COMM 207: News value -- novelty/"the bizzare"

When I was in J-school back in the Middle Ages, the list of news values (newsworthiness) I memorized included this item: "The bizarre." It was the one that's explained by saying if-a-man-bites-a-dog ... and so on. You know the rest. Now I see it listed in journalism books as "novelty" or "the unusual" or something like that. But I still think of it as The Bizarre, with a capital "T" and a capital "B." It just rolls trippingly off my tongue that way.

Well, here's a story in today's Washington Post that qualifies. It's a dog story, too, about how dogs that flunk out of obedience school find a new life as guard dogs in the Middle East.

Here's the lede, by Washington Post staff writer Laura Blumenfeld. It's a standard Newsweek-style soft lede -- I've heard them called a Jell-O lede or a marshmallow lede -- that catches the reader's attention by telling a little story. In this case, a couple of little stories:

The day before Ricky Bobby Baby Jesus was scheduled to die by an injection of pentobarbital, along came the cookie lady. She brought dog biscuits to the Howard County Animal Shelter. When she saw the yellow Labrador -- evicted for feistiness from three homes -- leap to catch a ball, she had an idea.

In a New York prison, Mary Jane, a black Labrador raised by a convicted murderer, was balled up in her cell. Bred from guide-dog stock and trained in an inmate program, Mary Jane flunked her test. "She lacks self-confidence," the evaluators noted. The convict sat on the cell floor and rubbed Mary Jane's belly, reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" out loud to her.

How Ricky Bobby Baby Jesus and Mary Jane went from being underachieving curs to canines sniffing out terrorists in Rabat, Morocco, is the story of how some Americans -- or at least their dogs -- are finding second chances through the war on al-Qaeda.

And here's the nut graf. See how it sums up the story in a nutshell? That's why a nut graf is called that. And "graf," by the way, isn't a misspelled graphic. It's a paragraph. Anyway, here it is:

In a 16-week program jointly run by the Justice and State departments, the two dogs, along with four other Labradors, transformed themselves from losers to potential lifesavers. Each canine teamed up for training in the Shenandoah Valley with a Moroccan law enforcement official. They would join more than 700 American dogs who have been deployed with foreign counterterrorism forces.

Read it! I think you'll enjoy it, especially if you like dogs and even more if you can't resist an undisciplined goofball of a dog. You know, the kind of dogs that will never win a dog show.

But also read it for style. Read it for the way the story's put together. Look for the odd little details that make the story come alive. Ask yourself: How did the reporter get that bit of information? Here's an example: When the dog handlers from Morocco ask, "Where's Wal-Mart? Where's Circuit City? Where's Potomac Mills?" Did she see it? Hear it? Did someone let it slip during an interview? How does she let you know? (That's called attribution.) Look for her story-telling technique. What writer's tricks does she use that you can use in your own writing?

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