Joe Hight for calling the Hallman piece to my attention.)

The handout for my workshop "Make Routine Stories Special" includes some tips on writing routine stories.

If your editor assigned you to write a feature on a toll booth operator or a retarded Elvis impersonator or a school class having a funeral for a rat, you might roll your eyes and update your resume. But Brady Dennis , Gregor McGavin and Steve Rubinstein turned them into great stories (I'm betting they were their own ideas, not assignments, though). Ken Fuson used an unorthodox storytelling style to make a great story out of the first nice day of spring (an annual chestnut, just like that Labor Day assignment).

Take your Labor Day assignment - or whatever routine assignment you're facing - and turn it into this kind of gem. It marks you as a writing jewel.

Here's some advice from my training colleagues on the Newscoach discussion list:

Another parade take from writing coach Ken O'Quinn:

I once was assigned to cover an annual parade for a charity, and that too seemed like a boring assignment. Most of us in the newsroom had covered it before, and after talking to numerous people participating, I found no new angles. But my editor noted that if I talked to 10 people out of the 200 who were participating, then there were 190 people I didn't talk to, and somewhere in there was a story.

The writer also might consider "point of view." As Don Murray once noted, an accident can be told from the point of view of the victim, the victim's family, bystanders, the police, the EMT, the insurance company, etc. Perhaps the writer can look at the assignment from a different angle.

From Perry Parks, author of "Making Important News Interesting: Reporting Public Affairs in the 21st Century"

The first step is to abandon the term "routine story," the mere mention of which constrains creative thought. One reason newspapers are having so much trouble is because they pursue "routine stories" far too often. The paper should, from the top editor on down, vow never to write a routine story again.

That means that every story must be viewed for its uniqueness -- what makes it different from all the stories that came before. Labor Day might happen every year, but this is the only Labor Day 2007 ever. It's the only one happening two years after Hurricane Katrina, when all sorts of jobs are still geared toward helping rebuild Louisiana and Mississippi, and when many workers in that region remain displaced. It's the only one happening in the middle of a a major mortgage crisis, which is making it harder for working folks all over the country to get a home loan. And it's the only one happening within the local context your hometown newspapers should understand better than anyone.

One reason stories that come up every year feel routine is because people are locked into covering the event - like Labor Day - instead of people. There might be a finite amount of Labor Day stories, but there are an infinite number of stories about people. A good reporter could find just about anybody with a job and, through a good interview and some smart writing, craft an enjoyable story.

People who love what they do are fascinating. People who are good at what they do are a joy to watch. People who feel trapped by their work are sympathetic. And on and on. Newspaper stories about people, instead of about days, have much more potential to resonate.

And finally, it seems to me that if a reporter and her editor and others in the newsroom can't come up with ANY angle that's fresh and interesting for a perennial or obligatory story, it's time to give yourself permission not to do the story. Go find a story that IS fresh and interesting and meaningful. If you're bored to tears by a topic, there's no way the reader is going to get anything out of it.

From Michigan writing coach Brian O'Connor:

Let me get radical: Why are you doing a story at all?

There's a difference between a "routine story" and story done "out of routine."

A routine story is a city commission meeting. Something will happen that needs to be noted for the record. Probably not big news, but incremental stuff, governmental housekeeping, etc., that should be reported.

A story done out of routine is one that's done because "we always do a XXX story" or "XYZ is happening and we HAVE to do a story."

No, we don't. The small and dwindling number of readers out there KNOW it was freakin' Labor Day yesterday. They know this because they are back to work, not doing whatever it is they did with they holiday off.

Meanwhile, the large and growing number of nonreaders looks at that kind of "Hey! It was Labor Day Yesterday" story and says, "Duh." (BTW, this is the group of people who don't read the paper because "There's nothing in it." And in this case, they're right.) This kind of story is a sign that editors are not thinking about the product, don't having anything to say and don't value their readers' time and money.

On Labor Day itself, tell people something useful about road closings and traffic and where to park for the big downtown festival, and what offices are closed and how trash pick-up is going to work. On the day after, give them the police report. Do a story only if something happened that was news (you know -- NEWS-paper?) like a big downtown festival drew a record crowd or beach parking lots closed at 10 am because they were at capacity or such.

But skip doing all kinds of back flips for some lame-o "slice of life" or "human interest feature" with a headline like, "Anywhere Residents mark Labor Day in many ways."

Really, I don't need the newspaper to tell me that people barbecued or did their back-to-school shopping any more than I need the paper to tell me my neighbors continued breathing. That is the journalistic equivalent of printing blank newsprint.

The lame holiday story deserve the same treatment as a lame horse - put it out of its misery.

PS - If you can't have this discussion in your newsroom, I'd suggest that you have bigger problems than how to handle a lame holiday story.

From independent newsroom coach Ev Landers:

First, do some advance planning. The old off the top of the city editor's head just might not work with ambitious writers. One of my old mentors had me spend some time with a man searching for work. He had a college degree, was caught in a downsizing move and was facing working for half of what he was making before. His plight was and is shared by many caught in similar circumstances. For him, Labor Day, had little to offer. He had enough days off. Beat the hell out of picnics in the park.

From Liz Allen, administrative editor at the Erie Times-News:

Routine stories can be helped at the planning stage. In addition to our weekly news-center meeting at the Erie Times-News, where we plan centers at least nine days out, we also periodically have a 45-day meeting, where we look at the calendar/daybook for holidays, anniversaries, annual stories six weeks to two or three months ahead. Sometimes the editors at the meeting brainstorm an idea then and there. Often, though, we assign the story far in advance to a reporter, with the idea that the reporter and the assigning editor have enough lead time to come up with a fresh angle.

Once you have the plan and the reporter is assigned, you can also take advantage of this list-serve for specific, creative ideas. The Youth Editorial Alliance list-serve (through NAA), serving teen editors, does a great job in bouncing ideas back and forth. Weeks before the new Harry Potter book came out, youth editors were exchanging fresh takes on how to cover this story. Maybe we should think of the next annual story we will cover (Constitution Day? Columbus Day? Veterans Day) and ask our members for ideas now or in the next few weeks.

Samantha Sommer, a reporter at the News-Sun in Springfield, Ohio, had a response much like mine, but more concise:

My response to this always has been that a good offense is the best defense. If you don't want to do the lame assignment, avoid them by coming up with your own stories that you like better. The stories will often read better to as the reporter tends to be more interested.

From writing coach Paul LaRocque:

Boring routine stories are a challenge. If they seem boring to reporters and editors, then that's the time for thought. There's always something interesting to readers in any story. It's the writer's and editor's task to find that interesting angle. Think. Observe. Use all your senses.

Years ago I found a good example of digging into the boring pit to find an interesting story in a book called "Done in a Day: 100 years of great writing from The Chicago Daily News." The story was about a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. The topic was when to hold a public hearing - a dull topic and a reporter would normally report such an item in one sentence. However, the debate on setting the date resembled the Abbott and Costello routine on "who's on first." The reporter saw the humor - and reader interest - in the debate and reported it in script format, providing readers with a front-row seat at his ridiculous exchange.

The lesson for reporters: keep your senses alert - all of them.

There's often a better story in the most routine assignments. Read The Wall Street Journal's "middle column" for inspiration. Those stories often make interesting reading out of the most routine. Some of those stories are collected in "Floating Off The Page: The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal's 'Middle Column'" and "Dressing for dinner in the Naked City and Other Tales from The Wall Street Journal's 'Middle Column.'" I recall one story in which a Journal reporter who was assigned to Africa wrote about the difficulty she encountered trying to write stories on a portable typewriter with a nonfunctioning letter Z. The title: "Z-less in Zanzibar."

The Journal books are still in print. The Daily News book might be hard to find. And good stories are hard to find, but worth seeking.