Two-Minute Drill: Finding Time For Deeper Dives

In September I started working as a local editor for Patch.com. As part of that work, I’ve been sort of a de-facto writing coach. This is one in an occasional series of writing tips I send out to our team of reporters in hopes of helping them produce cleaner copy for our readers.

The nature of our jobs doesn’t give us much time to take deeper, in-depth looks at the communities we cover — or at least not as much time as I’d like. If I have one complaint about my time at Patch, it’s that I miss chances to report the hell out of a story and write a few thousand words about it. But I knew that was going to be a luxury that I knew I would not be able to indulge in long-form journalism, so I’ll quit my whining.

Still, there have been a few times I have come up against stories in my towns that need a closer look and a deeper dive. In some cases it’s meant spending half a day to report and write the story, in other cases it’s been several hours a day spread out over the course of a few weeks. I’ve done it enough that a few of you have asked me how I’ve found the time to do it, so I’m going to outline a few of my strategies in this email.

How I Do It

For me, deeper dives are about time management — a skill journalists generally are not great at in my experience. But I like writing long, so finding a way — and the discipline — to make time to do that is a reward in and of itself.

Keep in mind, these strategies are what work for me. Try them with the caveat that what works for me may not work for you. I’m also hoping people will use this email as a jumping off point for a discussion on what works for them when it comes to time management.

Adopt A Time Management System: I use the Pomodoro technique to organize my day. You can google it, but you basically break your work day into “tomatoes,” or 25-minute chunks. The idea is you stay focussed on a task or project for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and repeat. After four tomatoes, you take a 15-minute break. The goal is to focus you on a single task: I’m only allowed to check personal email, my fantasy baseball team and my Amazon order during those breaks.

If I do 16 Patch tomatoes in a work day, it works out to about an eight-hour work day. And If I’m working on a deep dive, I might set aside four of those tomatoes for my in-depth reporting and writing. The rule is after those four tomatoes I have to stop and go back to the daily work I need to accomplish every day. I can pick up on the longer piece the next day or later on by extending my workday to 20 tomatoes.

If you want to use Pomodoro, there are plenty of online timers that will help you keep track of the time (I use http://www.tomato.es/). But the key is to have a system — any system — that keeps you on task and, most importantly, a system that works for you.

Get To Know The Open Records Law: I file a lot of open records requests. I try to target them when I suspect there may be a story. RCFP.org has a great primer for filing public records requests to both state and federal agencies and I also have 20+ years of experience if you need help understanding it.

The records provide a wealth of information and, depending on what I requested, I can usually squeeze a few stories out of every request.

Pick Up The Phone: Phone calls take up a lot of time, but they’re absolutely necessary for in-depth reporting. Email just doesn’t give the depth or the potential tangents that could lead to other stories. In a perfect world, I’d conduct all of my interviews in person, but this is not a perfect world.

Why I do it (in case you need convincing):

Writing long isn’t, to me, about page-view numbers. Good traffic follows good stories and good social media strategy whether they’re 100 words or 10,000 words long.

Done right, in-depth stories give our readers something our competition failed to give them. It’s usually depth and perspective, but sometimes it’s just an enjoyable read. It also lets our sources know that we’re taking the time to really understand the issues we’re writing about. It also gets readers talking about the issues and, by extension, Patch.

I’ve been in an email back-and-forth with a woman who has been following my coverage of the North Andover murder whose most recent email mentioned that she “defended Patch” when someone she knew was complaining that Patch just rips off other news outlets. Unfortunately, that perception still exists in some corners of the communities we cover, but thoroughly-reported and well-written stories can help change that image.

And from my own point of view, the time invested in a story almost always pays dividends. Every deep dive I have done for Patch has resulted in emails from new sources with new tips for related and unrelated stories on whatever topic I have written about (there’s a reason why I put my email and phone number in every story I publish).

And sometimes I just get the personal validation I need to keep pushing forward with the job. Earlier this month I received emails from two members of Wendi Davidson’s family thanking Patch for its coverage of her murder. We’re getting answers to questions they have that they’re not getting from the DA’s office and keeping pressure on a defendant who has slipped the system once already.