Bad Reaction   

It's an assignment sure to wipe the smile off of virtually any reporter's face: the dreaded react story. Should these newsroom perennials be buried forever, or is there a way to make them meaningful devices for getting real people into the news?

QUICK, A POP QUIZ:
You work at a newspaper or a television station, and the president is giving the State of the Union address tonight. What do you do?
A) Watch the speech and write down what he says.
B) Watch the speech with a group of area college students and write down what they say.
C) Watch the speech and then spend a frantic 25 minutes on the phone collecting quotes from local members of Congress.
D) All of the above.
We know, we know. The answer is "D," of course.
If you're an editor, it might be an assignment you hand out almost reflexively. If you're a reporter, it could easily be something you'd rather avoid. Envisioned at 11 a.m. as a short but telling narrative reflecting chatter on the street, it too often arrives at 5:30 p.m. as a padded 10 inches to be shoved inside the paper or something slapped on the end of a newscast.
Reviled, revered, unavoidable...it's the reaction story.
At their most basic level, reaction stories involve a simple survey of people's opinions--sending television crews out to talk to mall shoppers, say, about whether their school-age children are worried about upcoming state exams. Others corral people with a definite stake in the issue--families affected by a recent tax proposal, for example, or retirees dependent on certain prescriptions--to wax outraged/jubilant en masse. Triggered by local or national events (perennial favorites include politics, war and natural disaster), they aim to bring a story home to readers by highlighting the thoughts of a person who lives in the same ZIP code.
And they often tend to raise the question: Is this worth the effort?

OF COURSE, NO ONE STARTS out trying to waste airtime or newsprint. Few would dispute that assignments for these stories spring from the best of intentions: to reflect the community at large and to get those ever-elusive "real people" into the news.
"I think a react story is typical of a lot of what journalism is made up of. We pick up the phone and find out what people are thinking about," says Cristal Cody, a business reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "The man on the street provides color to the story, as long as [he's] used properly. If we only did stories with scientific polling, we would be leaving the community voice out of the story, which is the point of reading the paper in the first place. [Readers] want to know what Joe Blow is thinking about the department store that tore a bunch of trees down."
Says Dennis Foley, ombudsman at the Orange County Register: "My sense is because we view ourselves as a local paper and because we're trying to connect with our community, quite frequently [editors] look at the paper and say, 'Does this national event have any local ramifications?' It seems to be reasonable that if you're the local newspaper that you'll want as many local voices in the paper as you can get, so people can say, 'Oh, I saw what this person said. I never thought of that,' or even 'This person's nuts!'... It promotes a conversation in a different way than one in which everything is from a distance."
Sabrina Miller, a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune, confesses she cringes at the way some reaction stories turn out. Even so, she concedes, "I do think there's a usefulness to it. Honestly, when you look at the history of it, I know at the end of the day, nine times out of 10, the paper's going to somebody's cat litter box. But still, this is in some way a historical document. In a hundred years, you'd want to know what the mood was of a pretty good sampling of people about major historical events.... I think there is some value in getting a random sampling."
At WFOR, the CBS affiliate in Miami, news director Shannon High-Bassalik maintains the value of everyday voices is too high to pass up. Each day, one of the evening local news programs includes "Sound Off," a 30- to 60-second segment featuring people's takes on anything from a big news event to who they think ought to be voted off "Survivor."
"I feel like we all make up our community," High-Bassalik says. "To me, there are too many officials on TV. The people who are watching us, they're everyday people. I think everyday people want to see what people like them are saying: 'Do other people feel the same way I do?' I think that's an important part of what we do."
Some feel a little less...accepting, shall we say, of the genre. Take Joe Demma, city editor of the Sacramento Bee and a former investigations editor at Newsday: "I've seen the stuff where you take a family and you watch the president's State of the Union, and everybody talks and sucks their thumb on it. Or, they're starting to bomb Iraq: 'Whaddya think of it?' Or running to the Arab community in Brooklyn or running into Crown Heights and asking Hasidic Jews what they think of Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv.
"If you're just going to go ask, 'What do you think about these people dying?' why bother? They're gonna say it's terrible."
So why, pray tell, do so many news organizations do reaction stories? "Because they're easy, and it doesn't take any imagination," Demma says. "It doesn't take a lot of work. They're quick and dirty. A lot of this stuff gets dictated by television. They send somebody down to the mall and stick a camera in people's faces and people spout off."
Well, not at every station.
Mark Shafer, until recently the acting news director for WCPO, the ABC station in Cincinnati, deplores man-on-the-street stories almost as much as Demma.
"In my opinion, man-on-the-street interviews are about the lowest form of newsgathering that we can employ, so we don't employ them much. Occasionally there's the story where you just want to go out and get the opinions of random people. We did it I guess a year ago in February, when Ken Griffey Jr. announced he was going to come home. Of course, everyone was going to be excited....
"I think the only time that we really do it is when we feel that it's that kind of story, that 'water cooler' story, that talk-about story--that there's a real buzz in town and everybody is talking about it at cocktail parties, at bars, you know, at work on their breaks over lunch."
Both Shafer, who became news director at WSMV in Nashville at the end of April, and Demma note that they do think it makes sense to get so-called "regular people" into the news when they are actually affected by the event that's being covered. And that's a view shared by Charlie Moore, city editor of the Albuquerque Journal, who joins the push against the random man-on-the-street interview.
"That's generally my bent. It's not necessarily the bent of the paper as a whole. The ME has asked for straight reaction stories.... Certainly you want to get everyday people in your stories, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. I think that sometimes there are better ways to try and localize things.
"One of the ones we did lately was on the economy. After people got their 401(k) statements, our biz desk did go out and do a take-the-pulse story, talking to various people--were they worried, how concerned were they about what happened with their statements last year. And we talked to a lot of different people, from stockbrokers to average investors."
When the story of Jesse Jackson's illegitimate daughter broke, Des Moines Register Metro Editor Randy Essex, in his words, "wrestled mightily" with whether to do a reaction story. "Let's say that we would have gone out after the military action against Iraq last week and asked if that was good or bad. You're going to get completely lame responses from people. It's a complete waste of space. The connection with us with Jesse Jackson is that he ran for president, and he spent a lot of time here in '88. So we went to his supporters, black and white, the people who got to know him. We wrote a story that was quite ordinary. But at least these people knew the guy. It wasn't, 'Let's see what black Iowans or black ministers have to say.'
"What I wrestled with was how to do something that wasn't lame. What I succeeded in was getting something that limped."

SOMETIMES IT MIGHT BE best to just say no to a reaction story. But when they do seem appropriate (or someone with clout orders them up regardless), what's the best way to write them? That's a conversation perhaps easiest begun with a discussion of what to avoid. Ask reporters and editors about the problems with reaction stories and you'll get a catechism of potential pitfalls.
"It was the [recent] presidential election and the Supreme Court was ruling, and we were asked to go down to Northwestern University Law School," remembers the Chicago Tribune's Miller. "The idea was, this is a legal event, we're right down the street from a major law school, and they were broadcasting the decision on the radio. There was a notion that there would be this nostalgic group of people sitting around listening to the decision.
"So we get up to this room and there's maybe three people there. And I tried my best to squeeze good quotes out of them. And I talked to people in the lobby about why they weren't listening."
Jean Helms, a reporter at Alabama's Mobile Register, talks of calling sources about a news development happening on deadline, "and their reaction was no reaction. To me, that's the real problem with so many reaction stories. You're doing them so fast, and you're essentially trying to give them the news, and they'll say 'No comment.' Or particularly when it's something like a lawsuit, 'In view that the matter is under adjudication....' "
Might there be a way for her to tell editors there's no "there" there?
"Ah, no, I don't see me saying that."
In Indianapolis, there was the time the Star staff arranged ahead of time to have residents of a nearby retirement village watch then-President Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech, which editors knew would deal with prescription drugs for the elderly. The speech over, reporters trundled out to the complex to collect reaction.
"We got out there and the people were saying things like, 'I didn't know this was going to be on at 9 p.m.! I'm in bed at that hour!' and 'I'm sorry, company was here,' " recalls Janet Williams, one of the Star's assistant city editors. "You try for diversity in these stories, you work really, really hard, and then it's all blown to pieces because 'my brother-in-law came by.' "
(Williams confesses that in a profoundly desperate moment as a young reporter in Pittsburgh in the mid-'80s, assigned to get reaction from the city's then-minuscule Hispanic community to an earthquake in Mexico, she tried a local Chi-Chi's after other calls proved fruitless.)
And then there are the usual time crunches that are endemic to reporting, but can be especially deadly on a story designed to capture the pulse of a particular community. If a business-related reaction story isn't assigned until 3 p.m., for example, even the most dogged reporter has only a few hours to catch most people at their desks. Since the ostensible point is to show what a community--whether that's a city, a particular ethnic group or business leaders--thinks or is talking about in reference to an event, drawing broad conclusions from just the folks who happened to be by their phones presents a very real danger: Does the reporter even know what he or she is writing about?
"[M]y personal worst for reaction stories was one that ran on Sept. 18, 1999," wrote former Orange County Register reporter Phil Garlington in a January cover story for the alternative Orange County Weekly. "The headline: 'Korean Community Cautiously Optimistic on Trade Move.' Subhead: 'REACTION: But some condemn the easing of restrictions as a form of capitulation.' In the lead, I wrote, 'Orange County Korean-Americans responded cautiously to the Clinton administration's decision to ease trade restrictions with North Korea.'
"It went on for 703 boring words, sounded authoritative and conveyed the impression that the Register might know something about Orange County Koreans. Nope. My story was based entirely on quick phone interviews with two businessmen. For one of them, the English language was a very distant second cousin. I'd been assigned this...late in the afternoon, and after a few hours of calling around with deadline coming up, that's all I had.... The thing is, I could write it so there was no overt lie."
Register Executive Editor Ken Brusic says Garlington has a point--uninformed reaction is uninformed, and "we shouldn't do it." What good community newspapers should strive for, Brusic adds, is finding the thoughtful local voices that add context and meaning to stories.
"So reporters should be reviewing the credentials of their sources," he says. "Life experience, reflection and relationships, among others, allow a source to speak and react in insightful ways. In short, we should be looking to add useful information and knowledge for readers.
"Doing that is hard work. Reporters need to have topical maps of their community so they know where to go. They need to talk to lots of people to find the most qualified. They need to listen carefully, be honest with their sources, their editors and themselves."
Brusic continues, "If in the end we don't have the right people, if we can't provide insight, then reporters need to have the courage to say so. Editors need to have the resolve to agree. And we all need to work harder next time."
In his OC Weekly piece, Garlington suggested that reporters routinely include in their reaction stories how many people they talked to--an idea Ombudsman Foley says he agrees with.
Indeed, such forthrightness offers readers a clearer sense of what's being presented than an easily penned generalization. Elissa Papirno, the Hartford Courant's reader representative and president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, recalls a Courant story in which reaction was a small but puzzling slice. There was a protest at a local stop-and-shop supermarket, and a protester had gotten arrested. "The reporter...had this line in there saying, 'Shoppers were divided about the protest.'... I said, 'What does this mean, "Shoppers were divided"?' There was one person quoted in the story. Does this mean that he just talked to two people and one said one thing and the other said something else?"
Including the number of people interviewed "is just basic journalism," she says.

AND THAT INFORMS THE "shoulds" of how to do good reaction stories, now that we've combed through the "should-nots." Even reporters and editors who aren't fans of the genre suggest that a little planning and basic common sense go a long way. Indeed, a lot of the "reaction" stories that reporters and editors say are most successful are ones that draw on journalists' more enterprising instincts.
Miller, for example, remembers when the Jesse Jackson "love child" story broke in the tabloids. "Chicago, for all intents and purposes, is Jesse's hometown, so there was a scramble for something more deep than what I call the 'any asshole on the street' reaction.... We tried to make it a little more focused. We tried to talk to black ministers and teachers about how they would deal with him in their speeches and curriculums, if they felt his moral authority at all would be diminished."
Miller also cites success with a double-whammy reaction story--the weather feature. "This is something that a lot of reporters, especially veteran reporters, kind of roll their eyes at. Last February we had a sort of a heat wave, where it got up to 65 degrees. It was a reaction to the warm weather story that I ended up being assigned. But because the weather is so connected to how people treat each other, it turned out to be a great deal of fun.... I did the obvious things. I went to places like parks, where people were eating outdoors with no coats on. And then I managed to find a class of schoolchildren who were supposed to go ice skating that day, their hands all wrapped around the wrought-iron fence of the skating rink that had melted. I just happened to be going down State Street, and I thought, 'You know, why don't I just go by Skate on State?' And it just turned out really well."
Thinking about a routine assignment not-so-routinely also paid off for the race and demographics team of the San Jose Mercury News. Edwin Garcia and two colleagues were assigned to do a piece on how the community was handling the never-ending presidential election. They considered their options.
"Then we thought, 'Why don't we go up to people who are not from the United States, but live here and emigrated here?' " Garcia says. "And we came up with an interesting story by talking to people from Asia, Central America, South America, Mexico--people who were surprised or even not surprised about the end of the election process. Most of the people we talked to had lived through elections that were totally rigged. While U.S.-born voters were very much in suspense about not knowing who won, our sources were convinced the election was already decided. It was really interesting."
Another way some reporters and editors attack the beast is to seek out what many call "stakeholders"--real live people who are directly or indirectly affected by whatever the particular news event is. As the Democrat-Gazette's Cody puts it, "Anybody I call is going to have to be someone who has a dog in the race."
In Albuquerque, which is near Kirtland Air Force Base, Journal radar went up after President Bush said he wanted to raise military salaries. "So we went out and got a reaction piece from people on the base," says Metro Editor Moore. "Sure, everybody welcomes a pay raise. The lead on it was something like, 'It's hard to argue when your boss says he wants to give you more money,' but actually, we got some more interesting stuff.... It wasn't so simple as 'Oh great, more money.' One of the airmen said it really depends on what job he gets next [as to whether he stays in the service]. So there were comments like that that were fairly interesting and fairly unpredictable."
Williams says one of the Indianapolis Star's more successful reaction stories featured comments about the State of the State address solicited in advance about specific points the governor was going to make in his speech. "We had the parameters of what he was going to talk about, and our medical reporter found someone who worked in the hospital and was affected by health-care funding, an education reporter talked to a parent...the story ended up representing a diversity of issues. That requires a lot more effort than just seeing a wire story and saying, 'Whoops, we gotta get some reaction tonight.' But I think that kind of planning works."
If right now you're thinking, "Hey, that's just good old-fashioned reporting," then you're in fine company. The Des Moines Register's Essex, for example, notes that the paper used to do a lot of straight reaction stories in the mid-1990s. "I think the reason that we don't do it anymore is that we have gotten better about talking to people who aren't officials in our ordinary reporting, and we've gotten better in terms of getting in front of the news," he says. "So if there's a big national story we don't have to contrive some local piece to go with it, because we already have good local stories."
Essex's commitment to getting more voices into workaday journalism is particularly on point as polling, the Internet and polling via the Internet become common. "We have so many different tools at our disposal now, if you can figure out how to use them right," says the Courant's Papirno. "You can send a bunch of e-mails to get reaction, you can post something on a listserv or a bulletin board: 'Tell us what you think.' "
WCPO uses scientific polling to help boost its knowledge about the community's take on area issues, former news director Shafer says. About once a week, a polling service surveys 500 Cincinnati-area residents to ask about topics that have ranged from proposed changes to the new baseball stadium to alleged racial profiling by city police.
The Sacramento Bee has started using Web forums as a venue for readers' voices. When an area health-care group secured grant money to determine people's opinions about HMOs, the Bee put up a few questions from the survey, says Bill Enfield, online editor/assistant metro editor at the paper.
Still, Bee reporters haven't yet used comments from such surveys as real-people responses in stories (although they have followed up on online story tips). "There's two problems with that," Enfield says. "One is the fact that you're only drawing from a limited pool of people--people going online and people willing to express an opinion. The second thing is we have to verify their identity....
"I see the main advantage for us is that it gives viewers an outlet to express their opinions, especially in sports. It's kind of our version of a talk show."

OF COURSE, NEWSPAPERS DO far more than just serve as an in-print version of a talk show. And there are already-established venues for readers' voices--on the letters pages, for example. But amid the civic journalism and the Sunday narratives, the reaction genre survives, be it mug shots with quotes or extensive interviews with "stakeholders."
And assuming they're crafted intelligently, that may not be such a bad thing.
"Is it the most satisfying thing to do journalistically?" asks the Orange County Register's Foley. "No.... But they're really well-received among readers. Those people add something to the story. I know I go to the voices first. When I see a designed page [with mugs and quotes], I go to the quotes first. I read those first and see what people are saying, and then I go for the little identifiers. I find those things interesting, because those are usually not the usual suspects.
"You're looking for the fresh voices, so that there's some sense that there's more than five people in a community who can talk about something that's going on."