Behind the Times
“Every story we decide to do, we’re deciding to do,” says Wilgoren, speaking for the Times’s national staff. “We’re not doing it out of obligation.” She says Times correspondents ask themselves, “‘What’s the bigger thought here? What’s the point?’ We refer to it as the ‘page-one thought’ a lot of the time.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Times signed off after a paragraph; all it wanted to do at this stage was get on the record. The Sun-Times and Tribune dutifully plowed on. A breaking news story is constructed incrementally: There’s the news peg, followed by paragraphs of elaboration, background, and reaction. And though it would be unfair to call these paragraphs randomly ordered, there’s no deep narrative logic to their arrangement. As calls are returned and information turns up, each new piece of data is slipped into the account wherever it seems to fit.
“Liesel Pritzker’s late uncle, Jay Pritzker, was the founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain.”
A story written like this is easy to read but almost impossible to penetrate. Readers don’t expect it to explain what happened because they can tell at once that the writer hasn’t figured that out himself: assimilated knowledge doesn’t organize itself into one-sentence bursts. “Interesting yarn,” thinks the reader turning the page, perhaps wondering if Liesel Pritzker is a selfish brat or a daughter wronged.
“But after Mr. Pritzker’s death in 1999 and a nasty squabble between the triumvirate and the other cousins, that blueprint was torn up last year and replaced by a secret plan to carve up the $15 billion empire over the next decade, most likely taking public key assets like the Hyatt hotel chain, and handing each of the 11 a $1.4 billion purse.
