Routine story: An automotive plant is about to be shut down, adding to the growing roster of abandoned manufacturing facilities across the Northeast. Joseph Ryan, staff reporter for the Star-Ledger Newspaper, gets the assignment. But for him, there are no routine stories. So, what could have been another report of lay offs and economic discouragement becomes a narrative that illustrates the changing culture of Linden, N.J.

In 2003, when Ryan won the New York Press Association Writer of the Year Award for his work at the Riverdale Press, he was quoted in the NYPA contest publication as saying: “I write as if I’m unraveling knots. I ask myself how to get into the story, how to craft the lead. I begin to play with words, pace the floor, untie the knots inside me.”

In unraveling the knots in the closing of New Jersey’s last automotive plant, Ryan thought readers needed some statistics about the rise and decline of a manufacturing economy. He also thought they would be well served if he helped them to understand the big picture of the region, to put this crisis into a larger context. So, “Shifting Gears: Workers See Economy at Crossroad as Line Slows to a Halt in N.J.’s Last Auto Plant” begins with an anecdote from the 1930s.

Tracing the history of the land itself, Ryan pulls forth the power of all the literary devices commonly used in fiction, and he builds his journalistic narrative with a strong foundation by honing each word, phrase and sentence with care. The text flows with alliteration (…rise from fallow fields), metaphor/simile (…collar as blue as burning butane), description (…whose red curls pop out around his baseball cap) and well-chosen quotes. Important economic statistics are woven into the narrative in ways that do not interrupt the flow of the story.

How does a reporter who earned a degree in communication and worked as a bartender and juvenile detention center counselor after graduating from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, learn to write with super skills? Ryan credits his mentor, Bernard Stein, former co-publisher of the Riverdale Press in the Bronx, with helping him recognize the gravitas of journalism. “He taught me to respect the power of my words,” Ryan says. “He taught me to cut through bureaucratic language and to write for my readers, not my sources.”

In “Shifting Gears,” Ryan applied that lesson about cutting through bureaucratic language in this way:

When GM official refused to say the plant was closing but admitted it was idling, he asked, “Will it start building cars again?”

“We have don’t have that determined,” the officials said.

Ryan reported it like this: Wednesday is the plant’s last scheduled production day. General Motors has refused to say the faculty is closing. There are no plans, however, to restart the assembly line.

When Ryan’s story hit the newsstands, he knew the autoworkers did not like it. “They wanted a story about the death of manufacturing and how it would lead to the death of the American economy. But that’s not necessarily the case. The point of the story is that economies change, and that’s not always bad,” Ryan explains.

The principal put forth in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics as “Act Independently: Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know,” resonates with Ryan.

“Too often,” he says, “ journalists write for politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats and the CEOs they cover. We often slip into the language of the campaign or courtroom, subconsciously asserting ourselves as insiders.”

But journalists are not insiders; they are observers and reporters. “We should write for outsiders,” Ryan says. Journalists must translate legalese and campaign-speak so readers can understand and care about issues that affect their lives and their communities.

“Our words have power,” Ryan says. “We need to wield them carefully.”

By Linda Loomis

lloomis@oswego.edu