Copyright © 2017 by Wil C. Fry.
Some rights reserved.
Author: Cliff Morrison
Year: 2016
Genre: Journalism, Retrospective
Publisher: Morris Publishing
ISBN (N/A)
Author’s Facebook page
Summary
Note: This book was provided to me free of charge by the author.
60 True Stories is, as the title suggests, a collection of 60 stories. Author Cliff Morrison worked for several newspaper outlets over a 44-year career, and these stories are from those years (1968-2012). The book isn’t a “representative sampling”, Morrison says up front, nor is it a reflection of the biggest or most sensational stories he covered. These are stories that stuck in his mind for other reasons: “articles that were particularly interesting or challenging to do”. It also includes feature-style profiles of people he “liked personally”, as well as a handful of obituaries, reviews, local crime stories, etc.
What I Liked Least About It
The things that bugged me about reading this book don’t reflect so much on Morrison or the subjects of his stories, but on the medium of news writing. As a former news writer, I immediately noticed the inverted pyramid structure of the stories — the practice of sorting paragraphs from most important to least important, something I loathed during my years at a small-town newspaper. It sounds reasonable enough when described briefly, but has the effect of ruining chronological storytelling and making good transistions between paragraphs almost impossible.
Closely related is the newspaper practice of using only a single sentence for each “paragraph”. It looks fine in the narrow columns of newspapers but will never look good when each line spans the width of a book’s page.
Both practices evolved organically due to the way newspapers are made and were influenced heavily by the bane of news writing — “limited column inches”. The inverted pyramid structure means that when a story doesn’t fit in the allotted space, a layout editor knows to simply removed the last (least important) paragraph, and then the next-to-last, and so on until the story fits. If the writer has put the most important bits at the top, then only the least important bits will be cut. The one-sentence-per-paragraph rule came about for the same reason, but also because narrow columns in newspapers make paragraphs look longer and people stop reading when there aren’t any paragraph breaks for a while.
When reading a news story that should have a coherent narrative, but doesn’t, it is often because of the inverted pyramid rule. This messes up the chronology of crime and accident reports, sports stories, city council narratives, descriptions of scandals, and so on.
(I eventually convinced my own editors to allow me to break this rule as I saw fit. I would still put the most important bits in the first couple of paragraphs, but then tell a chronological story in the rest of the article. It sometimes caused difficulty when our layout editor was putting together pages, but the payoff was more understandable stories.)
What I Liked Most About It
I think what I liked most about this book was the nostalgic reminder of what it was like to work at a daily newspaper in small towns: writing obituaries about people you never met, writing cutesy feature stories about events or people that don’t interest you at all, trying to write fair and accurate crime/court stories when you personally know people on both sides, going on “ride-alongs” with police or fire personnel, showing up to crime scenes in the middle of the night, attending ribbon cuttings, emphathizing with the lives of people very different than yourself, and generally being part of a community.
It was clear from the stories that Morrison cared for his work and treated his journalism with special care — it was not just a job for him.
Conclusion
My attention was grabbed early. The second story (“Area Slayings Could Be Linked”) mentioned Seminole County, Okla., and the name of a homicide victim that I had come across in my own work. The story was from 1974, when I was a toddler, but my grandfather had collected articles relating to the suspicious killings and my Dad had presented them to me in the early 2000s. When I wrote an unsolved-murders case — published April 9, 2004, I included two of the names that I saw in Morrison’s story from 30 years earlier — Jimmy Lee Stinson and Eldon Wayne “Squirt” Cavett. Their murders remain unsolved to this day.
One story was about Carrico’s Leatherworks, a small business in Edna, Kansas, that makes gun belts, holsters, saddles, and other leather items for major feature films. Having seen some of the films in question, that caught my attention as well.
It also wasn’t lost on me that two of the obituaries were Morrison’s own parents, in 1996 and 2003.
This book isn’t for everyone, though it will certainly be interesting to a select few.
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