A few tidbits from the past week or two, thanks mostly to suggestions from Tracker readers and Twitter friends:
• The Boston Globe put out a fine feature piece Mar. 20th on Ryan Westmoreland (left), once a top Red Sox prospect, who is now recovering from a sudden illness that could have killed him. The story is by Charles P. Pierce, a Globe magazine staff writer. You could call it a sports story, or a medical story. However you want to characterize it, it’s one heck of a piece of writing. From the lede:
The afternoon is fading, and he is standing in the lobby of a salesman’s hotel in Cleveland Circle in Brookline. He looks like any other kid in a gray sweat suit, but you notice upon meeting him that the left side of his face has kind of a slide to it and that his speech is just a bit waterlogged. Ryan Westmoreland … left only this morning from the Red Sox spring training facility in Fort Myers, Florida. He did his workout, and his stretching, and his hitting, and his weight lifting, and all the other things that baseball players do every day to get ready for the season. Then he went in and did all the things he does that most baseball players don’t have to do, because these things are part of his life now.
And from the body of the story:
…Over the next 24 hours, Ryan fell off a cliff.
He went deaf in one ear. His vision began to blur. They [he and his girlfriend, Charlene] went back to Solomon. “He walked into the doctor’s office,” Charlene recalls, “and he came out in a wheelchair. The rate of progression was unbelievable. You see him sitting there and you know you can’t do anything for him, and then he starts to blink . . . differently.”
The story is moving, engaging, and superbly crafted. The kicker brought tears to my eyes. I can’t help stepping out of my role for a moment to say, as a reader, that I wish Westmoreland well.
***
• From the outside, one would guess that being a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine would be one of the best jobs in journalism. You get more space than most writers do, your copy is improved by the smart editors and meticulous fact-checking staff at the Times, and you presumably are far better paid than most of your colleagues.
Don’t accept the job, however, until you’ve read Robin Marantz Henig‘s candid and frightening account of what happens before a Times Magazine story sees print. Even for a contributing writer, such as Henig–an insider, a member of the team–it’s a brutal process.
You can find Henig’s tale on The Open Notebook, the valuable blog by science journalists Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann. Henig says she wrote 15 or 20 drafts before sending the story to her editor. “Not 15 or 20 totally different versions, but a lot of different versions.” Henig reports that her editor, who should be her champion at the magazine, “was very nervous—she told me later that she didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. I think she was still worried about an article that I’d had killed a full year earlier after many, many attempts at fixing it.” An editor who has worked with a writer for years assigns a story that she doesn’t think the writer can pull off? That’s bordering on sadistic.
A word about what Henig earns. She doesn’t tell us, but she does say that it takes her six months to write a story for the Times Magazine, and at least another couple of months after she finishes to come up with another idea. That’s less than two stories a year. Unless Henig is earning close to six figures for each story–more than what many writers get for writing a book–she’s not nearly as highly paid as we might imagine an NYT Magazine contributing writer to be.
And, a bonus: Henig shows us the lede the editor-in-chief of the magazine asked her to write, after she begged him not to. Thankfully, it was discarded.
***
• On Saturday, March 12th, NPR‘s Guy Raz interviewed a Dutch researcher about a study in The Lancet on the causes of ADHD and a possible new treatment. The researcher told Raz that ADHD was usually caused by diet, and that diet could usually cure it. Here are a few excerpts from the four-and-a-half-minute interview:
In 64% of children with ADHD, ADHD is caused by food. It’s a hypersensitivity reaction to food. (1:20)…
I think in all children we should start with diet research. If that is not successful…then we do need drugs, of course…but now we are giving them all drugs, and I think that’s a huge mistake. (2:02)
After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior. They were no more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper tantrums. (3:40)
“It was a miracle,” a teacher said. (4:05)
Nobody else was interviewed, and Raz made no effort to put the story in context–namely, to note that others are far more skeptical about the relationship between diet and ADHD. At the very least, NPR should have interviewed one or two others with different points of view.
In contrast, here was how the story appeared on MedPage Today:
A limited diet that focuses on a few selected foods including rice, meat, and vegetables may provide symptom relief for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, researchers said, but skeptics question the validity of their study.
NPR, you know better than this. Or you should. Was the science desk closed over the weekend? If so, you should have held this until Monday so the science folks could take a look.
One final note: In a recent post, I seconded a call for online news stories to link to primary sources. NPR did not link to the ADHD study, which you can find here, but it should have. There you can see the study’s conclusion, which is much more cautious than the researcher was in the NPR interview. Instead of claiming that a diet could cure ADHD, the study said, “A strictly supervised restricted elimination diet is a valuable instrument to assess whether ADHD is induced by food.”
– Paul Raeburn
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