Version D gains full marks for bringing in the background as soon as the second paragraph, but the paragraph is much too vague:
Mr. Benn, Minister of Technology, is flying north today to visit the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Authority at Risley, Lancs. Arrangements for the visit have been made at short notice.
Yesterday it was disclosed that he has written to atomic scientists working at Dounreay, Caithness and Risley, warning them of an American plot to discover the secrets of Britain’s latest reactor by recruiting senior scientists.
The reader might well wonder what ‘American plot’? The text editor should have written in a phrase such as: ‘. . . warning them of an attempt by America’s Westinghouse Corporation . . .’
The paper, in another story, gave a better demonstration of putting the news in context. This was the story of the Westinghouse denial: the denial is the news and in a brief story like this the background should not be too obtrusive. Note particularly how the background is run into the story with the second paragraph phrase ‘the company’s present recruiting efforts’:
Complaints by Mr. Benn, Minister of Technology, that the Westinghouse Electric Corporation was trying to obtain ‘on the cheap’ the secrets of the Dounreay fast-breeder reactor were firmly denied today by the company.
A Westinghouse spokesman in Pittsburgh said Mr. Benn’s interpretation of the company’s present recruiting efforts in Britain was ‘completely false’. He also said the British Atomic Energy Authority had been demanding a ‘completely prohibitive’ price for the licensing of information on the Dounreay fast-breeder reactor.
The company refused to say what it had offered Britain in the unsuccessful negotiations to work out a licensing agreement. But it was learned from a reliable source that the parties were ‘10 million dollars apart’ at the end of the talks.
None of these editing attempts was perfect – but they all made an attempt in perhaps hectic circumstances. I have made these criticisms, in more relaxed circumstances, to try to define the aim and standards all good text editors set themselves. Provided it is accurate, it is far better to make a hurried and imperfect attempt at putting the news in context than not doing it at all. Curiously, the paper which did so well on the first day of the Benn story did particularly badly on the second day – simply by not bothering at all with background. The italics are mine and so are the comments on the right:
Mr. Tony Benn, Minister of Technology, has asked to meet a delegation of four senior Dounreay scientists at Risley today to discuss the Westinghouse offer.
Two of the delegation will be Mr. Arthur Parry, deputy director at Dounreay, and Mr. Roy Matthews, head of administration there. They will fly to Ring-way, Manchester, in a plane supplied by the Ministry of Technology.
What Westinghouse offer? There is not a clue here that it was an offer to recruit individual scientists. Conceivably it might have been an offer from Westinghouse to the British Government. Nowhere in the story is this ambiguity directly resolved.
Late last night, Mr. Matthews said: ‘Quite frankly, we don’t know precisely what’s on the agenda for discussion. All we have been told is that Mr. Benn has asked to meet us in Risley tomorrow. But it is a fair assumption that the main topic will be about the Westinghouse offer.’
The reader, as well as Mr. Matthews, is still in the dark.
The other members of the delegation are Mr. Kenneth Butler, chairman of the Dounreay branch of the Institute of Professional Civil Servants and Mr. Geoffrey James, the branch councillor of the Institute’s Dounreay branch.
Properly ‘Institution’.
Last night a spokesman for the local branch of the institute said that the two officials would point out to the Minister that the reason why top scientists were wanting to leave Dounreay was that they did not have the full confidence in their future with the Atomic Energy Authority there.
Forget for a moment the clumsy ‘were wanting to’. The way this is put suggests that the initiative ‘to leave Dounreay’ has come from the scientists. The whole story is growing more confusing because of the failure of the text editor to recap on the Westinghouse advertisement and Mr Benn’s attack.
A deputation from the IPCS which saw Mr. Benn yesterday, told him that there had been prolonged uncertainty over the AEA’s research programme. Dr Dickson Mabon’s statement about a rundown at Dounreay had never been satisfactorily explained, there had been a severe cutdown at the world-famous Culham laboratory and only yesterday staff at Winfrith had been warned of a 3.5 per cent cut involving 70 people.
And who is he?
Is it really?
Where’s that?
There had been an ‘extraordinary downgrading of the chairman of the AEA which was in marked contrast with Steel Board salaries and what was being rumoured for the new chairman of British Rail.
Mr Roy Matthews, director of the Dounreay Atomic Station, from which at least a dozen scientists are thought to have been interviewed by the US Westinghouse Corporation, said there was no comparison between Dounreay facilities and Westinghouse, whose fast breeder reactor was only on paper. Westinghouse would be building a prototype when Britain’s first commercial fast reactor came into use in the seventies.
For the first time we are told that Westinghouse is an American firm. Even now we are given only a woolly idea that part of the story is about Britain’s lead in the fast-breeder reactor and Westinghouse’s attempt to catch up.
But there are mixed feelings among the Dounreay scientists. While Mr.Jim Mockett, assistant manager of the reactor, said a recent American visitor from the Enrico Fermi atom station near Chicago was envious of Dounreay facilities, Mr. M. Tucker, a young scientist, said there were a lot of other young men who would like to cross the Atlantic.
‘Some of us have been discussing this advert and we came to the conclusion we would need about four times our present salary before it would be worth going,’ he said.
Which advert?
Westinghouse’s nuclear reactor division, based at Pittsburg, has not yet issued any statement following the row. A spokesman for the firm in London could not say how many men had been interviewed nor confirm or deny reports of offers as high as seven times their present salaries.
What row? Not a clue that it is an attack by the minister on Westinghouse. Indeed the paper seems to have two rows going, since most of the story has been about scientists’ criticisms of Government atomic policy.
‘But talking in terms of enticement and underhand activities is absolutely rubbish’, said the spokesman. ‘Westinghouse are stretched on the ordinary nuclear power programme – 14 projects this year. They have now a fast breeder reactor to produce. They are advertising in the States for men. They know scientists are here, so they placed the advertisement.’
There are 300 professional people at Dounreay, and the establishment has been reduced in the past year by under 8 per cent, said the spokesman. He did not think the rate of contraction was greatly accelerated during the past year than previously.
He thought morale at the plant was ‘reasonably good’. No higher than that? He replied: ‘In the early days, when the place was building up, one got a kick out of the freedom and creative activity. We have now gone on to more or less routine work. But on the development side there is still zeal.’
The plot thickens. Who is ‘talking in terms of enticement and underhand activities’? There is nothing at all to link this with the minister. The rest of the paragraph seems irrelevant unless the reader knows of Mr Benn’s charge that it was an attempt by Westinghouse to gain nuclear secrets on the cheap.
In the Commons yesterday, Conservative MPs pressed for information about what the Government was doing to halt the brain drain. Mr. Peter Shore told Mr. Cranley Onslow (Con. Woking) that no money had been spent by the Department of Economic Affairs in analysing or attempting to reverse the brain drain. ‘I would not myself have placed so great a weight on the fiscal system as you do’, said Mr. Shore.
Mr Benn
’s own attempts to halt the brain drain have still not been mentioned: even at this stage Mr Benn’s visit to Risley is not projected as an attempt to persuade the scientists to stay in Britain.
Several days after Mr Benn’s original letter a Sunday paper took the story further. It provides a useful illustration of the way to give the background while taking the story forward in a piece of informed reporting. Note how in every sentence the background reference is used as a link to new information, thus informing the new reader without wasting the time of the reader who remembers the events earlier in the week:
The attack last week by Mr Benn, Minister of Technology, on the American Westinghouse Electric Corporation was far more than a melodramatic appeal to British nuclear scientists to stay at home.
His impassioned open letter to scientists at Dounreay, Risley, and other centres of fast reactor technology, came only two days after the Prime Minister announced a seven-point plan for a European technological community. The charges in Mr Benn’s letter were calculated to appeal to strong Common Market feeling against technological domination by America.
The letter can also be regarded as an unusual piece of British salesmanship to the Common Market. It refers specifically to the value of Britain’s fast reactor technology to the whole of Europe.
By revealing officially for the first time that Westinghouse had tried to acquire a licence for British fast reactor know-how, the Minister proved that the American company was interested more in specific information than in making good their shortage in manpower.
Background for Interest
Text editors should write in background mainly for intelligibility but also for interest. A few extra words of detail add bite to a story. Rather than letting copy pass with a reference to ‘Lockerbie’, or ‘the Lockerbie disaster’ the text editor writes in ‘the Lockerbie plane crash when 270 died after a bomb exploded in mid-air’.
When a member of a legislature resigns, the winning margin of votes at the last election should be written in so that the political fortunes of the seat can be assessed. If there is a bad train or plane crash, the previous worst, and any similarities should be recalled. Sometimes the text editor with a good library can create a whole story by relating information already known to a new development – for instance, the agency flash which brought the news in 1961 that Russia had decided to resume testing nuclear weapons and would test a series of giant nuclear bombs with a claimed yield equivalent to 20, 30, 50 and 100 million tons of TNT.
Here the lines of development include the background on disarmament talks, and the interpretation of 100 million tons of TNT into proportions the reader can grasp. The text editor sends for sets of clippings and can build up a story on the bald announcement. First the diplomatic side:
This ends the three-year-old truce on the testing of hydrogen bombs. The last known Soviet nuclear tests occurred on November 1 and November 3, 1958, within days of the start on October 31 of that year of the nuclear test-ban conference in Geneva.
The last United States test took place during October, 1958. The US declared that it would continue its suspension of nuclear testing on a voluntary basis, provided that no further tests were conducted after those in the early days of November, 1958.
The test-ban talks between Britain, the United States and Russia have been deadlocked for the past five months. During the talks the only known nuclear tester has been France.
The text editor could build the scientific background into a separate story:
The 100-megaton (100-million-ton) bomb, if it is ever tested, would cause barely imaginable devastation. The bomb the Americans dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was equal to only 20,000 tons (20 kilotons) of TNT – and it wiped out 80,000 people in one explosion. The 100-megaton bomb is 5,000 times as powerful. Even the smaller of the bombs announced, the 20-megaton, can cause third-degree burns 45 miles away.
It is not long since bombs were weighed in pounds. When the last war began a 1,000 lb bomb was enough to create terror among a civilian population. Four years later came the ‘block-buster’, which was ten tons of TNT, and then in March 1945 the Royal Air Force’s 22-ton Grand Slam, the heaviest conventional bomb ever used operationally.
If the Russians go ahead with their tests they are bound to throw up radioactive debris which will drift over the world creating new fears of pollution.
As it happens, the biggest bomb tested to date at that time was probably one of 57 megatons in the USSR on 30 October 1961 –according to the Guinness Book of Records, which is one of the easy sources for text editors when a bare agency message needs fleshing out in a hurry.
The chance for this kind of creative editing comes more often than you may think: a recurrence of floods (check and write in what action was promised last time);a runaway lorry on a hill (check previous accidents and protests); a take-over bid (check all the ramifications). Perhaps the most familiar opportunity is the death of a well-known person. On a busy evening paper, especially, there will be no time to invite an accomplished obituary. The text editor will call at once for the library clippings and add as much as possible in the time available. It is usually best for text editors to do this, rather than pass the task to a reporter, because the text editor can more easily weave into the story any further new agency information such as tributes, the circumstances of death, or a note on the political implications, and so on. Check the library clippings with Who’s Who, if you can.
Another opportunity is the compendium story – when a series of similar events are pulled into one story. In an icy weekend there were five separate drownings on frozen ponds in different places. It was good copy-tasting and editing to pull them together into one story with a common intro:
Five boys were drowned on frozen ponds over the weekend.
That is the general intro. If one accident is outstanding it can be made the intro, with a second general paragraph bringing in the other items.
At all times translate foreign figures into domestic – dollars into pounds (or vice versa) – and give both. Relate everything to the ordinary lives of the readers. Tell them what a ‘pasteurised’ egg is as well as a fast-breeder reactor; don’t leave them guessing what an invisible export is – or where they could find Aldabra. (It’s in the Seychelles.) If you have to hesitate yourself before you write in an explanation, consider how much easier you are making things for the reader. Never let anything pass which you yourself would not be able to explain without the help of the library.
Story-telling
The discussion so far has been on straight news stories of two types: action and statement and statement–opinion stories. The opening advocated in both is the same, to reveal at once the most dramatic or important human results of the activity. I would make one exception – the occasion when the news point is deliberately delayed for a sentence. That delay can add pith and contrast. It offers variety. And the news point is still high up in the story.
Delaying the point by a sentence or two is still essentially hard news treatment of a story. Delaying beyond that – perhaps to the end of the report – is a technique, not of news reporting, but of story-telling. The technique is common in feature writing: ‘How I escaped from the dreaded Wonga tribesmen’, says the headline and the story begins with the day the writer caught the boat train. The story begins at the beginning and goes step by step to its stirring conclusion. The emphasis is not on what happened but on how it happened. The technique is clearly distinct from the hard news treatment of an action story.
For most hard news stories story-telling is too slow a technique. It is exasperating to the reader who wants to find out what happened. But story-telling has its uses even in news columns. There is a certain monotony when every story on every page opens with the same hard news urgency. Story-telling provides a change of pace. It is most useful of all in popular newspapers which package news as entertainment, and for weekly news magazines and newspapers who are behind the dailies with the hard news, but who have extra detail to rela
te. But story-telling must be used frugally. It must never be the most prevalent structure.
Let us look at the two forms of treatment. First the straight news report. It meets all our tests of being direct, active and human:
Several American marines were hurt yesterday when they walked into a minefield outside their camp.
They were following a 14-year-old Vietnamese boy who later admitted that he had laid the minefield himself. He said he had been tortured by the Vietcong to do it.
The Marines said he was a ‘cute little guy’ who hung around the camp gate asking questions. They had talked to him and answered his questions – on explosives.
One popular tabloid treated this as an exercise in storytelling:
American Marines at a camp in Vietnam thought that the friendly 14-year-old Vietnamese boy was a ‘cute little guy’.
He would hang around the camp gates asking questions.
The Marines told him what he wanted to know ... about explosives.
Then one day the boy led a number of the Marines into a minefield outside the camp – a minefield he had laid himself.
Some of the Marines were hurt. The boy, caught later, said he had been tortured by the Communist Vietcong into doing it.
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