It Pays To Pay Attention

Last year I covered a radio story about a Dog Voting booth a Manlius woman had set up, as part of a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. In a fit of madness, my fondness for quirky features possessed my soul, and I stopped by the event.

I interviewed the organizer, who was very friendly, and she was a great interview because she was so passionate about the subject (who wouldn't be passionate about dog voting?) She had a good sense of humor, and was willing to play along with me as we spoke about the "funnier" aspects of the story.

OK, I've been out of the business as a professor for a while now, but I DID spend many years as a reporter. Anyway, I did several interviews, got a fairly good amount of nat sound, and after less than an hour, I left.

So I put together a wrap that ran on WAER, and pitched the story to NPR. To my surprise they liked it. But they asked me to change just one thing: they wanted me to paint a better verbal picture of the dog voting booth, but take no more than another 5 seconds to do it. So the producer asked me to describe the booth. That's when I realized...I couldn't, because I really didn't pay that much attention to it. In fairness, at the time, I didn't plan to focus on the voting booth; it was going to be about the "Doggies For Hillary" concept. But as I reviewed my interviews, it seemed to me that the voting booth was a stronger/quirkier angle. I realized I couldn't remember what the curtain of the booth was made of; what the doggie treats inside were sitting on; what the inside of the booth looked like. I didn't pay attention.

Luckily, my interviewee was just a phone call away, and I was able to get the missing details. I'm still not sure I did a very good job adding the details in 5 seconds of copy, but it seemed to make NPR happy. But the experience was something of an embarassing reminder that a good reporter pays attention to EVERYTHING, and nothing beats good notetaking and observation at the scene of a story.

Click the play button on the mad cool widget below to hear the story...

Dog Voting-WAER.mp...